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International Phenomenological Society Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
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TWO PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN
SARTRE'S BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
I.
The claim that the being of the for-itself is really a kind of non-
being is sometimes taken merely as the claim that human conscious-
ness necessarily involves an awareness of negative states of affairs of
certain sorts:
Knowledge entails that the object known is held at a distance from the person
who knows it: he distinguishes the object from himself, and he thereby forms
the judgment, 'I am not the object.' This distance at which the object is held
is the gap or nothingness at the heart of the For-itself.2
1 L'Etre et le Neant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). Quotations are from, and parenthetical
references to, Hazel Barnes's translation (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968),
which is a reprint of a translation originally published in 1953 by Philosophical Library,
Inc.
2 Mary Warnock, The Philosophy of Sartre (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), p. 61.
167
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168 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
between things-what is-and what is not but could possibly come to be, i.e.,
non-being.3
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 169
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
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170 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
(4) 'The being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Noth-
ingness.' (pp. 57-8)
(5) Therefore, ndgatites 'derive their origin from an act, an expectation, or a
project of the human being; they all indicate an aspect of being as it ap-
pears to the human being who is engaged in the world.' (p. 59)
"Negatites" are just negative states of affairs. Sartre's example is the
case of someone's absence from a certain cafe. Negative states of
affairs can be objects of perception on Sartre's view, and when they
are they possess an objective (cf. pp. 40, 42), transcendent (p. 59)
reality. Nevertheless, Sartre argues that this reality must be con-
ferred upon them just to the extent that they involve an objective
negativity. Premise (2) contains the reason for this: such negativity
(Nothingness) cannot be found merely from an examination of the
positive realities which any negative state of affairs involves, for
example a certain person and a cafe in our example. Thus Sartre's
argument centers on an awareness of the need for a distinction be-
tween states of affairs, or at least negative ones, and the particulars
which they involve.
If Sartre's argument indicates an awareness of the distinction be-
tween a state of affairs and the particulars which it involves, it also
indicates unclarity concerning the ontological issues which this dis-
tinction raises. Sartre takes it for granted, in premise (3), that if there
is a distinction between a negative state of affairs and the particulars
which it involves, that distinction can only be accounted for by an
appeal to something over and above the state of affairs in question.
It might be argued that this is simply mistaken. All that our ontology
demands, we might argue, is just that we do grant objective onto-
logical status to the distinction between particulars and states of af-
fairs. States of affairs, that is, are just different sorts of entities from
the particulars which they involve, and that is all there is to the mat-
ter. Sartre's own position with respect to the ontological status of
negative states of affairs is in fact rather ambiguous. He grants on
the one hand that they do possess an objective, transcendent reality.
Yet in his argument he takes it for granted that the distinction be-
tween a negative state of affairs and the particulars which it involves
cannot be accounted for by appeal to the domain of "being-in-itself."
In doing so Sartre assumes that what has being-in-itself can only be
the particulars which a state of affairs involves, not the state of af-
fairs itself, and this seems tantamount to withdrawing the admission
that he has already made. The upshot is of course that negative states
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 171
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
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172 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 173
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
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174 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
really nothing at all. The same unclarity, I have suggested, leads him
to think that consciousness is also nothing at all.
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 175
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
But putting Sartre's Point in the way that I have makes it clearer
than such formulations do just what ontological issues are being
raised by Sartre's claims.8 Thus it also provides a better foothold for
undertaking any critical assessment of those claims. It is Sartre's
claim that consciousness is, with respect to its ontological status, a
very unique sort of existence. It is a "nothing" in a world in which
everything else is something (excepting, of course, those "objective"
negativities which seem in Sartre's world really to be neither quite
here nor there). But if my suggestions have been correct, then at least
a good part of Sartre's reason for regarding consciousness as unique
in this way lies in a consideration of something which consciousness
has in common with any other state of affairs. Consciousness lacks
identity with the complete collection of "somethings" which it in-
volves in just the same way that any state of affairs lacks identity
with the entities which it involves. The claim that the whole being of
consciousness consists of a "pure intentionality" runs the risk of ob-
scuring this point. It leaves open the possibility that a state of con-
sciousness is not a state of affairs at all, but rather some sort of par-
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176 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
ticular. The claim that some sort of particular is not a something but
a "nothing" may indeed be a claim to a very radical sort of uniqueness
on the part of that particular. The same claim about a state of affairs
seems just to be a way of acknowledging that it is indeed a state of
affairs and not any sort of particular at all.
