(la substantialite ́)(CDG 143 ); that is the drive to be in-itself-for-itself
or what Thomas Anderson aptly calls “the God-project.”^31
“Freedom and Facticity: The Situation”
We referred to an important essay published after the war, where
Sartre remarks that any “philosophy of revolution” such as he was
then beginning to propose would have to elaborate the concept of
“situation.” It is inBeing and Nothingnessthat he analyzes this basic
concept in greatest detail. Again we encounter the ambiguous relation
between facticity and freedom, the given and the taken inherent in
any situation.
The reader will have understood that this given is nothing other than the in-itself
nihilated by the for-itself which has to be it, that the body as a point of view on the
world, that the past as theessencewhich the for-itself was – that these are three
designations for a single reality. By its nihilating withdrawal, freedom causes a whole
system of relations to be established, from the point of view of the end, betweenall
in-itselfs.
(BN 487 )
Sartre proceeds to discuss five components of “my situation,” which is
certainly one of the most accessible portions of the book, while insisting
that no one of them is given alone and that each should be considered on
the “synthetic background of the others” (BN 489 ;EN 570 ). This caveat
manifests both his early and abiding interest in the “figure/ground”
distinction of the Gestalt psychologists he embraced in the 1930 s and the
“totalizing” discourse the he will adopt after serious reading of Hegel
and Marx in the mid 1940 s and fifties. Sartre gathers these five aspects
of my situation under the rubrics: My Place, My Past, My Environment,
My Fellow man, and My Death. Each category allows him to offer
insightful phenomenological analyses of their subject. We must forego
discussions of each, except to warn again that the fundamental ambiguity
of the comparative “weight” of facticity and freedom is at work in each
of these categories.
(^31) Thomas Anderson,Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity(Chicago, IL:
Open Court, 1993 ), 53 , referring toNE 559.
218 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness