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Houston Newman

Prof. Jon Garthoff

PHIL 450

22 November 2016

Sartre on Death as Permanent Alienation

Abstract: In this essay, I explicate Sartre’s discussion of ‘My Death’ in Being and Nothingness
as it relates to alienation and his description of being-for-Others. My aim is to contribute to a
comprehensive understanding of Sartre’s project by explaining how this section interacts with
other parts of B&N. Here, I offer an interpretation that (i) includes some preliminary remarks vis-
à-vis ‘being-for-Others,’ then (ii) looks at the importance of ‘the Other’ in Sartre’s discussion of
death in order to (iii) defend the pessimistic conclusions that Sartre draws from his discussion:
that ‘my’ death is not in any way a structure of the for-itself and is an absurd contingency, and
that it is permanently alienating because its meaning does not refer to me nor my subjectivity —
the freedom that I am — but to the Other insofar as my being is for-him to ‘prey’ on.
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I. Introduction

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre offers several distinctions regarding death and the meaning

of it, especially as it relates to the Other. Before role of the Other is emphasized, there are several

preliminary considerations regarding death more generally. Among these is a criticism of

Heidegger’s concept of being-towards-death which segues into a clarification about how death is not

personalizing with respect to subjectivity because its not one of ‘my’ possibilities, and finally a

recharacterization of death as an absurd contingency which removes all meaning from life. At this

point, the removal of meaning gets recast in terms of a dispossession of meaning by the Other. In this

paper, I intend to explicate Sartre’s discussion of death by paying close attention to the role that ‘the

Other’ plays in the text as it relates to alienation. This will involve some preliminary remarks vis-à-

vis being-for-others as well as some other relevant parts of Sartre’s ontology and project more

generally in order to make clear and plausible his pessimistic conclusions. The conclusion most of

interest is that death is a special kind of alienation (permanent alienation) that is an aspect of being-

for-others and has the value of an absurd, radically contingent fact.

II. Being-for-Others and Sartre’s Basic Ontology

To begin, it is necessary to clarify a few terms in order to eventually understand Sartre’s

pessimism about death. Sartre is working with a dualistic1 ontology throughout Being and

Nothingness: being-in-itself and being-for-itself. The latter is most relevant to my purposes because

Sartre more or less identifies it with something like human subjectivity or consciousness (in the broad

1This is sometimes a contentious point, as some will argue that B&N is a tripartite ontology: being-in-itself,
being-for-itself and being-for-others. However, the consensus seems to be that Sartre is a dualist, and most
objections that would be raised in favor of triadism center around a concern that the objectee is not paying
enough respect to being-for-others. It should be clear that such a criticism would be a moot point here.
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sense that a phenomenologist speaks of consciousness). Sartre is giving human subjectivity a certain

precedence because his project is, as the subtitle of B&N states, phenomenological ontology. This

means that he is foremost concerned with the structures of subjectivity. To speak generally, these are

things like conscious intentionality, human freedom, responsibility, time-consciousness, as well as

what it is like to encounter another person. It to this last point that I will now turn.

In the famous section titled “The Look”, Sartre asserts the following:

“my fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be

referred back to my permanent possibility of being seen by the Other. It is in and
through the revelation of my being-as-object for the Other that I must be able to
apprehend the presence of his being-as-subject” (Sartre 344).

Focusing on the importance of being seen may help to explain the importance of the Look more

generally. For Sartre, to be seen is to be made an object for a consciousness. In the case of human

beings seeing one another, this involves some tricky relations because, until this point in the analysis,

the for-itself was experiencing a world which it, in a weak sense, constituted. Everything was

arranged by this ‘being of value’: certain things were acceptable or unacceptable, desirable or to-be-

avoided, even morally right or wrong. Now, to take Sartre’s example, suppose you are looking

unreflectively through keyhole at someone undressing, and then all of the sudden you realize you are

being watched and feel ashamed. As his description goes, you feel shame partly because something

about the world has changed: you have been made a shameful object by the Other — and this shame

reveals something about what you are for the Other, and it refers to an entirely different world of

values arranged by another subjectivity.

