Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology
Encyclopedia
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
treatise
Treatise
A treatise is a formal and systematic written discourse on some subject, generally longer and treating it in greater depth than an essay, and more concerned with investigating or exposing the principles of the subject.-Noteworthy treatises:...
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
. Its main purpose is to assert the individual's existence as prior to the individual's essence.
Analysis
While a prisoner of war in 1940/1941 Sartre read Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
's Being and Time
Being and Time
Being and Time is a book by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, it remains his most important work and has profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, particularly...
, an ontological
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
phenomenology (Husserl was Heidegger's teacher). Reading Being and Time initiated Sartre's own enquiry leading to the publication in 1943 of Being and Nothingness whose subtitle is 'A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology'. Sartre's essay is clearly influenced by Heidegger though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being. In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion," what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, and which religions identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being (with a lower case "b"). Consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body, but has no objective reality; it is nothing ("no thing
Object (philosophy)
An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
"). Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to make them appear, or to annihilate them.
Introduction
In the introduction, Sartre sketches his own theory of consciousness, being and phenomena through criticism of both earlier phenomenologists (most notably HusserlEdmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
and Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
) as well as idealists
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
, rationalists
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
and empiricists
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
. According to him one of the major achievements of modern philosophy has been to free us of the kinds of dualism that set the existent up as having a "hidden" nature as with Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
's noumenon
Noumenon
The noumenon is a posited object or event that is known without the use of the senses.The term is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to "phenomenon", which refers to anything that appears to, or is an object of, the senses...
; Phenomenology has removed "the illusion of worlds behind the scene."
Based on an examination of the nature of phenomena, he describes the nature of two types of being, being-in-itself and being-for-itself. While being-in-itself is something that can only be approximated by human being, being-for-itself is the being of consciousness.
Part 1, Chapter 1: The origin of negation
When we go about the world, we have expectations which are often not fulfilled. For example, Pierre is not at the café where we thought we would meet him, so there is a negation, a void, a nothingness, in the place of Pierre. When looking for Pierre his lack of being there becomes a negation; everything he sees as he searches the people and objects about him are "not Pierre." So Sartre claims "It is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation."Part 1, Chapter 2: Bad faith
Bad faithBad faith (existentialism)
Bad faith is a philosophical concept used by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the phenomenon where a human being under pressure from societal forces adopts false values and disowns their innate freedom to act authentically...
or "Self-Deception", as translations vary, can be understood as the guise of existing as a character, individual or person who defines himself through the social categorization of his formal identity. This essentially means that in being a waiter, grocer, etc. one must believe that his or her social role is equivalent to his or her human existence. Living a life defined by one's occupation, social, racial or economic class, is the very essence of "bad faith", the condition in which people cannot transcend their situations
Situation (Sartre)
One of the first times in which Jean-Paul Sartre discussed the concept of Situation was in his 1943 Being and Nothingness, where he famously said that...
in order to realize what they must be (human) and what they are not (a grocer, etc.).
It is also essential for an existent to understand that negation allows the self to enter what Sartre calls the "great human stream". The great human stream arises from a singular realization that nothingness is a state of mind in which we can become anything, in reference to our situation, that we desire.
The possibility of playing is afforded by time and situation. It isn't difficult to see how Sartre's ideas are linked to post-modernist/structural claims offered by Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
. However, the theories differ vastly with regard to human identity.
In any light, the difference in existence and identity projection remains at the heart of human subjects who are swept up by their own condition, their "bad faith." One of the most widely discussed examples of projection (via Freud's conception of the human mind) that Sartre uses is the café waiter who performs the duties, traditions, functions and expectations of a cafe waiter.
- "[W]hat are we then if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are if our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are? Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to changing his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seems to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. There is nothing there to surprise us."
Sartre consistently mentions that in order to get out of bad faith, one must realize that his or her existence and his formal projection of a self are distinctly separate and within the means of human control. This separation is a form of nothingness. Nothingness, in terms of bad faith, is characterized by Sartre as the internal negation which separates pure existence and identity, and thus we are subject to playing our lives out in a similar manner. An example is something that is what it is (existence) and something that is what it is not (a waiter defined by his occupation).
Yet, Sartre takes a stance against characterizing bad faith in terms of "mere social positions"; I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions. The good speaker is the one who plays at speaking because he cannot be speaking. This literally means that, like the cafe waiter, the speaker is not his condition or social categorization, but is a speaker consumed by bad faith. Thus, we must realize what we are (beings who exist) and what we are not (a social, historical, preoccupation) in order to step out of bad faith. Yet, existents (human beings) must maintain a balance between existence, their roles and nothingness to become authentic beings.
Additionally, an important tenet of bad faith is that we must enact a bit of good faith in order to take advantage of our role to reach an authentic existence. The authentic domain of bad faith, is realizing that the role we are playing is the lie. The goal of authenticity can be traced back to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground
Notes from Underground
Notes from Underground is an 1864 short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel...
