Sartre and Mental Health (pt. 2): Reality and Transcendence

When I was younger and life felt very intense, I learned about mindfulness and meditation. Boy howdy did I need those practices at that time. Mindfulness and the Buddhist tradition it comes from teaches that the past and future are not worth dwelling on, and offers some of the most tangible tools I know to reground in the present. This of course can be a powerful aid in dealing with depression and anxiety.  As helpful as these practices were, though, after several years of them I realized that I needed a little bit of something else too.  

Maybe it’s because I am culturally Western and more specifically, American. Traditional American values such as productivity and ambition spur us ever forward, with an eye always on the horizon. A modern countercurrent has emerged in the last few decades, though, one which implores us to take time, move more slowly, and be more present. So how does one balance the two? Existential philosophy and in particular the work of Jean-Paul Sartre gives us an excellent way to balance these needs with his concepts of “facticity and transcendence.” This framework emphasizes with equal care both what is real and what is possible in a way that helps us recognize the need for both in a human life.

For a deeper exploration of facticity check out my most recent blog post.

Jean-Paul Sartre himself was a man of frenetic lifelong activity. He wrote dozens of novels and nonfiction books; many more essays and articles; and threw himself into activism throughout his life, first with the French Resistance during World War II and later with the socialist party in France. Obsessed with getting his ideas out as fast as he could, and inspired with more ideas all the time, Sartre routinely took amphetamines in order to write for hours at a time without rest. In his monomania Sartre gave us an example of what an unbalanced gravitational pull into one’s own future could look like, an excess of his own “transcendence.” 

Let’s start with a few fundamental existential concepts. To help us understand human nature and consciousness, Sartre lays the groundwork by contrasting the nature of what it is to be human and what it is to be an inert object. The latter he labels a “being-in-itself”, while a human being is a “being-for-itself.” While “in-itself” objects such as pens and chairs are defined by their “pen-ness” or their “chair-ness”, individual humans are marked by exactly their lack of such a predetermined essence. 

Humans instead, according to Sartre, are defined both by our “being” but also our “nothingness”; by what is solid and fixed about us and also what is intangible, uncertain, and merely possible. The terms he uses for these qualities respectively are “facticity” and “transcendence.”  The stable ground we stand on, of our life as it is, is our facticity. But we can think of ourselves as always being projected forward past and surpassing our own facticity, hurled as if by some cosmic slingshot into our own next iteration. This is transcendence.

The concepts written about in this post are mostly contained in Sartre’s landmark work Being and Nothingness.

I think about facticity and transcendence all the time, sometimes in truly mundane ways. When I run, I think about the facticity of my need for a steady pace that allows for stamina, and the transcendent principle that pulls me forward just a little faster past my comfort zone. As individuals we need to acknowledge both our factical and transcendent natures. If we ignore our facticity we set ourselves up for unrealistic expectations which can result in shame and blame for ourselves when we do not meet them. If we ignore our transcendent nature, though, we breed fatalism and deny our ability and responsibility to shape our life.

Many of my clients tell me they tend to get stuck in one extreme or the other. One woman, for example, found herself continually mourning her position in an unsatisfying job role with few opportunities. She recognized over time that this tendency to fixate on her own facticity felt like safe and familiar territory, but it denied her the ability to move forward.  Another client who struggles with ADHD loves to share his new productivity schemes and organizational ideas. Over time though he realized that he needed to balance this transcendent pull with a more factical reckoning of his time, energy, motivation, underlying emotions, and obstacles to achieving these plans.

The line “Hell is other people” comes from Sartre’s play No Exit, which features three characters driving each other nuts in the literal hell of the afterlife. If this sounds familiar, it may be because the TV show “The Good Place” borrowed heavily from No Exit.

We might overemphasize facticity or transcendence in relationships, too. With Sartre’s famous line “hell is other people,” he bemoaned that one of the most painful aspects of social life is the sense of being trapped when other people see you as only facticity. For example, this can be an issue in long-standing relationships: if you have historically been the overly compliant “nice guy” or gal, it can be hard to start being more assertive when the people around you don’t immediately accept it. On the other side, we might want to overemphasize someone else’s transcendence when we believe they can change despite all the evidence. They might even reassure us over and over again that they will, but in reality the pull of their facticity is just too strong.

Facticity and transcendence are intertwined in a human life, revealing different facets of who we are alongside who we can be. To me this is a hopeful doctrine. It shows enough realism to keep me honest, while also pointing a way towards embracing what is mysterious and unknown about an individual’s trajectory. Our job is just to do the next thing that we feel our own gravitational pull of meaningful, valued action towards.