Like a Worm Inside Being
In Search of Absence, Series 01 Session 01
In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre opens with a question, a question very similar to the one we will continue to pose and re-evaluate throughout this series: Is nothingness inherent in being, or a mistake in judgement? And where does it come from? Let’s use a slightly revised example he gives to illustrate the problem:
Suppose you’ve agreed to meet Paul at the bar at 7:00 PM. You’re 15 minutes late, and Paul is usually on time for meetings, so you expect to see him there. But when you arrive at a quarter after 7, you look around and immediately don’t see Paul. The whole environment of the bar is a bit different from normal. You still see all the same barstools, regulars, the same music is still playing, and so on. But now, something is crucially different. Everything is the same and — Paul is not here. Everything you briefly intuited then quietly settles into the background of the scene, almost as if it’s all pointing towards one thing: Paul’s absence.
In this scenario, we can all agree that the most important thing in our consciousness at the time is Paul’s absence. But what are we to do with this absence? Everything about the problem of nothingness is tied into this wonderful example.
We could, for instance, say that Paul isn’t absent, he’s simply somewhere else. In this sense, there is no nothing to talk about — it’s all still positivity, the fullness of being, it’s just that the matter is rearranged in a different way, a way that doesn’t meet our expectations. So, is nothingness then just a matter of our expectations? Or is it intelligible to talk about a more fundamental or basic non-being that’s built into the very being of the situation of Paul’s not-being-here? And, if we can only talk about nothingness as a purely subjective, human-level experience, what allows us to bring nothingness into perception? For example, if we can see color, there must be light waves which produce the color we see. Is there a nothingness in the structure of reality that we simply perceive when we notice that Paul is absent from the bar, or is something humans uniquely introduce into reality? These are questions Sartre tries to answer in the first sections of Being and Nothingness.
First, a formula: “negation is a refusal of existence” (B&N: 43). This means that first, there is a thing which is posited: I expect Paul at the bar at 7:00 PM. Then, this being is refused, or negated: I arrive at the bar (late) and find that Paul is not here.
There were a lot of habitual assumptions which were broken here. Me and Paul agreed on this bar, at this time, in which both of us were going to show up to have a drink. I am a quarter-hour late. Paul is not here. In other words, “it must separate us from this wall of positivity enclosing us” (B&N: 43). His absence breaks the continuity of the habit of meeting people at bars that we’ve come to know. We can also think of those famous examples of people who lose their spouse but hear their footsteps or voices in the hallways of their house. Nothingness, in other words, haunts being. As he famously claims: “it is right inside being, in its heart, like a worm” (B&N: 57).
Even though Sartre rejects the hypotheses that nothingness is introduced from outside of being or some virtual reality, he needs to establish that non-being has an origin, that it comes from somewhere. He needs, therefore, to account for the “lived experience of nothingness … [which] is characterized by self-estrangement and self-deception” (Kirkpatrick 2017). But at the same time, we cannot deduce nothingness from being — at least, not “being” as is traditionally understood, i.e., as a world of things. For us to experience Paul as absent from the bar, there needs to be a structure of being which we manifest in our experience of his absence.
The Origin of Negation
Sartre launches on three questions which are fundamental to his philosophical intervention and we will look at them here.
First, what is the origin of nothingness? Human beings, in their process of questioning themselves, open at least one way through which non-being comes into the world. The question — and the ability to question — are key points for Sartre. If a being can question itself, it is at once removed from itself. This is why he can claim later that belief is already non-belief. If belief is supposed to be a worldview or entire commitment to an idea, then the fact that we can name it means we’ve moved beyond it — we are no longer ensconced in it. In the words of Coleridge, “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” We must therefore say that the human being for whom its own being is in question. This is a radically different kind of being from a table or a dog, whose being is not in question — they are always within the limits of being-a-table or being-a-dog. They do not experience doubt or self-awareness (or, at least, theirs is a different kind than that of the human’s).
Second, what is true for the human being that nothingness is possible through it? Human beings are characterized by freedom. This freedom is an essential part of Sartre’s concrete philosophy which is worked out in part four of Being and Nothingness, but to give a workable summary: humans are allowed to transcend or overcome their basic facts of life given the context in which they exist. For instance, two people may approach a boulder. One person sees it as in his way, as he needs to get through the boulder to continue his hike, so he finds a way to work around it. The other person has found exactly what he’s looking for and gets ready to start climbing. Same facticity, different intentions. This is the essence of Sartrean freedom. Although it is often confused with free will, Sartre is very clear on his disdain for theories of the latter.
Third, what is the structure of human freedom that nothingness comes through it? An essential aspect of Sartre’s conception of freedom is temporality: “Therefore any psychological process of nihilation implies a break between the immediate psychological past and the present. This break is, precisely, nothingness” (B&N: 64). He will later call this ‘break’ the act of the human subject.
Nothingness and Human Reality: Freedom
But let’s pick up this question of nothingness and freedom in earnest. We need to ask what the structure of human reality apropos freedom is that we get something like a negation, or a refusal, of being. Remember, we sought this question out because Sartre shows us that we experience nothingness, e.g., in the form of Paul not being at the bar, and we can’t account for the origin of this experience through the simple fact of being itself.
