this phenomenon in view of the duality-in-unity that is our conscious-
ness with the visual metaphor of reflection-reflecting. This quasi-
instantaneous back-and-forth dynamism eludes our attempts to capture
it “in flight,” as it were, and achieve a static reflection. We saw that
the for-itself, unlike the in-itself, was characteristicallynonself-identical.
Consciousness as self-consciousness “others” itself as well as the non-
self or “world.” In other words, consciousness is a “nihilating” relation
to itself, not a relation of identity; it nihilates itself (se ne ́antise)(BN 239 ;
F 295 ). Sartre calls this a relation of “presence to.” This expression
indicates both difference or “otherness” and, as we shall see, a particular
temporal “distance,” a “nothingness” (ne ́ant) that marks that peculiar
phenomenon called “self-consciousness.” He explains:
Theself...represents an ideal distance within the immanence of the subject in
relation to himself, a way ofnot being his own coincidence, of escaping identity while
positing it as unity – in short, of being in a perpetually unstable equilibrium between
identity as absolute cohesion without a trace of diversity and unity as a synthesis of a
multiplicity. This is what we shall call presence to itself.
(BN 77 )
Sartre cashes in this analysis when he links presence-to-self with
ontological freedom, the freedom which we are, explaining that “man
is free because he is not a self but a presence-to-self ” (BN 440 ).
“The Facticity of the For-Itself ”As his move from the abstract toward the concrete continues, Sartre
addresses the “givens” of our situated being with the Heideggerian term
“facticity.” The for-itself “isin so far as it is thrown into a world
and abandoned in a ‘situation’” (BN 79 ). Though he will unpack the
“factical” aspect of our situation later in the work, what matters now is
the utter gratuity of our “othering” relation tothissituation, beginning
with the contingency of these “facts” themselves and that of our own
existence. To be sure, the in-itself is without foundation; it just is. So in
Sartre’s cosmogony, it “seeks” its ideal foundation in the for-itself – a
futile pursuit, like the snowman seeking the warmth of the sun – leading
to the nihilation of the in-itself. The for-itself is the source of its
nothingness but it is not the ground of its own being; it seeks that
in the in-itself – resulting in bad faith. Echoing the experience of
190 The war years, 1939–1944