these “material meanings” far enough. Armed with existential psycho-
analysis, Sartre aims to uncover not just the sexual or power relations
exhibited by material phenomena, but to investigate their very being.
We saw that years later Sartre will insist that what ultimately distin-
guished him from the Marxists is his metaphysical interests, his concern
with being. Now he is asserting that this is what distinguishes his
psychoanalysis from those of Freud, Adler and even Bachelard: his
“metaphysical effort” to apprehend quality as a symbol of an ever elusive
being-in-itself.
In his quest for the concrete, Sartre admits, before drawing his final
conclusions, that “ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to
determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibil-
ities, and the value which haunts it” (BN 615 ). Since each human reality
has its own way of projecting itself toward the impossible goal of
“conscious self-identity” (in-itself-for-itself) and of appropriating the
world “as a totality of being-in-itself in the form of a fundamental quality,”
it is up to existential psychoanalysis to bring to reflective consciousness
that particular self-defining project and the world it constitutes by
deciphering the evidence of its multifaceted life – its empirical choices,
its cultural and social interactions, its practices and products.
“Conclusion”
Sartre gathers several insights (aperc ̧us) from the phenomenological
ontology just completed under two rubrics: the metaphysical and the
ethical. They are functions of his basic ontology of the in-itself and
the for-itself. By “metaphysical,” Sartre means the rather traditional
questions regarding ultimate origins and purposes raised by his
ontological descriptions such as “Why does the for-itself arise in terms
of being?” Limiting the question to “this” world as a concrete and
particular totality, he observes that “metaphysics is to ontology as
history is to sociolology” (BN 619 ). Again, phenomenological ontology
does not explain except in the formal sense of articulating intelligible
contours – “essences.” As Husserl observed, its aim is not to explain
(causally) but simply to get one to see. If the paradigmatic metaphysical
question – repeated by Aquinas, Leibniz and Heidegger, each in his
own way – is “Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?” Sartre
considers this question meaningless because “all the ‘Whys’ in fact
224 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness