The For-itself is a lack temporally outstripping and lagging itself

Evidence

In its second dimension of nihilation, the For-itself apprehends itself as a certain lack. It is this lack and it is also the lacking, for it has to be what it is. To drink or to be drinking means never to have finished drinking, to have still to be drinking beyond the drinking which I am. And when “I have finished drinking,” I have drunk: the ensemble slips into the past. While actually drinking, I am then this drinking which I have to be and which I am not; every designation of myself if it is to be heavy and full, if it is to have the density of the self-identical—every such designation escapes me into the past. If it reaches me in the Present, it is because it divides itself into the Not-yet; it is because it designates me as an unachieved totality which can not be achieved. This Not-yet is gnawed by the nihilating freedom of the For-itself. It is not only being-at-a-distance; it is the whittling down of being. Here the For-itself, which was in advance of itself in the first dimension of nihilation, is now behind itself. Before itself, behind itself: never itself. This is the very meaning of the two ekstases Past and Future, and this is why value in itself is by nature self-repose, non-temporality! — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 482

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the two ekstases Past and Future as self-transcendence; drinking example drives the ‘never identical with itself’ point home.
• XREF: The ‘lack’ that structures the For-itself and forever escapes self-coincidence directly grounds Beauvoir’s insistence that freedom perpetually reopens and never settles into a fixed state. — connects to: The for-itself’s lack is internal to it, not imposed from outside; The future is a lack the For-itself must be, not a not-yet now — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 450; The For-itself constitutes its Future by perpetually apprehending itself as unachieved (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• The For-itself’s being consists in internal negation rather than self-coincidence #expands (0.88) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 445
• Time is constituted by the For-itself’s nothingness rather than inhering in objects #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1524
• Sartre’s concept of the for-itself projects itself toward objects as lacks. #exemplifies (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 240
• The for-itself is only the emptiness where the in-itself detaches #complicates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 576