Jean-Paul Sartre

Sarah Richmond

Although the title of Being and Nothingness registers the importance of the concept of nothingness (le néant) to Sartre’s major philosophical book, it would be a mistake to think that nothingness only entered his philosophical thinking – or writing – in 1943. The concept appears frequently, with some variations, in Sartre’s earlier “phenomenological” essays.

In The Imaginary (L’Imaginaire), Sartre’s 1940 study of the imagination, the concept of nothingness, and the concepts associated with it – negation, denial, annihilation, nothing – play an essential role (Sartre 1940, 2004a). A principal aim of that work is to reject an influential philosophical conception of imagination as a capacity to entertain mental images, where these are conceived as immanent states of consciousness that are similar in type to sensations. Sartre argues cogently against that view (of which the best-known proponent is probably David Hume), putting forward a number of objections to the very idea that imagination involves the presence of “images” to the mind. Sartre argues instead that imaginative activity involves a relationship to the imagined object that requires a radical break, on the part of consciousness, with the world. In addition, he denies the existence of any “images” in the mind. Instead we are to understand that the imagining consciousness, like consciousness in general, is directed to an object. But the objects with which the exercise of the imagination puts us in contact are unreal. The imagining consciousness “must be able to form and posit objects affected by a certain character of nothingness” (Sartre 2004a: 183).

The idea of nothingness, moreover, is already intimately connected, in Sartre’s thinking about the imagination, with the freedom of consciousness. Sartre’s “Conclusion” to The Imaginary argues that for any consciousness to have the capacity to imagine, it is a necessary condition that it be free – and, further, that the imagination makes manifest a freedom which, in fact, any conceivable consciousness must possess.

As the main aim of this chapter is to set out and evaluate the claims that Sartre makes about nothingness in Being and Nothingness, I will not discuss his earlier work on the imagination in further detail. However, it is important to note the extent to which The Imaginary was, for Sartre, a “rehearsal” for the more ambitious project of Being and Nothingness. A similar use of phenomenological methodology to support a specific ontological characterization of consciousness – in terms of freedom – is also apparent in other early works. From the outset, then, Sartre’s interest in phenomenology co-existed with and was an instrument for his wish to demonstrate the existence of human freedom, and his sense that the way to do this was by establishing an essential connection of consciousness with nothingness.

It is fair to say, however, that in Being and Nothingness the concept of nothingness becomes far more prominent. In a letter to Simone de Beauvoir dated 24 January 1940 (the year that L’Imaginaire was published), Sartre announces that he has just discovered that nothingness can be given an organizing role in the “metaphysics” he is developing: “I have written a bit about metaphysics … ‘What a jumble!’, you will say. But not at all; it is neatly organized around the idea of Nothingness, or the pure event in the heart of being” (Sartre 1983a: II, 56; my translation) In Being and Nothingness Sartre announces that his project is “phenomenological ontology”, and argues that an adequate ontology must take account of nothingness, “alongside” being. The promotion of the concept to a more pivotal role is reflected in the fact that after having introduced it, in the first chapter of part one, Sartre devotes two of the following sub-sections to a comparison of his conception of nothingness with those of two influential predecessors, Hegel and Heidegger. In other words, nothingness is shown to be sufficiently important in Sartre’s philosophy to warrant inclusion in a detailed historical narrative, in which Sartre is also careful to point up the advantages of his own understanding of the concept, in comparison with the earlier ones.

Sartre’s argument for nothingness in Being and Nothingness

Sartre introduces the topic at an early stage in Being and Nothingness. Following the introduction, which surveys the domain of being in general, part one is entitled “The Problem of Nothingness”. Sartre’s route to this problem has been the need, which the Introduction has left unmet, to understand how the two “regions” of being so far described – the for-itself and the in-itself – are related to each other. Since each of these types of being is, Sartre says, an “abstraction” – incapable of existing in isolation from the other – we need to find a “concrete” phenomenon that will allow us to examine them as they are instantiated in the world. Closely tracking Heidegger’s methodology in Being and Time, Sartre suggests that we choose, as our initial example, the very activity in which we, as knowledge-seekers, are currently engaged: the activity of asking a question or, as Sartre often puts it, “interrogation”. From here his path diverges from Heidegger’s: Sartre wishes to focus specifically on the fact that, for any question, the possibility of a negative reply exists. This is true for every question, Sartre argues, not only for those that admit of a yes/no answer:

There are questions which on the surface do not permit a negative reply – like, for example, the one which we put earlier: “What does this attitude reveal to us?” But actually we see that it is always possible with questions of this type to reply, “Nothing” or “Nobody” or “Never”.

