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International Phenomenological Society

Two Problems of Being and Nonbeing in Sartre's Being and Nothingness


Author(s): Richard E. Aquila
Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Dec., 1977), pp. 167-186
Published by: International Phenomenological Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107159
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TWO PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN
SARTRE'S BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
In Being and Nothingness' Sartre undertakes a description of hu-
man existence and its relation to the world with which it is presented.
The term 'being-for-itself' designates the kind of existence with which
Sartre is concerned. The main claim he makes is that being-for-itself
is really a kind of non-being: to be or to exist in a way which is char-
acteristically human (or, at least, in a way which is characteristic of a
person) is, in an important sense, not to be at all. Unfortunately, Sar-
tre uses the term 'being-for-itself' to cover two distinct problems in
Being and Nothingness: the problem of the being of human (qua per-
sonal) consciousness and the problem of the being of human beings
(qua persons) themselves. It seems clear that Sartre wants to say
both that the being of human consciousness is a kind of nonbeing and
that the being of human persons is a kind of nonbeing. Commentators
on Sartre have, in my opinion, failed to recognize the very great dif-
ference between these two claims. I shall try to show that the two
claims are not in fact as closely related as is generally thought and
also that both, and especially the second, possess an ontological sig-
nificance which has not always been appreciated.
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
Sometimes Sartre's claim is identified with a much stronger assertion,
namely that it is human consciousness which is responsible for the
very being of the negative states of affairs which it encounters:
When the existentialists say that human being is different from the being of
things, they are saying simply that it is human beings who set up the contrast

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
168 PHILOSOPHYAND PHENOMENOLOGICAL
RESEARCH

between things-what is-and what is not but could possibly come to be, i.e.,
non-being.3
On either interpretation, the claims Sartre makes about the "nothing-
ness" of consciousness and those which he makes about the nothing-
ness of persons would apparently be just different ways of putting
the same point: that human consciousness necessarily involves a cer-
tain sort of "nihilating" behavior in the face of the world.
It will generally be agreed, I think, that this approach to Sartre's
claims about the nothingness of the for-itself fails to do justice to the
ontological intent of those claims. Sartre does not merely point out,
for example, that consciousness is, and involves an awareness of be-
ing, something distinct from whatever is its object at any moment. He
also insists that, in an important sense, the only appropriate response
to the question, 'What more is consciousness than its object at any
moment?', is the reply,'Nothing more!'. Thus:
In the internal negation the for-itself collapses on what it denies .... In
short the term-of-origin of the internal negation is the in-itself, the thing which
is there, and outside of it there is nothing except an emptiness which is dis-
tinguished from the thing only by a pure negation for which this thing furnishes
the very content. (p. 245)4
Sartre makes the same point about the being of persons. It is not
just that a person lacks identity with the objects of his awareness at
any moment. Nor is it that he is necessarily aware of various sorts of
negative states of affairs involving such objects. In addition to this,
according to Sartre, a person also fails to be anything more than the
totality of such objects:
But if I represent myself as him, I am not he; I am separated from him as the
object from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from
him. (p. 103)
As soon as we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legitimate judgment,
based on inner experience or correctly deduced from a priori or empirical pre-
mises, then by that very positing we surpass this being-and that not toward
another being but toward emptiness, toward nothing. (p. 106)
Two points are involved, I believe, in Sartre's insistence that con-
sciousness, though always distinct from whatever may be its object,
is nevertheless nothing more than the object. First, a state of con-

3 Frederick A. Olafson, Principles and Persons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins


Press, 1967), p. 99. Cf. Robert C. Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism (New
York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 265. Another suggestion by Solomon, namely that con-
sciousness is "nothing" for Sartre in that it is not a possible object of conscious, is
considered at the beginning of section III of this paper.
4 It is clear from the context that the "internal negation" in question is the struc-
ture of consciousness.
Two PROBLEMS OFBEINGANDNONBEING IN 169
SARTRE'SBeing and Nothingness

sciousness is distinguished from its object in virtue of being a certain


sort of state of affairs involving that object. A state of consciousness,
unlike many of its objects, is thus not a particular of any sort. States
of affairs may of course involve particulars, but it is clear that no
state of affairs is the same thing as the particulars which it involves.
The state of affairs, for example, which consists of my presence in a
certain room involves both myself and some particular room. But the
state of affairs in question is identical neither with those particulars
taken individually nor with the two of them together. (If one counten-
ances relational universals in addition to particulars, then the state of
affairs consisting of my presence in a certain room would also involve
the relation Being-present-in. But the point would remain: the state
of affairs in question is not the same thing as the various entities
which it involves, whether they be taken singly or collectively.) The
second point involved in Sartre's claim about the being of conscious-
ness is that the state of affairs which consists of an object being an
object of consciousness is a state of affairs which involves no other
entity besides that object. Consciousness, that is, is a very unusual
sort of state of affairs. It is a state of affairs involving only a single
object which is not itself consciousness but only the object of con-
sciousness.
Sartre was unclear about the distinction between states of affairs
and particulars. It would therefore perhaps be more accurate to say
that the claims that I have attributed to him are the claims that he
would be making if he were more clear about that distinction. Never-
theless, that Sartre was at least aware of the distinction, and also
aware of its relevance to his claims about the ontological status of
consciousness, is evident from a number of things that he says in
Being and Nothingness. It is especially evident in his treatment of
negative states of affairs.
Consider the following argument:
(1) 'In order for negation to exist in the world . it is necessary that in some
way Nothingness be given .... Nothingness must be given at the heart of
Being, in order for us to be able to apprehend that particular type of reali-
ties which we have called ndgatitds.' (p. 56)
(2) 'But this intra-mundane Nothingness can not be produced by Being-in-itself;
the notion of Being as full positivity does not contain Nothingness as one
of its structures.' (p. 56)
(3) 'It follows therefore that there must exist a being (this can not be the In-
itself) of which the property is to nihilate Nothingness, to support it in its
being, to sustain it perpetually in its very existence, a being by which noth-
ingness comes to things.' (p. 57)
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PHILOSOPHYAND PHENOMENOLOGICAL

(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
Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 171
SARTRE'SBeing and Nothingness
of affairs are relegated to a status somewhere, yet impossibly, in be-
tween that of the for-itself and the in-itself: though something "ob-
jective," 'Non-being exists only on the surface of being' and, one can,
indeed, exhaust the domain of what strictly speaking has being'with-
out finding there the least trace of nothingness' (p. 49).
It is clear that Sartre's difficulty concerning the distinction be-
tween a negative state of affairs and the particulars which it involves
is a general difficulty about states of affairs not confined to the case
of merely negative ones. The reason for Sartre's almost exclusive
attention to negative states of affairs is that he uses the notion of a
"negative"state of affairs so broadly as to include virtually all states
of affairs. Consider,for example, a line segment from A to B. So long,
according to Sartre, as what I am seeing is just the line regarded as
a single entity (as 'immediate object of intuition'), no negativity is
involved. But once I distinguish between the points A and B, and view
them in relation to one another, I have apprehended "negativity."In
this sense, Sartre concludes, even the apprehension of distance in-
volves an apprehension of nonbeing (pp. 54-5).It seems clear that the
distinction that Sartre is trying to draw here is just the distinction be-
tween seeing the distance between A and B an seeing that A and B are
distant from one another. The object of awareness in the former of
these cases is a line segment with A and B as its end points; the ob-
ject of the latter is a certain state of affairs involving those end
points. The real issue raised by the possibility of the latter sort of
awareness is therefore a general difficulty concerning the distinction
between particulars and states of affairs.
It is also clear that Sartre regards all states of affairs as sharing
in the same sort of ambiguous ontological status that he attributes to
explicitly negative states of affairs. Thus considering the very general
question of our awareness of any distinction at all between one par-
ticular and another, Sartre first observes that the sorts of relations
which are here in question can never be discovered by means of an
examination of the particulars to be related: 'The determinative rela-
tion of the this therefore can belong neither to the this nor to the
that; it enfolds them without touching them, without conferring on
them the slightest trace of new character; it leaves them for what
they are' (p. 256). This, as it stands, is just to acknowledge that a
state of affairs involving two particulars is something in addition to
those particulars themselves. But Sartre immediately proceeds to
conclude that such "external negation" 'can not appear as an objec-
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PHILOSOPHYAND PHENOMENOLOGICAL

