A social role can only be played at, never simply inhabited

Evidence

In a parallel situation, from within, the waiter in the café can not be immediately a café waiter in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass. It is by no means that he can not form reflective judgments or concepts concerning his condition. He knows well what it “means:” the obligation of getting up at five o’clock, of sweeping the floor of the shop before the restaurant opens, of starting the coffee pot going, etc. He knows the rights which it allows: the right to the tips, the right to belong to a union, etc. But all these concepts, all these judgments refer to the transcendent. It is a matter of abstract possibilities, of rights and duties conferred on a “person possessing rights.” And it is precisely this person who I have to be (if I am the waiter in question) and who I am not. It is not that I do not wish to be this person or that I want this person to be different. But rather there is no common measure between his being and mine. It is a “representation” for others and for myself, which means that I can be he only in representation. But if I represent myself as him, I am not he; I am separated from him as the object from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him. I can not be he, I can only play at being him; that is, imagine to myself that I am he. And thereby I affect him with nothingness. In vain do I fulfill the functions of a café waiter. I can be he only in the neutralized mode, as the actor is Hamlet, by mechanically making the typical gestures of my state and by aiming at myself as an imaginary café waiter through those gestures taken as an “analogue.” What I attempt to realize is a being-in-itself of the café waiter, as if it were not just in my power to confer their value and their urgency upon my duties and the rights of my position, as if it were not my free choice to get up each morning at five o’clock or to remain in bed, even though it meant getting fired. As if from the very fact that I sustain this role in existence I did not transcend it on every side, as if I did not constitute myself as one beyond my condition. Yet there is no doubt that I am in a sense a café waiter—otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or a reporter? But if I am one, this can not be in the mode of being in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 299

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the for-itself/in-itself distinction through the cafe waiter: roles and attitudes are never inhabited as in-itself being, only played as representation.
• XREF: The ‘mode of being what I am not’ directly sets up Beauvoir’s account of the human condition as ambiguity and bad faith in The Ethics of Ambiguity. — connects to: Roles are enacted, never inhabited, because identity would collapse into inert being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 343; Possession is enjoyed only through use, never through contemplation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1373
• SEED: The waiter example is a reusable pedagogical template for explaining the for-itself/in-itself gap to beginners in continental philosophy.

Broader Connections

• Roles are enacted, never inhabited, because identity would collapse into inert being #corroborates (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 343