It is important not to confuse this feeling revealed by shame with something like a mere

judgement or attitude held by the Other. This would be too epistemological for Sartre. What he is

describing is something ontological: how the self is constituted and what it means for such a thing to

exist, as well as the shift in a phenomenological field of consciousness. The problem of other minds
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is not an epistemological question for Sartre, but an ontological one, so, as he shows above, the

question is not about how one knows that others exist, but is rather about what it means to encounter

the Other as this experience changes the being of consciousness and comes to constitute something

like a ‘self.’ The following passage is trying to get at the role that others play in self-constitution and

self-reference:

“This means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in
that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation
outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other” (349).

This is also the reason Sartre rejects speaking of being-for-others in terms of knowledge. From the

Look, I understand that I have a foundation outside myself insofar as the Other makes me what I am.

This, according to Sartre, is a limit to my freedom. It is in this way that the Other is a threat to me.

This is a threat because Sartre also assumes that one wants to Be something.2 This is a psychological

point about what human projects are directed towards: not pleasure (as Freud thought), but Being. We

often speak this way: we want to be loved, or famous, or a good parter to our spouse, or virtuous, et

cetera. But the Other is a threat to this precisely because s/he is what founds it. One’s success at these

various projects depends on something which outside of one’s own control and freedom. This is what

Sartre means by saying that I am a ‘slave’ to the Other:

“Thus being-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which

is not my freedom. It is in this sense that we can consider ourselves as ‘slaves’ insofar
as we appear to the Other … I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at
the center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my
being … and which den[ies] my transcendence [freedom] in order to constitute me as
a means of ends of which I am ignorant—I am in danger. This danger is not an
accident but the permanent structure of my being-for-others” (358).

2By something, I do not mean just anything in general, but something specific relative to a person: good,
virtuous, an actor, a teacher, et cetera.
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The danger he speaks of in this passage is not a danger to my biological life, but a danger to the free

projects that I am, my being insofar as it is for-others. This will prove to be relevant later.

The last important thing to note before continuing to the discussion about death is that Sartre

does not think, as he claims Heidegger did, that my relation to the Other is something that is a

necessary feature of my human subjectivity. He states in the section titled ‘My Fellowman’, which

immediately precedes the discussion of death:

“There is no doubt that my belonging to an inhabited world has the value of a

fact. It refers to the original fact of the Other’s presence in the world, a fact which, as
we have seen, cannot be deduced from the ontological structure of the for-
itself” (656).

There is nothing which necessitates that I inhabit a world also inhabited by other human beings, and

the Other’s existence is a pure, contingent fact; and it is not, as we shall see with death too, an

ontological necessity of human consciousness.

III. Sartre’s criticism of Being-towards-death

Now, I will turn towards the discussion of Death beginning with the criticism of Heidegger.

Sartre understands Heidegger’s being-towards-death in the following way:

If the meaning of our life becomes the expectation of death, then when death
occurs, it can only puts its seal upon life. This is basically the most positive content of
Heidegger’s ‘resolute decision’ (Entschlossenheit)” (683).

As Sartre reads him, the kind of anxiety that a person has towards her death can be subdued if she

embraces her mortality and projects herself towards it to escape inauthenticity. But Sartre sees

something wrong with Heidegger’s analysis here:3

3 It’s worth mentioning that at this point in Sartre’s text, he is not yet expressly opposed to Heidegger’s
conclusion and is sympathetic towards the Heidegger enough to credit his views as advantageous and
including an “undeniable portion of truth” (682).
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“The sleight of hand introduced by Heidegger is easy enough to detect. He

begins by individualizing the death of each one of us, by pointing out to us that it is
the death of a person, of an individual, the ‘only thing which nobody can do for me.’
Then this incomparable individuality which he has conferred upon death in terms of
the Dasein, he uses to individualize the Dasein itself; it is by projecting itself freely
toward its final possibility that the Dasein will attain authentic existence and wrench
itself away from everyday banality in order to attain the irreplaceable uniqueness of
the person. But there is a circle here. How indeed can one prove that death has this
individuality and the power of conferring it?” (683, underline added).