(EN: 39; BN1: 5; BN2: 29)

Sartre goes on to argue that negative judgements of the type “S is not P” cannot fully account for nothingness (or non-being – non-être – an alternative term that Sartre uses interchangeably). Negative judgements are founded on nothingness, rather than the other way round. With this claim Sartre concurs with Heidegger, who had made the same point in his famous account of “das Nichts” put forward in his 1929 inaugural lecture at Freiburg, “What is Metaphysics?”. Sartre’s ideas about nothingness are heavily influenced by this lecture, to which he explicitly refers in Being and Nothingness. (It was from this lecture that Carnap took the sentences that he declared to be meaningless “pseudo-statements” in his equally famous 1932 article “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”; Carnap [1932] 1959).

The core of Sartre’s argument that, in addition to the negativity involved in negative judgements, nothingness requires ontological recognition is his well-known example of Pierre’s failure to turn up in the café where he is expected. Sartre’s strategy here is in the first instance phenomenological, not in Husserl’s strict sense, but in the looser, philosophical sense associated with appeals to “what it is like” to undergo some type of experience. Sartre sets out to show that when we consider what it is like to discover Pierre’s absence from the café, we see that the experience involves an element of “encounter” with Pierre’s non-being which precedes the level at which a judgement might be made, and cannot therefore be accounted for in terms of judgement. At the same time, Sartre is in disagreement with Bergson’s “eliminativist” treatment of the concept of nothingness, which denies that there is anything to that concept that cannot be derived from the idea of the logical function of negation.

Taking up the point of view of the person who, having made an appointment to meet Pierre in the cafe, is expecting to find him there, Sartre describes the activity of scanning the café visually in order to locate him. In this experience, Sartre suggests, there is an intuition of Pierre’s absence, an experience that might subsequently be reported by saying “I saw that he was not there” (Sartre takes the term “intuition” from Husserl; we can take it here as equivalent to “perception”). Sartre’s point is that if, in the course of looking out for Pierre, one sees, say, a female customer in a brown coat, that experience is not just a perception of a woman in a brown coat. Rather, part of what one sees, in seeing the woman, is that she is not Pierre – the experience of each person, as they are visually scanned, is modified by the possibility of their being Pierre, such that Pierre’s non-appearing person “haunts” it. If one compares this with the experience of the cafe that another person, not expecting anyone in particular, might have, we can see how different the two experiences will be. The other person, looking at the woman in the brown coat, apprehends her in her own right. We could say that he sees her simply as a woman-in-a-brown-coat, whereas our person looking for Pierre sees her as a woman-in-a-brown-coat-who-is-not-Pierre.

To fill out this claim about perception Sartre draws, as elsewhere in his work, on the resources of Gestalt psychology. According to Gestalt theory, sensory experiences typically involve a perceptual “field”, which may be differently organized by different subjects, according to their expectations and their practical orientation. The perceptual field is typically articulated into a salient figure – the object of explicit attention – against a more or less indifferently experienced background.

Borrowing this figure/background distinction, Sartre suggests that in the case of the person who has the appointment with Pierre, the café as a whole forms the background for a specific anticipated figure – that of Pierre. But as he is not there, the figure is experienced as an absence. It is worth quoting at length Sartre’s explanation of how, in these circumstances, the “object” of my intuition turns out to be “a flickering of nothingness”:

When I enter this café to search for Pierre, there is formed a synthetic organization of all the objects in the café, on the ground of which Pierre is given as about to appear … the original nihilation of all the figures which appear and are swallowed up in the total neutrality of a ground is the necessary condition for the appearance of the principle figure, which is here the person of Pierre. This nihilation is given to my intuition; I am witness to the successive disappearance of all the objects which I look at – in particular of the faces, which detain me for an instant (Could this be Pierre?) and which as quickly decompose precisely because they “are not” the face of Pierre. Nonetheless if I should finally discover Pierre, my intuition would be filled by a solid element, I should be suddenly arrested by his face and the whole café would organize itself around him as a discrete presence.

But now Pierre is not here. Pierre is absent from the whole café … the café remains ground; it persists in offering itself as an undifferentiated totality to my only marginal attention. Only it makes itself ground for a determined figure; it … presents the figure everywhere to me. This figure which slips constantly between my look and the solid, real objects of the café is precisely a perpetual disappearance; it is Pierre raising himself as nothingness. So that what is offered to intuition is a flickering of nothingness.

