Being-for-itself-in-itself

Deleuze. borrowing imagery from Merleau-Ponty, characterizes Sartre's concept of Nothingness as a 'lake' in the midst of 'Being', as opposed to a 'fold' in Being, thereby suggesting that for Sartre, Nothingness is Ontologically independent of Being. However, whether Nothingness, for Sartre, is as distinct from Being as water is from earth seems to be debatable. On the one hand, on a variety of occasions he does insist that Being is prior to Nothingness, as the ideal Being-in-itself-for-itself expresses, which would indicate that Nothingness is the product of a fold in Being. On the other hand, there is also textual evidence to indicate that the implicit ideal of Consciousness is, more accurately, Being-for-itself-in-itself, or, as Aristotle terms it, thought-thinking-itself. The latter would be Consciousness as it is in-itself, independent any of objects, of a body in which it is rooted, and of the limitations imposed on it by other Consciousnesses, all of which are themes that Sartre explores. Furthermore, as has been discussed, Sartre never explains how Consciousness could be re-embodied, which leaves it as groundless as water. So, in the final analysis Sartre may not have resolved, wittingly or otherwise, whether Nothingness is a fold or a lake.