are subsequent to being and presuppose it. Being is without reason,
without cause, and without necessity; the very definition of being
releases to us its original contingency” (BN 619 ).
If “the rose is without Why?” as the mystical poet Angelus Silesius
apostrophizes, not so Sartre’s For-itself. It’s very posture is questioning,
as we have learned. And so one can expect that its origin will not be a
problem for it: “The for-itself is such that it has the right to turn back
on itself toward its own origin. The being by which the ‘Why’ comes
into being has the right to posit its own ‘Why’ since it is itself an
interrogation, a ‘Why.’” But this is a question that ontology cannot
address because “the problem here is to explain an event, not to describe
the structures of a being” (BN 620 ). Sartre’s metaphysical “hypotheses”
sound suspiciously Kantian in their appeal to an “as if ” wherein the
in-itself in a project to found itself gives itself the modification of the
for-itself. Just as the Kantian “Ideals” of pure reason tie together the
otherwise divided realms of Nature and Freedom, so Sartre’s “hypoth-
eses” gain a certain “validity” only by the possibility which they offer
us of unifying the givens of ontology with the absolute event that is
the “pure spontaneous upsurge” of the for-itself. Still, such hypotheses
will remain only hypotheses since they are beyond verification or falsifi-
cation. The metaphysician can only theorize that man’s futile project
of conscious self-identity plays out a more profound futility that is
endemic to being itself.
As for the ethical implications ofBeing and Nothingness, consider his
two promissory footnotes regarding a possible ethic of authenticity.
Scarcely an ethical naturalist, Sartre claims that “we cannot possibly
derive imperatives from ontology’s indicatives” (BN 625 ). Still, these
“indicatives” offer a glimpse of the “origin and nature of value”
grounded in the phenomenon oflack. Given that human reality exists
“in situation,” and that the dynamism which focuses that situation is our
“condemnation” to achieve the missing (and futile) synthesis of “con-
scious self-identity” (in-itself-for-itself), whatever ethics one proposes
from this perspective will move beyond theories of self-interest (egoism
and altruism). But it avoids theories of “disinterested” (uncommitted)
reflection as well, due to the absence of any “common measure” between
human reality and its ideal of being self-caused (God). With an implicit
nod toward Kierkegaard, Sartre proposes: “We will consider then that all
human existence is apassion, the famous self-interest being only one way
“Conclusion” 225