Appropriation and possession

Appropriation and possession describe more than the external ownership of an object: they are the For-itself’s project of becoming united with what it lacks while the object remains independent. In making, knowing, and sport, a concrete thing becomes “mine” through a relation that joins self and not-self; at its furthest reach, possessing a thing is an effort to possess the world through it.

From doing to having

Desire takes different forms in the world: a person may want to have an object, do something, or be someone. These categories are not independent. Doing often serves having: a cane is cut from a branch in order to have a cane. Even activities that seem gratuitous, such as scientific research, sport, or artistic creation, can carry an appropriative purpose. Creating a picture, drama, or melody establishes a bond between creator and work, giving the creator a particular claim to the resulting existence.

That claim depends on a tension. The work must bear the creator’s mark, as though it were a continuously renewed creation, yet remain radically distinct from its creator. If it lacked independence, it would be reabsorbed into the creator’s being; to count as a work that is “mine,” it must also exist in itself. Its meaning may seem perpetually active, as if the creator were still forming it, but it sustains itself when the creator is no longer thinking of it. Ownership names this double relation: the work is conceived by its maker and encountered as something that persists apart from that act of conception.

The same structure reaches beyond fine art. A cane made from a branch can be both an object available for everyday use and the maker’s own work. People who surround themselves with things they have made unite appropriation by use and appropriation by creation in one object. Even a cigarette rolled by its smoker can bring the two together: the pleasure is bound not only to the object but to the act of making it. Luxury, by contrast, is described not as a quality of the possessed object but as a quality of possession.

Knowledge and the object’s independence

Knowing, too, is a form of appropriation. Scientific research is presented as an effort to appropriate: a discovered truth becomes the knower’s knowledge, formed through an act that reveals a facet of the world. Yet revelation does not turn that facet into a mere private representation. The truth has objectivity and an existence independent of the person who first forms the thought; it can be thought by others and thereby becomes anonymous as well as personally formed.

The result is again a synthesis of self and not-self. What is known is revealed to the knower but remains a being the knower is not. The text also draws attention to the appropriative language commonly used for discovery: an unknown object is imagined as withholding a secret, while sight is figured as taking or violating what had been hidden. Such images make the asymmetry vivid: the object is unaware of being investigated, while the knowing subject treats its revelation as a possession.

Possession as an internal relation

A realistic account of ownership, in which independently existing subject and object are joined only by an external relation, cannot explain the bond at issue. The possessed object remains substantial: it has permanence and sufficiency of being, and ordinarily it is not changed by being possessed, any more than an object is changed by being known. The insufficiency belongs instead to the possessing For-itself. Possession begins from that lack and gives the object an ideal significance as something that reflects ownership back to the possessor.

Possessor and possessed therefore form, ideally, a single reality. To desire a particular object is not merely to desire that object, but to desire union with it in the relation of “possessor-possessed.” The resulting “mine” stands between absolute interiority and absolute exteriority: the self becomes not-self, while the not-self becomes self, without either side simply disappearing. The project is haunted by an ideal value—the imagined unity of the For-itself and its property, in which the possessor would be identical with what is possessed.

This ideal unity is not achieved by literally making the object part of the subject. The object’s independence is essential to the relation: the possessor seeks an intimate bond with something that remains other. Appropriation thus reaches toward identification but preserves the distance that makes possession possible. The object’s substantiality and the possessor’s insufficiency are not incidental conditions; together they define the relation.

The world possessed through the object

The object of desire is concrete, but the project reaches beyond the particular thing. What appropriation seeks in an object is its being; through the being of a particular phenomenon, the desire opens onto being as a totality. Possessing is therefore an attempt to possess the world across an individual object, not a leap from a single thing to an abstract universal.

The For-itself’s project is to make itself the foundation of a totality of the In-itself—to become, ideally, the world as a whole existing in the mode of the In-itself. Being-in-the-world is consequently understood as a project of possessing the world: the world is apprehended as what the For-itself lacks in order to become in-itself-for-itself. This desired totality is not a universal concept formed in advance. The For-itself does not first exist, conceive an abstract whole, and then apply it to experience. Its choice is an individual venture, a choice of a concrete situation in its incomparable uniqueness.

The distinction between the concrete object and the ideal of possession remains crucial. Desire is at once a desire to be a certain being—the ideal in-itself-for-itself—and, in most cases, a relation to a contingent object that the subject projects to appropriate. Ontology identifies this double determination but leaves their precise connection as the problem to be examined: how appropriation of a concrete In-itself relates to the desire for the ideal being that would unite self and world.