Heidegger is accused of a circularity, underlined above, in which he starts from the point of view

important to Sartre (human subjectivity) and then uses the individuality of death that he stablished

from that point of view to individualize the very subjectivity he started with. As Sartre suggests,

“there is here an evident bad faith in the reasoning” (683). In an analytic fashion, Sartre provides

some counterexamples to Heidegger’s analysis:

“… if one considers death as the ultimate subjective possibility, the event

which concerns only the for-itself, then it is evident that nobody can die for me. But
then it follows that none of my possibilities taken from this point of view…can be
projected by anyone other than me. Nobody can love for me—if we mean by that to
make vows which are my vows, to experience the emotions…which are my emotions.
And the my here has nothing to do with a personality won by overcoming everyday
banality …; it refers simply to that selfness which Heidegger expressly recognizes in
everyday Dasein …” (683-4).

Sartre’s provocation here is meant to posit two things: (a) personalizing death as mine does not help

to make any sort of a special distinction between the mineness of death and other ‘banal’ sorts of

mineness, so (b) the emphasis on my death will not get one any closer to (nor, and by the same token,

any further away from) authenticity.4 In other words, if we are committed to personalizing death from

the point of view of subjectivity, then we are equally committed to personalizing more trivial, banal,

or even unauthentic events, actions, or states of affairs, and if we are committed to the latter, then

4The reluctance to adhere to any positive ethics or normative advice on Sartre’s part should not be a huge
surprise since his project in B&N is largely concerned with taking a negative attitude towards such matters in
order to properly describe ‘man in bad faith.’
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where lies the proof that taking that attitude towards one’s mortality is any more authentic than it is

inauthentic? This leads us to the second part of Sartre’s criticism of Heidegger.

We can think of banal events as personal, but we can also think of them impersonally or

“from the point of view of their function, their efficacy, and their result” (684). Sartre reverses a

previous example to show this:

“… the Other can always do what I do. If it is a question of making this

woman happy, of safeguarding her life or her freedom…or simply realizing a home
with her, of ‘giving her’ children, if that is what we call loving, then another will be
able to love in my place, he will even be able to love for me” (684).

So, this step of the argument goes a little further than the last. Now, all those projects that we

considered irreducibly personal can be thought of in ways that show they are not so irreducible. Not

only is it the case that these things need not be personal, but, and here is the crucial point, they need

not be personalizing either. A state of affairs in which a particular person ‘is loved’ does not entail

that this person ‘is loved by me.’ Nor does it mean that her ‘being loved’ is a something which makes

me the unique individual that I am. Now Sartre asks us to consider that death can be thought of in a

similarly impersonal way:

“If to die is to die in order to inspire, to bear witness, for the country, etc.,
then anybody at all can die in my place…In short there is no personalizing virtue
which is peculiar to my death. Quite the contrary, it becomes my death only if I place
myself already in the perspective of subjectivity; it is my subjectivity …which makes
death a subjective irreplaceable, and not death which would give an irreplaceable
selfness to my for-itself” (684).

This final step of the argument does a few things. First, it precludes death from being a structure of

my being-for-itself, and, at the same time, makes death into a contingency. This should reflect a

common intuition: the question of what to make of our own mortality is sometimes frustrating and

provokes a certain anxiety partly because it seems so unnecessary that we will die. The contingent
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nature of our mortality can often be what motivates the question in the first place. Conversely, the

second thing that this step achieves is that because death is not in any way of the structure of the for-

itself, the selfness that is a familiar structure of human subjectivity is not selfness by virtue of an

individualizing death. In other words, what makes me the unique individual that I am (qua for-

myself) has nothing to do with this contingency, but is an immediate structure of the for-itself that

Sartre confusingly calls finitude. By finitude, Sartre means “to make known to oneself what one is by

projecting oneself toward one possible to the exclusion of others” (698).5 This, he thinks, need not

have anything to do with death.

