Sincerity is impossible because consciousness’s structure prevents being what one is

Evidence

Under these conditions what can be the significance of the ideal of sincerity except as a task impossible to achieve, of which the very meaning is in contradiction with the structure of my consciousness. To be sincere, we said, is to be what one is. That supposes that I am not originally what I am. But here naturally Kant’s “You ought, therefore you can” is implicitly understood. I can become sincere; this is what my duty and my effort to achieve sincerity imply. But we definitely establish that the original structure of “not being what one is” renders impossible in advance all movement toward being in itself or “being what one is.” And this impossibility is not hidden from consciousness; on the contrary, it is the very stuff of consciousness; it is the embarrasing constraint which we constantly experience; it is our very incapacity to recognize ourselves, to constitute ourselves as being what we are. It is this necessity which means that, as soon as we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legitimate judgment, based on inner experience or correctly deduced from a priori or empirical premises, then by that very positing we surpass this being—and that not toward another being but toward emptiness, toward nothing. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 305

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how the for-itself’s structure of not-being-what-one-is makes sincerity a necessarily failed project, inverting Kant’s ought-implies-can.
• XREF: Directly repudiates Kant’s ‘You ought, therefore you can’ and continues the Sartre-Nietzsche strand of critique of conventional morality; connects to Beauvoir’s treatment of sincerity in The Ethics of Ambiguity. — connects to: Existing consciousness cannot veto insights that expose its own self-contradiction; Sincerity aims at an ideal mode of being human nature prevents attaining — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 312; Consciousness is contradictory and common sense is not unified (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Sincerity aims at an ideal mode of being human nature prevents attaining #expands (0.92) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 312
• Existing consciousness cannot veto insights that expose its own self-contradiction #corroborates (0.78)
• Consciousness is contradictory and common sense is not unified #expands (0.75)