ABSTRACT
M. Jean-Paul Sartre takes a certain amount of trouble to explain what he means by ‘the possible’, but nevertheless it is difficult to be quite sure what he means. He wishes to say that the possibilities of a thing actually belong to it, as properties. Consciousness according to Sartre is always referring forward, away from a more momentary awareness of what is true now. Sartre speaks of the upsurge of consciousness in the world as ‘the only possible adventure in the In-itself’. Knowing and being known is one of the fundamental relations which hold between the For-itself and the In-itself; and Sartre tries to show that this relation can exist only because of the nothingness at the centre of the For-itself. The only kind of human behaviour he has discussed is the behaviour of Bad Faith, because this arises directly out of, and confirms the existence of, the nothingness in the centre of consciousness.