One might of course object that the ontological peculiarity of
consciousness on Sartre's view does not lie simply in the fact that
consciousness of an object is a state of affairs and not any sort of
particular; it lies in the fact that consciousness of an object is a state
of affairs involving that object and nothing else besides. This, unfor-
tunately, reduces Sartre's claim to a merely quantitative one. It is a
peculiarity of any state of affairs that it be something "more" than
the particulars which it involves. What is allegedly peculiar about
consciousness, then, would simply be the capacity of consciousness to
involve only a single particular. It is difficult to believe that Sartre
was intending to point out such a merely quantitative difference be-
tween consciousness and anything else, though I do not deny that
this is in fact all that he has pointed out. But the difficulty with Sar-
tre's claim goes even further than this. For it is just not clear that
consciousness of an object does provide the only example of a state
of affairs involving a single object. (I take it for granted, for the sake
of sympathetic discussion, that Sartre is right in thinking that con-
sciousnss does at least provide such an example.) Consider, for exam-
ple, what it is for a particular to be identical with itself. A particular's
identity with itself seems to be a state of affairs which involves that
particular. Yet it is not clear what else it might involve over and above
that particular. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that even
"self-identity" on the part of the in-itself is something that arises on
Sartre's view only with the being of the for-itself:
Let us note first that the term in-itself, which we have borrowed from tradition
to designate the transcending being, is inaccurate. At the limit of coincidence
with itself, in fact, the self vanishes to give place to identical being. The self
can not be a property of being-in-itself. By nature it is a reflexive . . . The
self refers, but it refers precisely to the subject. (p. 123).
Certain sorts of existential states of affairs might provide further
examples of states of affairs involving only a single entity. Consider,
for example, the nonbeing of centaurs. This we may say, though Sar-
tre perhaps would not, is a state of affairs involving the property
being-a-centaur; it consists in the nonexemplification of that pro-
perty. But what other entities it needs to involve over and above th
property is not at all clear. It is interesting to note that Sartre him-
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 177
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
II.
Assuming the correctness of the interpretation I have just de-
fended, what success can we now have in relating Sartre's claim about
the nothingness of consciousness to his claim about the nothingness
of persons? It might be tempting to adopt the following line: when
Sartre says that a person, though not identical with any possible ob-
ject of his consciousness, is nevertheless distinguished from any such
object by nothing, he just means that a person is distinguished from
any possible object of consciousness through his consciousness of
that object, which is of course "nothing." This, in turn, could just be
Sartre's way of saying that a person's being whatever he is, at least in
any distinctively "personal" sense, is always a matter of that person's
conscious choice.9 Thus:
A pederast is not a pederast, since, in his most intimate consciousness, he
knows that there is no compulsion for him to be what he is. He is not what he
is, for human nature escapes all definition and refuses to see in its act any
destiny whatsoever. 10
We often conceive that we have the obligation to make ourselves be what we
are called. Thus a waiter, Sartre states, attempts to play the role of a waiter
.... But, Sartre notes, the waiter knows that being a waiter is only a role for
him and that his consciousness is not identified with his role.ll
On this approach, however, Sartre's claim that a person never "is
what he is" turns out to be compatible with the very thing Sartre in-
tends to deny by this paradoxical assertion, namely that a person is
what he is in the same way that a nonpersonal object is what it is
(p. 102). For the fact that a person's being what he is involves a free
and conscious embarkation upon a certain course of action (freely
playing a certain role, if one will) is perfectly compatible with the
9 Another interpretation of the claim that a person is distinguished from the ob-
jects of his consciousness by his very consciousness of them is that a present state
of consciousness is never its own object. I consider this interpretation at the begin-
ning of Section III.
10 Desan, op. cit., p. 26.
11 Catalano, op. cit., p. 85.
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178 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
fact that certain people are engaged in just such an activity in the
very same way that nonpersonal things are what they are. On an in-
terpretation such as the one suggested, then, Sartre would simply be
pointing out that predicates like 'is a waiter' and various other dis-
tinctively personal predicates can only be analyzed in terms that in-
volve a reference to the choice of behaviors. This, of course, is a sig-
nificant and controversial claim. But it does nothing at all to show
that the sense in which a person is whatever he might be is different
from the sense in which any nonpersonal thing is whatever it might
be. Sartre, on the other hand, appears to feel that his own view does
concern the very significance of the copula in assertions about per-
sons, and not simply the predicates which enter into such assertions
(pp. 103, 168).
It might appear that we can do justice to Sartre's claim about
the being of persons by taking it in a way exactly parallel to our
interpretation of his claim about consciousness. We might try to do
this with the aid of Sartre's distinction between the two dimensions
of personal existence, "facticity" and "transcendence." The former
involves, most prominently, a person's body and his bodily history.
