1158 JEAN-PAU LSARTRE
Throughout his life, Sartre preferred the pleasures of the café over the joys of
the hearth. For years, he and de Beauvoir were fixtures at La Coupole, a restau-
rant on the Left Bank of Paris frequented by artists. But eventually his health
deteriorated, exacerbated by his frequent use of amphetamines, and he was forced
to retire to his apartment. After an agonizingly slow decline, Sartre died in 1980.
Like Heidegger before him, Sartre was fascinated with “being.” According to
Sartre, there are two categories of being: “being-in-itself” (étre en-soi) and “being-
for-itself” (étre pour-soi). Being-in-itselfis complete in itself, “solid,” fixed, and
totally given: “Uncreated, without reason for being, without connection with any
other being, being-in-itself is superfluous for all eternity.” Like Parmenides’ One,
being-in-itself simply is. This is the being of rocks and trees. This being-in-itself
has no sufficient reason for being, no purpose or meaning—it is “absurd.”
Being-for-itself,on the other hand, is incomplete and fluid and without a deter-
mined structure. Being-for-itself is the being of human consciousness that at
every moment is freely choosing its future. This consciousness arises by virtue of
its power of negation, based on freedom: “[Consciousness] constitutes itself in its
own flesh as the nihilation of a possibility which another human reality projects
as its possibility. For that reason it must arise in the world as a Not.” Individual
consciousness constitutes itself by freely rejecting all roles that others try to force
upon it. It is precisely in the act of saying “No” to all attempts to make me into a
being-in-itself that I create myself as a being-for-itself.
In creating myself, I do not choose what I will become on the basis of pre-
existing values. There are no eternal values, no givens for me to use. Dostoevsky’s
character Ivan Karamazov had claimed, “If there is no God, all things are lawful.”
Sartre agreed and added that since there was no God, all things are, indeed, lawful.
In fact, there is no possible justification for any choice I might make, since justifi-
cation implies an appeal to given values. I am free to choose my values without
any external justification.
Although this freedom is complete, it is not absolute. In the first place, as a
free being, I encounter other free beings. My world is interrupted when the
“other” gives me “the look.” By looking at me, the other objectifies me, makes me
a part of his or her world, part of his or her freedom: “Thus being-seen constitutes
me as a being without defenses for a freedom which is not my freedom.” But I can
regain my freedom by looking back and by an act of will transforming the other
into an object for me. (This world of people-objects led Sartre to exclaim, “Hell is
other people.”)
Second, I must acknowledge the “facticity” found in existence. I cannot change
the fact that this tree is in front of me or that I cannot walk through it. But even here
my freedom still prevails. I freely create the meaningof this tree as an object
to climb or as a source of lumber or as a thing to be preserved or as a biological
specimen. In creating these meanings, I create the world in which I live.
In Existentialism Is a Humanism,translated here by Bernard Frechtman, Sartre
expands on this freedom while defending the basic ideas of existentialism. He
begins by discussing human artifacts, such as a book or a paper-cutter. An object
such as a paper-cutter begins as an essence, that is, as an “ensemble of both the
production routines and the properties which enable it to be both produced and
