Possession is an ideal symbolic relation that no concrete act can fully realize

Evidence

We can not insist too strongly on the fact that this relation is symbolic and ideal. My original desire of being my own foundation for myself is never satisfied through appropriation any more than Freud’s patient satisfies his Oedipus complex when he dreams that a soldier kills the Czar (i.e., his father). This is why ownership appears to the owner simultaneously as something given at one stroke in the eternal and as requiring an infinite time to be realized. No particular act of utilization really realizes the enjoyment of full possession; but it refers to other appropriative acts, each one of which has the value of an incantation. To possess a bicycle is to be able first to look at it, then to touch it. But touching is revealed as being insufficient; what is necessary is to be able to get on the bicycle and take a ride. But this gratuitous ride is likewise insufficient; it would be necessary to use the bicycle to go on some errands. And this refers us to longer uses and more complete, to long trips across France. But these trips themselves disintegrate into a thousand appropriative behavior patterns, each one of which refers to others. Finally as one could foresee, handing over a bank-note is enough to make the bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession. In acquiring the object, I perceive that possession is an enterprise which death always renders still unachieved. Now we can understand why; it is because it is impossible to realize the relation symbolized by appropriation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1375

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the underlying desire to be one’s own foundation (pour-soi / en-soi synthesis), which is the systematic backdrop to Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. — connects to: The ideal of possession is an impossible synthesis of assimilation and resistance; Possession is an internal bond of being, not an external relation — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1366; Possession is a magical relation projecting the ideal of the in-itself-for-itself (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies that appropriation/possession is a symbolic-ideal relation, not a concrete activity, in Sartre’s ontology.

Broader Connections

• Possession aims at appropriating being-in-itself and symbolically the whole world. #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1381
• Possession is a lived, non-thetic relation rather than a known one. #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1379
• Possession is a continuous creation that grants objects their functional being. #qualifies (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1371