Become what it is not, and not what it is

“To be what one is not while not being what one is” names the For-itself’s freedom as a continual break with fixed identity. It is not a contradiction to be solved but a description of consciousness as it exceeds what it is and refuses to be exhausted by any essence, label, or motive.

The Formula of Freedom

The expression appears in an account of freedom grounded in nihilation: human reality can rupture with the world and with itself, and this permanent possibility of rupture is freedom. The For-itself exists by nihiliating the In-itself that it is; it therefore escapes its being as a settled essence. What can be said of a person never fully captures that person, because the For-itself is already beyond the name or property assigned to it.

The formula gathers several descriptions into one claim. To have to be what one is, to be what one is not while not being what one is, and to say that existence precedes and conditions essence all express human freedom. The passage also places beside this account the formulation that “Wesen ist was gewesen ist,” contrasting the For-itself’s escape from fixed essence with an account that identifies essence with what has been.

Causes, Motives, and Self-Evasion

The formula also clarifies why causes and motives cannot serve as a complete explanation of action. Once consciousness is aware of the causes that inspire an act, those causes become transcendent objects for it: they are outside consciousness rather than an unbroken substance determining it from within. A person cannot seize them as an ultimate definition, because existence carries the person beyond them. The passage accordingly describes human beings as condemned to exist beyond essence and beyond the causes and motives of their acts.

Determinism represents the contrary effort to treat action as continuous with a fully given psychic reality. In that account, a motive provokes a decision and act as a physical cause provokes its effect; everything is full, with no rupture. The refusal of freedom is thus an attempt to apprehend oneself as being-in-itself. The expression’s paradox turns on this contrast: the For-itself is what it is not because it can surpass its given past, yet it is not what it is because no fixed description can contain its ongoing existence.

Significance

The formula is not an optional quality added to an otherwise complete human nature. Freedom is the very stuff of the For-itself’s being, and that being is perpetually in question. Attempts to hide this condition by treating causes and motives as things are themselves ways of refusing to recognize freedom. The phrase therefore makes instability essential to human reality: a person is neither reducible to what has already happened nor able to step outside the freedom through which that past is continually surpassed.