The latter involves a person's projection beyond the bodily deeds and
states of any past moment and toward his own future and the goals in
terms of which that future is defined for him. These two aspects of
human existence 'are and ought to be,' on Sartre's view, 'capable of a
valid coordination' (p. 98). The body taken by itself is not strictly
identical with the person whose body it is, and to take it as such
would be to confuse that body 'with the idiosyncratic totality of
which it is only one of the structures' (p. 103). On the other hand, it
is equally a confusion to conclude that, since I am not strictly iden-
tical with my body, I must therefore be identical with something other
than my body in just the same way that the body is at least identical
with whatever it is (p. 108). This might suggest the following interpre-
tation of Sartre's view: personal existence consists in the transcend-
ing of a given facticity toward certain goals; this transcending is a
state of affairs which involves the facticity in question as its only real
constituent; like any state of affairs, however, it is not identical with
the totality on entities which it involves. The relation, in other words,
between consciousness and its object is like that between the existence
of persons and the bodies of those persons. Like the existence of con-
sciousness, personal existence is not the same thing as the existence
of bodily facticities of any sort; but there is, in an important sense,
nothing which distinguishes it from such facticities.
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 179
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
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180 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 181
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
The reason is that, as I have argued, states of affairs do not have any
objective status of their own on Sartre's view. They have a being
which is always constituted by the consciousness which apprehends
them. But insofar as states of affairs derive whatever reality they
have from the consciousness which apprehends them, it is difficult to
see how the existence of a person could consist of a state of affairs in
which present (and past) bodily behavior is consciously transcended
toward the future.
III.
At this point the objection may once again arise that I am over-
estimating the ontological significance of Sartre's claims. Sartre, it
might be said, is not dealing with the question of the being of persons
simpliciter. He is concerned only with the being of persons as objects
of awareness. The claim that a person is "nothing" might then just
be Sartre's way of saying something about a person's awareness of
himself, not a way of saying anything about what a person really is
or is not. It might, for example, be a way of saying that a person is
always conscious of a certain lack of identity with the objects of his
consciousness, whatever those objects might be. We have already
seen, of course, that it is impossible to pretend that Sartre refrains
from all claims of ontological significance in Being and Nothingness.
But it is especially difficult to adopt such an interpretation in the
present case. For Sartre after all maintains that any attempt to iden-
tify an object of consciousness with oneself is a matter of "bad faith,"
and bad faith, Sartre clearly states, is a case in which one attempts to
hide the truth from himself (p. 89). Thus it is not simply that one is
always conscious of a lack of identity with the objects of his con-
sciousness. In addition, the consciousness of this lack of identity is
correct: one is not identical with any such object. It might also be
argued, of course, that when Sartre points out that it is correct to
deny one's identity with whatever may be the object of his conscious-
ness at some moment, he simply means to point out that in any aware-
ness of an object one's consciousness of the object is never itself an
object of consciousness.12 In the first place, however, this is a claim
that Sartre had already made in the Introduction to Being and Noth-
ingness without any appeal at all to talk about the "nonbeing" of the
for-itself (pp. 12-13). Furthermore, the claim in question is clearly
12 Solomon, op. cit., p. 265, calls this the "innocent" interpretation of Sartre's clai
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182 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
13 Les Mains Sales (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Quotations are from, and parenthetical
references to, the translation by Lionel Abel in No Exit and Three Other Plays (New
York: Vintage Books, 1955).
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 183
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
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184 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 185
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness
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186 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
IV.
If I have been correct in interpreting Sartre's view in Being and
Nothingness, then Sartre's claim that the being of the "for-itself" is
really a kind of nonbeing actually amounts to two radically different
sorts of claims. First, the claim that the being of consciousness is
really a kind of nonbeing is just the claim that a state of conscious-
ness is a state of affairs involving an object of consciousness and
nothing else besides. I have tried to show that Sartre's failure to put
the point in just this way rests on his own unclarity concerning the
ontological problems raised by any distinction between states of af-
fairs and the particulars which they involve. I also tried to show that,
while a number of commentators may well have intended such an
interpretation of Sartre's view, their failure to put it in just this way
obscures the issues which are raised by Sartre's claim that the onto-
logical status of the for-itself is unique. I argued, further, that the
problem of the being of persons (qua persons) in Being and Nothing-
ness differs from the problem of the being of consciousness in a way
not generally recognized by commentators. That the being of con-
sciousness is a kind of nonbeing on Sartre's view is compatible with
regarding the existence of consciousness as an objective fact though
not necessarily a fact which is an object of consciousness). But the
existence of persons (qua persons) on Sartre's view is not an objec-
tive fact. Both of Sartre's claims are significant ontological claims
which might well be put by saying that the being of the for-itself is
really a kind of nonbeing. They are not, as is often thought, claims of
a far less significant sort garbed in an obscure language. The claims
are, nonetheless, significantly different from one another in a way not
generally recognized by commentators and, perhaps, by Sartre him-
self.
RICHARD E. AQUILA.
THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE.
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