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🪵 The Threshold

Past motives become objective things, collapsing the distinction between cause and motive

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, xref, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@sartre_being_1943, loc. 1092

2 min read

Past motives become objective things, collapsing the distinction between cause and motive

Evidence

As soon as a consciousness is made-past, it is what I have to be in the form of the “was.” Consequently when I turn back toward my consciousness of yesterday, it preserves its intentional significance and its meaning as subjectivity, but, as we have seen, it is fixed; it is outside like a thing, since the past is in-itself. The motive becomes then that of which there is consciousness. … But as the motive is in-itself and as the cause is objective, they are presented as a dyad without ontological distinction; we have seen, indeed, that our past is lost in the midst of the world. That is why we put them on the same level and why we are able to speak of the causes and of the motives of an action as if they could enter into conflict or both concur in determined proportion in a decision. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1092

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Explains how the motive, once past, becomes in-itself, erasing the ontological distinction between motive and cause — a core mechanism in Sartre’s theory of freedom.
  • XREF: Directly sets up Beauvoir’s treatment of facticity and freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity — the past as in-itself but escaped by the for-itself. — connects to: Past actions become irrevocable facts the for-itself cannot escape — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 495; Being past turns subjective states into thing-like objective facts; Historians invoke subjective motives only when objective causes fail to explain an act (+5 more)

Broader Connections

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