Causes require nihilation and transcendence toward a not-yet-existing potentiality

Evidence

When Clovis appreciates the aid which the Church can furnish him, it is not certain that a group of prelates or even one particular priest has made any overtures to him, nor even that any member of the clergy has clearly thought of an alliance with a Catholic monarch. The only strictly objective facts, those which any for-itself whatsoever can establish, are the great power of the Church over the people of Gaul and the anxiety of the Church with regard to the Arian heresy. In order for these established facts to be organized into a cause for conversion, it is necessary to isolate them from the ensemble—and thereby to nihilate them—and it is necessary to transcend them toward a particular potentiality: the Church’s potentiality objectively apprehended by Clovis will be to give its support to a converted king. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1089

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up Beauvoir’s account of freedom and situation — the reader’s stated purpose. — connects to: A nihilating being cannot be the cause of further phenomena; Temporality is the necessary horizon for the for-itself’s transcendence; Knowing is realizing being through an inner negating transcendence (+10 more)
• QUESTION: How does this ‘transcendence toward potentiality’ relate to the concept of the project developed later in the book?

Broader Connections

• Intention requires a rupture with the given, illuminating being in light of non-being #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1144
• The possible is a lack constitutive of consciousness itself #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 385
• Negation arises in consciousness as the nihilation of another’s projected possibility. #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 277
• Knowing aims to coincide with being yet is structured as not being it #expands (0.75)
• Pregnancy collapses the subject-object opposition that normally drives transcendence #complicates (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1449