The title of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is taken from the opening paragraphs of Hegel’s dialectic. In the 1812–16 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) Hegel argues that Being (Sein) and Nothing (Nichts) are the fundamental concepts because without them there are no concepts. Being and nothing are dialectically antithetical because semantically, psychologically and ontologically opposed yet mutually dependent. They are indeterminate because being is pure being and nothing pure nothing. Being and nothing are aufgehoben (synthesised, relieved, abolished, retained, taken up) in becoming (Werden). Becoming is the transition between being and nothingness.
Sartre subjects this clean Hegelian dialectical reasoning to Heideggerian criticism in Being and Nothingness. The phenomenological concept of nothingness is not the dialectical concept of nothingness. Nevertheless, in reading the ways in which nothingness is introduced into the world by being-in-itself it is useful to see Sartre distancing himself from the Hegelian picture.
Sartre takes from Heidegger’s Being and Time the idea of the question. In raising the question of being, Heidegger had said that there is no inquiry without an inquirer, no search without a seeker and, in at least a minimal hermeneutic sense, the questioner already knows the answer to the question in order to seek for it. Sartre argues in the passages below from Being and Nothingness that it is questioning that fundamentally discloses nothingness. Nothingness is presupposed by questioning in three ways: The answer to the question may be negative, the questioner is (paradig-matically) in a state of ignorance or non-knowledge, truth is limited by non-truth, or the false. It is Sartre’s view that negative existential propositions depend upon non-being or nothingness rather than the reverse. The phenomenological is prior to the linguistic.
Although it is sometimes said about Sartre that he reifies nothingness, writes as though nothing were a thing, or something cal led ‘nothing’ exists, it is not his overt or professed view. Indeed, he is conscious of it as a possible misunderstanding and tries to rule it out by saying ‘Nothingness is not’. He tries to improve on Heidegger’s famous, or infamous, dictum in What is Metaphysics? (Was ist Metaphysik?, 1929) that ‘nothingness nihilates’ (Das Nichts selbstnichtet) by saying ‘Nothing does not nihilate itself; Nothingness “is nihilated”’. Heidegger too is trying to avoid the charge of holding that nothing in some sense exists but Sartre thinks Heidegger makes a mistake in his formulation. By saying ‘nothing nihilates’ Heidegger imparts an agency to nothing; the power to nihilate, but this agency could hardly be efficacious unless it or that which exercises it existed. Sartre’s ‘Nothingness is nihilated’ does not carry the logical or grammatical connotation of accomplishment. It is a putative affirmation of nothing’s non-being logically consistent with that of the Eleatic pre-socratic philosopher Parmenides (c. 480 BC). Sartre fails to observe that his passive rendering of Heidegger’s active voice may have equally incoherently construed nothing as a subject of anihilation, and hence, something that exists.
Nonetheless, it is true according to Sartre that there are absences. There are refusals and denials, acts of imagining that things could be otherwise. For example, in the celebrated passage from Being and Nothingness reproduced below Sartre is expecting his friend Pierre to be in a café but Pierre is not there. Sartre encounters nothingness. Sartre wonders whether this is a judgement or thought that Pierre is absent or whether there is an experience of Pierre’s absence, an intuition of nothingness. Sartre knows there is a prima facie absurdity in speaking of the experience of nothing. Nothing is not anything, so an experience of nothing would not be an experience of anything. Nevertheless, Sartre decides that it is by sight that the absence of Pierre was detected. There was at least the phenomenon of seeing that Pierre is absent, even if not a seeing of Pierre’s absence.
It is as if nothingness existed. Non-being is a component of the real. Nothingness is real even though nothingness is not. We may speak of absent friends, holes in the ground, negative and false propositions, purely imaginary states of affairs, fictional characters as though they existed because nothingness possesses an appearance of being, a being it borrows from being. The appearance of nothingness depends upon the appearance of being. For example, a hole in a wall exists in a borrowed sense because it is nothing over and above the arrangement of the remaining parts of the wall. An earthquake destroys a city and ontologically this is a redistribution of beings that to human beings is disastrous. Sartre says after a storm there is no less than before, there is something else. It is the presence of human reality in the world, being-for-itself, that makes the redistributions of beings called ‘storms’ and ‘earthquakes’ into cases of destruction.