tive characteristic of the thing, if we understand by objective that


which by nature belongs to the in-itself,' hence, 'Its very exteriority
therefore requires that it remain "in the air,"exterior to the For-itself
as well as to the In-itself' (p. 256).
We may conclude that Sartre is indeed consciously occupied with
the problem of distinguishing between states of affairs and the par-
ticulars which they involve. We should also take note of the signifi-
cance of his conclusion that the distinction in question can be onto-
logically grounded only through an appeal to the being of conscious-
ness. That assumption, as we have seen, indicates Sartre's failure to
recognize the possibility of accepting the distinction between states
of affairs and particulars as an ontologically irreducible distinction,
that is, as one which requires no appeal to something over and above
the sort of entity that a state of affairs is. But there is a further signi-
ficance to Sartre's appeal to the being of consciousness at this point.
For Sartre assumes, in making that appeal, that consciousness itself
is a kind of "nothing"in just the same way that the difference be-
tween a (negative) state of affairs and its constituents is nothing.
This is the point of premise (4) in the argument that I have set out.
Now when Sartre claims that the difference between a negative state
of affairs and the particulars which it involves is nothing (cf. pp.
256-7: 'if I say "The inkwell is not the table," I am thinking nothing.')
he is just acknowledging, though in an unclear way, that a state of
affairs is something distinct from the complete collection of entities
which are involved in that state of affairs. We should be led to sus-
pect, then, that if consciousness itself is the primordial "nothing" in
Sartre's thought, then to say as much is in effect to acknowledge that
consciousness of an object is not any sort of particular, but rather
just a state of affairs which involves some particular.
It might be objected that my interpretation overlooks the pheno-
menological orientation of Sartre's work. Sartre is concerned with
the being of objects as phenomena, as objects for a consciousness. His
point, one might argue, is simply that a necessary condition for the
existence of states of affairs as objects of consciousness is a certain
amount of activity on the part of consciousness. Apart, that is, from
the existence of human expectation and projection, there would be no
such thing as an awareness of states of affairs as opposed to partic-
ulars. So only in this sense, it might be said, does the being of nega-
tivity outside of consciousness derive its origin from the original
negativity which is consciousness. It seems to me that this objection
Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 173
Being
SARTRE'S and Nothingness
overlooks the ontological orientation of Sartre's phenomenology. Sar-
tre makes that orientation clear at the very beginning of Being and
Nothingness. There he argues at length that the mere fact that we
restrict ourselves to objects as objects of consciousness does not im-
ply that those objects lack a being of their own, and that all talk
about the being of such objects is really just talk about the being of
consciousness. The opposite is rather the case on Sartre's view: the
being of consciousness depends upon the independent being of its ob-
ject (pp. 21 ff.). This independence, Sartre even concedes, extends to
those negative states of affairs which we apprehendas objects (p. 59).
That such states of affairs derive their being from the being of con-
sciousness does not preclude their existing, once produced by con-
sciousness, as objects in their own right:
In addition destruction, although coming into being through man, is an objec-
tive fact and not a thought. Fragility has been impressed upon the very being
of this vase, and its destruction would be an irreversible absolute event which I
could only verify. There is a transphenomenality of non-being as of being. (p.
40).
It is part of Sartre's view, then, that even a phenomenological
orientation must grant that objects of consciousness have a being of
their own. What then could account for Sartre's special treatment of
states of affairs as objects of consciousness? States of affairs become
objects of consciousness only through consciousness; but the same
can be said about any object at all. The only difference, apparently,
is that on Sartre's view a certain amount of projective and expectative
activity is required in the case of the former sorts of objects. The
mere apprehension of objective being, Sartre seems to grant, does not
require such activity, but the genuine apprehension of states of affairs
does require it. The most that could be gotten from this point, how-
ever, is that the being of states of affairs as objects of consciousness
(as "phenomena")depends on human activity in a way that nothing
else does. But if the fact that the being-in-itself that concerns Sartre
in Being and Nothingness is the being of mere "phenomena" is
compatible with its being something external to consciousness and
hence "in-itself," then why should the fact that Sartre's concern is
limited to merely phenomenal states of affairs be incompatible with
the supposition that those states of affairs possess a "being-in-itself"?
Yet Sartre, as we have seen, denies that they do. The only explanation
seems to me to be that Sartre is just unclear about the distinction
between states of affairs and the particulars which they involve, and
this unclarity leads him to think that the former are "in themselves"
174 RESEARCH
PHILOSOPHYAND PHENOMENOLOGICAL