Now, I will turn towards Sartre’s distinction between two senses of the verb ‘expect’ which

supports his conclusion that the contingency of death is absurd, and then I will transition to

explicating how Sartre thinks of death and how this relates to the Other.

IV. The Absurdity of Death

At the end of Sartre’s criticism of Heidegger, he states the following: “for it is death as my

death, and consequently its essential structure as death is not sufficient to make of it that personalized

and qualified event which one can wait for” (685). It is hard to see how this follows from his

criticisms of Heidegger, despite everything that Sartre’s counterargument established. Perhaps the

best way to interpret this is to view Sartre as getting ahead of himself since, at this point in the text,

he has not told us anything of death’s “essential structure” aside from it being contingent and thereby

not belonging to subjectivity. What Sartre needs here is go one step further, and he begins this by

distinguishing between two senses of ‘expect.’

5 Choosing at the exclusion of other possibilities would happen even if humans were immortal according
to Sartre because of the irreversibility of temporality (698-99).
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The first sense is translated as ‘to wait for,’ and the second simply as ‘to expect.’6 His

discussion here is also a bit opaque, but the difference he wants to bring out is the difference between

saying something such as ‘I expect Pierre to arrive at noon’ and ‘expect the worse.’ The latter usually

involves a degree of indeterminacy, while the former assumes some sort of determinate order within

a relatively closed system. Sartre relates this distinction to death in the following way: to say that I

can ‘expect death’ or ‘wait for death’ in the first sense would require a similar degree of determinacy

as would ‘waiting for Pierre to arrive at noon,’ and this is usually not true of death unless in certain

special circumstances.7 What mean when we say, ‘I expect that I will die,’ is usually ‘expect’ in its

second sense. It is in this way that death introduces a degree of chance and indeterminacy to my

projects. But Sartre is very careful not to allow this sort of chance to be one which belongs to my

personal(izing) projects:

“… this perpetual appearance of chance at the heart of my projects cannot be

apprehended as my possibility but, on the contrary, as the nihilation of all my
possibilities, a nihilation which itself is no longer a part of my possibilities. Thus
death is not my possibility of no longer realizing a presence in the world but rather an
always possible nihilation of my possibles which is outside my possibilities” (687).8

Because death lies ‘outside my possibilities’ and also involves a degree of indeterminacy and chance,

it no longer makes sense to speak of ‘waiting for death’ nor ‘projecting oneself towards one’s death’

6There is an important translator’s note in this passage which admits that the distinction he is making is
not usually maintained in French and is the difference between the reflexive and non-reflexive form of the
verb attendre.
7 Sartre gives the example of “[my] execution which will take place in eight days” (685).
8The reason Sartre uses ‘nihilation’ here instead of ‘annihilation’ is because he is committed to
maintaining the point of view from subjectivity, and to nihilate means to ‘make a nothingness.’ This is, he
claims, the essential to consciousness because consciousness exists by not being the intentional object
which it is conscious of. Because consciousness is intentional in this way, it exists by nihilation. So, to
preserve the rather Cartesian framework, he is committed to thinking of his own thinking about death also
as a nihilating activity.
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if this is meant to describe, as Heidegger’s view does, how one should live or answer the question of

Being.

Sartre reframes the previous passage in terms of meaning:

“… we can no longer even say that death confers a meaning on life from the outside;
a meaning can come only from subjectivity. Since death does not appear on
foundation of our freedom [subjectivity], it can only remove all meaning from
life” (689).

