ego as inauthenticity

...Sartre said the meaning of death is that “the for-itself is changed forever into an in-itself that has slipped entirely into the past.” Turns out the “for-itself” is Jean-Paul’s term for human consciousness, which he tells us is called “for-itself” because it is not a thing. If it were a thing, it would be an “in-itself.” What Sartre means is that human beings have no “essence,” no predetermined purpose like, say, a rubber ducky does. “In themselves” human beings are nothing; rubber duckies, on the other hand, are quite something, as anyone who’s ever been stuck in a bathtub for three hours can attest. Sartre thinks a key difference between human beings and the duckies is that we humans invent our own essence by choosing to be what we want to be. There are other differences too, of course. But we humans are for ourselves, self-created, rather than in ourselves, created for a fixed purpose.

Or at least that’s the way we ought to be—always freely reinventing ourselves. But, alas, most of us have this nasty habit of wanting to be a thing—no, not a table-thing or a wall-lamp-thing or a bathtub-thing, but a human-role-thing, like dissolving our identity into our profession or our nationality or our reputation on the golf course. In this way, we slip into inauthenticity, a kind of living death, like Sartre’s famous waiter, who thinks that waiterhood actually defines his essence. Silly garcon. He fails to see that the possibility of freedom—the possibility to transcend what he’s become—is always there.

Until he really dies, that is. At that point, we all become things. Then we do have a stamped-on essence: to wit, the essence of dead meat.

- Thomas Cathcort

How It Happens

The sky said I am watching

to see what you

can make out of nothing

I was looking up and I said

I thought you

were supposed to be doing that

the sky said Many

are clinging to that

I am giving you a chance

I was looking up and I said

I am the only chance I have

then the sky did not answer

and here we are

with our names for the days

the vast days that do not listen to us

— W.S. MERWIN