the “givens” of our lives – our moving beyond the factical toward the
possible, beyond the essence to the future. It is with this in view that
Sartre adopts the poet’s “I am more than myself ” to capture this
phenomenon. “Human reality is free because it is not enough...The
being which is what it is [the in-itself] can not be free. Freedom is
precisely the nothingness which ‘is been’ (est e ́te ́) at the heart of man
and which forces human reality tomake itself(se faire) instead ofbeing.”^25
The relation between the for-itself ’s nonidentity and its inherent tem-
porality warrants Sartre’s introduction of this neologism,est e ́te ́,to
characterize the nothing (rien) at the heart of consciousness. An adequate
translation is difficult, but the oddity of the expression jars us into
recognizing that consciousness, like Zeno’s arrow, “is-not” at any point
in its temporal trajectory. It is its past in the manner of not-being it,
again the mode of being proper to Sartrean consciousness.
As he begins to concretize an originally “abstract” freedom, Sartre
reveals several equivalencies for the term. Though Iris Murdoch once
lamented Sartre’s penchant for “great inexact equations,”^26 the increased
“parsing” of his fundamental ontology consists, in large part, of
rendering explicit features implicit in his three basic modes of being.
Thus the pure upsurge which is the appearance of the for-itself can,
in relation to action, be understood as “original Choice” which is the
ground or reason (motif) for our subsequent choices as well as for the
deliberation that precedes them and the “will” to which we appeal to
effect them. “The will in fact is posited as a reflective decision in relation
to certain ends...Human reality can not receive its ends...either from
outside or from a so-called inner ‘nature.’ It chooses them and by this
very choice confers upon them a transcendent existence as the external
limit of its projects” (BN 443 ). This is Sartre’s argument with every
form of determinism. But he resists awarding “Choice” a temporal
priority over choices. “By original freedom, of course, we should not
understand a freedom which would be prior to the voluntary or
(^25) BN 440 ;F 516. Thus Hazel Barnes translatesest e ́te ́as “is made-to-be” (BN 78 ); Maurice
Natanson renders it “is-was” (A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology[The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1973 ], 59 ); and Peter Caws offers us “is been,” explaining that this
turning of “to be” into a reflexive verb captures Sartre’s nuance that the for-itself is “a
self-sustaining reflection of Being upon itself ” (Sartre[London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
261979 ],^82 ).
Murdoch,Sartre,Romantic Rationalist, 147.
216 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness