The Quest of the Absolute: Spinoza and Sartre

Abstract

In 1948 Sartre wrote an essay about the absolute space in Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures. This notion of absolute space is also used by Gilles Deleuze, inspired by the art critic and philosopher Henri Maldiney, in his approach of the notion of essence in Spinoza. In the first part of this article, I explain what this absolute space is about, and how it helps us to better understand Spinoza’s theory of the relation between essences and existence of modi in their relationship with—and dependency of—the substance. In a second part, I explain Sartre’s notion of absolute space in order to illustrate his inversion of the relation of essence and existence, and what this inversion means on a metaphysical level. I conclude with the suggestion that Sartre’s early philosophy and his notion of absolute consciousness and freedom can be interpreted as a kind of Spinozism, stripped of its essences.

“We have to go to the limits and see what we can do”1.

If there is a Spinozism in Sartre, it is in a form amputated from the conatus; that is, the essence that asserts itself as the power to act. Now, between essence and this power to act, there is a kind of tension which is, at first sight, strange. Lacking nothing, Spinoza affirms that this power can vary in degrees of perfection, and can increase or decrease.

For Sartre, existence does not express an essence, it creates it. Existence does not express a being (substance), it is freedom or lack of being. While this may be true, we find a tension similar to that encountered in Spinoza: as he summarizes in a precise and sharp way in a passage from the Notebooks for an Ethics, this freedom is still as absolute and undiminished—while the power I have to act on the things that affect or determine me can vary ([2], p. 433).

In the transition between Sartre and Spinoza, the imagination plays a central role. This is what I would like to develop in the following. I would also like to address, in an indirect way, the inversion of the relationship between essence and existence and all that this inversion implies on a metaphysical level. I will approach it through a detour.

This detour is moreover the one taken by Gilles Deleuze, when he adopted Henri Maldiney’s descriptions of Byzantine art and the idea of absolute space in order to describe the essence of a mode in the Ethics.

This idea of absolute space is also found in what Sartre wrote in a short essay dealing with Giacometti’s statues, under the title “The Quest for the Absolute.” However, in Sartre, this absolute space is imaginary. In Spinoza, according to Deleuze at least, this space expresses the idea of the pure light that is the substance. In short, in this absolute space, a transition is accomplished from Spinoza to Sartre, that of a desubstantialization of light.

1. Essence of Modes

Spinoza’s Ethics is based on a metaphysically founded opposition between the infinite and the finite. An opposition—at least concerning finite modes—between what is in itself and by itself (in se and per se) on the one hand, and what is in alio on the other.

Substance is, in fact, “quod in se est et per se concipitur” (E1d3): that which is in itself and is conceived by itself. The modes are in something else and are conceived by it (E1d5). A mode is an affection or modification of substance according to the essences; i.e., its attributes. Each mode itself has an essence that distinguishes or delimits it (terminare) as a finite being (E1d2). This essence, or power, is the very expression of the power of God; that is, of substance.

The power by which particular things—and, consequently, man—preserve their being is the very power of God; i.e., of Nature […]. So, the power of man, insofar as it is explained through his actual essence, is a part of the infinite power; that is, of the essence of God (i.e., of Nature) (E4p4dem)2.

Dependent on nature, the essence of a finite thing does not imply existence (E1p24): existence is fulfilled as a form of challenge in its perpetual confirmation of essence. Finite things therefore exist according to a double constraint: that imposed on them by their nature or essence—and which subjects existence to necessity—and the constraint suffered by the force and impact of other things that affect each mode, according to laws of pure determinism. Whatever one does, one is prompted to do so by the necessity of one’s nature: all action is always ‘reactive,’ insofar as it responds to the impact of something that determines me to “operate”; in short, to react (E1p28).