(EN: 44; BN1: 9–10; BN2: 34)

This nothingness-involving perceptual experience, then, forms the basis for the judgement that might subsequently be formed, that “P is not here”: the negative judgement depends upon the antecedent, pre-judicative “intuition”.

What should we make of this? Sartre has, I think, convincingly demonstrated that there is something phenomenologically distinctive about experiences that appear to involve nothingness, but is this sufficient to establish, against the eliminativist, that nothingness needs to be acknowledged as an element of ontology? Sartre’s account invites the objection that the experience of Pierre’s absence from the café is merely subjective in so far as it depends on the prior belief or expectation that Pierre will be there: the “intuition” of his absence is not after all of something that is there “for all to see” but is a function of the spectator’s expectation (indeed, Bergson would explain away the “intuition” in just this way, as registering a mismatch between the actual appearance of the café, and the way it was expected to appear).

Surprising as it may seem, in so far as this admission appears to weaken his case, Sartre is in fact happy to acknowledge that the experience of Pierre’s absence undergone by his friend is a function of the friend’s expectation but, refusing to see this point as a problem for his account, he takes it in a completely different and non-deflationary direction.

Sartre agrees that Pierre’s absence is subject-relative in so far as it depends upon the observer’s expectation. Pierre’s absence differs from that of a host of other equally absent characters (Sartre mentions Wellington and Valery) whose absences from the café are “purely formal”, and do not figure intuitively in the experience of anyone there:

To be sure, Pierre’s absence supposes an original relation between me and this café; there is an infinity of people who are without any relation with this café for want of a real expectation which establishes their absence. I myself expected to see Pierre and my expectation has caused the absence of Pierre to happen as a real event.

(EN: 44–5; BN1: 10; BN2: 34)

This admission, however, is not supposed to diminish the “reality” of nothingness; we are not to conclude that, because Pierre’s absence is only apparent to his friend, the “intuition” is an illusion. Rather, Sartre claims, it shows that nothingness is associated with human consciousness, it tells us something about its “location”. Sartre is happy to admit that without consciousness there would be no nothingness.

In section V of the chapter, Sartre pursues the question of where nothingness comes from. It must be kept in mind that nothingness, qua non-being, has no being. It cannot then be explained in terms of the in-itself, because that “region” of being, as Sartre has told us, is “full positivity”: it cannot therefore “contain … Nothingness as one of its structures” (EN: 57; BN1: 22; BN2: 46). But where then can “it” come from? As non-being, nothingness can have no power to produce itself, it cannot be or do anything.

Perhaps in order to distance himself from Heidegger’s controversial assertion “Das Nichts selbst nichtet” (often translated as “The Nothing noths”), Sartre issues a logical caution about the risk of misusing the concept of “nothingness”. Evincing a more orthodox attitude towards logic than Heidegger’s and anticipating the objection (which I discuss in the following section) which A.J. Ayer would make against him – Sartre warns that it would be incorrect to use “nothingness” as the subject of any verb:

we can not grant to nothingness the property of “nihilating itself”. For although the expression “to nihilate itself” is thought of as removing from nothingness the last semblance of being, we must recognize that only Being can nihilate itself … in order to nihilate itself it must be. But Nothingness is not.

(EN: 57; BN1: 22; BN2: 46)

So if nothing cannot be produced either by being or by nothingness, Sartre concludes that there must be some being that in some way “is” its own nothingness: “the being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Nothingness” (BN1: 23; BN2: 47; Sartre’s emphasis). There must be a being “shot through” with nothingness, a dynamic being which “nihilates Nothingness in its being in connection with its own being” (BN1: 23; BN2: 47; Sartre’s emphasis). And the only being that fits the bill, Sartre argues, is consciousness.

Indeed, Sartre argues, the very possibility of asking a question – the conduct which Sartre initially sets out to investigate – requires the capacity to “stand out” from being, in order to put it into question. A withdrawal, or detachment (“recul”), from being is required, and nothingness makes this possible.

The itinerary which has led us through Pierre’s absence in the café now turns out to have been redundant. It looked as if the “negative reply” that any question may elicit had led us to see nothingness as a “real” element within the world – given to intuition – but the further question about its source shows that in fact it is consciousness which introduces it there in the first place. Sartre could have managed without this entire P-involving detour, by simply arguing, as he does, that nothingness – or, as it now takes on the guise of this new name – freedom, is a necessary condition of the human capacity to ask a question.

