Sartre initially asks whether the ambition of “modern thought” has overcome the embarrassing problems of philosophy – dualism - and how successful have the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger’s been in this respect. Sartre, in his haste to abandon the loose ends of dualism, underscores that at least it’s not the unattractive Kantian ‘ding-an-sich,’ the world of noumena; the true appearances of an object may be infinite in series, but the object itself is finite, limited. There may be infinite aspects of a coffee mug, but there is only one of it.
A new issue rears its head- the problem of the “being of this appearing.” The question whether Being can be reducible to phenomena, that is it itself an appearance is in direct opposition to Husserl’s eidetic reduction, where “one can always pass beyond the concrete phenomenon towards its essence.” Husserl asserts that once the de facto existence of the object is “bracketed out,” it still is a porcelain mug. Therefore, existence is an aspect of the object. In the introduction to L’Etre Sartre defines “being of the phenomenon” as what underlies and supports the phenomenon, similar to how the television set ‘manifests’ the soap opera. However Sartre emphatically writes that “the being of a phenomenon is not itself a phenomenon.” One never sees the soap opera all by itself in thin air. By isolating the being of phenomenon from all phenomenal conditions, Sartre establishes a transphenomenality of being, that “phenomenon exists only qua appearance…it indicates itself on the foundation of being.” Being of phenomenon is, in other words, existence. Another transphenomena Sartre introduces is consciousness.
In order to initiate the transphenomenality of objects Sartre appropriates and rehabilitates Husserl’s concept of intentionality. Husserl had said that intentionality was an internal structure of consciousness, which is directed towards objects. But that does not mean the object must be independent of consciousness. In an effort to avoid idealism, Sartre objected - they should be or otherwise they owe their being to consciousness. This is impossible, because objects are never exhaustively 'given' to an instantaneous intuition, what Husserl labels “constitutive consciousness.” Both Husserl and Sartre see eye-to-eye that a recollection of an object is different from the existing object, but Sartre points out that “existence-as-an-aspect-of-an-object” is radically different from brute existence. The human access to brute, pure existence is far different from the act of objectification, which is an act of the consciousness. This is where Sartre becomes strikingly original. He introduces boredom and Nausée as a method of access to existence, an awareness of existence. The pivotal point of Sartre’s reinterpretation of the phenomenological method is that reality is existence and the naked exposure of existence to consciousness through the “pre-reflective awareness” is Nausée or boredom. Then it follows that there is no such thing as an abstract, pure access to being. Sartre achieves the main purpose of his introduction by defining the hint of existence as Nausée and boredom that when a person becomes afflicted with either Nausée or boredom he is uncomfortably aware of reality as a brute existence.
Sartre accentuates that one’s access to existence is inherently and fundamentally different from the “objectification by consciousness.” An actor watching his own television show, say, Days of our Lives, may recall a memory of his experience of the performance. However he will not claim that his description of his performance is equivalent to and as rich as the experience of the performance. This is somewhat sticky; whether description of an existing object is as parallel, or consistent to the experience of the same object. A dissection of Being causes knowledge of being, not a direct access to being itself. For example, the actor in the soap opera can inquire into the nature of ‘acting-being,’ though he is no longer in immediate contact with the being of acting, he is analyzing the meaning of the performance. Therefore, the meaning of being is not equivalent to the immediacy of being.
With the conclusion that being is without a phenomenal character of an essence, and that it is transphenomenal, Sartre endeavors to show how this ‘transphenomenality’ of being is the “pre-reflective cogito.” The contrast between realism and idealism is relevant here: since realism irrevocably leads us to dualism of representations and the things themselves and idealism limits the existence of things to subjective, solipsistic knowledge. In an attempt to clarify his definition of consciousness, Sartre dismisses Husserl’s phenomenology as a sophisticated revision of the Bishop George Berkeley’s idealism by stating that Husserl and his disciples treat the noema as a fiction. Sartre stresses that the limits to knowledge ought to be discovered before an attempt to investigate the workings of the mind is made: “an idealism intent on reducing being to the knowledge which we have of it ought first to give some kind of guarantee for the being of knowledge. If one begins… by taking the knowledge as a given, without being concerned to establish a basis for its being, and if one then affirms that esse est percipi, the totality ‘perceived-perception’ lacks the support of a solid being and so falls away in nothingness.” Overlooking the fact that knowledge presupposes existence of the knower was the typical faux pas of past philosophers. Since Sartre maintains “consciousness can know and know itself… but it is in itself something other than a knowledge turned back upon itself.” Knowledge of knowledge of knowledge ad infinitum is an absurd impossibility; for knowledge is in the end based on being, not additional knowledge.
