Parsing Sartre
.This evening Seth and I spent a couple of hours getting through about a page of *Essays in Existentialism*. That’s slightly slower than our usual rate… and most of that time was spent on the first half-page. We ended up having to re-word it significantly in order to make sense of it. (More accurately, to make what we thought was sense out of it—naturally it’s unclear if we were correct about that.) Presented below are the original and our parsing—please note that I’m not making any claims about the comprehensibility or even sensicality of our version, either in relation to the original or independent of it…
Sartre’s original:
>Freedom in fact … is strictly identified with nihilation. The only being which can be called free is the being which nihiliates its being. Moreover we know that nihilation is *lack of being* and can not be otherwise. Freedom is precisely the being which makes itself a lack of being. But since desire, as we have established, is identical with lack of being, freedom can arise only as being which makes itself a desire of being; that is, as the project-for-itself of being in-itself-for-itself.
— p72, Jean-Paul Sartre, *Essays in Existentialism*, Kensington, New York 1993
My initial reaction to this (both tonight and on previous occasions) was: WTF? My subsequent reactions were similar. With work, though, we managed to get through it, and the parsing below helped us significantly:
>Freedom in fact … is strictly identified with change. The only mode of existing which can be called free is the mode of existing which changes its mode of existing. Moreover we know that the result of change is a lack of a mode of existing and can not be otherwise. Freedom is precisely the mode of existing which makes itself a desire of a mode of existing. But since desire, as we have established, is identical with a lack of a mode of existing, freedom can arise only as a mode of existing which makes itself a desire of a mode of existing; that is, as the project-for-itself of being in-itself-for-itself.