Nothingness depends upon consciousness. Consciousness depends upon being-for-itself so nothingness is ultimately introduced into the world by being-for-itself. In the café, we are aware of the absence of Pierre because we expect to see him there; as a figure against a background. Sartre distinguishes clearly between non-existence that depends on consciousness and non-existence that does not. After all, many people are absent from the café. The Duke of Wellington and Paul Valéryare absent. But they are only thought to be absent, in the abstract, or not even thought. Pierre’s absence is experienced. In these ways, according to Sartre, consciousness is prior to nothingness.
Consciousness is defined by negation. This is partly the modal point that its being and its being what it is depend upon its not being what it is not. It is partly the psychological claim that its imaginative power to negate is one of its essential properties. Unless we could think or imagine what is absent we could not intuit that which is present.
There is a more profound connection between consciousness and nothingness. I am my consciousness and my consciousness is a kind of nothingness; a nothingness at the heart of being. The being of consciousness contrasts with the kind of being of Sartre calls ‘en-soi’ or ‘in-itself’. Being-in-itself is massive, opaque, full, dense and inert. It confronts me and it surrounds me. If I try to locate myself as consciousness, in contrast, I am strangely absent. Phenomenologically, I seem to be a subjective region of non-being within the plenitude of being. Consciousness is a kind of emptiness or non being. Consciousness is certainly not one object amongst others that I could encounter in the course of my experience. Sartre thinks nothingness distances me from being-in-itself and I am nothing but consciousness of being.
Sartre often speaks as though consciousness is a kind of nothingness or emptiness. Sometimes he says consciousness is a prerequisite for nothingness. Sometimes he says nothingness confronts consciousness. For example, when in Being and Nothingness he says consciousness is total emptiness because the whole world is outside it, he implies that consciousness is a kind of non-being, an absence of being-in-itself. All these views may be exhibited as mutually consistent. Sartre is establishing a hierarchy of dependencies between kinds of absence. Consciousness is a kind of absence that depends on being: being-in-itself. Consciousness essentially involves the power of negation: the possibility of denial through imagination. This in turn makes possible the experience of absence as a kind of quasi-being.
It is through its power of negation that consciousness distinguishes itself from its own objects. This distinction makes possible consciousness’ intentionality which, as we saw in the last two chapters, is essential to what consciousness is.
Our inquiry has led us to the heart of being. But we have been brought to an impasse since we have not been able to establish the connection between the two regions of being which we have discovered. No doubt this is because we have chosen an unfortunate approach. Descartes found himself faced with an analogous problem when he had to deal with the relation between soul and body. He planned then to look for the solution on that level where the union of thinking substance and extended substance was actually effected—that is, in the imagination. His advice is valuable. To be sure, our concern is not that of Descartes and we do not conceive of imagination as he did. But what we can retain is the reminder that it is not profitable first to separate the two terms of a relation in order to try to join them together again later. The relation is a synthesis. Consequently the results of analysis can not be covered over again by the moments of this synthesis.
M. Laporte says that an abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state. The concrete by contrast is a totality which can exist by itself alone. Husserl is of the same opinion; for him red is an abstraction because color can not exist without form. On the other hand, a spatial-temporal thing, with all its determinations, is an example of the concrete. From this point of view, consciousness is an abstraction since it conceals within itself an ontological source in the region of the in-itself, and conversely the phenomenon is likewise an abstraction since it must “appear” to consciousness. The concrete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. The concrete is man within the world in that specific union of man with the world which Heidegger, for example, calls “being-in-the-world.” We deliberately begin with the abstract if we question “experience” as Kant does, inquiring into the conditions of its possibility—or if we effect a phenomenological reduction like Husserl, who would reduce the world to the state of the noema-correlate of consciousness. But we will no more succeed in restoring the concrete by the summation or organization of the elements which we have abstracted from it than Spinoza can reach substance by the infinite summation of its modes.