What, then, is the essence of a finite thing? Essences are the qualities by which substance (“quod per se concipitur”) conceives and expresses itself; i.e., its attributes, within which finite things are modifications, or “parts.” Its parts are distinguished from each other by reason of their essence or their existence. An essence, as we have said, is caused by God, or Nature (substance)—existence finds its cause in another singular thing, itself caused by a singular thing, and so on to infinity (E1p28). However, the relationship between essence and existence is not of the order of the virtual to the actual. An essence is not a potentiality waiting to be realized or to be executed as existence; it is already completely in action and completely finished. It lacks nothing, just as a sonata by Vinteuil does not wait to be performed in order to be accomplished3—it is what it is, played or not. The difference between the essence of a mode and its existence is rather the way it (the mode) relates to other modes: intrinsically (essence) or extrinsically (existence). The essence of a mode is a quantity of being (“quantum in se est”, E3p6) or expressive power of substance. This quantity is a degree of intensity: a particular work or idea has more reality, in the sense that it contains greater complexity in itself or in the sense that it condenses other works or ideas internally. Essence is a form of “complication” in an attribute. On the other hand, once played, this sonata by Vinteuil measures its power by extrinsic relationships with other modes: it inspires a musician to transcribe it for the local brass band, or it moves lovers to turn it into their private hymn of love. These relationships remain extrinsic to the essence of the sonata. Essence as a quality is, therefore, power to be. Existence, on the other hand, is a power to persevere in one’s being, an effort, a conatus4; i.e., a power to act, to affect other finite things or to be affected by them. The essence does not change—it is fully what it is, always at the limit of itself, without any reservation or restraint. As for the power to act of a singular thing, it is measured by its power to subsume other modes or finite things to its nature, to absorb them; i.e., to explain or express its essence in such a way that the impact of things does not limit its extensive impulse.

But what is the limit of a finite thing?

In his definition of a finite thing, Spinoza uses the term “terminare potest” (E1d2). A thing is said to be finite (Ea res dicitur in suo genere finita…) if it can be “limited” by another of the same nature. Hence, terminare can mean “finish”: a particular thing is ‘finished’ once it is destroyed by another thing which is more powerful (E4axiom). However, it can also mean to “achieve”: particular things all tend to accomplish what they are as an essence.

2. Absolute Space

In order to describe what is meant by the power or essence of a mode, Deleuze seeks inspiration in the reflections that Henri Maldiney formulated on the idea of spacing in Byzantine art ([3], pp. 173–207). According to Deleuze, Spinoza is a philosopher of the Enlightenment, where Light is considered in the almost literal sense of the term5.

Maldiney himself claims light as the absolute power of irradiation and the “unifying power” ([3], p. 64) in relation to space and illuminated figures. This idea, to remain within the phenomenological framework adopted by Maldiney, implies much more than a simple inversion of the figure–ground relationship specific to real spatialization. It presupposes a modification of this relationship as such. The figure–ground differentiation is conceived according to our relationship to things in real or lived space. On the contrary, the idea of light as a power presupposes that of an absolute space; i.e., a space that imposes its distances by freeing itself from those that a subject deploys by relating to the things around him. “Light takes on an independence in relation to form” ([4], p. 279). This independence is accompanied by a modification concerning the apprehension of the notion of the essence of a thing: instead of a “form,” the thing is defined by its power, that of tending (conor: striving to) towards its limit.

For the Greeks, Deleuze says, form (eidos) is thought of as contour: the idea of a cube is defined by, or is limited by, six squares. The world is structured and energized by the tension between pure form (the idea of the circle) and its material copy or decal. However, this idea of contour is based on that of demarcation, copied from and genetically constituted by our tactile relationships with things6. The figure presupposes the “tactile–optical” sensible world7.

It is also in this world, in this real extension or space, that the figure distinguishes itself from others thanks to a contour that cuts the thing out of a material reality which withdraws on the background. The meaning of this background and depth therefore depends on the limits by which the figure is cut out from the rest of extension. The background is that which falls out of limits and is abandoned and discarded by the present figure as uninteresting elements. This background is populated by insignificant details that may disturb and distract. The figure, through its form, thus conjures up a real matter; it is in this conjuring that space unfolds and expands.

Hence, there is a kind of confusion—to which Sartre will return—between this real space and the one that the figure evokes or imposes. Molded in this matter, the spatial distances measured directly according to one’s relationship with things, the figure (statue) stands as a real and unreal thing at the same time. One can go around it, discover new details (“all this lunar orography” of the skin, as Sartre would say; [1], p. 297) by getting closer; however, at the same time, these details will only ever be those that the artist has put into them.

This is because the notion of perspective is still anchored on that of the point of view of a subject located in the world, which is an inherently tactile perspective. However, in the seventeenth century, discoveries and theses of a purely optical perspective were developed: for the Greeks light lived only on and through the bodies it illuminated, whereas this pure geometry (like Dessargues’ projective geometry)8 was based on the idea of pure visibility, without confusion with the tactile or the contact of light with shapes or contours. It is “light for itself” ([4], p. 282). The research and discoveries of this pure geometry redefined the figure and its mode of appearing entirely in terms of light, as well as the challenge of distinguishing in order to create the image of the body (“the surface of this body in parts illuminated and shaded”) and the advantage of discerning, in particular, “the place where the illuminated and the shaded meet”9. This geometry, whose figures do not depend on a point of view anchored in reality, but which imposes and deploys a perspective that is itself geometric, is based on the existence of an absolute space.