In harmony with Husserl’s characterization of consciousness as intentional, which constantly aims at something, an object other than itself, Sartre establishes a true correlation between consciousness and the world and escapes the litmus test of solipsism. Consciousness is empty, that it “has no content.” “Consciousness is its own nothingness.” There is no such thing as “self-consciousness”, for that concept implies a cumbersome duality of consciousness. To whom that may ask whether it is possible for a consciousness to be aware of itself as an object, Sartre has an answer ready: “the reflecting consciousness posits the consciousness reflected-on, as its object. In the act of reflecting I pass judgment on the consciousness reflected-on; I am ashamed of it, I am proud of it, I will it, I deny it, etc.” I could be watching a soap opera, and it would occupy my entire consciousness. The self is missing unless I reflect upon my experience of the soap opera, then the self emerges, the ‘I’ is now within my consciousness. Hence, by its nature as awareness, consciousness is the “pre-reflectively cogito.” No laws inhibit it, given that Sartre states it is “futile to invoke pretended laws of consciousness” while laws are “transcendent objects of knowledge; there can be a consciousness of law, not a law of consciousness.”
When one experiences a pleasure, he is doubly aware of the experience and indirectly aware of himself in pleasure. Claiming that there is no division between the object and the consciousness of the object, Sartre also infers that there is no logical difference between watching and the consciousness of watching: “Pleasure cannot exist ‘before’ consciousness of pleasure- not even in the form of potentiality or potency. A potential pleasure can exist only as consciousness (of) being potential. Potencies of consciousness exist only as consciousness of potencies.” Pleasure does not vanish into its own self-consciousness, for it is a “concrete event, full and absolute.” This avoids idealism, which installs consciousness as an independent existence, a substance that subsists itself. ‘Being for consciousness,’ foreshortened later in the second half of L’Être as “being-for-itself,” is a brute existence that has a principal characteristic Sartre calls ‘activity.’ It is dependent on matter, for without matter there would be no consciousness. In opposition, the transphenomenal being of phenomena, being-in-itself has a character of an “incomplete inactivity” for any relationship to itself, in Sartre’s language, “opaque” and “coincides exactly with itself.” it is self-contained, and that being is in itself. Sartre has made a metaphysical claim that he is a dualist, that there are two forms of beings, unlike the later Husserl.
The Ontological proof presented in the introduction has little in common with the historical arguments of Descartes and Anselm. It is not an argument, for phenomenologists do not argue, they describe. Sartre explains that his ontology does not attempt to refer to extra-phenomenal realities such as those of Kant and Anselm. Extra-phenomenal realities such as God or the noumenal world belong to the legacies of metaphysics, not ontology. Instead, Sartre focuses on the relation of consciousness, a being, to being-in-itself, another being and tries to demonstrate the existence of transphenomenal Being of the objects from the pre-reflected cogito. Consciousness by its very essence requires that consciousness be intentional, and requires something other than consciousness. It requires being-in-itself, a non-conscious transphenomenal being. “Consciousness is a being that is in question of its own being that it implies a being other than itself.”
In the preceding chapters, Sartre has ruled out both idealism and realism solutions to existence. Briefly, a realistic interpretation is incompatible with a spontaneous character of consciousness since “the being of the phenomenon can on no account act upon consciousness.” Idealism is also discarded, since it claims that a study of knowledge precedes a study of being, and Sartre has shown us being is not a meaning- “by the examination of the spontaneity of the non-reflective cogito that consciousness cannot get out of its subjectivity if the latter has been initially given” . In the final section of the introduction, an in-depth analysis of being-in-itself Sartre lists three general descriptions:
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Being is in itself: the transcendent being is absolutely united. A coffee mug is a coffee mug. The mug is “not a connection with itself, it is itself.” Power, change does not describe its being, for that is a relation to consciousness. A coffee cup “grows” cold only in relation to consciousness. Remove consciousness from the equation and being is at one with itself. Causality, movement, and passivity are all human labels, nametags consciousness attaches to being-in-itself for its own explication. “It is an immanence which cannot realize itself, an affirmation which cannot affirm itself, an activity which cannot act, because it is glued to itself.” It is “neither passivity nor activity.”