The relation of the regions of being is an original emergence and is a part of the very structure of these beings. But we discovered this in our first observations. It is enough now to open our eyes and question ingenuously this totality which is man-in-the-world. It is by the description of this totality that we shall be able to reply to these two questions: (1) What is the synthetic relation which we call being-in-the-world? (2) What must man and the world be in order for a relation between them to be possible? In truth, the two questions are interdependent, and we can not hope to reply to them separately. But each type of human conduct, being the conduct of man in the world, can release for us simultaneously man, the world, and the relation which unites them, only on condition that we envisage these forms of conduct as realities objectively apprehensible and not as subjective affects which disclose themselves only in the face of reflection.
We shall not limit ourselves to the study of a single pattern of conduct. We shall try on the contrary to describe several and proceeding from one kind of conduct to another, attempt to penetrate into the profound meaning of the relation “man-world.” But first of all we should choose a single pattern which can serve us as a guiding thread in our inquiry.
Now this very inquiry furnishes us with the desired conduct; this man that I am—if I apprehend him such as he is at this moment in the world, I establish that he stands before being in an attitude of interrogation. At the very moment when I ask, “Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation of man with the world?” I pose a question. This question I can consider objectively, for it matters little whether the questioner is myself or the reader who reads my work and who is questioning along with me. But on the other hand, the question is not simply the objective totality of the words printed on this page; it is indifferent to the symbols which express it. In a word, it is a human attitude filled with meaning. What does this attitude reveal to us?
In every question we stand before a being which we are questioning. Every question presupposes a being who questions and a being which is questioned. This is not the original relation of man to being-in-itself, but rather it stands within the limitations of this relation and takes it for granted. On the other hand, this being which we question, we question about something. That about which I question the being participates in the transcendence of being. I question being about its ways of being or about its being. From this point of view the question is a kind of expectation; I expect a reply from the being questioned. That is, on the basis of a pre-interrogative familiarity with being, I expect from this being a revelation of its being or of its way of being. The reply will be a “yes” or a “no”. It is the existence of these two equally objective and contradictory possibilities which on principle distinguishes the question from affirmation or negation. 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.” Thus at the moment when I ask, “Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation of man with the world?” I admit on principle the possibility of a negative reply such as, “No, such a conduct does not exist.” This means that we admit to being faced with the transcendent fact of the non-existence of such conduct.
One will perhaps be tempted not to believe in the objective existence of a non-being; one will say that in this case the fact simply refers me to my subjectivity; I would learn from the transcendent being that the conduct sought is a pure fiction. But in the first place, to call this conduct a pure fiction is to disguise the negation without removing it. “To be pure fiction” is equivalent here to “to be only a fiction.” Consequently to destroy the reality of the negation is to cause the reality of the reply to disappear. This reply, in fact, is the very being which gives it to me; that is, reveals the negation to me. There exists then for the questioner the permanent objective possibility of a negative reply. In relation to this possibility the questioner by the very fact that he is questioning, posits himself as in a state of indetermination; he does not know whether the reply will be affirmative or negative. Thus the question is a bridge set up between two non-beings: the non-being of knowing in man, the possibility of non-being of being in transcendent being. Finally the question implies the existence of a truth. By the very question the questioner affirms that he expects an objective reply, such that we can say of it, “It is thus and not otherwise.” In a word the truth, as differentiated from being, introduces a third non-being as determining the question—the non-being of limitation. This triple non-being conditions every question and in particular the metaphysical question, which is our question.
We set out upon our pursuit of being, and it seemed to us that the series of our questions had led us to the heart of being. But behold, at the moment when we thought we were arriving at the goal, a glance cast on the question itself has revealed to us suddenly that we are encompassed with nothingness. The permanent possibility of non-being, outside us and within, conditions our questions about being. Furthermore it is non-being which is going to limit the reply. What being will be must of necessity arise on the basis of what it is not. Whatever being is, it will allow this formulation: “Being is that and outside of that, nothing.”
Thus a new component of the real has just appeared to us—non-being. Our problem is thereby complicated, for we may no longer limit our inquiry to the relations of the human being to being in-itself, but must include also the relations of being with non-being and the relations of human non-being with transcendent-being. But let us consider further.
