“I am what I’m not and I’m not what I am”. I was struck by this Sartre quote that Thad gave during his lecture on Sartre’s philosophy. At first it seems completely incoherent and my initial reaction is to reject the statement outright as illogical and foolish, however, this statement is actually deceptively powerful in it’s implications. In order to understand what Sartre means by this quote, we must first understand Sartre’s definition of transcendence and facticity. Transcendence is the set of all the possibilities that a person has in their present or their future. A person’s hopes, dreams and goals are all constituent parts of the transcendence of that individual. Facticity, on the other hand, is the set of all the things that are true of a person either in their past or their present. Personal history, physical and mental attributes, and current social status are all examples of a persons facticity. Sartre’s quote, “I am what I’m not and I’m not what I am”, is directly in reference to these two concepts of transcendence and facticity. “I am what I’m not”, often times, we as individuals like to refer to ourselves in terms of the things we will do or plan to do. As a Physics major, I often consider myself a physicist, even though I have yet to graduate and thus do not have the facticity to back up this claim. In this half of the quote, Sartre is referring to the fact that the way we identify ourselves is not always the same as our facticity. The second half of the quote is merely a mirror image of the first with a very similar semantic meaning, “I’m not what I am”. If an individual prefers to think of themselves in terms of one’s own transcendence, then that individual is considering oneself as different from one’s own facticity. This quote seems to perfectly surmise the constant internal conflict that accompanies the consciousness of a social being. A constant struggle between what we are and what we wish to be.
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