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Being is what it is: Brute existence does not have unity; it is its unity. It is “opaque to itself precisely because it is filled with itself.” Sartre contends that being is what-it-is is not tautological, an analytic statement where the predicate explains what is in the subject. The word ‘is’ in the phrase “being is what-it-is” refers that being-in-itself is completely identified with itself.
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Being is: being is “too much,” that is “superfluous.” There is no intrinsic explanation, apart from the intentions of consciousness. There is no such reason why it exists, that it is necessary. Being-in-itself is contingent, a brute fact.
The first chapter of the first book deals with the origin of negation, which has to be “for-itself.” Negative judgments require a paralogical or ontic counterpoint, which is non-being. Sartre describes consciousness as the human capability to ask questions and receive negative answers. A theme Sartre borrows from Heidegger is that explaining the relationship between for-itself and in-itself in isolation is an error. This false start trapped Descartes in the abyss of philosophy – solipsism - by introducing a proof of an existential consciousness first and then deal with the insurmountable problem of proving an external world. However, in analyzing the origin of negation, Sartre contends that Heidegger failed to account how non-being could manifest in a locality within the world. In pages 34-36, Sartre states that every question requires three different kinds of non-being, i.e. three kinds of Nothingness:
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The non-being of knowledge in the questioner, that a questioner cannot already know the answer to his inquiry. The act of asking implies negativity. E.g., ‘Is my girlfriend here?’
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In every question, there is what Sartre defines as “the possibility of non-being of being in transcendent being”. All questions require that a negative answer is possible, that there is a lack in reality. E.g., ‘Where’s my copy of Being and Nothingness?’ the answer could be: ‘It’s not here.’
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Each question presupposes a correct answer. ‘What class is this?’ ‘It’s phenomenology, not philology.’ This implies a demarcation of reality, which is broken up into segments.
How does this mesh with a reality of being? Sartre shows us that it is consciousness that produces these three kinds of ‘nothingness.’ It cannot be being-in-itself since it is positive, affirmative, opaque. Nothingness, non-being, any form of lack, or absence has absolutely no objective status in reality. Inquiries are attitudes towards the world and here Sartre will show that they are far more than merely collection of words or a psychology state. A question begs an answer from reality. Statements of negations indicate that objects exist within the mind, within consciousness but are missing a reality remains a troublesome problem. How can this be reconciled with a solid being-in-itself, a reality wholly united is a pressing issue Sartre attempts to address in this section. If ‘nothing’ is not transcendent then dismiss all negations as figment of the imagination, i.e. the Pegasus or square triangles. Non-being cannot exist within being-in-itself, given that Sartre has already defined the realm of opacity as “beyond negation as beyond affirmation.” As a mental construct, all questions dealing with non-being are as complete and structured as affirmative judgments.
Not to be confused with abstract negations, ‘concrete nothings’ within being create the possibility of negative judgments and the general notion of nothingness. Absence, destruction, fragility are concrete nothings, while abstract nothings are designated by illogical arbitraries such as square triangles. A bizarre episode of the Three Stooges where one of the characters went AWOL is an example of a concrete nothing. The non-being of the missing character is ‘real,’ not an idea of the mind, but a concrete evidence of absence. The empty position is not a vacuous act, and the rest of the group is affected. Since there were less yuks to go around, the other two had to pull their weight. Sartre concludes that absences are expected, that it is real and the relation between consciousnesses and being-in-itself confirms its lack of reality.
Sartre analyzes the previous philosophers who have worked on the concept of nothing: Hegel and Heidegger. The dialectics of Hegel’s concept of non-being is merely an abstract negation of being which are empty concepts, e.g. triangle circles. Heidegger is further along with his definition of non-being. Since Heidegger’s method is largely phenomenological and describes nothingness as “a surging up” from Dasein, Sartre maintains that this attempt remains too abstract, too detached from reality to have any impact, and remains an independent entity. Nothingness must be related to both consciousness and being. Heidegger cannot account for how Dasein transcends or how negation can occur within being: ‘Moe is not on this show.’ In nailing down the gestation of nothingness to the basic realms, human reality and the world, Sartre defines the world as arising from happenings of nothing to being-in-itself. “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm.”
