No consciousness, not even God’s, can view reality’s totality from outside.

Evidence

The question has no meaning. It is supposing that it is possible for us to take a point of view on the totality; that is, to consider it from outside. But this is impossible precisely because I exist as myself on the foundation of this totality and to the extent that I am engaged in it. No consciousness, not even God’s, can “see the underside”—that is, apprehend the totality as such. For if God is consciousness, he is integrated in the totality. And if by his nature, he is a being beyond consciousness (that is, an in-itself which would be its own foundation) still the totality can appear to him only as object (in that case he lacks the totality’s internal disintegration as the subjective effort to reapprehend the self) or as subject (then since God is not this subject, he can only experience it without knowing it.) Thus no point of view on the totality is conceivable; the totality has no “outside,” and the very question of the meaning of the “underside” is stripped of meaning. We cannot go further. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 807

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A foundational epistemic limit statement: totality cannot be viewed from without because any viewer is engaged within it. Reaches to the heart of the for-itself/for-others systematic structure.
• XREF: The impossibility of an external viewpoint on totality echoes the theme of radical immanence and the rejection of a God’s-eye view central to continental thought; connects forward to Beauvoir’s situated ethics. — connects to: Consciousness cannot constitute its object because that object is a full presence outside it — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 148; Pure spontaneous consciousness can neither act upon nor be acted upon by things.; Human reality arises as a lack of an impossible self-totality — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 362 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies why ‘the totality’ resists apprehension: it has no outside, so even God cannot be its spectator.
• QUESTION: Is this the strongest metaphysical argument against the possibility of an objective total standpoint, and does it pre-figure (or get pre-empted by) perspectivalist critiques?

Broader Connections

• Consciousness cannot constitute its object because that object is a full presence outside it #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 148
• You cannot evaluate your own culture from outside it #epitomizes (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 463
• Pure spontaneous consciousness can neither act upon nor be acted upon by things. #expands (0.80)
• Human reality arises as a lack of an impossible self-totality #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 362