Re: Jean Paul Sartre Being And Nothingness Pdf 21
Tanja Freeze
From Sartre's phenomenological point of view, nothingness is an experienced reality and cannot be a merely subjective mistake. The absence of a friend and absence of money hint at a being of nothingness. It is part of reality. In the first chapter, Sartre develops a theory of nothingness which is central to the whole book, especially to his account for bad faith and freedom.[4] For him, nothingness is not just a mental concept that sums up negative judgements such as "Pierre is not here" and "I have no money". Though "it is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation",[5] the concrete nothingness differs from mere abstract inexistence, such as the square circle. A concrete nothingness, e.g. not being able to see, is part of a totality: the life of the blind man in this world. This totality is modified by the nothingness which is part of it.[6]
In the totality of consciousness and phenomenon (Heidegger's being-in-the-world), both can be considered separately, but exist only as a whole (intentionality of consciousness). The human attitude of inquiry, of asking questions, puts consciousness at distance from the world. Every question brings up the possibility of a negative answer, of non-being, e.g. "Who is entering? No one." For Sartre, this is how nothingness can exist at all. Non-being can neither be part of the being-in-itself nor can it be as a complement of it. Being-for-itself is the origin of negation. The relation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself is one of questioning the latter. By bringing nothingness into the world, consciousness does not annihilate the being of things, but changes its relation to it.
This essentially means that in being a waiter, grocer, etc., one must believe that their social role is equivalent to their 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 in order to realize what they must be (human) and what they are not (waiter, 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.
However, Sartre takes a stance against characterizing bad faith in terms of "mere social positions". Says Sartre, "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 café 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.
Sartre's recipe for fulfillment is to escape all quests by completing them. This is accomplished by rigorously forcing order onto nothingness, employing 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 diminishes before nothingness since consciousness is probably based more on spontaneity than on stable seriousness, he contends that any person of a serious nature is obliged to continuous struggle between two things:
One of the main features of this system, which Sartre presents in the introduction and the first chapter of Part One, is a distinction between two kinds of transcendence of the phenomenon of being. The first is the transcendence of being and the second that of consciousness. This means that, starting with the phenomenon (that which is our conscious experience), there are two types of reality which lie beyond it, and are thus trans-phenomenal. On the one hand, there is the being of the object of consciousness, and on the other, that of consciousness itself. These define two types of being, the in-itself and the for-itself. To bring out that which keeps them apart, involves understanding the phenomenology of nothingness. This reveals consciousness as essentially characterisable through its power of negation, a power which plays a key role in our existential condition. Let us examine these points in more detail.
After dispensing with the concept of the noumenon, Sartre outlines the binary distinction that dominates the rest of Being and Nothingness: the distinction between unconscious being (en-soi, being-in-itself) and conscious being (pour-soi, being-for-itself). Being-in-itself is concrete, lacks the ability to change, and is unaware of itself. Being-for-itself is conscious of its own consciousness but is also incomplete. For Sartre, this undefined, nondetermined nature is what defines man. Since the for-itself (like man) lacks a predetermined essence, it is forced to create itself from nothingness. For Sartre, nothingness is the defining characteristic of the for-itself. A tree is a tree and lacks the ability to change or create its being. Man, on the other hand, makes himself by acting in the world. Instead of simply being, as the object-in-itself does, man, as an object-for-itself, must actuate his own being.
Sartre explains that as a conscious being, the for-itself recognizes what it is not: it is not a being-in-itself. Through the awareness of what it is not, the for-itself becomes what it is: a nothingness, wholly free in the world, with a blank canvas on which to create its being. He concludes that the for-itself is the being through which nothingness and lack enter the world, and consequently, the for-itself is itself a lack. The absence it signifies is the absence of the unattainable synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself. The being-for-itself is defined by its knowledge of being not in-itself. Knowing is its own form of being, even if this knowledge is only of what one is not and cannot be, rather than what one is. The human can never know being as it truly is, for to do that, one would have to be the thing itself. To know a rock, we have to be the rock (and of course, the rock, as a being-in-itself, lacks consciousness). Yet the being-for-itself sees and intuits the world through what is not present. In this way, the being-for-itself, already wholly free, also possesses the power of imagination. Even if absolute beauty (to Sartre, the absolute union of being and consciousness) cannot be apprehended, knowing it through its absence, as in the way one feels the emptiness left by a departed loved one, is its own truth.
I'm trying to understand Sartre being and nothingness. The wording he uses is a little bit complex and difficult to understand. I was wondering if anyone could point me to a resource or help explained Sartre. What is his argument for free will, how does he argue against determinism and libertarianism? What is the justification for saying that we have free will.
This is amazing passage shows how the main character in Sartre's novel, whose name is Roquentin, comes to realize that brute reality is just that, brute and hence ultimately inaccessible to the intellect (which approaches things in terms of categories like "tool" that are features of the intellect, not the things themselves). Remember that this work was written well before Sartre had developed his distinction between "being" and "nothingness" in his masterwork by that name. In this novel, the word "existence" is used in a way that seems to stand midway between these two terms, though that is not entirely accurate either (note the way he talks about existence as "slithing gelatinity" toward the end of this selection). I think it is best not to try to map Roquentin's reflections directly onto our class discussions of Being and Nothingness, but rather to let yourself actually experience, by means of Sartre's rich albeit somewhat repetitive prose, the discovery that there is an unbridgeable gap between your consciousness and that which you are conscious of.
In what may appear a conservative rebuttal, I would suggest that we are dependent upon history in a way that puts us into a chain of being that disrupts the concepts of nothingness. The role of things that have come into being must be taken into account regardless of their first cause. In this, I feel as if Sartre claims we are trapped in this framework, but I would suggest that he does not allow fully the positive aspects of that chain of events that enhance the world for the good.
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