. Dostoevsky has been called "The Grandfather of existentialism." To live and project into the future as a project of a self, while keeping out of bad faith and living by the will of the self is living life authentically. This is perhaps one of the main goals of Sartre's opus.
One of the most important implications of bad faith is the abolition of traditional ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
and morality. Being a "moral person" requires one to deny authentic impulses (everything that makes us human), and allow the will of another person to change one's actions. Being a moral person is one of the most severe forms of bad faith. Essentially Sartre characterizes this as "the faith of bad faith" which is and should not be, in Sartre's opinion, at the heart of one's existence. Sartre has a very low opinion of conventional morality, condemning it as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses. Examples include a "Keep Off The Grass" sign, which derives its being from a bourgeois need but hinders the need of the masses for play and relaxation.
Bad faith also results when individuals begin to view their life as made up of distinct past events, like the "perfect moments" or "adventures" from Nausea. By viewing one's ego as it once was rather than as it currently is, one ends up negating the current self and replacing it with a past self that no longer exists (as illustrated by Anny in Nausea).
Part 3, Chapter 1: The look
The mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at him/herself as an object, and see his/her world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a specific location outside oneself, it is non-positional. This is a recognition of the subjectivitySubjectivity
Subjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.-Qualia:...
in others.
This transformation is most clear when one sees a mannequin
Mannequin
A mannequin is an often articulated doll used by artists, tailors, dressmakers, and others especially to display or fit clothing...
that one confuses for a real person for a moment.
-
- While they are believing it is a person, their world is transformed, and everything exists as an object that partially escapes them. During this time the world comes on to you differently, and you can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now his world, a foreign world that no longer comes from you, but from him. The other person is a "threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world…Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's values, over which you have no control."
-
- When they realise it is a mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and they are again in the center of a universe.
- This is back to the pre-reflective mode of being, it is "the eye of the camera that is always present but is never seen". The person is occupied, and too busy for self-reflection.
This process is continual, unavoidable and ineluctable. Subjectivity is competitive. This explains why it can be difficult to look someone in the eye.
Being for Others
Sartre states that many relationships are created by people's attraction not to another person but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the look" of the other. The consequence is conflict. In order to keep the person's own being the person must control the other, but must control the freedom of the other "as freedom". These relationships are a profound manifestation of "bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced with the other's freedom. The purpose of either participant is not to exist but to maintain the other participant's looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called love, but is in fact nothing more than emotional alienation and a denial of freedom through conflict with the other. Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable anguish of a person's relationship to their "FacticityFacticity
Facticity has a multiplicity of meanings from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence.The term is first used by Fichte and has a variety of meanings...
" (all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited, such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme, the alienation can become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by "the look" and therefore radically missing their own freedoms, the participants can experience masochistic and sadistic attitudes. This happens when the participants cause pain to each other, in attempting to prove their control over the other's look, which they cannot escape because they believe themselves to be so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own subjectivity would be equally unbearable.
Sex
"The look", Sartre explains, is the basis for sexual desire; Sartre declares that there isn't a biological motivation for sexSex
In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
. Instead, "double reciprocal incarnation," is a form of mutual awareness which Sartre takes to be at the heart of the sexual experience. This involves the mutual recognition of subjectivity of some sort, as Sartre describes: "I make myself flesh in order to impel the Other to realize for herself and for me her own flesh. My caress causes my flesh to be
born for me insofar as it is for the Other flesh causing her to be born as flesh."http://www.comm287.com/handouts/16.pleasure.pdf
Even in sex (perhaps especially in sex), men and women are haunted by a state in which consciousness and bodily being would be in perfect harmony, with desire satisfied. Such a state, however, can never be. We try to bring the beloved's consciousness to the surface of her/his body by use of magical acts performed, gestures (kisses, desires). But at the moment of orgasm
Orgasm
Orgasm is the peak of the plateau phase of the sexual response cycle, characterized by an intense sensation of pleasure...
the illusion is ended and we return to ourselves, just as it is ended when the skier comes to the foot of the mountain or when the commodity that once we desired loses its glow upon our purchase of it. There will be, for Sartre, no such moment of completion because "man is a useless passion" to be the ens causa sui, the God of the ontological proof.
Nothingness
Sartre contends that human existence is a conundrum whereby each of us exists, for as long as we live, within an overall condition of nothingness (no thing-ness)—that ultimately allows for free consciousness. But simultaneously, within our (physical world) being, we are constrained to make continuous, conscious choices.It is this dichotomy that causes anguish, because choice (subjectivity) represents a limit on freedom within an otherwise unbridled range of thoughts. Subsequently, humans seek to flee our anguish through action-oriented constructs such as escapes, visualizations or visions (dreams) designed to lead us toward some meaningful end, such as necessity, destiny, determinism (God), etc.
Thus, in living our lives, we often become unconscious actors—Bourgeois, Feminist, Worker, Party Member, Frenchman, Canadian or American—each doing as we must to fulfill our chosen characters' destinies.
