Every possessive act secretly aims to become the foundation of the whole world

Evidence

Thus what fundamentally we desire to appropriate in an object is its being and it is the world. These two ends of appropriation are in reality only one. I search behind the phenomenon to possess the being of the phenomenon. But this being, as we have seen, is very different from the phenomenon of being; it is being-in-itself, and not only the being of a particular thing. It is not because there is here a passage to the universal but rather the being considered in its concrete nudity becomes suddenly the being of the totality. Thus the relation of possession appears to us clearly: to possess is to wish to possess the the world across a particular object. And as possession is defined as the effort to apprehend ourselves as the foundation of a being in so far as it is ourselves ideally, every possessive project aims at constituting the For-itself as the foundation of the world or a concrete totality of the in-itself, and this totality is, as totality, the for-itself itself existing in the mode of the in-itself. To-be-in-the-world is to form the project of possessing the world; that is, to apprehend the total world as that which is lacking to the for-itself in order that it may become in-itself-for-itself. It is to be engaged in a totality which is precisely the ideal or value or totalized totality and which would be ideally constituted by the fusion of the for-itself as a detotalized totality which has to be what it is, with the world, as the totality of the in-itself which is what it is. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1383

Categorization

• XREF: This is the systematic core — possession collapsed into the in-itself-for-itself ideal, directly feeding Beauvoir’s account of how desire and appropriation miss authentic freedom. — connects to: Possession aims at appropriating being-in-itself and symbolically the whole world. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1381; In possession the for-itself seeks to become its own foundation as in-itself
• DEFINE: Defines possession as the project of constituting the for-itself as foundation of the world; the passage hinges on the in-itself-for-itself ideal.

Broader Connections

• Possession aims at appropriating being-in-itself and symbolically the whole world. #corroborates (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1381
• In possession the for-itself seeks to become its own foundation as in-itself #expands (0.95)