Nothingness: Tips and Tricks #6

Being and Nothingness An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology French L’ tre et le n ant Essai d’ontologie ph nom nologique sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology is a book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre In the book Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his existentialism dealing with topics such as consciousness perception social philosophy self-deception the existence of nothingness psychoanalysis and the question of free will While a prisoner of war in and Sartre read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time which uses the method of Husserlian phenomenology as a lens for examining ontology Sartre attributed the course of his own philosophical inquiries to his exposure to this work Though influenced by Heidegger 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 Sartre’s account man is a creature haunted by a vision of completion what Sartre calls the ens causa sui meaning literally a being that causes itself which many religions and philosophers identify as God Born into the material reality of one’s body in a material universe one finds oneself inserted into being In accordance with Husserl’s notion that consciousness can only exist as consciousness of something Sartre develops the idea that there can be no form of self that is hidden inside consciousness On these grounds Sartre goes on to offer a philosophical critique of Sigmund Freud’s theories based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious Being and Nothingness is regarded as both the most important non-fiction expression of Sartre’s existentialism and his most influential philosophical work original despite its debt to Heidegger Many have praised the book’s central notion that existence precedes essence its introduction of the concept of bad faith and its exploration of nothingness as well as its novel contributions to the philosophy of sex However the book has been criticized for its abstruseness and for its treatment of Freud Background Descartes Sartre’s existentialism shares its philosophical starting point with Ren Descartes The first thing we can be aware of is our existence even when doubting everything else Cogito ergo sum In Nausea the main character’s feeling of dizziness towards his own existence is induced by things not thinking This dizziness occurs in the face of one’s freedom and responsibility for giving a meaning to reality As an important break with Descartes Sartre rejects the primacy of knowledge a rejection summed up in the phrase Existence precedes essence and offers a different conception of knowledge and consciousness Husserl Important ideas in Being and Nothingness build on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology To both philosophers consciousness is intentional meaning that there is only consciousness of something For Sartre intentionality implies that there is no form of self that is hidden inside consciousness such as Husserl’s transcendental ego An ego must be a structure outside consciousness so that there can be consciousness of the ego Summary In the introduction Sartre sketches his own theory of consciousness being and phenomena through criticism of both earlier phenomenologists most notably Husserl and Heidegger as well as idealists rationalists and empiricists According to him one of the major achievements of modern philosophy is phenomenology because it disproved the kinds of dualism that set the existent up as having a hidden nature such as Immanuel Kant’s noumenon 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 the being of things and being-for-itself While being-in-itself is something that can only be approximated by human beings being-for-itself is the being of consciousness Part Chapter The origin of negation 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 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 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 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 Part Chapter Bad faith As bad faith Sartre describes one’s self-deception about the human reality It can take two forms the first one is making oneself falsely believe not to be what one actually is The second one is conceiving oneself as an object e g being identical to a job and thereby denying freedom 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…