![]() ![]() It's that philosophical tension that drives learning, growth, ethics, and etc. Sartre attributed the course of his own philosophical inquiries to his exposure to this work. ![]() ![]() That is the sense of 'negation' in Sartre: negating that which is historically (observably) the case in support of an aspirational or ideal view of the self. While a prisoner of war in 19, Sartre read Martin Heidegger 's Being and Time (1927), which uses the method of Husserlian phenomenology as a lens for examining ontology. A brilliant and radical account of the human condition, Being and Nothingness explores what gives our lives significance. As you can see, the second of these often amounts to a rejection or denial of the first: we want to be the kind of person who does X, so we reject the fact that (historically) we may have done Y. 'Being-for-itself', by contrast, is the aggregate of how we perceive ourselves: what we think of ourselves, what we want for ourselves, what we imagine ourselves to be. 'Being-in-itself', for Sartre, is the totality of what someone is: the accumulated sum of one's biology, history, and thoughts and behavior as they manifest in the present moment. If I understand this correctly, Sartre considers negation (usually as internal negation) as one of the fundamental aspect of humanity, because it reflects the tension between being-in-itself and being-for-itself where the latter is (ostensibly) a feature specific to human consciousness. ![]()
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