This space, according to Deleuze and inspired by Maldiney, is found among other things in Byzantine art and its mosaics; for example, the mosaics of the church of St Vitale in Ravenna.

One has the impression that these figures no longer have depth, but this is because this depth is “the space between the spectator and the mosaic.” This space does not unfold according to a concrete point of view—that of the person admiring the mosaics—instead, it is these mosaics which impose a space and a distance: that evoked by the very sparkle of the figure, by its colors and the light they capture or emit.

For a Byzantine mosaic, it is no longer form-contour, it is light-color. This is what defines in the literal sense of defining; i.e., marking the limits of something. A definition is an indication of the limit; that is, the figure continues how far the light it captures or emits goes, and how far the color of which it is composed goes ([4], p. 394).

A figure no longer extends because of its limits (outline), it is an expansion because of light and colors. As Henri Maldiney says, “The radiance of colour generates a figure whose existence precedes the definition of its outline” ([3], p. 205).

Light and its play of shadow, of claire-obscure, generates by itself the appearance of figures and their spatialization. A figure extends its power of presence as far as the light carries it—it is no longer torn from a background, but is transmitted by an irradiation that “crosses figure-background.” The figure has a power of expansion that creates and evokes its own space, its own depth and notion of distance. Color—for example, golden yellow—is a “generator of space” ([3], p. 204); this space is no longer a container (contenant), but radiates as a kind of “aura.” Thus, depth no longer depends on the dynamic of figure–ground differentiation; instead, it emanates from the figure. It is the space that the figure imposes on the spectator who seeks to capture, or to be captured by, its expressive power. It is this distance that puts him at a distance, one that is no longer measured by the mobility of his own point of view or bodily anchorage, but which seems out of the world, absolute. This figure therefore imposes a new form of presence10—no longer a decal of material presence, qualified by the “fixity of inertia” (the figure remains in place and does not disappear), but a presence understood in terms of intensity: of the power to impose itself up to the limit of its radiation or light diffusion. There have been various attempts to describe this intensity of presence in religious terms, such as signs of spiritualization and disembodiment, with Byzantine images said to be akin to “visions of another world” [6] (p. 39). However, as a work, it is rather a materialization of light, effected by the expansion of the golden background “symbolizing” the celestial light or the divine luminosity of the sun [6] (p. 37) and “transforming” the one who sees the light. He makes a “leap” (“un saut,” as Sartre would say) into an absolute space, the one created by mosaics—absolute because it is independent of, or not relative to a singular point of view, by and in a matter fed and animated by the rays of the sun and its light waves11, a matter through which light seems to “exude.” Hence the remark of G. Duthuit, in his approach to light in Byzantine art: “Objects take on value only to the extent that they concretize, to the extent that they color the luminous wave that comes to meet them” ([7], p. 76).

3. Sartre on Absolute Space

The idea of absolute space plays a central role in the imaginary and in the application that Sartre makes of it in his essay on Giacometti’s statues. Absolute space is no longer the one generated by light, but is the result of inversion processes specific to the dynamics of the imagination. It is absolute, because it is unreal.

A real object is individualized thanks to the contiguous relations that it maintains with other objects and that bind it to its environment or the space that encompasses it. These relations are external in the sense that they do not belong to the very nature of the thing. However, in the case of an imagined object, these same relationships are modified into a link that could be said to be internal, intrinsic: Sartre speaks of a relationship of belonging. The spatial dimensions that specify the object’s links are now internalized to the image. As an image, such an object does not appear at a distance from me or in relation to the particular angle from which I am viewing it: its distance is an integral part of its appearance. It is integrated into it as an absolute property of the object of the image-making consciousness. Thus, this object in image presents itself as a concrete totality, says Sartre, “which envelops, among other qualities, extension” ([8], p. 245). The distance is not in relation to me, since the object does not maintain any link or relationship with me: it contains as a quality a “coefficient of depth,” it embodies and evokes a relationship ([8], p. 244). Moreover, the object of an image-forming consciousness no longer arises as a figure on a background: if it arises or ‘appears’, it is at the cost of a vanishing or disappearing of all background. If Swann imagines Odette in her room, the room itself “leaves the stage,” or this scene is affected by the absence of the beloved person he seeks to make present.

