Being and Nothingness

Sartre's existentialism shares its philosophical starting point with René Descartes: The first thing we can be aware of is our existence, even when doubting everything else (Cogito ergo sum). In Nausea, the main character's feeling of dizziness towards his own existence is induced by things, not thinking. This dizziness occurs "in the face of one's freedom and responsibility for giving a meaning to reality".[1] As an important break with Descartes, Sartre rejects the primacy of knowledge (a rejection summed up in the phrase "Existence precedes essence") and offers a different conception of knowledge and consciousness.

Important ideas in Being and Nothingness build on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. To both philosophers, consciousness is intentional, meaning that there is only consciousness of something. For Sartre, intentionality implies that there is no form of self that is hidden inside consciousness (such as Husserl's transcendental ego). An ego must be a structure outside consciousness, so that there can be consciousness of the ego.[2]

From Sartre's phenomenological point of view, nothingness is an experienced reality and cannot be a merely subjective mistake. The absence of a friend and absence of money hint at a being of nothingness. It is part of reality. In the first chapter, Sartre develops a theory of nothingness which is central to the whole book, especially to his account for bad faith and freedom.[4] For him, nothingness is not just a mental concept that sums up negative judgements such as "Pierre is not here" and "I have no money". Though "it is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation",[5] the concrete nothingness differs from mere abstract inexistence, such as the square circle. A concrete nothingness, e.g. not being able to see, is part of a totality: the life of the blind man in this world. This totality is modified by the nothingness which is part of it.[6]

In the totality of consciousness and phenomenon (Heidegger's being-in-the-world), both can be considered separately, but exist only as a whole (intentionality of consciousness). The human attitude of inquiry, of asking questions, puts consciousness at distance from the world. Every question brings up the possibility of a negative answer, of non-being, e.g. "Who is entering? No one." For Sartre, this is how nothingness can exist at all. Non-being can neither be part of the being-in-itself nor can it be as a complement of it. Being-for-itself is the origin of negation. The relation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself is one of questioning the latter. By bringing nothingness into the world, consciousness does not annihilate the being of things, but changes its relation to it.

As bad faith, Sartre describes one's self-deception about the human reality. It can take two forms, the first one is making oneself falsely believe not to be what one actually is. The second one is conceiving oneself as an object (e.g. being identical to a job) and thereby denying freedom.[7]

This essentially means that in being a waiter, grocer, etc., one must believe that their social role is equivalent to their human existence. Living a life defined by one's occupation, social, racial, or economic class, is the very essence of "bad faith", the condition in which people cannot transcend their situations in order to realize what they must be (human) and what they are not (waiter, grocer, etc.). It is also essential for an existent to understand that negation allows the self to enter what Sartre calls the "great human stream". The great human stream arises from a singular realization that nothingness is a state of mind in which we can become anything, in reference to our situation, that we desire.

The difference between existence and identity projection remains at the heart of human subjects who are swept up by their own condition, their "bad faith". An example of projection that Sartre uses is the café waiter who performs the duties, traditions, functions, and expectations of a café waiter:

[W]hat are we then if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are if our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are? Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to changing his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seems to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us.

Sartre also gives, as an example of bad faith, the attitude of the homosexual who denies that he is a homosexual, feeling that "a homosexual is not a homosexual" in the same sense that a table is a table or a red-haired man is red-haired. Sartre argues that such an attitude is partially correct since it is based in the "irreducible character of human reality", but that it would be fully correct only if the homosexual accepted that he is a homosexual in the sense that he has adopted a pattern of conduct defined as that of a homosexual, although not one "to the extent that human reality can not be finally defined by patterns of conduct".[8]

Sartre consistently mentions that in order to get out of bad faith, one must realize that one's existence and one's formal projection of a self are distinctly separate and within the means of human control. This separation is a form of nothingness. Nothingness, in terms of bad faith, is characterized by Sartre as the internal negation which separates pure existence and identity, and thus we are subject to playing our lives out in a similar manner. An example is something that is what it is (existence) and something that is what it is not (a waiter defined by his occupation).

However, Sartre takes a stance against characterizing bad faith in terms of "mere social positions". Says Sartre, "I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions." The good speaker is the one who plays at speaking because he cannot be speaking. This literally means that, like the café waiter, the speaker is not his condition or social categorization, but is a speaker consumed by bad faith. Thus, we must realize what we are (beings who exist) and what we are not (a social/historical preoccupation) in order to step out of bad faith. Yet, existents (human beings) must maintain a balance between existence, their roles, and nothingness to become authentic beings.

Additionally, an important tenet of bad faith is that we must enact a bit of "good faith" in order to take advantage of our role to reach an authentic existence. The authentic domain of bad faith is realizing that the role we are playing is the lie. To live and project into the future as a project of a self, while keeping out of bad faith and living by the will of the self is living life authentically.

One of the most important implications of bad faith is the abolition of traditional ethics. Being a "moral person" requires one to deny authentic impulses (everything that makes us human) and allow the will of another person to change one's actions. Being "a moral person" is one of the most severe forms of bad faith. Sartre essentially characterizes this as "the faith of bad faith" which is and should not be, in Sartre's opinion, at the heart of one's existence. Sartre has a very low opinion of conventional ethics, condemning it as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses.

Bad faith also results when individuals begin to view their life as made up of distinct past events. By viewing one's ego as it once was rather than as it currently is, one ends up negating the current self and replacing it with a past self that no longer exists.

The mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at oneself as an object and see one's world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a specific location outside oneself, but is non-positional. This is a recognition of the subjectivity in others.

This transformation is most clear when one sees a mannequin that one confuses for a real person for a moment.

• While they believe it is a person, their world is transformed. Objects now partly escape them; they have aspects that belong to the other person, and that are thus unknowable to them. During this time one can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now the other person's world, a foreign world that no longer comes from the self, but from the other. The other person is a "threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world...Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's values, over which you have no control".[9]
• When they realise it is a mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and they are again in the center of a universe. This is back to the pre-reflective mode of being, it is "the eye of the camera that is always present but is never seen".[9] The person is occupied and too busy for self-reflection.[10] This process is continual, unavoidable, and ineluctable.[9]

Sartre states that many relationships are created by people's attraction not to another person, but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the look" of the other. The consequence is conflict. In order to maintain the person's own being, the person must control the other, but must also control the freedom of the other "as freedom". These relationships are a profound manifestation of "bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced with the other's freedom. The purpose of either participant is not to exist, but to maintain the other participant's looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called "love", but it is, in fact, nothing more than emotional alienation and denial of freedom through conflict with the other. Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable anguish of a person's relationship to their "facticity" (all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited, such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme, the alienation can become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by "the look" and therefore radically missing their own freedoms, the participants can experience masochistic and sadistic attitudes. This happens when the participants cause pain to each other, in attempting to prove their control over the other's look, which they cannot escape because they believe themselves to be so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own subjectivity would be equally unbearable.

Sartre explains that "the look" is the basis for sexual desire, declaring that a biological motivation for sex does not exist. Instead, "double reciprocal incarnation" is a form of mutual awareness which Sartre takes to be at the heart of the sexual experience. This involves the mutual recognition of subjectivity of some sort, as Sartre describes: "I make myself flesh in order to impel the Other to realize for herself and for me her own flesh. My caress causes my flesh to be born for me insofar as it is for the Other flesh causing her to be born as flesh."

Even in sex (perhaps especially in sex), men and women are haunted by a state in which consciousness and bodily being would be in perfect harmony, with desire satisfied. Such a state, however, can never be. We try to bring the beloved's consciousness to the surface of their body by use of magical acts performed, gestures (kisses, desires, etc.), but at the moment of orgasm the illusion is ended and we return to ourselves, just as it is ended when the skier comes to the foot of the mountain or when the commodity that once we desired loses its glow upon our purchase of it. There will be, for Sartre, no such moment of completion because "man is a useless passion" to be the ens causa sui, the God of the ontological proof.

Sartre contends that human existence is a conundrum whereby each of us exists, for as long as we live, within an overall condition of nothingness (no thing-ness)—that ultimately allows for free consciousness. Yet simultaneously, within our being (in the physical world), we are constrained to make continuous, conscious choices.