Now, not only does death fail to personalize me, and not only does it fail to give my life a meaning or

justification, but it removes the meaning and values that my subjectivity assigned to it. Because death

is something external to me, involves chance, and renders life meaningless for me (meaningless w/r/t

my being-for-itself), he calls it absurd.9 This removal of meaning is later characterized as a removal

through dispossession by the Other, and it is this idea to which I will now turn.

V. Death and the Other: Dispossession and Alienation

With the preceding exegesis in place, we are now ready to examine the role that the Other

plays vis-à-vis death. In an oxymoronic fashion, Sartre transitions from talking about ‘my death’ into

a discussion of the ‘dead life.’ This is meant to capture a notion of posthumous existence, and as we

will see, it is inevitable that all talk about our own posthumous existence will be limited to the point

of view of the Other. Sartre prefaces the part on dispossession with the following:

“Thus from this point of view [the point of view of the Other] we can see clearly the
difference between life and death: life decides its own meaning because it is always
in suspense; it possesses essentially a power of self-criticism and self-metamorphosis
which cause 10 it to define itself as a ‘not-yet’ or, if you like, makes it be as the

9 It may be worth mentioning that, contrary to Camus, my life is not absurd until I have died on Sartre’s view,
since it is death which makes my life retroactively ‘fall into absurdity.’

10In the french, the verb he uses here is faire, the verb for ‘to do’ or ‘to make.’ This sense of cause does not
carry with it any sense of determinism which would be problematic for the rest of Sartre’s project to defend a
radical, absolute human freedom.
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changing of what it is. The dead life does not thereby cease to change, and yet it is all
done. This means that for it[,] … it will henceforth undergo its changes without being
in any way responsible for them” (694-5).

The most important part of this passage is the last sentence. This is probably the only point in B&N

where Sartre emphasizes a complete lack of responsibility on the part a person. This can be explained

by referring to his previous assertion that the meaning of a life can only come from subjectivity.

Meaning is a broad term for Sartre, but the relevant sense here may be characterized as ‘what it

means for me to be who I am.’ This refers us back to the claim about human psychology alluded to in

§II: for Sartre, all human projects signify the desire to be something; they are aimed at answering an

ontological question. He is working on the assumption, and developed the idea elsewhere in B&N,

that this is the correct description of human reality. So, since we fundamentally care about being

something, it will turn out that the answer to the question, ‘what does it mean for me to be anything

after death?,’ i.e., what it means for me ‘exist posthumously,’ will have to refer to another subjectivity

if it is a legitimate question because for any life to mean anything, that meaning must be imparted

upon it by human subjectivity. And death entails the non-existence of my subjectivity, so this

meaning must come into human reality through the Other:

… to the extent that this meaning [the meaning of one’s life] surpasses the
limits of a simple individuality, to the extent that a person makes himself known to
himself though an objective situation to be realized …, death represents a total
dispossession; it is the Other who dispossesses … the very meaning of [my] efforts
and therefore [my] being, for the Other … undertakes to transform into failure or
success, into folly or an intuition of genius the very enterprise by which [I] made
[myself] known to [myself] and which [I] was in [my] being” (695).

Because the way that the Other sees me is an ontological act which makes me who I am, and because

the Other is (in part) the foundation of my being, and because I fundamentally desire to be

something, the meaning of my death and the anxiety I may bear towards it is not a Heideggerian fear

of nothingness or annihilation (this would require thinking of death as my possibility), but it is rather
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a fear of failing to be what all of my projects are projections towards being (loved, a good politician,

an ‘apostle of peace,’ et cetera) by virtue of the fact that the Other will, through his very being,

dispossess the meanings I chose to give to my life. On Sartre’s view, there is nothing like

dispossession in life because I must always assume responsibility for these meanings and for my

being-for-others in virtue of being free, but no such responsibility can be assumed after the death of

my subjectivity and freedom.