really nothing at all. The same unclarity, I have suggested, leads him
to think that consciousness is also nothing at all.
Sartre's claim that consciousness is really a kind of "nothing"is
not, of course, completely clarified by the claim that consciousness
is a state of affairs and not any sort of particular. For Sartre is also
of the opinion that consciousness is, if a state of affairs, a very unique
sort of state of affairs. But the remainder of Sartre's claim is cap-
tured in the claim that consciousness is a state of affairs involving
some object of consciousness and nothing else besides. If I have been
correct in my interpretation so far, it would be impossible to confirm
this interpretation in any very direct way. Sartre, in my view, was
never clear enough about the distinction between states of affairs and
the particulars they involve to formulate explicitly the view that I
am attributing to him. But I have tried to show how my interpreta-
tion is supported by Sartre's perception of some close ontological
connection between the problem of negative states of affairs and the
problem of human consciousness. In any case, I offer the interpreta-
tion as the only really intelligible way to do justice both to Sartre's
insistence, in the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, that con-
sciousness of an object presupposes that there actually be some ob-
ject of consciousness and also to his insistence that consciousness of
an object is distinguished by nothing from that object. Consciousness
is the fact that there is awareness of objects, and the fact that there
is awareness of objects is a state of affairs involving those objects
and nothing else besides:
[F]or consciousness there is no being outside of that precise obligation to be
a revealing intuition of something ... (p. 23).
Thus the very meaning of the for-itself is outside in being, but it is through
the for-itself that the meaning of being appears. This totalization of being adds
nothing to being; it is nothing but the manner in which being is revealed
(p. 251).
Thus knowledge is the world. To use Heidegger's expression, the world and out-
side of that-nothing. But this "nothing" is not originally that in which human
reality emerges. This nothing is human reality itself as the radical negation by
means of which the world is revealed. (p. 251).