Someone will object that being-in-itself can not furnish negative replies. Did not we ourselves say that it was beyond affirmation as beyond negation? Furthermore ordinary experience reduced to itself does not seem to disclose any non-being to us. I think that there are fifteen hundred francs in my wallet, and I find only thirteen hundred; that does not mean, someone will tell us, that experience had discovered for me the non-being of fifteen hundred francs but simply that I have counted thirteen hundred-franc notes. Negation proper (we are told) is unthinkable; it could appear only on the level of an act of judgment by which I should establish a comparison between the result anticipated and the result obtained. Thus negation would be simply a quality of judgment and the expectation of the questioner would be an expectation of the judgment-response. As for Nothingness, this would derive its origin from negative judgments; it would be a concept establishing the transcendent unity of all these judgments, a propositional function of the type, “X is not.”
We see where this theory is leading; its proponents would make us conclude that being-in-itself is full positivity and does not contain in itself any negation. This negative judgment, on the other hand, by virtue of being a subjective act, is strictly identified with the affirmative judgment. They can not see that Kant, for example, has distinguished in its internal texture the negative act of judgment from the affirmative act. In each case a synthesis of concepts is operative; that synthesis, which is a concrete and full event of psychic life, is operative here merely in the manner of the copula “is” and there in the manner of the copula “is not.” In the same way the manual operation of sorting out (separation) and the manual operation of assembling (union) are two objective conducts which possess the same reality of fact. Thus negation would be “at the end” of the act of judgment without, however, being “in” being. It is like an unreal encompassed by two full realities neither of which claims it; being-in-itself, if questioned about negation, refers to judgment, since being is only what it is—and judgment, a wholly psychic positivity, refers to being since judgment formulates a negation which concerns being and which consequently is transcendent. Negation, the result of concrete psychic operations, is supported in existence by these very operations and is incapable of existing by itself; it has the existence of a noema-correlate; its esse resides exactly in its percipi. Nothingness, the conceptual unity of negative judgments, can not have the slightest trace of reality, save that which the Stoics confer on their “lecton.”1 Can we accept this concept?
The question can be put in these terms: Is negation as the structure of the judicative proposition at the origin of nothingness? Or on the contrary is nothingness as the structure of the real, the origin and foundation of negation? Thus the problem of being had referred us first to that of the question as a human attitude, and the problem of the question now refers us to that of the being of negation.
It is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation. It is because I expect to find fifteen hundred francs that I find only thirteen hundred. It is because a physicist expects a certain verification of his hypothesis that nature can tell him no. It would be in vain to deny that negation appears on the original basis of a relation of man to the world. The world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities. But is this to say that these non-beings are to be reduced to pure subjectivity? Does this mean to say that we ought to give them the importance and the type of existence of the Stoic “lecton,” of Husserl’s noema? We think not.
First it is not true that negation is only a quality of judgment. The question is formulated by an interrogative judgment, but it is not itself a judgment; it is a pre-judicative attitude. I can question by a look, by a gesture. In posing a question I stand facing being in a certain way and this relation to being is a relation of being; the judgment is only one optional expression of it. At the same time it is not necessarily a person whom the questioner questions about being; this conception of the question by making of it an intersubjective phenomenon, detaches it from the being to which it adheres and leaves it in the air as pure modality of dialogue. On the contrary; we must consider the question in dialogue to be only a particular species of the genus “question;” the being in question is not necessarily a thinking being. If my car breaks down, it is the carburetor, the spark plugs, etc., that I question. If my watch stops, I can question the watchmaker about the cause of the stopping, but it is the various mechanisms of the watch that the watchmaker will in turn question. What I expect from the carburetor, what the watchmaker expects from the works of the watch, is not a judgment; it is a disclosure of being on the basis of which we can make a judgment. And if I expect a disclosure of being, I am prepared at the same time for the eventuality of a disclosure of a non-being. If I question the carburetor, it is because I consider it possible that “there is nothing there” in the carburetor. Thus my question by its nature envelops a certain pre-judicative comprehension of non-being; it is in itself a relation of being with non-being, on the basis of the original transcendence; that is, in a relation of being with being.
