That is, even though we are ultimately responsible for our own consciousness, consciousness of self is never quite identical to consciousness itself.
For Sartre, the only truly authentic outlook recognizes one’s true state as a being possessed of self-consciousness whose future conscious state of being is always a matter of choice, even as that conscious state will itself always be in flux. That is, even though we are ultimately responsible for our own consciousness, consciousness of self is never quite identical to consciousness itself. This difficult paradox—that one is responsible for one’s own consciousness, even though that consciousness is never quite graspable, since it is based on nothingness—goes to the heart of Sartre’s existentialism and is crucial to his conceptions of human freedom and moral responsibility.