That Sartre's claim that the being of consciousness is really a


kind of nonbeing is a way of saying that consciousness of objects is
a state of affairs involving some object and nothing else besides has
perhaps been what sympathetic commentators have meant to say in
Two PROBLEMS
OFBEINGANDNONBEING
IN 175
SARTRE'SBeing and Nothingness
pointing out that consciousness for Sartre is a sort of "pure inten-
tionality"5and nothing else besides. Thus:
[I]f for a moment we should try to give consciousness a kind of being which
would belong to itself alone, we should have a form of nothingness, a pure
translucidity. But precisely because it is pure translucidity, this consciousness
is inevitably intentional, i.e., "pointing towards" that which is beyond con-
sciousness . . . It is because consciousness needs its object in order to exist as
consciousness that the being of such an existence is merely the being of the in-
tentional object . . .6
He calls it a "nothing" because all physical, all psychophysiological, all psychic
objects, all objective truths and values are transcendent to it. There is no long-
er an "inner life," and consciousness is wholly a self-transcending, spontaneous
activity that intends a world of meaning and value for itself.7
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.8Thus 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-
5 For a nonexistentialist defense of the view that "thought" at least involves
"pure intentionality" cf. W. J. Ginnane, "Thoughts," Mind, LXIX, July, 1960, pp 372-90.
6 Wilfrid Desan, The Tragic Finale (New York: Harper & Row, 1960; reprint of
edition originally published by Harvard University Press in 1954), p. 31.
7 James M. Edie, "Sartre as Phenomenologist and as Existential Psychoanalyst,"
in Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (eds.), Phenomenology and Existentialism
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 153.
8 Joseph S. Catalano comes a little closer than such formulations by emphasizing
that consciousness involves something that is 'more than the sum total of its parts.'
A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" (New York: Harper &
Row, 1974), p. 53. Catalano seems to suggest, however, that the "totality" in question
involves consciousness and an object as two distinct parts.
176 RESEARCH
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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 that
property is not at all clear. It is interesting to note that Sartre him-
Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 177
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness

self distinguishes such "radical"states of affairs from more concrete


ones. The absence of a centaur from my office, as opposed to the non-
existence of centaurs simpliciter, requires appeal to the for-itself as
the original ground of the negativity which it involves. Sartre grants,
at least tentatively though no doubt only rhetorically, that negations
of the former sort might be accounted for without appeal to the pro-
jective activities of consciousness (p. 53).
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.
11Catalano, op. cit., p. 85.
178 PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH
ANDPHENOMENOLOGICAL

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.
Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 179
Being
SARTRE'S and Nothingness
The problem with this interpretation is that there is in fact some-
thing on Sartre's view which distinguishes, or at least helps to distin-
guish, a person from his facticity. This is a person's present con-
sciousness: transcendence is a conscious projection toward goals. We
cannot, unfortunately, appeal at this point to the claim that con-
sciousness itself is nothing in order to restore our original interpre-
tation. For the claim that consciousness is nothing, as I have argued,
just means that the existence of consciousness is a state of affairs
involving an object of consciousness and nothing else. But the trans-
cending consciousness which is a necessary condition for the exis-
tence of a person is not a consciousness whose object is the facticity
of the person in question. The body is not ordinarily an object of
consciousness (p. 430). Thus the relationship between a transcending
consciousness and bodily facticity is not the same as that between
consciousness and its object, and it could not be such a parallel that
Sartre is intending to express by claiming that a person is in a certain
sense nothing. The existence of bodily facticity is one sort of state of
affairs, and the existence of a consciousness which transcends that
facticity is a distinct state of affairs (which is not of course to say
that the two are unrelated). Though there may be some point in say-
ing that a transcending consciousness is really "nothing," the point
of saying this lies, as I have argued, wholly in a comparison of a
transcending consciousness and the object of that consciousness. In
comparison with the bodily facticity that is being thereby trans-
cended, the transcending consciousness is indeed something. It is sim-
ply a distinct state of affairs. To be sure, Sartre does argue that in
some sense a transcending consciousness is not distinct from bodily
facticity, at least when the latter is understood in an appropriate
way: 'Being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be wholly
consciousness; it can not be united with a body' (p. 404). To think
otherwise is to consider the body only as it is "for others" and not as
it is "for itself." It is clear from Sartre's argument, however, that the
only point he is trying to make by means of such a claim is that
though the body is not ordinarily an object of consciousness, it is
nevertheless always "indicated"by those things in the world which
are objects of consciousness. It is indicated, namely, by the fact that
such objects are always perceived from some determinate "point of
view" and as "calling for" certain sorts of behaviors as opposed to
others (pp. 428,ff.). This argument should not obscure the fact that
the existence of a "bodily"consciousness and of a bodily facticity is
the existence of two distinct states of affairs.
180 PHILOSOPHY
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We remain, then, with what appear to be two necessary conditions


