Roquentin inNausea, Sartre concludes: “Just as my nihilating freedom
is apprehended as anguish, so the for-itself is conscious of its facticity.
It has the feeling of its complete gratuity; it apprehends itself as being
therefor nothing, as beingde trop”(BN 84 ).
“The For-Itself and the Being of Value”Sartre now directs his account of the ontological structures of being-for-
itself to the realm of values. Human reality, he explains, “is that by which
value comes into the world” (BN 93 ). Nietzsche had famously charac-
terized man as an “evaluating animal.” Sartre’s ontology of the for-itself
as an internal, constitutive relation to the in-itself deepens this remark.
Nihilation, as the action of consciousness, not only “others” the in-itself;
it does so by transcending, that is, “moving beyond it,” toward the
fulfilling of alackthat itisby its very structure as for-itself. Conceived
in its most abstract form, this lack is the privation of being-in-itself
that would justify its being as for-itself-in-itself. It is the self as totality,
as in-itself, that constitutes supreme value. All mundane desires issue
from this fundamental lack and the movement to fulfill it. The resultant
imperative to pursue this value, one can say, is both categorical and
hypothetical. It denotes the “having to be” that henceforth punctuates
Sartre’s discourse. This expression indicates that value is operative.
As categorical, it is a priori and “moral” in a sense to be explained. As
hypothetical, it motivates and guides the needs and desires of our
everyday lives. We have seen this translate into the futile desire to be
God. Sartre can conclude that the for-itself is by nature [Hegel’s]
unhappy consciousness. But he insists that this lack is not the object
of an explicit desire; rather, it is the meaning/direction (sens) of its
prereflective awareness. As lack, this missing totality of the self “haunts
non-thetic self-consciousness” (BN 90 ). And it does so not only in
the abstract. Previewing what he intends to show in the remainder of
the book, Sartre informs us that “the self is individual; it is the individ-
ual completion of the self which haunts the for-itself ” (BN 91 ). This is
what it means to say that “the being of the self is value” (BN 90 ).
Before moving from value, we should note Sartre’s approving mention
of Max Scheler’s thesis that “I can achieve an intuition of values in terms
of concrete exemplifications; I can grasp nobility in a noble act” (BN 93 ).
Without pursuing the matter here, let me note that Scheler was one of
Being and Nothingness 191