Sartrean terms and the terms this book introduces, each glossed briefly and referred to the chapter and section where the book develops it. Nothing appears here that the book does not develop there.
The first of Sartre’s two regions of being, characterized by three clauses: being is, being is in itself, being is what it is. It derives from nothing, stands in no relation to itself, and admits no negation, and therefore harbors no possibility, lack, value, or purpose. It is contingent through and through, in excess, without ground and without reason.
Chapter One, section III
The second region, which is consciousness. Its formulas mirror those of the in-itself: it is the being that is not what it is and that is what it is not. Consciousness never coincides with any determination of itself, and it is defined by the possibilities toward which it projects itself. Underlying both formulas is presence to self, which requires a minimal distance across which the presence is established.
Chapter One, section IV
The non-positional self-awareness that accompanies every consciousness of an object. Absorbed in counting or reading, one is not reflecting on the counting or the reading, yet can answer at once what one is doing, without inference and without observation. This is the seat of the translucency Sartre attributes to consciousness, and it secures the emptiness on which the doctrine of freedom rests.
Chapter One, section V
Background: Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The activity by which the for-itself arises as an internal decompression of the in-itself, a region where being is hollowed out by the nothingness that allows it to appear to itself. The relation is asymmetrical and the asymmetry is decisive for Sartre’s realism: the for-itself depends on the in-itself; the in-itself does not depend on the for-itself.
Chapter One, section VI; Chapter Three
The thesis, inherited from Brentano and Husserl and radicalized by Sartre, that consciousness is always consciousness of something other than itself. A consciousness of nothing would be no consciousness at all. The thesis is what empties consciousness of inner furniture and turns it wholly toward the world.
Chapter Two, section I
Background: Intentionality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Sartre’s answer to Husserl. The ego is not an inhabitant of consciousness but an object constituted by reflection and encountered, like other objects, from outside. Expelling it leaves the unreflected field impersonal, and a consciousness with no indwelling self is a consciousness that cannot be determined from within.
Chapter Two, sections III and IV
Freedom in the first register: the formal non-coincidence of the for-itself with every factual description of it. It is not a quantity of worldly power, is not increased by privilege, and is not abolished by confinement. The claim is universal and structural, and it does not imply that every agent can envisage the same alternatives or take up a stance with equal ease.
Chapter Five, section IX
Freedom in the second register: the situated power to form, sustain, and realize projects within a resistant world. It gathers situated choice and obtaining without becoming two further freedoms. It admits of degrees, and its distribution is radically unequal.
Chapter Five, section IX
The given that freedom must be rather than merely have: place, past, surroundings, body, the Other, and death. Facticity is not an external limit imposed on an otherwise complete subject; it is the material through which a project becomes concrete, and it is already visible in outline in the asymmetry between the two regions of being.
Chapter Five, sections I through VII
The resistance a thing offers to a project. A rock is an obstacle only for a being already oriented toward an end; to a being with no project, the same rock is neither obstacle nor aid. The concept is later extended from individual action to history, where worked matter carries the accumulated weight of countless praxes.
Chapter Four, section VIII; Chapter Eight, section IV
The original choice of being through which particular desires and acts become intelligible, and the object of the existential psychoanalysis Sartre proposes in place of the Freudian unconscious. It is not a hidden cause behind conduct but the unifying meaning conduct expresses.
Chapter Four, section VI
The encounter in which the Other appears not as an object in my world but as a subject for whom I am an object. The look does not merely supply an opinion I may accept or reject: it can establish public identities, allocate credibility, authorize access, and attach sanctions to conduct, and so it reaches into the field of possible action.
Chapter Five, sections IV and V
The lie to oneself, which is paradoxical because the deceiver and the deceived are one consciousness. Its mechanism is the disjunction of facticity and transcendence: one affirms whichever term evades the demand of the moment, treating oneself as sheer fact when responsibility presses and as sheer possibility when a fact must be owned.
Chapter Six, sections I and III
Background: Self-Deception (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The demand that a person be what he is, which Sartre argues is itself a form of bad faith. To coincide fully with an avowed identity is to aspire to the density of a thing, and that aspiration is precisely the flight the for-itself cannot complete.
Chapter Six, section IV
The relation to one’s own freedom that bad faith flees. The book locates both bad faith and authenticity in the first register, which is why neither can by itself settle a question of practical responsibility, and it treats bad faith as an achievement often sustained by social arrangements rather than by the individual alone.
Chapter Six, sections VII and VIII
Background: Existentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The activity by which an organism reorganizes the material field to satisfy a need, negating a negation. Individual praxis is the foundation of the whole dialectic of the Critique, its translucid starting point, and Sartre insists that the dialectic is grounded in the totalizing activity of individuals rather than imposed on history from above.
