A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – Introduction
This episode is the first in what I hope will be a series in which I present and critique Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology by Jean-Paul Sartre, published in French in 1943. In writing these episodes, I hope to join a venerable tradition in philosophy in which a critique is not so much a negative review but rather a thoughtful interpretation which uses its source as a jumping-off point for a new philosophical position.
Being and Nothingness is one of the central texts of two philosophical movements: phenomenology and existentialism. Existentialism is widely known even outside of philosophical circles. Like stoicism, it has enjoyed a measure of notoriety in popular philosophy. The existentialist tradition is rooted in the works of two thinkers of the late 19th century: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both shifted the focus of philosophy from broad speculation and analysis concerning the nature of the world to subjective human experience. Existentialism also has roots in the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud and the sociology of Max Weber.
Phenomenology is less well-known, though my audience might remember the term from prior episodes. Phenomenology follows what may be the most important insight in the history of philosophy, Immanuel Kant’s critique of reason. Kant argued that while human reason can comprehend the structures and principles governing experience (phenomena), it cannot attain knowledge of things as they are in themselves (noumena). This established the limits of metaphysical speculation and set the stage for subsequent philosophical inquiry into the nature of human experience and cognition.
Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, built upon Kant’s ideas by focusing on the structures of consciousness and the essence of experiences. He emphasized intentionality, the notion that consciousness is always directed toward something, and sought to develop a rigorous science of phenomena as they appear to consciousness, free from presuppositions about external reality. Husserl’s method aimed to uncover the essential features of experiences through careful descriptive analysis.
Husserl’s project was taken up by his student Martin Heidegger, who oriented it towards questions of ontology, the field of philosophical inquiry concerning the nature of existence. For Heidegger, an ontology rooted in his teacher’s phenomenology meant grounding it in human experience: to look at the nature of appearances, we have to understand what it is to which they appear.
Heidegger’s project was taken up in turn by a slew of thinkers, primarily French: Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. Sartre is the most notorious among them; one of the few philosophers to enjoy fame in his own lifetime. Born in 1905, Jean-Paul Sartre was a prolific writer and intellectual, contributing not only to philosophy but also to literature and political thought. His work Being and Nothingness is a seminal text in existentialism, and his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir and his political activism made him a prominent public figure until his death in 1980.
Sartre begins Being and Nothingness with an introduction, the intent of which is to put forth his ontological questions and ground his inquiry in the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger and Husserl. The text is an ontology, which, as mentioned, in the broadest sense, seeks to answer questions about the nature of existence. It’s really quite difficult to even pin down what exactly ontology is talking about. We certainly toss around the verb “to be” in its various forms with little difficulty, but what’s really going on under the hood? What does it mean for something or anything to be or to exist or to not exist? Once we’ve got that handled, what kinds of things exist? Can we say that there is anything that doesn’t exist; or is it the case that, if it doesn’t exist, we can’t posit it in the first place? Is existence itself a something, over and above the existence of any particular thing? A complete survey of the discourse is well outside the scope of this essay and would likely require its own podcast for a really complete treatment, so we’ll focus on Sartre’s concerns specifically.
Being a phenomenologist, Sartre rejects being as a ground of appearances. We have all these phenomenal experiences and, following Kant, say that we can’t get behind them, so to speak, to see what things are really like in themselves, apart from experience. If there’s a fountain pen on my desk, it doesn’t even make sense to talk about what the fountain pen is like without reference to my experience or possible experience of it. For this reason, Kant split the world into two domains: the phenomenal appearance of things, and the noumenal world of things-in-themselves, about which we can have no knowledge. Sartre agrees with this in part: being is not a hidden and inscrutable ground of phenomena but is rather something given and knowable within experience. Responding to Kant, Sartre says, sure we can’t get behind appearances, but we don’t need to. We have everything we need right in front of us, and in fact there isn’t any reason to posit something lurking behind appearances that we can’t get to. Appearance is “full positivity” (BN 2): there aren’t any holes or gaps where the thing-in-itself might be hiding. Keep that in mind; I’m going to be countering that further on and it’s important to what Sartre is saying here. In short, Sartre acknowledges the situation that Kant is describing but rejects the entire distinction between noumenon and phenomenon.
We might wonder at this point whether Sartre is heading in the path of an idealistic metaphysics which identifies the world as being purely mental in nature, rather than being a physical reality from which mentality somehow arises. But then we remember that this isn’t a metaphysical ontology but a phenomenological one. Sartre looks at idealist and physicalist responses to metaphysical questions and sees an impasse. He’s seeking another way forward: not a third metaphysical path that strides between physicalism and idealism but a different way of approaching the whole matter, following in Husserl’s footsteps. Husserl was famous for saying, “Back to the things themselves;” meaning, bypass the metaphysical speculation by looking at what’s actually on your plate, which is what is given in experience. And that’s what Sartre is doing here. He’s not actively denying the existence of a metaphysical ground, just directing our attention to the things themselves, to being itself, as given in experience.