Thus, the representation of an unreal object affects the space in which one stands with unreality. It drives it into a background that is pure nothingness. This object then appears unattached to the real world—it is out of the world, out of reach, out of space. It is characterized by what Sartre also calls an “absenteeism of space.” The unreal object has no real place and, within the real, it is absent.

The unreal object therefore has a power to appear that is based on an inversion of the power of a real object. While the real object is silhouetted by contrast with contiguous objects that weave links of individualization, the unreal object internalizes its links. Its power to appear is based on its “immanent qualities” which are distance, depth, and space.

This immanent distance is the one that Sartre also detects in Giacometti’s statues. We are accustomed to seeing paintings with an immanent space: their landscapes or portraits are unreal apparitions, the space between them and the viewer is itself unreal. It is the distance required for the painting to deploy its power of self-manifestation: too close, and I see only spots; too far away, I only see colors. However, as soon as I capture the figures for what they are, I apprehend them according to their own spatial relief that is totally inherent to the canvas. The little piece of yellow wall will always appear at such a distance from the roof of the neighboring house, and the little figures—the two women on the banks of the canal—are once and for all at such and such a distance, a few seconds away from the moored boat. Of course, these distances are incompatible with those that I myself deploy as a point of view. The very meaning of this point of view is altered: it frees itself from the real angle and subsumes itself into the focus from which the painted figures are composed and impose an unreal environment. This milieu haunts with its presence the real space where I am; the painting is an expansion of space that radiates from itself.

However, according to Sartre, Giacometti’s statues accomplish exactly the same power. No matter how far away I may be, ten, fifteen, or twenty yards, I shall always see them “twenty paces from me.” ([1], p. 296). Thus, Sartre transposes the power of paintings to that of Giacometti’s statues ([1], p. 297). His statues—unlike the so-called classical sculptures ([1], p. 297)—are no longer unreal objects in a real space, with all the ambiguities that this implies12: they have an unreal space and, therefore, have no real relationship with what surrounds them. The artist “restores,” says Sartre, “an unreal space to the statues” (…). If he sculpts man from a distance, it is at an “absolute distance” ([1], p. 299). This distance sticks and is immanent to the figure, it emanates from it as an intrinsic quality. Not “seeing” this distance is like not noticing the smile on the Mona Lisa’s lips or the peaceful, timeless calm in the View of Delft. The figure then “jumps” into the unreal: whatever I do, it appears “twenty paces away” and it stays there.

A “classical” statue therefore remained an object on which one could multiply the points of view, grasp new details by getting closer. However, “you don’t come close to a statue of Giacometti”; it reveals itself or imposes itself “only at a respectful distance” ([1], p. 299).

How does this absolute space unfold, what is it the expression of? It is no longer an expression of the “unifying power” of light, but of the imaginary and its dynamic of “inversion” or double negation (double néantization).

In an act of perception, I put myself in touch with an object that offers itself to my gaze from the point of view that I embody. I move closer or further away, in order to better grasp it. My eyes move from left to right to follow the movement of a pendulum. However, in the imagination, the movement of the eyes follows nothing, does not seek to escort the trajectory of an imagined clock. These eye movements evoke those of the pendulum and, between the evocation of it and my consciousness, there is no longer the slightest gap. It is this consciousness that creates the image, its movement, and any spatial aspect that corresponds to it. However, creating a clock as a mental image is based on an act of consciousness that sees nothing, that does not observe or admire what it has aroused. Moreover, consciousness gives itself this image all at once or not at all: without retouching, without approaching it or distancing itself from it in the hope of being able to better understand it.

An imagined pendulum is unreal, it is a nothingness that frees itself from real things, their space, or their environment. This evocation only works to the extent that my consciousness manages to “neutralize” what is really present, to modify its meaning in favor of what is imagined. The imaginary has this double power of ignoring the reality that stretches out before one’s eyes, invoking an image that is nothing apart from the act of consciousness that evokes its appearance. To ignore reality does not mean to be deaf to its presence, but to monopolize this presence and modify it in favor of the absent image. I hear the ticking of my watch but, deep down, I do not really hear it; I assimilate these sounds as material to evoke the ticking of a fictitious clock. This ticking is not real matter projected onto an unreal clock. As a sound, it “jumps” into the unreal; it is an integral part of the image, it is an intrinsic or immanent quality of it. This sound has become an absolute.

