Who you ARE and who you WANT TO BE

The distinction between 'who you ARE' and 'who you WANT TO BE' is because these two don't fit together very coherently[1]. So when you assume that you need 9 hours of sleep every day, insisting on this would affect what you aspire to do during the coarse of the day. In this case you were defining yourself through a fact, instead of mixing it with your aspirations. You could also ignore facts through your hopes/fears, and become full aspirations, like a 30 year old who aspires to be a Olympics gymnast, or the fundamentalist zealous fighters for a promised land whether in communist ideology or among radical Zionists in Israel. You cannot put an stress on one while ignoring the other...

Sartre's story is more interesting: he looks at the waiter in Parisian cafe he is writing in. And sees him with his straight body, sharp turns, and says that the waiter is trying to be a waiter, he is lost in the facts that define his being a waiter. Another enlightening examples is the homosexuality and those who are hesitant about their nature despite their obvious homosexual desires. What Sartre says is that the homosexual will if, confident enough quite justifiably , conclude and call himself/herself a homosexual however the mere labeling based on a series of facts is going to close to the person the choice of not being a homosexual anymore.

Think about relationships. This makes so much sense over there too. If people would have allowed themselves to be guided by the mix of their honest feelings and aspirations, then I bet most relationships would have worked out...problem is, the proper ratio is so hard to achieve...and Sartre recognizes this too...b/c most people want to be the person who they ARE while at the same time be the person who THEY WANT TO BE...but this is something that only a God-like creature could do...because it is only a God that is omnipresent so he is all he is, and at the same time all powerful so that he can be all that he wants. For the rest of us, we just have to sit back and take it eazy and deal with it!

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[1]

One way you can characterize individual behavior is through what one is at a moment, and what one aspires to be.

What you are in a moment, is the part of you that is composed of facts in your life. It is constituted of your past and present, in the sense of your now unchangeable past and present experiences that are the facts that happen about you. Examples could be your birth, your family, the fact that you were with black hair. The fact that determined your gender. In present, the facts are like what you are doing, like me writing right now, and more generally writing occasionally, and working during the week and trying to enjoy company of friends at other times. This constitutes part of what I am.

There is also another part. It which is what you aspire to. This is like your dreams, and aspirations to overcome the 'facts' of your life and go above and beyond them at least so far as you are looking to your future.

In other words, as Heidegger puts it (Pg. 483, Being and Time) 'Present is the result of the past, and is pregnant with the future.' Heidegger believes this in a very 'passive' way...where it is almost your future that shapes you are put in it...for Sartre things are more personal...more romantic maybe! This is what he says in Being and Nothingness [apparently in respond to Heidegger's insistence that consciousness does not have intentionality, it is just there...as Dasein:]

"The For-itself (or what Sartre loosely sees as consciousness, or self) cannot be 'pregnant with the future' [as put by Heidegger] nor 'expectant of the future' nor can it be 'a knowledge of future' expect on the basis of an original and prejudicative (prejudicative means here: so unbiased and nonjudgmental that is in fact before any judgment can start to take form), relation of itself to itself."

For Sartre, the who you are has a relation to itself and that is coherent with the fact that it can bear the responsibility of creating its own future. So "if you want to be lawyer, though you are currently not now at present, your plans and your possibilities in future are characterized as such. Sometimes these possibilities are there and I deny them (or ignore them) nevertheless what I want to be define what I am right now in a very profound and obvious way."