Moreover if the proper nature of the question is obscured by the fact that questions are frequently put by one man to other men, it should be pointed out here that there are numerous non-judicative conducts which present this immediate comprehension of non-being on the basis of being—in its original purity. If, for example, we consider destruction, we must recognize that it is an activity which doubtless could utilize judgment as an instrument but which can not be defined as uniquely or even primarily judicative. “Destruction” presents the same structure as “the question.” In a sense, certainly, man is the only being by whom a destruction can be accomplished. A geological plication, a storm do not destroy—or at least they do not destroy directly; they merely modify the distribution of masses of beings. There is no less after the storm than before. There is something else. Even this expression is improper, for to posit otherness there must be a witness who can retain the past in some manner and compare it to the present in the form of no longer. In the absence of this witness, there is being before as after the storm—that is all. If a cyclone can bring about the death of certain living beings, this death will be destruction only if it is experienced as such. In order for destruction to exist, there must be first a relation of man to being—i.e., a transcendence; and within the limits of this relation, it is necessary that man apprehend one being as destructible. This supposes a limiting cutting into being by a being, which, as we saw in connection with truth, is already a process of nihilation. The being under consideration is that and outside of that nothing. The gunner who has been assigned an objective carefully points his gun in a certain direction excluding all others. But even this would still be nothing unless the being of the gunner’s objective is revealed as fragile. And what is fragility if not a certain probability of non-being for a given being under determined circumstances. A being is fragile if it carries in its being a definite possibility of non-being. But once again it is through man that fragility comes into being, for the individualizing limitation which we mentioned earlier is the condition of fragility; one being is fragile and not all being, for the latter is beyond all possible destruction. Thus the relation of individualizing limitation which man enters into with one being on the original basis of his relation to being causes fragility to enter into this being as the appearance of a permanent possibility of non-being. But this is not all. In order for destructibility to exist, man must determine himself in the face of this possibility of non-being, either positively or negatively; he must either take the necessary measures to realize it (destruction proper) or, by a negation of non-being, to maintain it always on the level of a simple possibility (by preventive measures). Thus it is man who renders cities destructible, precisely because he posits them as fragile and as precious and because he adopts a system of protective measures with regard to them. It is because of this ensemble of measures that an earthquake or a volcanic eruption can destroy these cities or these human constructions. The original meaning and aim of war are contained in the smallest building of man. It is necessary then to recognize that destruction is an essentially human thing and that it is man who destroys his cities through the agency of earthquakes or directly, who destroys his ships through the agency of cyclones or directly. But at the same time it is necessary to acknowledge that destruction supposes a pre-judicative comprehension of nothingness as such and a conduct in the face of nothingness. In addition destruction although coming into being through man, is an objective fact and not a thought. Fragility has been impressed upon the very being of this vase, and its destruction would be an irreversible absolute event which I could only verify. There is a transphenomenality of non-being as of being. The examination of “destruction” leads us then to the same results as the examination of “the question.”
But if we wish to decide with certainty, we need only to consider an example of a negative judgment and to ask ourselves whether it causes non-being to appear at the heart of being or merely limits itself to determining a prior revelation. I have an appointment with Pierre at four o’clock. I arrive at the café a quarter of an hour late. Pierre is always punctual. Will he have waited for me? I look at the room, the patrons, and I say, “He is not here.” Is there an intuition of Pierre’s absence, or does negation indeed enter in only with judgment? At first sight it seems absurd to speak here of intuition since to be exact there could not be an intuition of nothing and since the absence of Pierre is this nothing. Popular consciousness, however, bears witness to this intuition. Do we not say, for example, “I suddenly saw that he was not there.” Is this just a matter of misplacing the negation? Let us look a little closer.
