GOD AND HONEY
What is the contrary to God? I will tell you: it is honey. At first it may seem utterly absurd and senseless, but with Sartre I will show you with certainty how it is precisely the case. Sartre distinguishes between being-in-itself (en-soi) and being-for-itself (pour-soi). More or less they would be, respectively, a thing and consciousness. A thing is „in itself“, it has no relation to itself, but it simply „is“. Consciousness (or being-for-itself), on the other hand, is no thing, and in a certain senise it is nothing, a pure relation with itself without any substiantiality; it relates to certain worldly things (beings-in-itself), but it is not them. In a temporal senise we can say that being-for-itself is between two beings-in-itself which are its past and its plans for future. These two are in itself, as unchanging things, but being-for-itself is neither of them, it is neither its own past nor its future. Or if we take into account that the future is „not yet“, then we obtain the formula that Sartre repeats often in „Being and Nothingness“: being-for-itself is not what it is (its past), and it is what it is not (its future). In general terms, being-for-itself is pure becoming, a transformation, which differentiates itself from unchanging beings, both from perceived external things and from its own past and future-projects. It is nothing, but it is obsessed by the dream that once it could become „itself“, i.e. that it could be in-itself, but without losing its essential characteristic of being-for-itself.
1) The dream or ideal of being-for-itself is thus being-in-itself-for-itself. But the realization of this ideal would be a contradiction in terms, because being-for-itself as such means the annihilation of being-in-itself. This ideal of being-in-itself-for-itself is God, who is precisely on the one hand completely conscious and on the other hand completely in-itself („I am what I am“). As we said, this ideal, according to Sartre, exists only as a striving of a being-for-itself, a striving that can never reach its aim.
2) God represents the impossible situation where the being-for-itself as if swallows the being-in-itself – but there’s another side of the coin, the reverse situation where the being-in-itself seems to swallow the being-for-itself, the thing seems to take possession of the consciousness. This situation is the viscosity, for example honey. The viscosity is different both from solids and from liquids. It doesn’t provide support for our action, as a stone or water would. A stone or other solid substance shows resistance to our action, and it is precisely this resistance that makes our action possible. Water or other similar liquids give support for our action with its fluidity, so that we can gilde on it, or swim in it, and with our own bodily movement feel our boundaries. But in viscosity we dissolve, our limits vanish, we don’t feel them as feedback neither from external environment (stone, ground, etc), neither from internal relationships (swimming). It sticks to us. In a temporal sense the viscosity is a situation where we feel ourselves glued to our past, where we feel incapable of distinguishing ourselves from our past and to project ever new possibilities for the future, but remain determined by the past and tend to loose the changeability, self-relationship or “nothingness” characteristic to the being-for-itself. It is the horror of falling back into being-in-itself; it is our anti-ideal.
So, as we see, it comes out that honey (as an example of viscosity) is the contrary of God. So, God and viscosity represent two extremes of transformation: its maximum (which tends to become itself a thing, a substance) and its minimum (which tends to coagulate into thing, into being-in-itself). On the one hand the maximum of difference which breaks through to become a something, and on the other hand the minimum of difference which collapses into something. Neither of the extremes can be realized; the being-for-itself moves between them, its potency rising towards God and diminishing towards “honey”.
Here it could be asked, whether the being-in-itself would not be an unrealizable dream itself, both in the form of God or viscosity, or in the form of unchanging past or fixed future. Sartre claims that being-in-itself is ontologically and metaphysically prior to the being-for-itself.[1] Being-in-itself would be both “logically” and “chronologically” prior. But this seems to be highly problematical and is related to the fact that Sartre associates the being-for-itself only with human beings.[2] Of course it is very clear how there were no human beings for billions of years after the Big Bang, and how they evolved at a certain time. But this is merely empirical aspect. If we should think that at time n after the beginning of the universe the being-for-itself as such came into being, then we don’t understand anything any more. Whence and how should this relation to itself come into being? Isn’t it a pure deus ex machina? It is possible to imagine that this relationship to itself has evolved over time and transformed itself, but it is utterly unimaginable that it could have “become” or “started” at a certain time. Even in Sartre’s own terms: how could nothing come to be? The “nothing” what the being-for-itself is? Pursuing this thought futher, it would perhaps come out that being-in-itself is nothing but the aspect that is shown to the others or that appears to the others. That being-in-itself exists only for a being-for-itself. That those utterly dense, closed, unchanging “things” are but practical idealizations that a being-for-itself creates around itself.
In this manner we could perhaps reach an even deeper and original difference or differentiation, which would be the potentcy itself with its two aspects, growth and diminishing. And Sartre’s merit is to show how being-for-itself needs being-in-itself, how freedom needs facticity. Being-in-itself and facticity don’t limit being-for-itself and freedom, but on the contrary, they give them the possibility to open and to potentiate themselves, supply a fulcrum for their operation. How could being-for-itself and freedom realize themselves, if they would not encounter the Other, especially an Other that is also a being-for-itself? Only in this encounter can we evaluate what they are worth. The “inner difference” of a being-for-itself can express itself only through the “outer difference” from an Other, from another being-for-itself. The being-in-itself and being-for-itself would be just two aspects of interaction between degrees of potency.
[1] J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. by Hazel E. Barnes, Washington Square Press, New York-London-Torontoy-Sydney. 1992 (c: 1956, 1984), p. 787-788.
[2] Sartre translates Heidegger’s Dasein as réalité humaine, which is astonishingly poor and misleading translation, because one of the reasons why Heidegger chose that word was namely to avoid such words as „human being“ or „consciousness“ – although it is true that he associates Dasein (at least in „Time and Being“) with human beings. This was one of the reasons of the controversy between Heidegger and Sartre (see Heidegger’s famous „Letter on Humanism“). And Sartre himself actually uses the key term of „being-for-itself“, and not „human“ or „consciousness“, so that we have the right to enlarge Sartre’s conception.