This is where Sartre’s famous distinction between being-in-itself (en soi) and being-for-itself (pour soi) comes into play. Being in-itself, in its full positivity, cannot produce nothingness. But we know that nothingness exists, because we have lived experience of it. So, Sartre splits being in two, and introduces human reality, or consciousness, as a cleavage within being through which non-being is born. Kirkpatrick (2017) astutely points out that Sartre is aligned with St. Augustine on this point: through humans, sin is brought into the world, and sin is nothing but the absence of being. (This is a point we’ll take up in the series of negative theology.)
Being and Nothingness gives us a vision of human beings characterized by non-being. In fact, one could say that the model of the subject portrayed within the text is one which is nothing — human reality is fundamentally non-being, i.e., freedom. Though I don’t want to reduce Sartre to his historical circumstances, I do think that one of the effects of writing a phenomenology of nothingness during the Nazi occupation of Paris influences his readiness to jump to freedom in his definition of nothingness.
Freedom is not something which is gained or acquired in addition to being a human, it is built into humanity itself: “I am condemned to be free” (B&N: 577). This is one of the reasons why Sartre rejects the absolutist version of free will — if we did indeed have absolute free will, one could will oneself to be un-free. But this is not the case if freedom is equivalent to non-being, because there is a forbidding threshold in between being and non-being, or the in-itself and the for-itself, a threshold he calls an “absolute event”.
On Not Fitting In
If we are always free and always non-being, we never quite fit in anywhere. Sartre’s theory of the subject is simultaneously one of too-littleness and too-muchness. Subjectivity is too little because it lacks the same kind of substantiality that characterizes the in-itself. It is too much because this always decenters the for-itself, never allowing it to comfortably fit into its surroundings. A good example of this is bad faith. The subject is living in bad faith when it comes to identify itself with a concrete, or fixed, structure — i.e., when it mistakes itself to be an in-itself. In this case the subject is fleeing from its own freedom. But at the same time, the subject can never fully be identified with what it is at any given time: the waiter is always more and less than just a waiter. He is also a man, an American, a spouse, and a father.
The subject-as-nothingness makes it so that no factual situation can ever encompass what it is, because “it is not what it is and is what it is not”. The subject of the conscious human being cannot just be what it ‘is’. Just being what one is means one can be at-one or self-identical. But how can nothingness be self-identical?
For instance, if one is sincere, then we take this to mean that they mean what they say or that they are acting in accordance with what they really believe. But there will always remain a gap between what one thinks and what one is, or one’s consciousness and how one behaves. And this gap is structural, it is not a problem of epistemology or ethics. No matter how much one tries to be honest and sincere by aligning their words with their actions, they will never quite fit into the mold of their own ideal. Man is the only creature, says Sartre, which tries to be God.
The account to which Sartre gives of the fundamental structure of freedom, its ontological origins, is ultimately “dissatisfying” and needs a mediation through a “(broadly) Augustinian anthropology of fallenness” (Kirkpatrick 2017: 169). We will return to St. Augustin in the next series on theology, but it is important to note this limitation of Sartre’s atheistic existentialist project of nothingness. He isn’t able to give an answer to the final question he posed above: what is the nature of human freedom that produces nothingness? He is only able to say, somewhat circularly: nothingness is human freedom.
A Helpful Tautology
Nothingness : freedom :: freedom : nothingness.
This is the kind of definition that would drive Rudolf Carnap mad, but we shouldn’t dismiss it for this reason. In Being and Nothingness Sartre raises the fundamental question for the theorists of nothingness: is it out there in the world? Or is it the product of human reality? If it’s the former, how does it translate to the latter, and if it’s the latter, what is the foundation of it? As a phenomenologist, perhaps Sartre can safely avoid the question by claiming to be studying subjectivity, not ontology — but ultimately, he does flail about ontology quite a bit in B&N.
Three points that Sartre brings up we need to hold on to in particular:
1. That the nothingness of subjectivity makes it so that humans never fully fit into their world, place, or time. Self-estrangement is not an effect of capitalism, toxic relationships, or racism, though all of these forms of estrangement exacerbate the more fundamental alienation. It is virtually built into subjectivity.
2. Subjects try to avoid their nothingness by adopting certain behaviors or modes of being which shield or disguise the non-being within. These ‘defense mechanisms’ are ubiquitous, and central to social life, but they are always a response to the anxiety/anguish which freedom qua nothingness engenders.
3. Negation/non-being/nothingness is a phenomenological or subjective experience, not something to be located in “reality itself.” Although Sartre doesn’t claim this outright in B&N, it is his failure to demonstrate it that we will take up in later essays, particularly the final series on the ontology of nothingness.
In a way, Sartre is doing what C.S. Lewis says of some forms of ‘realism’: “Suppose this happened, how interesting, how moving, the consequences would be! Listen. It would be like this.” (Lewis, 1961). From nothingness we get anguish, bad faith, negatities, alienation, and so on — but questioning the postulate, Lewis tells us, would be a misunderstanding of the project. This is both the limitation and brilliance of Sartre’s existentialism of nothingness.
References
K. Kirkpatrick, Sartre on Sin (2017)
C. S. Lewis, Experiment in Criticism (1961)
J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943) (abbreviated ‘B&N’)
