The ideal of possession is an impossible synthesis of assimilation and resistance

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Let no one reproach us with capriciously inventing a being of this kind; when by a further movement of thought the being and absolute absence of this totality are hypostasized as transcendence beyond the world, it takes on the name of God. Is not God a being who is what he is—in that he is all positivity and the foundation of the world—and at the same time a being who is not what he is and who is what he is not—in that he is self-consciousness and the necessary foundation of himself? The being of human reality is suffering because it rises in being as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it, precisely because it could not attain the in-itself without losing itself as for-itself. Human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Possession is an ideal symbolic relation that no concrete act can fully realize — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1375; Possession is a magical relation projecting the ideal of the in-itself-for-itself; God is the hypostasized ideal of the impossible self-synthesis — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 363

Broader Connections

• Possession is an ideal symbolic relation that no concrete act can fully realize #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1375
• Possession is a magical relation projecting the ideal of the in-itself-for-itself #expands (0.85)
• God is the hypostasized ideal of the impossible self-synthesis #exemplifies (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363