Death enters experience only as an interiorized meaning out of reach.

Evidence

It is also the triumph of the point of view of the Other over the point of view which I am toward myself. This is doubtless what Malraux means when in l’Espoir he says of death that it “transforms life into destiny.” Death, in fact, is only on its negative side the nihilation of my possibilities; since indeed I am my possibilities only through the nihilation of being-in-itself which I have to be, death as the nihilation of a nihilation is a positing of my being as in-itself in the sense in which for Hegel the negation of a negation is an affirmation. So long as the for-itself is “in life” it surpasses its past toward its future, and the past is that which the for-itself has to be. When the for-itself “ceases to live,” this past is not thereby abolished. The disappearance of the nihilating being does not touch that part of its being which is of the type of the in-itself; it is engulfed in the in-itself. My whole life is. This means not that it is an harmonious totality but that it has ceased to be its own suspense and that it can no longer change itself by the simple consciousness which it has of itself. Quite the contrary, the meaning of any phenomenon whatsoever in that life is henceforth fixed not by itself but by this open totality which is the arrested life. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1259 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Sartre agrees that at the moment of death one becomes only his past and hence an in-itself; the meaning of one’s life is henceforth to be determined and sustained only as others are interested in interpreting it. … But he denies that one’s life is free if a God has been able to determine the end of it. … If God is to determine the time, then I shall not have been responsible for making my life what it will have been. Of course, if God does not determine my death, the fact remains that unless I commit suicide, I do not myself determine it. But this undetermined contingency Sartre does not regard as a threat to freedom, rather just one more example of the finitude within which I make myself. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 63 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Thus death is in no way an ontological structure of my being, at least not in so far as my being is for itself; it is the Other who is mortal in his being. There is no place for death in being-for-itself; it can neither wait for death nor realize it nor project itself toward it; death is in no way the foundation of the finitude of the for-itself. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1272 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: At death a life becomes an in-itself whose meaning only others sustain. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 63; Death converts the for-itself into an in-itself that only others can interpret — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1259; Only the Other’s being, not the for-itself, contains death — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1272

Broader Connections

• Death converts the for-itself into an in-itself that only others can interpret #corroborates (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1259
• At death a life becomes an in-itself whose meaning only others sustain. #corroborates (0.92) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 63
• Only the Other’s being, not the for-itself, contains death #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1272