part0008

Warning! This chapter is mind-bendingly abstract but essential reading if you want to learn about the logical or ontological bones that form the supporting skeleton of existentialism. If you like to get beneath the skin of things as all good philosophers do, it should not bother you that this load of old bones is as dry as a Saharan drought. I am confident that if you persist with it, and maybe re-read the more difficult bits, it will eventually make sense. After all, I’m no genius and I understand it.

To truly understand existentialism it is vital to understand the all important role existentialists ascribe to nothingness or non-being. It is not really possible to explain the existentialist view of nothingness without knitting together convoluted strings of negations that at first sight appear absurd – talk of x not being what it is and being what it is not and stuff like that. With a bit of focus, however, these strings of negations can be grasped and traced back to a most subtle and profound view of reality.

Basically, what has to be kept in mind is that not everything in reality is a thing. The universe, at least as we encounter it, is comprised of a lot of entities that do not exist in their own right but only in relation to things that do exist. We constantly encounter the world and make sense of it in terms of what is not there, in terms of what is lacking or absent, in terms of various nothingnesses or negativities.

You so wanted to see him, to be with him, but he was not at the party as you expected. His absence from the party is not a ghostly fog that pervades the party but a nothingness that you place there on the grounds of your expectation of his presence and your desire for it. This absence, this nothingness, although it is nothing, characterises the whole party for you. I offer this example because it is probably one you are familiar with from your own life experience. Hopefully, it serves to remind you that you already have a sense of the crucial role nothingness plays in your life, in all our lives. Half moon, half empty glass, unbaked cake, yesterday is just a memory, tomorrow never comes, nothing was done, nobody saw.

Anyway, being is and nothingness is not . What could be simpler than that? But nothingness cannot simply be its own nothingness otherwise it would be absolutely nothing at all and there would only be being-in-itself as described in the previous chapter. For nothingness to have some kind of existence, albeit a negative existence, for it to play the important role it undoubtedly plays in shaping reality, nothingness cannot be a nothingness in itself, simply nothing. It must actively be the nothingness, the denial, the negation of being-in-itself. Nothingness, the existentialists say, is being denied . That is, nothingness or non-being requires being in order to be the denial or negation of it.

To put it slightly more formally, which may well help your understanding, existentialist philosophers say, non-being – as the negation of being – is ontologically dependent upon being. Being, of course, is not ontologically dependent upon non-being because, as we noted above, being is and nothingness is not. Being has no need of nothingness in order to exist. It has logical precedence over nothingness. But nothingness needs being even more than gin needs tonic because nothingness is nothing more than the nothingness, the denial, the negation, of being.

Let’s try and nail all this down. Take a deep breath and be prepared to re-read. Being-in-itself, unlike nothingness, is what it is and not what it is not. Nevertheless, what it is not (nothingness) is . Not in the sense of being it – that would make nothingness indistinguishable from being-in-itself – but in the sense of having to be it. Unlike being-in-itself, which simply is without having to do anything to achieve its being, nothingness has to achieve, for itself , its being as the non-being of being-in-itself by perpetually negating being-in-itself. It has to be what it is for itself as the active negation of being-in-itself. Hence, some existentialists, Sartre in particular, call non-being being-for-itself or the for-itself .

The for-itself is the negation of being. It is being first posited then denied. It is not the non-being of itself, it is the non-being of being. In not being the non-being of itself, the for-itself has to perpetually strive to be the non-being of itself without ever being able to become non-being-in-itself, or what Sartre and company call being-for-itself-in-itself .

Being-for-itself-in-itself is a perpetually desired but absolutely unrealisable state of being in which the negation of being becomes a self-sufficient negation-in-itself. It is the impossible fusion of being-for-itself and being-in-itself. In other words, it is an impossible state of being in which the nothingness that is the essence of being-for-itself exists with the full positivity of being-in-itself.

Interestingly, it is widely held that God exists in this way. God is essentially a being-for-itself, a conscious, knowing being, yet his consciousness is held to exist fundamentally rather than as a relation to being or a negation of it. ‘I am that I am’ said God, impersonating a burning bush (Exodus 3:14). In short, God’s existence and essence are assumed to be one and the same. God is the ultimate for-itself-in-itself. This is why some existentialists argue that the fundamental, unrealisable project of being-for-itself – the fundamental, unrealisable project of human consciousness – is to be God! Deep down we are all megalomaniacs.

If being-for-itself achieved identity with itself it would become being-in-itself; it would collapse back into being. Therefore, the for-itself has both to be the perpetual project of negating being in order to realise itself as the negation of being, and the perpetual project of negating itself in order to refuse a coincidence with itself that would be its own annihilation. The for-itself cannot coincide with itself and, indeed, it exists by virtue of continually not coinciding with itself and, so to speak, avoiding itself. In order not to collapse back into being – or, to be more precise, in order not to collapse into a pure non-being that left only being – the for-itself must be both an affirmation denied and a denial affirmed.

The affirmation that is denied is being-in-itself. The denial that is affirmed is the for-itself’s denial of itself as denial-in-itself; that is, the denial of itself as for-itself-in-itself. Unable to be a being fixed and determinate in itself, either as being or as non-being, the for-itself has to be a perpetually ambiguous, indeterminate and paradoxical being. It has to be a perpetual double negation .

In describing the paradoxical nature of the for-itself Sartre says repeatedly in Being and Nothingness that the for-itself is a being which is not what it is and which is what it is not. In one place Sartre says, ‘At present it is not what it is (past) and it is what it is not (future)’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 146), revealing that the ambiguous, paradoxical nature of the for-itself is best understood in terms of time or temporality. Time is the focus of Chapter 5.

It has been more than hinted at several times already that nothingness, non-being, negation, being-for-itself is the essence of consciousness. Consciousness is, according to the existentialists, a nothingness in relation to being. Hopefully, the rather dry explanation of the being-nothingness relationship thrashed out in this chapter will help justify the various bold claims made in the following chapter on the existentialist view of consciousness, and generally render that chapter and all those that follow it far more accessible, coherent and credible than they might otherwise be. Tough and even tedious though it is to do, it is always necessary when philosophising to lay firm logical foundations that prevent the structure on top from collapsing into the mire.

Besides, I had to include this chapter to justify the catchy title of this book. Or rather, the title of this book, an inverted paraphrase of the famous Douglas Adams expression, ‘Life, the universe and everything’, obliged me to include this chapter.