The phenomenological project, he says, has succeeded in a key way: it has eliminated “troublesome dualisms” (BN 1) from philosophy, replacing them with “the monism of the phenomenon” (ibid.). Philosophy tends to be averse to dualisms; we prefer there be one answer to any question we pose and not two different answers at the same time. But Sartre says that, in eliminating other dualisms, phenomenology has created another one: the dualism of the finite and the infinite. This is not to be understood as a strict metaphysical dualism, however, but rather a tension that exists within being.
To understand this, let’s clarify the core content of the book, which is Sartre’s conception of being, of existence itself. As already stated, what we mean here by being is not something hidden behind or beneath phenomena but rather given within experience. Getting back to my fountain pen: at any given moment I am having what I would describe as a material experience of the fountain pen, which is the exact sensory experience I have of the pen at any moment. Not just the fact that I can see my fountain pen on my desk, but the exact way in which I see it. Husserl called these adumbrations; or, at least, that’s how the German word Abschattungen is often translated in his work. Other translators use the word “profiles,” but “adumbrations” neatly captures both the structure of the German word—being revealed from shadow—and Husserl’s particular use of it.
Obviously the being of the fountain pen lies in each individual adumbration, but we can’t say it’s limited to that. If I ask the question, what is the being of my fountain pen? Or, to put it in a more natural way, what is my fountain pen? And answer it, “Something that I can see in a certain way right now,” I seem to have missed the mark by more than a little. What if I say that it’s not only any one adumbration, but all of them? Not bad, but then the pen is still tied to my consciousness of it and doesn’t seem to have any being of its own. And maybe it doesn’t have any being beyond that—maybe, as the idealist philosopher George Berkeley would say, esse is percipi, “to be is to be perceived”—but Sartre will respond to that elsewhere. If we decide, at least on a preliminary basis, that that answer doesn’t satisfy us, we might say the being of the pen is the sum of its possible adumbrations, the infinite collection of every way it could possibly be experienced. Alright, not bad. We can already see here a tension between the finitude of any particular experience of the pen and the infinite set of all of its possible experiences.
What Sartre actually ends up saying is that the principle of the series of adumbrations is the meaning of the object’s being (BN 6). The object isn’t the experiences thereof or even all the possible experience thereof—being is not perception, and again, he’ll argue for that elsewhere in the introduction—rather, that the fountain pen exists means that I can have these possible experiences in which it features as content, and this meaning constitutes the phenomenon of the object’s being (BN 24). It’s a subtle but important distinction, one we’ll be returning to over the course of this series. He calls this meaning the essence of the object, distinct from and related to being in important ways that are critical for Sartre’s main points in Being and Nothingness. Essence, in the broad sense, is what makes something what it is. If it didn’t hold ink, it wouldn’t be a fountain pen. If its clip didn’t have a damaged veneer as a result of its getting knocked around with other pens in my pen case, it wouldn’t be my fountain pen. So those properties are essential to the fountain pen; they are its essence, along with many other properties besides.
So the meaning of the being of an object is its essence, and essence is the phenomenon—the appearance—of being. What then is being itself? Well, that’s why this isn’t a much shorter book. For the time being, he tells us that we have at least a basic understanding of being just through its presence in our language (BN 5; Heidegger calls this the “preontological understanding of being”), and that at the most basic level it is present in the phenomenal appearance of objects. Seeing my fountain pen on the desk, I encounter its being directly. But being also extends beyond that; infinitely so, and our relationship with this side of being is indirect.
This may seem either paradoxical or trivial: being is not a hidden cause of appearances but is also in excess of appearances. Certainly we don’t think that the word “being” and the verb “to be” are empty signifiers—they are empirically necessary both to our experience of the world and to our ability to relate to the world in the social context of language. And perception seems sufficient for being, at least once we’ve ruled out hallucinations. Even an illusion or a mirage or a misperception tells us that there is something there (which is a matter of existence), even if it isn’t what we think it is at first (a matter of essence). Realism seems to account for this quite well: if the world is a mind-independent state of affairs which consciousness represents to us, then the being of an object is its mind-independent material reality. Sartre doesn’t reject this viewpoint and does say that the world is outside of consciousness (BN 16); it might be better to say, though, that for Sartre, this outsideness is consciousness. “A table is not in consciousness,” he writes, “not even as a representation. A table is in space, beside the window, etc.” (BN 9). Sartre is cutting out the middle-man: the being of stuff in space and time is constitutive of consciousness, both in terms of the phenomenal appearance of said stuff and in terms of its objectivity as stuff that exists whether or not we’re experiencing it at any given moment. In other words, Sartre is saying that basic realism doesn’t really get us anywhere, doesn’t give us any new information. Consciousness remains absolute and inescapable. This isn’t a rejection of realism so much as a rethinking of the questions to which realism is an answer.