for the existence of a person: the existence of bodily facticity and the
existence of a consciousness which transcends that facticity. We may,
if we like, take the claim that a certain consciousness "transcends"a
given facticity simply as the claim that the objects of that conscious-
ness "indicate"the facticity in question. (Those objects are, for exam-
ple, perceived from a point of view defining the location of some par-
ticular body.) Is it Sartre's view, then, that the existence of a person
with a certain bodily history and a certain present consciousness
simply consists in the coexistence of certain bodily facts and certain
conscious states which "indicate"those facts? Or is there some fur-
ther relation involved in our saying that some particular conscious-
ness, which may indeed "indicate" a given facticity, actually does
transcend that facticity and thereby constitute the existence of a per-
son? Either alternative seems to be ruled out on Sartre's view. For
it is Sartre's view that to identify the existence of a person either
with the existence of a certain bodily facticity or with the existence a
certain consciousness is tantamount to regarding a person as some-
thing that is what it is in just the same way that nonpersons are what
they are. Both identifications are forms of "bad faith" (pp. 97-9). But
if to regard the existence of a person in either of these ways is mis-
takenly to regard it as having an objective being-in-itself, then pre-
sumably the same would hold for any attempt to identify a person's
existence with the mere conjunction of some bodily facticity and a
consciousness which succeeds in "indicating" that facticity. Such a
conjunction would simply be a state of affairs involving both of the
original states of affairs. The same difficulty clearly holds for the
second of the alternatives that I mentioned. For if a person's existence
simply consists in some relation obtaining between a certain body
and a certain bodily consciousness, then once again the existence of
a person would simply consist in the obtaining of some particular
state of affairs.
There would, to be sure, be some point on this view in saying that
persons are "nothing."For none of the elements which constitutes a
person's existence on this view will itself be a person. But this is just
to say that the term 'person' does not function as an ordinary refer-
ring expression, and the same can clearly be said about a number
of nonpersonal terms. Furthermore, there is also another reason for
concluding that, while this may be a view that is supported by much
of what Sartre says, it is a view which he cannot ultimately maintain.
Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 181
SARTRE'SBeing 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.12In 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"interpretationof Sartre's claim.
182 ANDPHENOMENOLOGICAL
PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH

compatible with a position that Sartre repeatedly denies, namely that


a person is whatever he is in just the same way that nonpersons are
what they are. For the claim that a person is never aware of his pre-
sent consciousness as an object of consciousness is obviously com-
patible with the claim that a person is presently conscious in just
the same way that various nonpersons are whatever they are at some
moment. Finally, the claim in question does not, by any reasonable
stretch of the imagination, imply that a person who takes himself to
be identical with some present object of consciousness is in "bad
faith."
There is, I think, only one interpretation of Sartre's claim about
the nothingness of persons which is compatible with the various other
claims that he makes. This is simply that no proposition which deals
with an object in a distinctively personal way is, for Sartre, capable
of being either true or false in the usual sense. Propositions which
deal with objects as persons presuppose certain truths on Sartre's
view. They presuppose truths about bodily facticities and conscious-
nesses which transcend those facticities. When those presuppositions
are mistaken, we might then say that the proposition in question is
false, but there is no corresponding criterion for the truth of that pro-
position (as opposed to the truth of its presuppositions). Such a pro-
position, for Sartre, always expresses something in addition to its
factual presuppositions. But in an important sense, I shall argue,
there is nothing more that it expresses: it expresses no additional
facts; at most it expresses some present attitude or resolution on the
part of the proposition's utterer.
A purely literary confirmation of this view can be found in the
play Dirty Hands."3Hugo's finger pulls a gun's trigger in this play,
occasioning the death of Hoederer, an official of the Proletarian party
to which Hugo belongs. Prior to the moment in which Hoederer is
killed, Hugo had actually planned the death of Hoederer, which he
regarded as a politically desirable goal. He had also, prior to that
moment, at least regarded his own behavior as motivated by this
plan. Hence he regarded his planning to kill Hoederer as a genuine
intention to ill Hoederer, and no mere wishing or desiring. But now,
once Hoederer is dead by Hugo's hand, Hugo puzzles over the ques-
tion of his own responsibility. He wonders whether he has in fact
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).
Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 183
SARTRE'SBeing and Nothingness
performed a murderous act. Or was the deed rather merely a piece of
"pure behavior?"
Did I even do it? It wasn't I who killed-it was chance-But me? Where does
that put me in the thing? It was an assassination without an assassin . . . . I
wonder whether I really killed him at all. (Act VII, pp. 240-241)
Yes. I really drew my finger back. Actors do that too, on the stage. Look here:
I cock my forefinger, I aim at you. It's the same gesture. Perhaps I wasn't real.
Perhaps only the bullet was .... Where is my crime? Does it exist? And yet I
fired. (Act VII, pp. 241-242)
Hugo's reflection on all of the facts of the matter gives him no guid-
ance. But it is not, he admits, that there is something about those
facts which he has failed to understand:
Rather . . . I understand it too well. It's a door that any key can open. I courd
tell myself, if I had a mind to, that I shot him out of political passion .
(Act VII, p. 241)
It might be thought that Hugo's problem is a purely epistemo-
logical one. One might, that is, take Sartre to be raising no more than
a question concerning the possibility of one's knowledge of his own
past deeds. But that Sartre is raising a very different question is evi-
dent from the way in which Hugo finally solves his problem. The play
closes with Hugo's acknowledgment that there are in fact no past
deeds which he might either succeed in knowing or fail to know in the
present:
If I openly claim my crime .. . and am willing to pay the necessary price, then
[Hoederer] will have the death he deserves .... I have not yet killed Hoederer,
Olga. Not yet. But I am going to kill him now, along with myself. (Act VII, pp.
247-248)
Thus what Hugo acknowledges, at the play's end, is that a decision
about the occurrence or nonoccurrence of some action is just not at
all a decision that some event of a certain peculiar sort has in fact
occurred. It is just one's own present projection toward future be-
haviors. In this sense an action has no objective existence apart from
the "judgments"about it which our present projects express. But on
Sartre's view, the ascribability of action to a person is a necessary
condition for regarding anything as a person in the first place (p. 613).
Being and Nothingness contains a statement of just the same posi-
tion about the ontological status of persons:
If I say, "Paul is fatigued," one might perhaps argue that the copula has an
ontological value, one might perhaps want to see there only an indication of
inherence. But when we say "Paul was fatigued," the meaning of the "was"
leaps to our eyes: the present Paul is actually reponsible for having had this
fatigue in the past. If he were not sustaining this fatigue with his being, he
would not even have forgotten that state; there would be rather a "no-longer-
being" strictly identical with a "not-being." The fatigue would be lost. (p. 168)
184 PHILOSOPHYAND PHENOMENOLOGICAL
RESEARCH

