performance or the synchronized actions of our rowing team. But he
considers such matters of “lateral” and nonpositional consciousness of
their bodies as correlative to my body and not part of the basic looking/
looked-at ontology. Sartre who had long rejected the Durkheimian
collective consciousness, insists that “the ‘we’ is experienced by a par-
ticular consciousness” (BN 414 ).
One notable result of the looking/looked-at model is his thesis
that “the being-for-others precedes and founds the being-with-others”
(BN 414 ). This is an explicit rejection of the HeideggerianMitseinthat
postulates the converse. In fact, Sartre claims that if being-with is
ontologically prior to the individual for-itself, then there would be no
way to derive individual existence from such a collective phenomenon.
He then reminds us in a well-known phrase that “the essence of the
relations between consciousnesses is not theMitsein; it is conflict”
(BN 420 ).
Sartre takes this occasion to introduce examples of class conflict
and draw a socioeconomic moral from his social ontology. But since this
will be a major concern of his subsequent work, let it suffice to note
its presence in his phenomenological ontology as we had remarked its
presence at the conclusion ofTranscendence of the Ego.^24
“Partiv: Having, Doing and Being”
Having established with the help of the questioning character of
human reality the three distinct and irreducible forms of being, namely,
the in-itself, the for-itself, and the for-others, Sartre continues his
pursuit of the concrete by distinguishing the three cardinal categories
of human reality: having, doing and being. Saving “being” for thenext
chapter, he elaborates the “freedom” that accompanies the determination
of “man.” The internal negation of the in-itself that the for-itself
“is in the manner of not-being it” reveals the permanent possibility
of a rupture with that particular in-itself and this, Sartre confirms
“is the same as freedom” (BN 439 ). Like the “perfect waiter,” we can
always try to act otherwise. By now we recognize that his “freedom” can
be described alternatively as our “nihilation” or our “transcendence” of
(^24) See below,Chapter 9.
“Partiv: Having, Doing and Being” 215