Nothingness, as the bedrock for questions of absence, must always be in question since solidity and opacity belong to being-in-itself. Since being-in-itself is united, at one within itself forever, Sartre presents man as that unique being which never is one with himself. The human desire, the craving to be whole is bad faith, which we shall discuss in detail later. However, Sartre is not saying that nothingness is a hole or a void within us, since we can articulate philosophical questions about nothing! Having established the nature of consciousness as nothingness in the introduction, man is constantly aware of this “monstrous freedom.” Human freedom can never be complete, sufficient, or “collapse into an identity” within itself and “become an opaque, thick, fixed in-itself.”
As is a groundbreaking philosopher’s wont, Sartre introduces a host of strange terms at this point, ones that bear little to no philosophical history: Anguish. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was the first to break philosophical ground with ‘anguish.’ Sartre distinguishes anguish from its common sense synonym, fear. Externally directed out towards the menacing object, fear is never reflected in consciousness. ‘I fear failing my class.’ Anguish, on the other hand, is introverted; internal: “I am in anguish on how to live with the possibility of failure.” Fear is limited to immediate concerns, but anguish overstays it welcome like a visiting in-law, it relates to the future as well as the past. The past promises I have made do not cause my present actions, for there is a “rupture” between my past promises and the self as of this moment. Nothing prevents me from breaking my promise. I must re-create the very motivation that lead to my promise all over again, constantly.
Not everybody suffers anguish in the face of this unlimited freedom. Sartre fleshes out his most brilliant anti-Freudian weapon yet: Bad Faith. In a ‘flight from anguish’, one adopts the psychological determinism attitude. Psychological determinism means culture and genetics causally determines our actions. In sartrean terminology, psychological determinism “reintroduces us in the absolute positivity of being-in-itself and reinstates us at the heart of being.” Psychological determinism denies freedom at the level of logic, not experience. We all experience immediate intuition at the very moment of a decision. Sartre’s answer is that since “determinism is only a postulate or a hypothesis,” then there are many possibilities within the moment, especially “when I constitute myself as the comprehension of a possible as my possible, I must recognize its existence at the end of my project and apprehend it as myself, awaiting me down there in the future and separated from me by a nothingness.”
I could envision the possibility of not completing this essay, which is bringing about nothingness between me and the future possibility of a complete essay, and causing the concrete possibility of a negation. This leads to anguish. I can also envision causal chains to explain my behavior and recede to the comfort of habits in order to avoid the ramifications of Anguish. Yet “I cannot help constituting them as living possibility, that is as having the possibility of becoming my possibility.” Instead of anguish, I conceive of my past as my true self. Sartre dismisses this attempt to sink into facticity, saying this is nothing but the object formed by reflecting on my past behavior, that “we are always ready to take refuge in a belief in determinism. If this freedom weighs upon us too heavily or if we need an excuse.” All attempts to flee from anguish are fruitless, “for we are anguish.” “I am what I wish to veil.” The attempt of “expelling anguish from consciousness” and “of constituting it in an unconscious psychic phenomenon” is self-deception, or Bad faith.
French for Being and Nothingness
The return to the things themselves, the bracketing out of the real, existence, the thing in themselves, excluded as unknowable. This claim is a rejection of Idealism.
Husserl’s pure ego is his homage to Descartes and Kant. It is the assertion that the ego is the subject of consciousness, but Sartre treats consciousness in two aspects: negatively and positively. Negatively it is a denial of Husserl’s doctrine of the ego, and positively it is a determination of Sartre’s own egoless consciousness.
German for “thing in itself.”
Noema is a perceptual content of a phenomenological description of a perceptual experience, the object that is intended. The noema of a hallucination is an intentional act, even if the hallucination lacks a corresponding entity in reality. Noema is correlated with noesis, which is what gives sense to the immanent object of consciousness – believing, remembering, valuing, etcetera – the act of intending.