This means that, in order to understand being, we have to understand it not only in terms of the objective being of things in the world, but also in terms of the subjective being of consciousness itself. Sartre is responding chiefly to Berekely’s statement that being is perception—esse is percipi; again, “to be is to be perceived.” Sartre examines the terms of that statement quite directly, asking, what is the being of the “to be” and the being of the “to be perceived”? He’s not inquiring into the being of the subject at this juncture, but rather into the being of subjectivity itself (BN 16). Taking stock, Sartre is claiming something he describes as “transphenomenal being,” objective being in excess of mere appearances. We certainly talk and go about our lives as if this is the case, but being good philosophers, we’re not content to just leave it at that, and, having sidestepped realism as a satisfactory answer, we want to know if we can’t just say, “Sure, we talk about objective being, but that’s just a discursive convenience, a kind of fiction that we use to make sense of things.”
We note that consciousness is intentional, which means that consciousness is only ever consciousness of something or other. We can’t even begin to conceive of it otherwise. So consciousness is empty; it has no being of its own, no being apart from objects of consciousness: thoughts, sensory experiences, physical sensations, emotions, and so forth. Are we then to say that this emptiness creates being ex nihilo? “[T]he doctrine of esse est percipi requires that consciousness, a pure spontenaity unable to act on anything, should bestow being on a transcendent nothingness while preserving the nothingness of its being—and this is asburd” (BN 19). It’s hard to fault Sartre’s logic here. He notes that Husserl encountered the same problem and warded it off with the introduction of the hyle, a kind of indeterminate substance of experience, but Sartre says that just kicks the can down the road. We’re still left with the question: where does being get its objectivity? If there is some sort of indeterminate substance of consciousness, how does that substance, present in our direct encounters with the world, become something objective and not just a reflection of my own subjectivity?
Here Sartre has a remarkable insight: if we take the objective being of an object and subtract everything of it that is given in present-moment conscious experience, what we are left with is absence. To say that I could take my fountain pen and walk down to the corner store with it is to describe an unreal situation. We have already established that this could-take-with is part of the object’s being: a fountain pen is something one is able to take on a walk. But this being is also nonbeing: I’m sitting at my desk writing an essay, so it can’t be the case that I’m outside walking, and even if I wrap up this paragraph and go for a walk with my pen in my pocket, the absence of the could-take-with remains: it’s something I could do again, or even more strangely, could have done before.
This is one of those moments in philosophy that seems absolutely inane when you first encounter it but then you start thinking about it and go a little bit crazy. How can nonbeing be the basis of being? Sartre’s conclusion here is that we’re correct in finding the question absurd. If we act “as though” objectivity is a real feature of the world, we find our faith consistently rewarded. We have sound reasons to reject being as merely percpetion. And it can’t be (Sartre says) that the positive being of objectivity is based in nonbeing, so we’re left with transphenomenal objectivity as a feature of the world, one that exists in excess of our perceptions. This isn’t exactly a realist position; again, that’s not even the question he’s addressing. His focus remains firmly fixed not on the world as it “really is” (whatever that even means) but on the world as it appears to us, and it appears that there is something beyond appearances, so we accept that there is on that basis. Sartre calls this his “ontological proof.”
I don’t find his conclusions on this point entirely satisfactory, but I’ll get back to that. Let’s make sure we’ve covered the other main points from the introduction. The sixth section of the introduction, titled “Being in Itself,” summarize what Sartre has presented so far, so let’s summarize his summary by way of taking stock of what we’ve covered so far.
Sartre describes consciousness as “ontico-ontological.” Without worrying too much about the terminology, this just means, as we’ve discussed, that consciousness is presented with objects in the form of adumbrations but can surpass the object towards the meaning of its being, which Sartre now begins to refer to by the more specific hyphenated term being-in-itself. Being-in-itself, Sartre says, cannot be derived from possibility or necessity. It contains within itself no negation, nor does it have any relation to anything else. It is not temporal. It is immediately related to consciousness as a totality but is also described as opaque, which indicates something occulted, something being hidden. Sartre also makes an unexpected theological point here: he describes being using the German word Selbständigkeit which translates as “independence” but could be glossed more literally as “self-perpetuating-ness.” “If being exists in the face of God,” Sartre writes, “it is because it provides its own support, because it does not retain the faintest trace of divine creation” (BN 26).