It is this dichotomy that causes anguish, because choice (subjectivity) represents a limit on freedom within an otherwise unbridled range of thoughts. Subsequently, humans seek to flee our anguish through action-oriented constructs such as escapes, visualizations, or visions (such as dreams) designed to lead us toward some meaningful end, such as necessity, destiny, determinism (God), etc. Thus, in living our lives, we often become unconscious actors—Bourgeois, Feminist, Worker, Party Member, Frenchman, Canadian or American—each doing as we must to fulfill our chosen characters' destinies.

However, Sartre contends our conscious choices (leading to often unconscious actions) run counter to our intellectual freedom. Yet we are bound to the conditioned and physical world—in which some form of action is always required. This leads to failed dreams of completion, as Sartre described them, because inevitably we are unable to bridge the void between the purity and spontaneity of thought and all-too constraining action; between the being and the nothingness that inherently coincide in our self.

Sartre's recipe for fulfillment is to escape all quests by completing them. This is accomplished by rigorously forcing order onto nothingness, employing the "spirit (or consciousness of mind) of seriousness" and describing the failure to do so in terms such as "bad faith" and "false consciousness". Though Sartre's conclusion seems to be that being diminishes before nothingness since consciousness is probably based more on spontaneity than on stable seriousness, he contends that any person of a serious nature is obliged to continuous struggle between two things:

a) The conscious desire for peaceful self-fulfillment through physical actions and social roles—as if living within a portrait that one actively paints of oneself

b) The more pure and raging spontaneity of no thing consciousness, of being instantaneously free to overturn one's roles, pull up stakes, and strike out on new paths

In Sartre's opinion, consciousness does not make sense by itself: it arises only as an awareness of objects. Consciousness is therefore always and essentially consciousness of something, whether this "something" is a thing, a person, an imaginary object, etc. Phenomenologists often refer to this quality of consciousness as "intentionality". Sartre's contribution, then, is that in addition to always being consciousness of something, consciousness is always consciousness of itself. In other words, all consciousness is, by definition, self-consciousness. By "self-consciousness", Sartre does not mean being aware of oneself thought of as an object (e.g., one's "ego"), but rather that, as a phenomenon in the world, consciousness both appears and appears to itself at the same time. By appearing to itself, Sartre argues that consciousness is fully transparent; unlike an ordinary "object" (a house, for instance, of which it is impossible to perceive all of the sides at the same time), consciousness "sees" all aspects of itself at once. This non-positional quality of consciousness is what makes it a unique type of being, a being that exists for itself.

Sartre offers a critique of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious, based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also argues that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed.[11] According to Sartre, in his clinical work, Freud encountered patients who seemed to embody a particular kind of paradox—they appeared to both know and not know the same thing. In response, Freud postulated the existence of the unconscious, which contains the "truth" of the traumas underlying the patients' behavior. This "truth" is actively repressed, which is made evident by the patients' resistance to its revelation during analysis. Yet what does the resisting if the patients are unaware of what they are repressing? Sartre finds the answer in what Freud calls the "censor". "The only level on which we can locate the refusal of the subject", Sartre writes, "is that of the censor." Further:

[T]he resistance of the patient implies on the level of the censor an awareness of the thing repressed as such, a comprehension of the end toward which the questions of the psychoanalyst are leading . . . These various operations in their turn imply that the censor is conscious itself. But what type of self-consciousness can the censor have? It must be the consciousness being conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in order not to be conscious of it. What does this mean if not that the censor is in bad faith?[12]

In other words, Sartre views Freud's unconscious to be a scapegoat for the paradox of simultaneously knowing and not knowing the same information. Instead of alleviating the paradox, Freud simply moves it to the censor, establishing "between the unconscious and consciousness an autonomous consciousness in bad faith".[13] Sartre thinks that the postulation of a censor within the psychic economy is therefore redundant: at the level of the censor, we still encounter the same problem of a consciousness that hides something from itself. For Sartre, what Freud identifies as repression is rather indicative of the larger structure of bad faith. Psychoanalysis thus does not yield any special insight, since hiding something from oneself occurs at the level of consciousness as a unified phenomenon, not as part of some intra-psychic mechanism.

Toward the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre attempts to adapt some of Freud's ideas, and thereby develop an "existential psychoanalysis" in which causal categories are replaced by teleological categories.[11]