It might be tempting to read in this passage only a claim much milder


than the one I am attributing to Sartre. One might, for example, take
Sartre merely to be claiming that the truth of statements about the
past can never provide an objective resolution of questions about
present existence. Thus, similarly, the point of Dirty Hands would
reduce to Hugo's realization that his present political commitment
will never be determined by settling whether his deeds have really
been politically motivated ones. But Sartre makes it clear that his
claims are much stronger than this. For he tells us explicitly, in the
passage just quoted, that he is concerned not merely with the bearing
of past deeds on present existence, but also with the very meaning of
the claim that some deed has in fact occurred. Apart from present
projects of the appropriate sort, he says, there is just no such thing
as Paul's having been fatigued at some point in the past. By that very
fact, of course, it also follows that there is no point at which Paul
might have said that he is fatigued, at least in any sense of 'is' of the
sort employed when we make a judgment about what some non-
person is (p. 172),i.e., when we try to express the "ontological value"
of "inherence"by such a judgment.
The force of the point may be more evident when we contrast
what Sartre says about the ontological significance of statements
about persons with what he says about the significance of statements
about bodily facticity and consciousness. Not only statements about
bodily facticities, but also statements about past consciousness, per-
form, on Sartre's view, an ordinary fact-asserting function. In a cer-
tain sense, indeed, both assert a "being-in-itself":
The grief which we had-although fixed in the past-does not cease to present
the meaning of a for-itself, and yet it exists in itself with the silent fixity of the
grief of another, of the grief of a statue . . . . The past psychic first is; and
then it is for itself-just as Pierre is blond, as that tree is an oak. (p. 174)
Here, Sartre is granting, even a past mode of being-for-itself, a past
state of consciousness, can be regarded as possessing a being-in-
itself of sorts. This, as I see it, can only be Sartre's admission that a
state of consciousness is, though a mode of subjectivity, also an ob-
jective fact: it is a state of affairs which actually obtains or obtained
at some moment of time. To be sure, Sartre restricts this admission
to the case of either past consciousness or the consciousness of others.
But this, clearly, is simply because Sartre, like Wittgenstein, denies
that one's own "ascription"of present consciousness to himself, as
for example when I tell you that "I am in pain," is to be regarded
as a way of stating some fact about oneself. Unlike Wittgenstein, of
Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 185
SARTRE'S Being and Nothingness

course, it is not Sartre's view that such a self-ascription is merely a


substitute form of pain-behavior.14 It is rather an expression of,
though not an assertion about, some altered state of awareness of the
world (pp. 437-8). But the point remains that Sartre's view about
first-personal ascriptions of conscious states is perfectly compatible
with the view that conscious states have an objectively present exis-
tence. If his claim were not compatible with this view, then he could
never consistently maintain, as he does, that assertions about the past
existence of conscious states may have an objective truth value.
It is clear, then, that Sartre draws a very sharp distinction be-
tween assertions about the mere existence of conscious states (and
bodily facticities) and statements which ascribe such states to actual
persons. That there is at this moment a state of consciousness trans-
cending, toward certain goals, a given bodily facticity is a state of
affairs which either does or does not obtain at this moment. The ob-
taining of such a state of affairs, Sartre takes pains to insist, is a
presupposition of any talk about persons qua persons. But any talk
of the latter sort-for example, the ascription of a consciousness
transcending some body to a person whose body that actually is-
does not perform the function of affirming a state of affairs which
either does or does not obtain at some moment. What it expresses,
over and above the sorts of "presuppositions" I have mentioned, is
just yet another case of conscious transcendence toward the future.
This, I suggest, is the only interpretation which does justice to Sar-
tre's claim that a person never is anything in the way that nonpersons
are something, even though not-being anything in this way is also a
way of not-being something that one "is": human reality is a 'being
which is what it is not and which is not what it is' (p. 100). A person,
on this view, never is what he is in that no assertion about a person
(qua person) is the affirmation of a state of affairs which either does
or does not obtain. In this sense a person is "nothing." But a person is,
nonetheless, also in a sense "something." He is something at least in
the sense that statements about persons presuppose certain affirma-
tions of states of affairs which either do or do not obtain.

14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., tr. by G. E. M. Ans-


combe (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958), par. 244: 'The verbal expression
of pain replaces crying.'
186 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICALRESEARCH

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.
RICHARDE. AQUILA.
THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE.

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