Sartre’s assimilation of the nothingness of consciousness to its freedom, and the context of rational enquiry, in Being and Nothingness, might seem to align him with the tradition of thought, inspired by Kant, in which freedom is said to be a requirement of rationality. Indeed, our freedom qua rational beings is often illustrated by our capacity to “question” – as when we step back from our immediate beliefs in order to question their well-foundedness, and to decide, on the basis of reflective judgement, whether to endorse or dismiss them. In fact, the freedom that Sartre ascribes to human consciousness has no particular conceptual connection with rationality: for Sartre, adherence to the norms of rationality is itself a choice. In this respect, nothingness is a useful term for indicating the “thinness” of Sartre’s characterization of consciousness.

We can see that Sartre’s claim is simply a variant of his earlier claim, in The Imaginary, that nothingness is a precondition of the imagination. Indeed, the interchangeability of the two arguments can be seen in both texts: in Being and Nothingness, several pages after the discussion of Pierre in the café, Sartre makes it clear that the capacity for which he thinks nothingness is required is in fact a general human capacity to “tear itself away from the world” (“s’arracher au monde”), and refers the reader back to his earlier work on the imagination: “The image must enclose in its very structure a nihilating thesis” (BN1: 26; BN2: 50). Symmetrically, in the conclusion to The Imaginary, Sartre states that the freedom he has shown to be necessary for imagining is also manifested in conscious activity more generally. For example, Sartre says, we see its operation in the exercise of Cartesian doubt.

How acceptable is Sartre’s account of nothingness? Our survey so far should already have made clear how mind-bogglingly slippery this concept is. In the next section I will focus more closely on some of the problems raised by Sartre’s use of it.

Problems for Sartre

An important question is whether Sartre’s use of nothingness requires us to tolerate a logical contradiction. Certainly Sartre appears at times to break the so-called “law of non-contradiction”. According to this law, allegiance to which is commonly regarded as a necessary condition of rational belief, P and not-P cannot both be true. If Sartre appears to violate it, is there a way of making sense of what he says that we can accept?

At some points, Sartre seems explicitly to commit himself to the necessity of logical contradiction in his thought. In the Introduction, he asserts, for example, that the “principle of identity” has only a “regional” validity: it holds true of the in-itself, but not of the for-itself. Thus Sartre agrees that we can say, in relation to being-in-itself, that “being is what it is” (BN1: xlii; BN2: 21; Sartre’s emphasis).

But, as he goes on to say, outside that domain the principle cannot be maintained:

This statement is in appearance strictly analytical. Actually it is far from being reduced to that principle of identity which is the unconditioned principle of all analytical judgments. First the formula designates a particular region of being, that of being-in-itself. We shall see that the being of for-itself is defined, on the contrary, as being what it is not and not being what it is.

(EN: 32; BN1: xli; BN2: 21; Sartre’s emphasis)

This passage also contains, in the last sentence, the overtly paradoxical phrase – “being what it is not and not being what it is” – which Sartre uses throughout BN to characterize the for-itself. I will return to this phrase later.

In addition to this explicit statement, there are several passages where Sartre appears to make the concept of nothingness internally contradictory by reifying it – allowing it to stand as the subject of a verb – in just the way that, we noted earlier, his logical caution warns against.

The following passage, for example, illustrates Sartre’s oscillation, in the space of a few lines, between a reified “nothing” – capable of “insinuating itself” between elements of being – and an incompatible acknowledgement of its non-being:

This freedom which reveals itself to us in anguish can be characterized by the existence of that nothing which insinuates itself between motives and act. If someone asks what this nothing is which provides a foundation for freedom, we shall reply that we cannot describe it since it is not.

(EN: 69; BN1: 34; BN2: 58; Sartre’s emphasis)

In one of the earliest English-language commentaries on BN (written even before it had been translated into English), A. J. Ayer noticed this move. Ayer objected to the “Looking Glass logic” of Sartre’s discussion of nothingness. Ayer’s complaint is that Sartre uses the term “nothing” as if it named something (Ayer 1945: 17), closely paralleling Carnap’s criticism of Heidegger’s use of “das Nichts”. Ayer goes on to illustrate the sort of “trick” that Sartre plays:

To say that two objects are separated by nothing is to say that they are not separated; and that is all that it amounts to. What Sartre does, however, is to say that, being separated by Nothing, the objects are both united and divided. There is a thread between them; only, it is a very peculiar thread, both invisible and intangible. But this is a trick that should not deceive anyone.

(Ibid.: 18–19)

As the passage from Being and Nothingness that I have just quoted shows, it is undeniable that there are some passages in the text in which Sartre uses this “trick”. However, it is also a rambling work, demonstrably in need of editing, and within its many pages Sartre is often inconsistent. It would be unfair to dismiss Sartre’s endeavour as a failure merely on the basis of a few unfortunate passages. So a question remains as to whether some cogent position, which is either independent of those passages, or allows them an unproblematic interpretation, can be extracted from what Sartre says.

One interpretative strategy, which has been used by several defenders of Sartre, is to steer clear of the ontological aspects of his argument altogether. Anthony Manser, defending Sartre’s use of “le Néant” against Ayer, deferred to the positivists’ repudiation of metaphysics, arguing that Sartre was not in fact advancing metaphysical claims. Instead, Manser offered a reading of (parts of) Sartre’s claims which likened them to Wittgensteinian insights about the limits of some of our concepts; he suggests, for example, that if we register our unwillingness to say of a machine that it is “following orders”, we will have understood something about Sartre’s opposition to psychological determinism. More recently, other philosophers have suggested that the most productive use of Sartre’s claims is to construe them as merely phenomenological. Gregory McCulloch, for example, writes that Sartre “is interested in what is involved, from the phenomenological point of view, in existing … consciously, rather than in what a conscious entity is (e.g. brain, biological organism, immaterial substance, or whatever)” (McCulloch 1994: 3–4).

Commentators have also accommodated Sartre’s apparently contradictory claim that consciousness “is what it is not and is not what it is” by suggesting that we should qualify it – temporally or in some other way. There are passages in Being and Nothingness that support this reading: Sartre’s suggestion as to what the homosexual in bad faith should say, were he to speak truly, incorporates just such a temporally qualified characterization of his identity: “To the extent that a pattern of conduct is defined as the conduct of a paederast and to the extent that I have adopted this conduct, I am a paederast. But to the extent that human reality cannot be finally defined by patterns of conduct, I am not one” (EN: 99; BN1: 64–5; BN2: 87; my emphasis).

But these strategies are misguided. In the first place, they make poor sense of a great deal of the text in question. As I have attempted to show, Sartre takes himself to be offering a chain of arguments that lead to the conclusion that consciousness “introduces” nothingness into the world, that it is literally its vehicle (Sartre’s well-known statement “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm” does not look remotely phenomenological; BN1: 21; BN2: 45). If Sartre’s intention were to convince the reader of her freedom solely by means of phenomenological considerations, we would expect the experience of anguish to carry great weight. But Sartre actually points out that his claim that anguish manifests our consciousness of our freedom is not supposed to convince us, on its own, that we are not subject to determinism. He takes himself to have provided a distinct proof of that fact (which, moreover, does not rely on facts about the way in which we experience anything): “anguish has not appeared to us as a proof of human freedom; the latter was given to us as the necessary condition for the question” (BN1: 33; BN2: 57).

Second, removing the ontological force from Sartre’s claims, by turning them into claims about how things must appear to us, makes them much weaker. Sartre himself concedes that these claims cannot secure the conclusion he wants: that is why, as we have just seen, he does not make our experience of anguish the central point by which we are to be persuaded. He is happy to admit, against an imaginary interlocutor, that anguish – despite the fact that it feels like a consciousness of freedom – could co-exist with a psychological determinism of which we were ignorant (BN1: 33; BN2: 57). Similarly, if we introduce temporal qualifications, in the way suggested above, to defuse the description of the for-itself as “being what it is not and not being what it is”, the claim states only that consciousness is subject to change, which is, of course, quite compatible with psychological determinism.

It is clear then that Sartre intends nothingness to ground our freedom ontologically. But once this intention is given full recognition, it also becomes clear that the requirements made of the concept of nothingness cannot be met.

Things go awry in Sartre’s account at a number of points. One problem is that his argument often moves much too fast. This is a serious flaw in Sartre’s attempt to found negation as a logical category on nothingness tout court, in which the alternative explanation offered by Bergson’s eliminativist approach is never convincingly ruled out: even if the putative experience of nothingness “precedes” the specific judgement that “Pierre is not here”, Sartre has not shown that it is not informed by the subject’s antecedent expectation of Pierre and thereby dependent on prior conceptual activity. So he has not shown that the concept of nothingness cannot in general be derived from our capacity for negation. Instead, Sartre jumps from the claim that nothingness is necessarily associated with human consciousness to the claim that it is somehow “woven into” the fabric of consciousness.