It is also important to understand that because all of my projects, according to Sartre, are the

various ways in which I choose to give my life meaning, and they are inseparable from who I am

insofar as they are also projections towards who I want to be. But, since death is something I expect

(in the second sense distinguished previously), in trying to grasp its meaning I do not discover a

personalized Self that I am projecting myself towards, but only the fact of dispossession by the Other

that comes with the end of my life. Sartre describes this discovery as alienating:

“Thus the very existence of death alienates us wholly in our own life to the
advantage of the Other. To be dead is to be a prey for the living. This means therefore
that the one who tries to grasp the meaning of his future death must discover himself
as the future prey of others. We have therefore a case of alienation which we did not
consider in the section of this work which we devoted to the For-others” (695).

This kind of alienation associated with death is different because while I am living, I can always

escape what I am for the Other by virtue of my free action. This conflict, to be clear, is between

trying to escape the foundation that lies ‘outside’ myself and constantly being arrested by the Other

and thus thrown back into it. With this in mind, Sartre is carefully states that “… in this ‘dubious

battle’ the definitive victory belongs to neither the one nor the other of these modes of being. But the

fact of death without being precisely allied to either of the adversaries in this same combat gives the

final victory to the point of view of the Other …” (696, underline added). This means a couple of

things. Firstly, it means that in positing the meaning of my death and in considering its alienation, I
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do not discover my being-for-others, but the fact of the dispossession of my being-for-others.

Secondly, this fact does not entail that the meaning I chose to give to my life will change in the hands

of the Other; it only refers to the possibility of such change or ‘being-preyed-upon.’ It does not make

me ‘preyed-upon’ by the living but only renders me a prey to the living in the same general way that

mice are prey to cats. It is not me, but the point of view of the Other, the other-as-subject, to which

the fact of my death refers:

“Insofar as it is the triumph of the Other over me, it refers to a fact,

fundamental to be sure, but totally contingent as we have seen, a fact which is the
Other’s existence … And to contemplate my life in terms of death would be to
contemplate my subjectivity by adopting with regard to it the Other’s point of view.
We have seen that this is not possible” (697).

The reason that contemplating my subjectivity by adopting the Other’s point of view is impossible is

because the meaning of my fundamental relation to the Other refers to the possibility of my being

seen by him. And, for the sake of brevity, only objects are seen. Thus, it is my being-as-object that I

would regard by taking the Other’s point of view, not my being-as-subject. This is why, provided that

the meaning of death refers me to the existence of the Other, it is difficult to take certain attitudes

towards it (for example, being-towards-death).

To be clear, my fundamental connection with the Other refers only to the possibility of ‘being

seen,’ not necessarily ‘being seen’ as such. This parallels the possibility of being preyed-upon by way

of dispossession, but the type of alienation involved is different:

“What then is death? Nothing but a certain aspect of facticity and of being-
for-others … It is absurd that we are born; it is absurd that we die. On the other hand,
this absurdity is presented as the permanent alienation of my being-possibility which
is no longer my possibility but that of the Other. It is therefore an external and factual
limit of my subjectivity!” (699).
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In both cases I am alienated from myself, but with death, this alienation is permanent by virtue of the

fact that I can in no way take responsibility for the being that I am for the Other nor make an effort to

escape this dimension of my being. Its meaning does not refer to my subjectivity or freedom, nor

does it personalize these things, nor does it even refer to the being that I am for the Other and for

which I am absolutely responsible; death only refers to the Other’s radically contingent existence

through the dispossession of my being-for-others unto the Other’s point of view.

VI. Conclusion

Here, I hope to have offered a substantial exegesis of Sartre’s discussion of death in B&N.

Having considered first how his criticism of Heidegger relocates death to the level of contingency,

given support to the claim that this contingency is absurd, and finally understanding this absurdity in

terms of a removal of meaning (for-myself) via dispossession by the Other, I hope to have offered

some plausibility regarding Sartre’s claims about the way in which death permanently alienates one

from oneself.

Works Cited

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. Hazel Estella.

Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1992. Print.