Iam“haunts” the world insofar as it is “mine.” This “my-ness” (moiı ̈te ́)
of the world is a fugitive structure, always present, a structure which
Ilive.”^54
We recognize the existentialist categories of freedom, anguish and
possibility emerging as fundamental components of the circle of selfness
as mine. And the evaluative dimension of this revolving circle comes to
the fore when Sartre amplifies the world as “the necessary obstacle
beyond which I find myself as that which I am” in the form “of having
to be it”; that is, as value (BN 104 ). He underscores the mutual implica-
tion of world, selfness and person (articulations of his basic in-itself and
for-itself ontology) with the following summation: “Without the world
there is no selfness, no person; without selfness, without person, there
is no world” (BN 104 ).
But the foregoing analysis of the “immediate” structures of the for-itself
was conducted under the didactic fiction of an “instantaneous nucleus.”
Recall his reference in theWar Diariesto his “metaphysical” treatise on
nothingness and time. Since “it is ‘in time’ that the for-itself is its own
possibilities in the mode of ‘not being’” (BN 104 ), we must continue
our pursuit of the concrete by addressing the nature of temporality.
(^54) BN 104 .“Moiı ̈te ́” seems to be a French coinage of Heidegger’s “Jemeinichkeit” which is also
translated as “myness.” However, its first use by Sartre occurs in his thesis for the Diploˆme
d’E ́tudes Supe ́rieures (DES) of 1926 – 1927 (pages 258 – 259 ) and then inThe Imaginary
( 154 ), where it is attributed to the Swiss psychologist Edouard Claparede and is described as “the feeling of belonging to me.” Sartre describes it as a neologism (Imaginary 170 ) and thus perhaps only coincidentally resembling Heidegger’s term since it occurs in Claparede’s
Quatre-vingt-un chapitres sur l’E ́sprit et les passions(Paris: al’E ́mancipatrice, 1917 ). References to Sartre’s DES are taken from Alain Flajoliet’s execellent study,La premiere philosophie de
Sartre(PPS).
Being and Nothingness 195