In any case, as we saw earlier, the example of Pierre is an unnecessary detour. It returns us to Sartre’s claim, rehearsed in The Imaginary, that nothingness is a necessary condition for raising a question in the first place. But the necessity of some kind of withdrawal (recul) from the world is not enough to establish the necessity of nothingness. Sartre has pointed out that some attitude other than complete perceptual immersion in being is required, but this is not enough to rule out alternatives to his own nothingness-involving account. Sartre of course will dismiss any representational account of our capacity to conceive of things as being other than they are – but the reason for this dismissal – that consciousness can have no “content” – is not independent of the conclusion he is trying to establish. Rather than leading us to his ontology from some point outside it, then, Sartre’s train of thought seems to circle around within it (Sebastian Gardner (2009: 22), one of Sartre’s ablest defenders, suggests that we might make a virtue of Sartre’s “methodological circularity”, once we have recognized its unavoidability. I do not have space to discuss this sophisticated line of defence here, but the strategy needs to be noted.).

Most philosophical theories are obliged to acknowledge the existence of compelling philosophical alternatives; I am not suggesting either that the failure of Sartre’s theory to adequately rule such alternatives out could have been avoided, or that it is fatal. There is, in addition, a general problem with the concept of nothingness that we have already touched on. The problem is the philosophical work that Sartre wants this concept to do. Even if we seem able to formulate a concept of nothingness, we cannot intelligibly grant it an explanatory role in relation to being. Sartre cannot at the same time respect his own logical caution about nothingness (by remaining faithful to its non-being) and establish that nothingness is the reason for our freedom. Sartre represents nothingness as “blocking” psychological determinism, but if determinism would hold “without” nothingness, then it must also hold “with” it, because non-being cannot intervene in the workings of being. Commentators have pointed out that one bizarre consequence of the ontology Sartre presents in BN is that, in terms of being, it amounts to no more than materialism. Adding non-being to the picture does not add any genuine further way of establishing human freedom.

Problems without Sartre

Sartre is often at his most brilliant when criticizing and noticing the weaknesses in the theories he rejects. And it is noteworthy that everyone who has taken a serious interest in the areas of philosophical thought that Sartre’s own concept of nothingness aims to revolutionize has found them to be formidable and vexatious. In particular, Sartre is right to notice that the basic nature of human consciousness – and its capacity for self-consciousness – are especially resistant to explanation, either in naturalistic terms or by means of our “ordinary” concepts.

From the outset of the phenomenological tradition, philosophers found it impossible to articulate the structures of consciousness satisfactorily. For example, Franz Brentano (commonly regarded as the first phenomenologist) is committed to two doctrines about consciousness that cannot be reconciled: first, that the object of consciousness is a content of consciousness, a “proper part” of it; and second, that in the case of self-consciousness, or “secondary intentionality”, the object of consciousness is itself. This is mereologically impossible. Related difficulties can be found in Brentano’s phenomenological successors, for example, in Husserl, in the “splitting of the ego”, which makes phenomenological reflection possible. More recent discussions of consciousness often make these challenges the starting point of discussion. (And David Chalmers’s well-known phrase “the hard problem of consciousness” turned the difficulty of accounting for consciousness’s subjective aspects into a slogan.) In light of this history, we could regard it as a merit of Sartre’s account that it embraces the contradictions that have been such a stumbling block to others, and tries to put them to productive use.

In addition, Sartre shows great insight in grasping the many areas in philosophy in which the phenomenon of non-existence (as non-Sartreans would put it) features, and is poorly understood. Alongside the imaginary objects that Sartre discusses in The Imaginary, philosophers have struggled to explain the ontology of fictional entities, impossible objects (like the round square), and the objects referred to in statements of their non-existence. Sartre’s elaboration of the concept of nothingness aims both to account for these strange objects and to unify them within its compass.

I have argued that Sartre’s attempt to make the transition, from the phenomenon of negative judgements to a “nothingness” that allegedly provides their foundation, is insufficiently motivated. In relation to his philosophical rivals, we might see Sartre as making the same mistake: however apparent it may be that these rival theories are not successful, it does not, unfortunately, follow that the turn to nothingness provides a solution.