BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, 1943

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BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, 1943

• Introduction The Pursuit of Being
• Part One The Problem of Nothingness
• Part Two Being-For-Itself
• Part Three Being-For-Others
• Part Four Having, Doing, and Being
• Conclusion

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Chapter One The Origin of Negation

• I. The Question
• We must begin with a concrete, human totality,
  not abstractions.
• Questions
• 1. What is the synthetic relation which we call
  being-in-the-world?
• 2. What must man and the world be in order for a
  relation between them to be possible?

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• Questioning presupposes
• A being who questions,
• A being which is questioned
• about something
• Thus a question encompasses a triple nothingness
• i. non-being of knowing in humans
• ii. non-being in transcendent being
• iii. non-being of limitation

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• II. Negations
• Question Does negation found nothingness or vice
  versa?
• Non-being always appears within the limits of a
  human expectationthis is an original relation to
  the world.
• Negation is not only a quality of judgment.
• Questioning is a pre-judicative attitude, which
  is itself a relation of being with non-being.

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• Other non-judicative conducts which present
  non-being
• Destruction an essentially human activity
  requiring a relation of humans to being and a
  conduct in the face of nothingness.
• The absence of Pierre
• Do you remember the description of the situation?

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• Non-being doesnt come to things by a negative
  judgment, rather a negative judgment (e.g.
  Pierre is not here.) is conditioned and
  supported by non-being.
• The necessary condition for our saying not is
  that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and
  outside of us, that nothingness haunt being.
• But where does nothingness come from?

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• III. The Dialectical Concept of Nothingness
• Hegel (Logic) reduces being to a signification of
  the existent (concrete) its essence.
• Hegel writes Being is related to essence as the
  immediate to the mediate and
• This pure Being is pure abstraction and
  consequently absolute negation, which taken in
  its immediate moment is also non-being.

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• The upshot for Hegel is that Being and Non-Being
  are complementary abstractions.
• Sartre denies this and argues that Being is the
  ground of the concrete and nothingness (which is
  to say nothingness is logically subsequent to
  Being).

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• IV. The Phenomenological Concept of Nothingness
• This section charts Heideggers progress over
  Hegel.
• 1. B N are not empty abstractions. We have a
  pre-ontological comprehension of B in human
  projects, and N in human attitudes such as hate,
  prohibitions, regret, etc.
• Moreover, a human can come face to face with N as
  a phenomenon in Anguish.

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• 2. Nothingness nothings. Heidegger doesnt give
  being to N it is supported and conditioned by
  transcendence.
• 3. For Heidegger Dasein (human reality) is
  defined as Being-in-the-world.
• Anguish is the discovery of a double nihilation
• i. to understand the self, a human is set against
  what a human is not, i.e., the world, so that
  being emerges in non-being.
• ii. The non-being of the world is suspended in
  nothingness.

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• 4. Understanding the world qua world is a
  nihilation of the necessary conterpart of the
  human reality which lives, moves, and has its
  reality in the world.
• Nothingness is the foundation for this negation
  or nihilation.
• N conditions or structures transcendence so that
  the self can pro-ject itself beyond the world.

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• 5. Sartre wants a more explicit development of
  the implicit negative counterparts to Heideggers
  ontology.
• Thus Sartre wants to develop the fundamental
  structure of Nothingness which grounds
  transcendence, negation, and the nêgatités
  (negative entities realities experienced by
  humans whose inner structure is inhabited by
  negation), e.g., distance, absence, change,
  distraction, etc.

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• Sartre has discovered that human beings enclose
  within themselves non-being.
• Thus he concludes, Nothingness lies coiled in
  the heart of beinglike a worm.
• The next question is, where does this worm come
  from?