Sartre's Being and Nothingness
A brief analysis
From having read the introduction of Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s magnum opus, I find that he vacillates between (at least) two ontological positions or commitments, which it seems he confuses as one. This fragmentation at the outset makes the foundations of his project wobbly. One of the ontological positions is a variant of realism - that there is something external to and independent of experience that can be spoken about. The other ontological position is that there isn’t, what I call panenexperientialism - that all is in experience. Disclaimer: This analysis is not impartial, and it will be obvious that I am biased towards the latter, but this does not detract from Sartre’s conflation of the two positions into one.
Why can’t an external and independent world be spoken about? Because doing so exemplifies the ontic projection fallacy (See further down, as well as Experience and Immersion). All that is given to us is given to us through experience, even the notion of a world-in-itself. The ontic, Sartre’s being-in-itself, is the source of being, the that-ness of experience. All we can justifiably say is that the ontic is, but anything beyond that will be a statement about the world as it is in our experience, and not about the world-in-itself. I will in the following trace his wavering between these two ontological positions. I will take consciousness as synonymous with experience.
In the opening section of the introduction Sartre states that modern thought has banished the dualism between being and appearance, interior and exterior. There is no reality «behind» phenomena. Appearance does not hide essence, it reveals it, is it: «The phenomenal being manifests itself; it manifests its essence as well as its existence, and it is nothing but the well connected series of its manifestations.» All dualisms are now converted into that between finite and infinite. But the existent cannot be reduced to the finite, the phenomenal being is infinite. In the second section of the introduction, “The Phenomenon of Being and the Being of Phenomenon”, he finds that these are not equal, though coextensive, and that the being of phenomena surpasses the knowledge which we have of it. The phenomenon of being is «ontological» and requires the transphenomenality of being.
So far we seem to go along the path of panenexperientialism, but this changes in the third section: «A table is not in consciousness - not even in the capacity of a representation.» This is where he makes a fallacious ontic projection - for how can he state that the table is not in consciousness without presupposing that there is something outside consciousness? Next, he finds that to be conscious of something is to be conscious that one is conscious of something, thus that it is the very nature of consciousness to exist «in a circle». I.e. the only mode of consciousness of something is self-consciousness. By this, Sartre wants to avoid the primacy of knowledge and idealism by refusing that something can be defined by the consciousness of it. Obviously, if idealism is the only option he sees along this path, no wonder he makes a wrong turn. Consciousness of X defines X as experiential, which is all that X is as it is in that experience. To project beyond the experience is to project ontically. He verbalizes this quite clearly a bit later (emphasis added): «But it is precisely because consciousness is pure appearance, because it is total emptiness (since the entire world is outside it)—it is because of this identity of appearance and existence within it that it can be considered as the absolute.»
In section four he appears to stray back on the path of panenexperientialism: «It seems that we have arrived at the goal of our inquiry. We have reduced things to the united totality of their appearances, and we have established that these appearances lay claim to a being which is no longer itself appearance. The "percipi" referred us to a percipiens, the being of which has been revealed to us as consciousness. Thus we have attained the ontological foundation of knowledge, the first being to whom all other appearances appear, the absolute in relation to which every phenomenon is relative.» Consciousness is the “absolute” in relation to which all phenomena relate, i.e. all is in experience. But his conception of a thing as the united totality of its appearances is what foils his “ontological proof” in section five: because Sartre believes that a thing must be the infinite totality of all its appearances, he concludes that the thing must have a transcendent being, and not be constituted by consciousness, because consciousness cannot contain the infinite totality. But a thing is always becoming, never completed! We will never experientially encounter anything as an infinite totality, so to conceive this as the definition of a thing is, once again, a fallacious projection. He cements his “realist” commitment further near the end of this section: «consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself.» This being is the «transphenomenal being of phenomena», and «it requires simply that the being of that which appears does not exist only in so far as it appears.» (emphasis added). Nothing can be said outside of appearance! We can’t in any sense say that that which appears exists outside its appearance, for this is to project beyond experience.
To reiterate what can and can’t be said: It is certainly useful to talk about things and events outside of our experience of them, but to do so is an explanatory shorthand device, a way to explain the coherence of our experience. We will find that our experience coheres in such a way as if certain things and events were the case outside of our experience of them, but this is “just” a device. This bears little importance in everyday life, we could in fact not do without such explanatory devices, as explanation lies at the heart of reasoning, justification and our scientific efforts, if not at the core of the origin of epistemics altogether. However, when it comes to the ontological analysis of reality and our relationship to it, the projection beyond experience must be seen for what it is.
We haven’t even gotten to Nothingness. Jumping ahead to the conclusion of Sartre’s work in order to see where he is headed, I find some dubious outcomes. «…the ontological problem of knowledge is resolved by the affirmation of the ontological primacy of the in-itself over the for-itself.» In other words, this states the primacy of the ontic (in-itself) over consciousness (for-itself). But can such a conclusion be drawn? Is not the ontic revealed in consciousness? «But here as in Greek philosophy a question is raised: which shall we call real? To which shall we attribute being? […] To the pure in-itself or to the in-itself surrounded by that shell of nothingness which we have designated by the name of the for-itself?» But there can be no in-itself without for-itself! All statements are made from for-itself, from experience, and an ontic apart from consciousness is inconceivable without commiting to ontic projection. Part of Sartre’s project is to close the gap between the two realms of being, in-itself and for-itself, and he talks at length about how abstractions may cause confusion, even stating the following earlier in the book: «M. Laporte says that an abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state.» Gaps cannot be closed by synthesis, because synthesis can only aim to put together pieces, while the whole cannot be recovered from its abstractions without loss. I find it strange that Sartre does not apply the same logic to his own division of in-itself and for-itself, and why he does not abstain from proclaiming the primacy of one over the other, when they are, also following his own logic, clearly of one whole. The ontic and consciousness aren’t separate in reality, only in our abstraction is this the case.
Sartre might very well reel it in in the rest of the book, but given such an indecisive and confused beginning, as well as some puzzling conclusions, I am hesitant to keep on reading.
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References
Sartre, J-P. (2003). Being and Nothingess. Routledge Classics. [1943]