Similarly, Giacometti’s statues are “characters are wholly and all at once what they are,” and do not allow themselves to be “learned or observed” ([1], p. 300). They impose themselves with a form of presence that is no longer that of a thing in a space, one that would reveal itself in profiles and in relation to the objects that surround them. These characters give themselves at once, once and for all, without parts, absorbing all spatiality as an absolute quality. Hence, a pure and dense presence emerges, which does not extend and does not depend on extension in order to appear as a thing. It has its own internalized extension as a power of expansion: the power that determines how far its elongated form haunts real space without disappearing into it as a material thing. On this subject, Sartre says that Giacometti managed to “compress” space, he pressed it into the form as absolute distance: “he puts distance within reach, he pushes before our eyes a distant woman–and she remains distant even when we touch her with our fingertips” ([1], p. 300). While the plaster block is close, the character evoked is forever distant.

Giacometti thus joins what Deleuze attributed to Byzantine art: the art of spatialization.

4. Figure and Essence

The essence of a thing is its power, which always tends towards and extends to its limit. This limit is not external to the nature of a thing, it is that of the thing itself that acts. There is a sense of “limit-terminus,” which defines the thing by its contour (idea) and the “limit-tension” ([4], p. 395). Essence is that which tends towards a limit while subsuming under its nature the elements and parts which are conducive to its power to act. Deleuze draws inspiration from Byzantine mosaics to describe this notion of essence. What defines a figure here (in the sense of marking the limits) depends on the light: “the figure extends as far as the light it captures or emits, and as far as the color of which it is composed” [4] (p. 394). The figure will therefore go as far as it acts: “there is no outline of the figure, there is an expansion of the light-color.”

According to Deleuze, echoing Maldiney, it is this idea of expansion that inspired the Stoics when approaching the notion of essence in a non-Platonic way, and which would reappear in Spinoza. Essence is thus thought of in energetic terms.

The tectonic forms of classical art, constituted from their limit and defined by the circumscription of their contour, have been replaced by energetic forms whose autogenesis is an expansion of luminous energy, either of color or of brightness and shadow. Such is the Stoic definition of beings ([3], pp. 206–7).

The limit in this sense is conceived more as a “zone”: that particular zone between the woods and the meadow, or the zone as far as the power of an animal extends (cf. the “territory” delimited by the appetite of the cow and not by barriers), or that of a germ or a seed capable of bursting a wall.

This dynamic notion of essence and limit is very well summarized by Emile Bréhier, commenting on the force that constitutes the nature of living in Stoic beings: this force determines the form of the being, “its limits, not in the manner of a sculptor who makes a statue, but like a seed that develops its latent capacities to a certain point in space and only to that point.”13

This force—which is, for example, the essence of a body—has the power to subsume the parts to infinity—that is to say, to the infinitely small—and thus to prevent fragmentation and decomposition. In this respect, essence is the very expression of the infinite power that is substance or nature and of its abundant and inexhaustible self-affirmation. All decomposition is nothing but new recomposition.

Put precisely, this infinity is also at the center of Sartre’s approach to Giacometti’s sculptures, which illustrates the transfer of meaning that Spinozist nature undergoes as it sinks into Sartrean ontology: the sculptor has the “terror of emptiness” (le vide), that of a space or a matter that is scattered to infinity. What Giacometti seeks to drive out of his work, to ward off, is precisely this “infinite divisibility.” It is always too much, it expresses a “pure and simple coexistence of juxtaposed parts”14: “space is the cancer of being” ([1], p. 295) and eats away at everything, it decomposes from within what binds or unites things.

The sculptor’s task is that of compression, it is a question of “degreasing the space,” compressing it to “drain all its exteriority” ([1], p. 295). This compression, as we saw, is achieved by reversing the relationships that a thing has with those around it. The sculptor integrates or absorbs these relationships as qualities of the object.

The imaginary then creates an essence through the dynamic of inversion—that is, through internalization of the external relations proper to existence—whereas Spinoza sees the existence of a thing as the exteriorization of its essence.

As the fruit of the imagination, Giacometti’s statues therefore seem very vulnerable, perishable, and ephemeral: their material is this “strange powdery flour,” a pure “dust of space.” For Sartre, the sculptor does not express being or reality: he seeks to contain it, compress it, and conjure it away; to annihilate or nullify it. The real is ultimately nothing more or less than this infinite dissolution without hope of composition or unification; i.e., without hope of form. The form is purely imaginary.