But again, Sartre contends, our conscious choices, leading to often unconscious actions, run counter to our intellectual freedom. Yet we are bound to the conditioned, physical world—in which some form of action is always required. This leads to failed dreams of completion, as Sartre described them, because inevitably we are unable to bridge the void between the purity and spontaneity of thought and all-too constraining action; between the being and the nothingness that inherently coincide in our self.
Yet Sartre's recipe for fulfillment is to escape all quests by completing them, by rigorously forcing order onto nothingness, using terms such as the "spirit (or consciousness of mind) of seriousness" and describing the failure to do so in terms such as "bad faith" and "false consciousness".
Though Sartre's conclusion seems to be that being pales before nothingness, since consciousness is probably based more on spontaneity than on stable seriousness, he contends that any person of a serious nature is obligated to continuous struggle between:
a) the conscious desire for peaceful self-fulfillment through physical actions and social roles—as if living within a portrait that one actively paints of oneself (see the gallery of Bouville's notables in Nausea
Nausea (book)
Nausea is an epistolary novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which was published in 1938 and written while he was teaching at the lycée of Le Havre...
), and
b) the more pure and raging spontaneity of no thing consciousness, of being instantaneously free to overturn one's roles, pull up stakes, and strike out new paths.
Phenomenological ontology
In Sartre's opinion, consciousnessConsciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
does not make sense by itself: It arises by the awareness of objects. So consciousness of is the proper way to qualify consciousness. One is always aware of an object. The latter being something or someone, it accounts to the same.
This non-positional quality of consciousness is what makes it an ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
. And the fact that third parties are the tangible foundation for the intangible self is what truly makes it a phenomenological ontology.
This section can be re-stated in terms of essence and existence. The waiter "exists" and when he realizes his "bad faith" he is his essence. In other words, existence comes before essence.
Special terminology used by Sartre
Explanation of terms based on postscript to the English edition of Being and Nothingness by translator Hazel Barnes- Being (être): Including both Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself, but the latter is the nihilation of the former. Being is objective not subjective or individual.
- Being-in-itself (être-en-soi): Non-conscious Being. The sort of phenomenon that is greater than the knowledge that we have of it.
- Being-for-itselfPour soiPour soi or being-for-itself is a term used by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Existentialist work Being and Nothingness. Contrasted with the being-in-itself which rejects its own freedom and objectifies itself, the being-for-itself actively exercises its own freedom to impart essence and meaning to its...
(être-pour-soi): The nihilation of Being-in-itself; consciousness conceived as a lack of Being, a desire for Being, a relation of Being. The For-itself brings Nothingness into the world and therefore can stand out from Being and form attitudes towards other beings by seeing what it is not.
- Being-for-others (être-pour-autrui): Here a new dimension arises in which the self exists as an object for others. Each For-itself seeks to recover its own Being by making an object out of the other.
- Consciousness: The transcending For-itself. Sartre states that "Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself."
- ExistenceExistenceIn common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...
: Concrete, individual being-for-itself here and now.
- Existence precedes essenceExistence precedes essenceThe proposition that existence precedes essence is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence or nature of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence...
. The subjective existence of reality precedes and defines its nature. Who you are (your essence) is defined by what you do (your existence).
- FacticityFacticityFacticity has a multiplicity of meanings from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence.The term is first used by Fichte and has a variety of meanings...
(facticité): Broadly: facts about the world. More precisely, the For-itself's necessary connection with the In-itself, with the world and its own past.
- Freedom: The very being of the For-itself which is "condemned to be free". It must forever choose for itself and therefore make itself.
- Nothingness (néant): Although not having being, it is supported by being. It comes into the world by the For-itself.
- Reflection (reflet): The form in which the For-itself founds its own nothingness through the dyad of "the-reflection-reflecting"
- Reflection (réflexion):The consciousness attempting to become its own object.
Connection to No Exit
A man or a woman will always be in a world of other people, who can capture him within their gazeGaze
Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object...
, reducing him to his external materiality. They will take his measure, call him hero, coward, nonentity, fool, etc. And then, at last, they will tote up the balance sheet of his life after his death.
Thus, for Sartre's Garcin, in No Exit
No Exit
No Exit is a 1944 existentialist French play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The original French title is Huis Clos, the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, referring to a private discussion behind closed doors; English translations have also been performed under the titles In Camera, No Way Out...
, "hell is other people."
There is a second reference. When explaining the difference between existence and essence, Sartre uses a paper-knife (un coupe-papier). A paper-knife also appears as a crucial prop in No Exit.
See also
- Being-in-itself
- Critique of Dialectical ReasonCritique of Dialectical ReasonCritique of Dialectical Reason, , was the last of Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical works...
Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
The 100 Books of the Century is a grading of the books considered as the hundred best of the 20th century, drawn up in the spring of 1999 through a poll conducted by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde....
External links
- Being and nothingness: an essay in phenomenological ontology, By Jean-Paul Sartre, Citadel Press, 2001
- Class Lecture Notes on Sartre's Being and Nothingness by Professor Spade at Indiana University.