Chapter Eight, section II
The contingent fact that there is not enough to satisfy all, which turns praxis against itself and makes rivals of free praxes. Scarcity supplies what the early work lacked: an account of why conflict is the pervasive material condition of human life rather than an episodic clash of glances.
Chapter Eight, section III
The central innovation of the Critique. Praxis works matter, and the worked object outlasts the act that made it; once deposited in matter, praxis no longer remains under the agent’s command but confronts later agents as an exigency. It does not destroy praxis. It bends it, diverting ends and returning human activity to agents as necessity.
Chapter Eight, section IV
Background: Jean-Paul Sartre (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The reversal by which the aggregate of intelligible individual ends produces an outcome no one chose. Sartre’s example is deforestation: each peasant clears land to plant a crop, and together those acts remove the cover that held the soil. No peasant chose the flood, yet the flood is their praxis returned in an alien form.
Chapter Eight, section IV
The structure of a collective united not by a common project but externally, through a shared relation to a material object, within which each member is interchangeable and related to the others in the mode of alterity. Sartre’s example is the bus queue. Seriality is the precise locus of conditioned freedom: the serialized person remains ontologically free and practically impotent.
Chapter Eight, section V
Under a common danger the series may fuse into a group acting as one, and practical efficacy is recovered. The group-in-fusion is unstable, and to survive it binds itself by the pledge, which authorizes coercion of any member who would defect. The variable across these transformations is efficacy; the constant is the freedom of praxis itself.
Chapter Eight, section VI
The book’s replacement for unlimited responsibility. An agent is answerable when it is fair to ask for reasons, acknowledgment, repair, or changed conduct, because the action is sufficiently attributable to the agent under the conditions in which it occurred. Answerability is not identical with causal authorship, moral blame, legal liability, or ultimate desert; it is the general relation within which those judgments become possible.
Chapter Seven, section IX
Background: Moral Responsibility (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The thinnest of the four forms. A being is formally answerable when its conduct can be approached under intentional descriptions and addressed through reasons. It marks the difference between asking why a circuit failed and asking why a person signed, refused, concealed, or complied, and it establishes very little on its own.
Chapter Seven, section XI
The agent’s actual ability to recognize and respond to reasons, with epistemic, affective, bodily, temporal, and social components. Information must be available in a usable form, a consideration must have salience enough to compete with fear or dependence, and the alternative must be more than a verbally describable possibility.
Chapter Seven, section XI
To be answerable is always to be answerable to someone, or to a norm embodied in a legitimate practice. The fittingness of a negative judgment and the authority to direct blame are different questions, and loss of standing need not make the underlying reason disappear: it changes who may address the demand and which consequences may legitimately follow.
Chapter Seven, sections XI and XII
Background: Blame (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The social allocation of the conditions of answerability. Institutions decide who receives information, who may speak, whose testimony counts, who controls alternatives, who can impose costs, and who has power to repair. The term does not refer to dividing a fixed quantity of blame; it refers to the architecture that distributes responsibility-relevant powers and vulnerabilities.
Chapter Seven, section XI; Chapter Eight, sections XIII through XV
Background: Collective Responsibility (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The degree and form of answerability should track the agent’s situated share of causal contribution, epistemic access, practical control, role authority, benefit, exposure to cost, and capacity to alter the conditions of action. It is not an algorithm; the factors can conflict. Its function is to prevent responsibility from following a single variable such as intentional action, formal office, causal proximity, or metaphysical freedom.
Chapter Seven, section XIV
What occurs when power designs fragmentation and later invokes that fragmentation as evidence that no powerful agent is answerable. The principle therefore yields a presumption against downward displacement: an institution should not centralize benefit and policy control while dispersing risky execution, then treat the executors as the sole bearers of responsibility when harm occurs.
Chapter Seven, section XIV
Five institutional functions organize the conditions under which agents become responsible: the epistemic function distributes information and interpretive categories; the authoritative function distributes powers of decision, refusal, and review; the cost function distributes the burdens of compliance and resistance; the justificatory function determines who must give reasons to whom; the remedial function distributes the capacity to correct, compensate, and redesign.
Chapter Eight, section XIV
No concepts match that group.
Glosses are summaries written for this site, not quotations. Where the precise wording matters, consult the section named in each entry. Each division name links into the contents, which opens at that chapter.
Where an entry carries a background link, it points to an independent reference work, most often the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Those articles are not the source of the gloss above them and they do not state the position this book takes. They are offered to a reader who wants the wider debate a term belongs to before reading what the book does with it.
Two entries above carry most of the argument: ontological freedom and practical efficacy. The distinction between them is set out at length on Two Registers, stated in the author's own words in the excerpt, and worked through particular cases in the notes and essays.
