Knowledge of being presupposes the knower’s separation from the being known

Evidence

The world is human. We can see the very particular position of consciousness: being is everywhere, opposite me, around me; it weighs down on me, it besieges me, and I am perpetually referred from being to being; that table which is there is being and nothing more; that rock, that tree, that landscape—being and nothing else. I want to grasp this being and I no longer find anything but myself. This is because knowledge, intermediate between being and non-being, refers me to absolute being if I want to make knowledge subjective and refers me to myself when I think to grasp the absolute. The very meaning of knowledge is what it is not and is not what it is; for in order to know being such as it is, it would be necessary to be that being. But there is this “such as it is” only because I am not the being which I know; and if I should become it, then the “such as it is” would vanish and could no longer even be thought. We are not dealing here either with scepticism—which supposes precisely that the such as it is belongs to being—nor with relativism. Knowledge puts us in the presence of the absolute, and there is a truth of knowledge. But this truth, although releasing to us nothing more and nothing less than the absolute, remains strictly human. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 653

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sartre’s account of why the ‘such as it is’ of being only appears to one who is not that being — the epistemology grounding his ontology of consciousness.
• DEEPTHINKING: The doubling move — knowledge ‘is what it is not and is not what it is’ — is the hinge of the whole for-itself structure; dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: connects to: Knowing is realizing being through an inner negating transcendence; Knowing is the very being of the for-itself, not a relation — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 572; Knowledge is not a property but is the ekstatic being of the For-itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 651 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Knowing aims to coincide with being yet is structured as not being it #corroborates (0.92)
• In knowledge the knower is the absence that makes the known’s plenitude present #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 577
• Knowledge is a form of appropriation by the for-itself #corroborates (0.88)
• Consciousness is being, not merely self-knowledge, so knowledge’s primacy must be abandoned #complicates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 128
• Consciousness introduces differentiation, meaning, and plurality into undifferentiated Being #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 40
• Absolute Knowledge arises from being’s own self-systematizing, not from the I #qualifies (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1090