Sartre describes this in total by way of three propositions: being is; being is in itself; being is what it is. And with this he concludes his introduction to Being and Nothingness and moves on to the first chapter, “The Origin of Negation,” which will be addressed in the next episode in this series. Before we get to that, let’s look at the points where I differ from Sartre.
I think in many cases, I’d like to do for Sartre what Marx did for Hegel and stand him on his head. The depth of Sartre’s insight into subjective phenomenal experience is remarkable, but he makes some understandable errors which cause him to incorrectly posit his priorities—priorities here in the sense of what comes first.
Where Sartre uses the term “essence,” which again is the whatness of things, that which makes things what they are, I prefer the term “nature,” which I see as encompassing aspects of both being and essence. Nature is simply the world given in present-moment consciousness, pure subjective experience without objectivity. There are no objects in nature; objectivity is an abstract regulative idea, not an innate feature but rather something we use to structure our experience.
This is the case with being as well. Being is abstracted from nature, in contradistinction to essence, which is materially present in nature. Being is indeterminate with regards to both time and space. Here’s an example to clarify: any pen is a pen; that’s being: indeterminate, abstract, not tied to time or space. Being a pen doesn’t place it anywhere or at any given time. This might sound like I’m actually talking about essence here: a pen is what it is. But essence, I think, is actually more visible in this pen, here on my desk at the very moment I’m recording this, this black pen whose nib I replaced, whose converter is half-filled with a Japanese brown ink, whose clip has a damaged veneer, damaged in this exact way and not any other way. Determinate, concrete, present here and now. All of conscious experience is like this: never just a thought but always this thought or that thought; never just an object but always this thing or that thing. From the particulars present in nature, we abstract the universal. From the essence of nature, we abstract being.
Of course, just by describing my pen I make determinations that detach it from its indeterminate essence, but that’s necessary to be able to use it as an example. The example points to the truth without representing it, if that helps.
This has major implications for everything else Sartre says, and we’ll get to as much of it as I can cover. For now, let’s move on to another of Sartre’s points on which I’d like to push back.
Sartre describes consciousness as a “non-substantial absolute.” I agree that consciousness is non-substantial, and this will be critical for understanding my critique as it unfolds over this series. Consciousness is non-substantial in that it is not the raw material of any kind of object or being. In fact, I’ll be arguging throughout this series that no substances exist whatsoever, not in the concrete sense anyway; it’s another abstract regulative idea. We can say with equal justification that the world is made of consciousness and that the world is made of matter: we are conscious of matter, so consciousness seems to be a substance; but we are at the same time ourselves conscious matter, so matter has equal claim to being substance. The question is undecidable. However, contra Sartre, consciousness is non-absolute, and it is non-absolute precisely because it is non-substantial.
I agree with Sartre that phenomenal experience implies, even necessitates objective being, but I disagree with him that objective being obtains. We seem to experience being in present-moment consciousness of nature and that sliver of being implies—again, even necessitates an infinite substance of being, what Sartre calls “transphenomenal being”… but it isn’t there. We’re not talking about something that merely isn’t a part of reality, like a real, living unicorn. We can easily imagine a world where no one ever came up with the idea of a unicorn. We wouldn’t miss it if the idea had never existed, in other words. And we would find it absurd to say that the world isn’t made of anything at all, yet the question has consistently proven undecidable. No, this absence is more like a hole. A hole in nature; a hole in experience; a hole in the world, one over which the world hovers like a shimmering on the surface of water. Something is missing. We don’t even think to look for it but once you realize it’s there—or rather, that it’s not there—there’s no unseeing it. The Nothing, the constitutive absence of substance in all things. The Real, the thing that should be there but isn’t, its absence inscribed into experience as a kind of wound. The world is marked by its own limitation, its own failure.
Sartre is famous for saying that “existence precedes essence.” That precise formulation doesn’t appear in my copy of Being and Nothingness but he argues for it throughout. In general, Sartre would likely say that existence and essence emerge simultaneously in nature, but that, for human-reality, there is a gap between our coming in to being and our becoming what we are, and this gap is the freedom we have to act within the nothing that is contingent upon being. But I think that, perhaps as a kind of defense mechanism, Sartre misidentifies this gap and as a result mislocates its priority, which has major implications for his entire body of thought and in particular his account of human freedom. Instead of existence precedes essence, I would say nature precedes nothing; nothing is the space where being is supposed to be. And as I stated earlier, from that state of affairs we abstract being. Thus, nature precedes nothing, and essence precedes existence.
BN: Sartre, J.-P. (1943/2018). Being and nothingness (S. Richmond, trans.). Washington Square Press.