Thus Giacometti solved, in his own way, the problem of the unity of the multiple: “it is plaster or bronze that are divisible: but this woman who walks towards the indivisibility of an idea, of a feeling; she has no parts because she gives itself up all at once…”

This is also what Sartre calls Giacometti’s Copernican revolution:

“Before him, we thought we were sculpting being, and this absolute collapsed into an infinity of appearances. He chose to sculpt the situated appearance and it is revealed that through it one reached the absolute” ([1], p. 301).

5. Sartre’s “Spinozism”

Sartre’s ontology is like a Spinozism stripped of its essences15. What is in itself cannot be conceived, contrary to the Spinozist substance (“quod in se est et per se concipitur”): the in itself is inert. Any dynamic injected into this inertia is not essential either. It is nothingness, and it is from this nothingness that the very idea of an “essence” must be conceived. However, this conception remains affected by the lack of being from which it originates. Faced with what is, an essence is nothing: it is of the order of the imagination.

However, there is nevertheless a form of Spinozism that persists in this ontology. It is not insignificant to note that the rare occasion that Sartre refers to Spinoza is when he introduces and describes the absolute character that is precisely this “nothingness”; that is to say, the absolute consciousness of the Transcendence of the Ego.

“Consciousness,” says Sartre, “can only be limited (like Spinoza’s substance) by itself” [9] (p. 23).

With this claim, he is not referring at all to Spinoza’s definition of substance (E1d),16 but to proposition 8 (E1p8) stipulating that all substance is necessarily infinite, as well as to its demonstration (“it would have to be bounded (terminari) by another of the same nature…”).

Here, thus, is the transition: consciousness is infinite, but stripped of its conceptual power; it is empty. This transition is reflected in the relationship established between essence and existence, which was our starting point.

We have seen that in Spinoza there is a tension between, on one hand, the accomplished character and the unbreakable power of the essence of a finite thing (a mode) and, on the other hand, the way in which this mode maintains itself in the face of what determines its existence “from outside.” Basically, this means that in every situation experienced, the essence is fully actual. It is fully realized in the infinite ways in which the thing will have to determine itself in the face of what affects it. Thus, suffering does not diminish its essence: this power is manifested as fully in cases of pain as in those which mark joy. Only sadness manifests its essence in a situation where the singular thing is threatened in its existence, as in an illness. Thus, a sick body fully affirms its essence (i.e., what structures the body as an individual), as a body which, because of the disease, loses part of its power to act. The frustration that results from this loss is precisely the full and unreserved actualization of the essence in such a situation. What the thing does and feels is no “less” essential when it lives in sadness and hatred than when it frees itself through joy. However, in hatred, its power to act and to fulfill its essence is diminished, disturbed, or thwarted.

This intuition also seems to feed Sartre’s ontology—the one in which the ego is not the expression of an essence, but the imaginary fallout of a pure, empty, and impersonal consciousness. This ego is driven by a consciousness that is infinite and limitless, but which conceives nothing and, therefore, expresses nothing: it is not the source of essence but, rather, “the tireless creation of existence” ([9], p. 79), says Sartre.

What drives one into being is therefore not essential: no “necessity” is realized in one’s relationships with things. However, in every relationship that determines me, what drives me or exposes me to things remains untouched: freedom. In every particle of action, my freedom remains total, and every action is and remains the total expression of this freedom. For example, I pass through a contagion zone and “I am affected, that is to say contaminated” ([2], p. 447): I fall ill. It “weakens me, changes me, abruptly limits my possibilities.” This is what the “popular language calls being diminished” ([2], p. 448). However, this reduction in no way limits my freedom; that is, the need to make this diminution my own and to take responsibility for it.

I am perpetually condemned to want what I did not want, to no longer want what I wanted, to rebuild myself in the unity of a life in the presence of the destruction inflicted on me by the outside ([2], p. 448).

Just as the sculptor wards off the infinite fragmentation of matter by compressing space, by imposing on it each time a unity to which it does not tend by itself, the Sartrean for-itself is condemned to ward off the entropy of meaning imposed on it by existence, with its external relations and pure determination.

What one is exposed to, and the meaning that these things that determine or “affect” me take on, is no longer expressive of anything: the meaning comes from what one does with or makes of it, from what one does with what these things have done to them.

In this way, one is totally determined and totally free; forced to assume or accept this determinism in order to set the goals of freedom beyond it, to make this determinism one more commitment… [2] (p. 449)

There is probably something very Stoic in these luminous affirmations.