It is certain that the café by itself with its patrons, its tables, its booths, its mirrors, its light, its smoky atmosphere, and the sounds of voices, rattling saucers, and footsteps which fill it—the café is a fullness of being. And all the intuitions of detail which I can have are filled by these odors, these sounds, these colors, all phenomena which have a transphenomenal being. Similarly Pierre’s actual presence in a place which I do not know is also a plenitude of being. We seem to have found fullness everywhere. But we must observe that in perception there is always the construction of a figure on a ground. No one object, no group of objects is especially designed to be organized as specifically either ground or figure; all depends on the direction of my attention. 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. This organization of the café as the ground is an original nihilation. Each element of the setting, a person, a table, a chair, attempts to isolate itself, to lift itself upon the ground constituted by the totality of the other objects, only to fall back once more into the undifferentiation of this ground; it melts into the ground. For the ground is that which is seen only in addition, that which is the object of a purely marginal attention. Thus 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. Nevertheless 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. This does not mean that I discover his absence in some precise spot in the establishment. In fact Pierre is absent from the whole café; his absence fixes the café in its evanescence; the café remains ground; it persists in offering itself as an undifferentiated totality to my only marginal attention; it slips into the background; it pursues its nihilation. Only it makes itself ground for a determined figure; it carries the figure everywhere in front of 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 on the ground of the nihilation of the café. So that what is offered to intuition is a flickering of nothingness; it is the nothingness of the ground, the nihilation of which summons and demands the appearance of the figure, and it is the figure—the nothingness which slips as a nothing to the surface of the ground. It serves as foundation for the judgment—“Pierre is not here.” It is in fact the intuitive apprehension of a double nihilation. 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. But, to be exact, I myself expected to see Pierre, and my expectation has caused the absence of Pierre to happen as a real event concerning this cafe. It is an objective fact at present that I have discovered this absence, and it presents itself as a synthetic relation between Pierre and the setting in which I am looking for him. Pierre absent haunts this café and is the condition of its self-nihilating organization as ground. By contrast, judgments which I can make subsequently to amuse myself, such as, “Wellington is not in this café, Paul Valéry is no longer here, etc.”—these have a purely abstract meaning; they are pure applications of the principle of negation without real or efficacious foundation, and they never succeed in establishing a real relation between the cafe and Wellington or Valéry. Here the relation “is not” is merely thought. This example is sufficient to show that non-being does not come to things by a negative judgment; it is the negative judgment, on the contrary, which is conditioned and supported by non-being.
How could it be otherwise? How could we even conceive of the negative form of judgment if all is plenitude of being and positivity? We believed for a moment that the negation could arise from the comparison instituted between the result anticipated and the result obtained. But let us look at that comparison. Here is an original judgment, a concrete, positive psychic act which establishes a fact: “There are 1300 francs in my wallet.” Then there is another which is something else, no longer it but an establishing of fact and an affirmation: “I expected to find 1500 francs.” There we have real and objective facts, psychic, and positive events, affirmative judgments. Where are we to place negation? Are we to believe that it is a pure and simple application of a category? And do we wish to hold that the mind in itself possesses the not as a form of sorting out and separation? But in this case we remove even the slightest suspicion of negativity from the negation. If we admit that the category of the “not” which exists in fact in the mind and is a positive and concrete process to brace and systematize our knowledge, if we admit first that it is suddenly released by the presence in us of certain affirmative judgments and then that it comes suddenly to mark with its seal certain thoughts which result from these judgments—by these considerations we will have carefully stripped negation of all negative function. For negation is a refusal of existence. By means of it a being (or a way of being) is posited, then thrown back to nothingness. If negation is a category, if it is only a sort of plug set indifferently on certain judgments, then how will we explain the fact that it can nihilate a being, cause it suddenly to arise, and then appoint it to ‘be thrown back to non-being? If prior judgments establish fact, like those ‘which we have taken for examples, negation must be like a free discovery, it must tear us away from this wall of positivity which encircles us. Negation is an abrupt break in continuity which can not in any case result from prior affirmations; it is an original and irreducible event. Here we are in the realm of consciousness. Consciousness moreover can not produce a negation except in the form of consciousness of negation. No category can “inhabit” consciousness and reside there in the manner of a thing. The not, as an abrupt intuitive discovery, appears as consciousness (of being), consciousness of the not. In a word, if being is everywhere, it is not only Nothingness which, as Bergson maintains, is inconceivable; for negation will never be derived from being. The necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being.
1 An abstraction or something with purely nominal existence—like space or time. Tr.