being and nothingness.docx

Being and NothingnessFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia(Redirected fromBeing for itself)Being and NothingnessCover of the first editionAuthorJean-Paul SartreOriginaltitleLtre et le nantTranslatorHazel BarnesCountryFranceLanguageFrenchSubjectOntologyPublished 1943 (Gallimard, in French) 1956 (Philosophical Library, in English)Pages638 (Routledge edition)ISBN0-415-04029-9(Routledge edition)Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology(French:Ltre et le nant: Essai dontologie phnomnologique), sometimes subtitledA Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by philosopherJean-Paul Sartre.1Sartres main purpose is to assert the individuals existence as prior to the individuals essence (existence precedes essence). His overriding concern in writing the book was to demonstrate thatfree willexists.2While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre readMartin HeideggersBeing and Time, anontologicalinvestigation through the lens and method ofHusserlianphenomenology(Edmund Husserlwas Heideggers teacher). ReadingBeing and Timeinitiated Sartres own philosophical enquiry.Though influenced by Heidegger, Sartre was profoundly sceptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfilment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being. In Sartres account, man is a creature haunted by a vision of completion, what Sartre calls theens causa sui, literally a being that causes itself, which many religions and philosophers identify as God. Born into the material reality of ones body, in a material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being. Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to make them appear, or to annihilate them.Contentshide 1Summaryo 1.1Part 1, Chapter 1: The origin of negationo 1.2Part 1, Chapter 2: Bad faitho 1.3Part 3, Chapter 1: The look 1.3.1Being for Others 1.3.2Sex 1.3.3Nothingness 1.3.4Phenomenological ontologyo 1.4Critique of Freud 2Influence and reception 3Special terminology used by Sartre 4See also 5References 6External linksSummaryeditIn the introduction, Sartre sketches his own theory of consciousness, being, and phenomena through criticism of both earlierphenomenologists(most notably Husserl and Heidegger) as well asidealists,rationalists, andempiricists. According to him, one of the major achievements of modern philosophy is phenomenology because it disproved the kinds ofdualismthat set the existent up as having a hidden nature (such asImmanuel Kantsnoumenon); Phenomenology has removed the illusion of worlds behind the scene.3Based on an examination of the nature of phenomena, he describes the nature of two types of being,being-in-itselfandbeing-for-itself. While being-in-itself is something that can only be approximated by human being, being-for-itself is the being of consciousness.Part 1, Chapter 1: The origin of negationeditWhen we go about the world, we have expectations which are often not fulfilled. For example, Pierre is not at the caf where we thought we would meet him, so there is anegation, a void, a nothingness, in the place of Pierre. When looking for Pierre his lack of being there becomes a negation; everything he sees as he searches the people and objects about him are not Pierre.4So Sartre claims, It is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation.5Part 1, Chapter 2: Bad faitheditBad faith(or self-deception) can be understood as the guise of existing as a character, individual, or person who defines himself through the social categorization of his formal identity. 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 ones occupation, social, racial, or economic class, is the very essence of bad faith, the condition in which people cannot transcend theirsituationsin 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 caf waiter who performs the duties, traditions, functions, and expectations of a caf waiter:Whatare wethen if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves whatwe areif our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are? Let us consider this waiter in the caf. 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 atbeinga waiter in a caf. There is nothing there to surprise us.Sartre consistently mentions that in order to get out of bad faith, one must realize that their existence and their formal projection of a self are distinctly separate and within the means of human control. This separation is a form ofnothingness. 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 issomething that is what it is(existence) andsomething 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 whoplaysat speaking because he cannotbe speaking. This literally means that, like the caf 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 traditionalethics. Being a moral person requires one to deny authentic impulses (everything that makes us human) and allow the will of another person to change ones 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 Sartres opinion, at the heart of ones existence. Sartre has a very low opinion of conventional ethics, condemning it as a tool of thebourgeoisieto control the masses.Bad faith also results when individuals begin to view their life as made up of distinct past events. By viewing ones 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.Part 3, Chapter 1: The lookeditThe mere possible presence of another person causes one tolook at oneself as an objectand see ones 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 thesubjectivityin others.This transformation is most clear when one sees amannequinthat 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 persons 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 Others values, over which you have no control.6 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.6The person is occupied and too busy for self-reflection.7This process is continual, unavoidable, and ineluctable.6Being for OtherseditSartre states that many relationships are created by peoples 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 persons 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 others freedom. The purpose of either participant is not to exist, but to maintain the other participants 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 persons 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 experiencemasochistic and sadisticattitudes. This happens when the participants cause pain to each other, in attempting to prove their control over the others 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.SexeditSartre explains that the look is the basis forsexual desire, declaring that a biological motivation forsexdoes 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 beloveds consciousness to the surface of their body by use of magical acts performed, gestures (kisses, desires, etc.). But at the moment oforgasmthe 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 theens causa sui, the God of theontological proof.NothingnesseditSartre 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. But simultaneously, within ourbeing(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 unconsciousactorsBourgeois, Feminist, Worker, Party Member, Frenchman, Canadian or Americaneach 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 worldin which some form of action is always required. This leads tofailed 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 thebeingand thenothingnessthat inherently coincide in ourself.Sartres recipe forfulfillmentis to escape all quests bycompletingthem. 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 Sartres 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 isobligedto continuous struggle between:a) the conscious desire for peaceful self-fulfillment through physical actions and social rolesas if living within a portrait that one actively paints of oneself.andb) the more pure and raging spontaneity ofno thingconsciousness, of being instantaneously free to overturn ones roles, pull up stakes, and strike out on new paths.Phenomenological ontologyeditIn Sartres opinion,consciousnessdoes not make sense by itself: it arises only as an awareness of objects. Consciousness is therefore always and essentially consciousnessof something, whether this something is a thing, a person, an imaginary object, etc. Phenomenologists often refer to this quality of consciousness as intentionality. Sartres contribution, then, is that in addition to always being consciousnessof something, consciousness is always consciousnessof 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., ones ego), but rather that, as a phenomenon in the world, consciousness both appears and appearsto itselfat 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 existsfor itself.In this sense, Sartre usesphenomenologyto describeontology. Thus, the subtitleAn Essay on Phenomenological Ontologyor, alternatively,A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology: what truly makes Sartres a phenomenological ontology is that consciousness structureisthe way that itappears. Philosopher Kenneth Williford suggests that Sartres reasoning turns on a logic of full phenomenal transparency that might not withstand scrutiny. In other words, Sartre implicitly argues that if consciousness seems to possess a certain property, then it actually possesses that property. But, conversely, if consciousness doesnotseem to possess a certain property, Williford argues that it would be hasty to conclude from this seeming that consciousness doesnotactually possess that property. (For example, consciousness might not seem, upon reflection, to be brain process, but it is not clear from this seeming that consciousness isnot, in fact, a brain process.)8Critique of FreudeditBeing and Nothingnessoffers a critique ofSigmund Freuds theory of theunconscious, based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also argues that Freuds theory of repression is internally flawed.9According to Sartre, in his clinical work, Freud encountered patients who seemed to embody a particular kind of paradoxthey appeared to bothknowandnot knowthe 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 evid