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🪵 The Threshold

Intention requires a rupture with the given, illuminating being in light of non-being

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, define, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@sartre_being_1943, loc. 1144

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Intention requires a rupture with the given, illuminating being in light of non-being

Evidence

If the given can not explain the intention, it is necessary that the intention by its very upsurge realize a rupture with the given, whatever this may be. Such must be the case, for otherwise we should have a present plenitude succeeding in continuity a present plenitude, and we could not prefigure the future. Moreover, this rupture is necessary for the appreciation of the given. The given, in fact, could never be a cause for an action if it were not appreciated. But this appreciation can be realized only by a withdrawal in relation to the given, a putting of the given into parentheses, which exactly supposes a break in continuity. In addition, the appreciation if it is not to be gratuitous, must be effected in the light of something. And this something which serves to appreciate the given can be only the end. Thus the intention by a single unitary upsurge posits the end, chooses itself, and appreciates the given in terms of the end.

Under these conditions the given is appreciated in terms of something which does not yet exist; it is in the light of non-being that being-in-itself is illuminated. There results a double nihilating coloration of the given; on the one hand, it is nihilated in that the rupture makes it lose all efficacy over the intention; on the other hand, it undergoes a new nihilation due to the fact that efficacy is returned to it in terms of a nothingness appreciation. Since human reality is act, it can be conceived only as being at its core a rupture with the given. It is the being which causes there to be a given by breaking with it and illuminating it in the light of the not-yet-existing.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1144

Categorization

  • XREF: Core ontology connecting to Beauvoir’s ethics — freedom as nihilation of facticity is the systematic backdrop the reader is building. — connects to: Causes require nihilation and transcendence toward a not-yet-existing potentiality — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1089; An act must be self-present as operative intention to unify consciousness; The power to not-see is constitutive of seeing itself (+7 more)
  • DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘rupture’ mechanism: appreciation and prefiguration of the future both require a break with the given.

Broader Connections

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