JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
I To be conscious is to be conscious of something; consciousness refers to and separates itself from something not itself. And to be conscious of something is to be aware of being conscious of something. But this secondary awareness is implicit in the primary consciousness of something. Otherwise, I should be aware of being conscious of something and aware of being aware of being conscious of something, to infinity. My consciousness cannot become an object to itself in this way; it is seized only as consciousness of something else. Consciousness is always present to something which it is not, and thus is present to itself, but always in the form of not being something. Consciousness comes into the world as a No, and is aware of itself as an everlasting No, as pure possibility separated from everything existent. It is a form of being which implies a form of being other than its own. Itself, it is a mode of being ‘which has yet to be what it is, that is to say, which is what it is not and which is not what it is’. On the other hand, the object of consciousness is what it is; it is wholly there, totally given, without any separation from itself; it is not possibility, it is itself, it is in itself; ‘uncreated, without any reason, without any relation with another being, being-in-itself has been eternally de trop’. These two modes of being, consciousness and its object, the poursoi and the en-soi, are not merely in contrast. Consciousness absolutely requires the given objective world. It only comes into existence as separation from what is there. Consciousness cannot be deduced from the world, which is independent and self-sufficient. The world can be deduced from consciousness; not because consciousness is prior and independent, but because it comes into the world as nothing, as not the world, and gives the world as there. Consciousness is thus relative to the objective world and dependent upon it. On the other hand, consciousness is not something other than the world, since that would be itself an object to consciousness, an en-soi, it perpetually reconstitutes itself other than the world, in relation to every item of experience, perpetually puts itself in question, and is thus an absolute. The en-soi and the pour-soi are therefore modes of being related by an unbridgeable separation. How, then, is knowledge possible, or action, or any form of transcendence? Is Being an irresolvable duality, a plenitude on the one hand and a barren
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