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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-
(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-
172 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).
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
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
ANDPHENOMENOLOGICAL
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.
RICHARDE. AQUILA.
THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE.