Sartrean Ontology and the Stoic Theory of Incorporeals
by Laurent Husson and Suzanne Husson, trans. by Kurt Lampe
1 Sartre’s Ontological Project and Stoic Ontology1
1.1 Sartre’s Ontological Project and Classical Ontology
Although he reshaped it considerably, especially under Heidegger’s influence and in line with his own philosophical convictions, Sartre inherited from Heidegger the idea that ontology is one of the elements of philosophy and indeed its foundation. This idea goes back to Aristotle, who distinguishes, at the heart of the theoretical sciences, between “first philosophy” (the study of separate and unchanging beings, also called “theology”) and “second philosophy” (the study of substances in motion, also called “physics”) (Met. E.1 1026a10-32). As we know, the status of this first science in Aristotle is very problematic: it is sometimes presented as the science of first causes, or of being qua being, or finally of unchanging and therefore divine substances.2 However, this tension regarding definition did not become clear in France until 1962, thanks to the work of Pierre Aubenque. The young Sartre therefore inherited a traditional reading of Aristotle, which sees in the latter’s metaphysics a unified study of “being qua being” and of first causes—something which Heidegger, well after Being and Time, had encapsulated and critiqued under the name of “onto-theology.” It would even be possible to discover there the traditional questions about the soul, the world, and god belonging to metaphysica specialis.
Thus, in its subtitle An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Being and Nothingness represents—from the point of view of the classical dualism between being and phenomenon—an oxymoron. However, from the phenomenological point of view, it revisits Heidegger’s project in Being and Time, which is indissociable from a “destruction of ontology.” Clearly the issue here is the sense of being, such that at the end of Being and Nothingness, the project of a metaphysics or more precisely of a metaphysica generalis (in the classical sense of the term3 ) is revisited. Moreover, the study of the two modalities of being (in-itself and for-itself) leads to a subject proper to metaphysica specialis, namely the determination of the ens causa sui as the failed foundation of the in-itself by itself and as the ideal of being at which the for-itself aims in its own foundational project. In this way, it is revealed that the study of being (its scission into two modalities and their articulation) concerns being as a totality and that this total being first appears in the ideal of the being which is its own cause. It is therefore this total being’s pretentions to reality that are studied in the conclusion to Being and Nothingness. This is not merely a conceptual study, as the question had been posed at the end of the Introduction, but an ontological one (2011: 668–9)—and in this respect, as we shall see, it joins the Stoic perspective.
1.2 Stoic Materialist Ontology and Its Break with the Platonic-Aristotelian Tradition
The Stoics, for their part, took a position at odds with that of Aristotle. Because they identified being with corporeality, they automatically denied the distinction between first and second philosophy. If we can only ascribe being to bodies, because they alone act and receive action,4 then the conception of purely changeless reality is an illusion. Thus, if we frame the question in Aristotelian terms, it is physics that is first philosophy, since for the Stagirite “if there is no other substance beside those constituted by nature, physics would be first science.”5
Physics will be the study, not of being conceived in a general manner (“qua being”), but “of the kosmos and what is found in it” (Aet. I Preface 2 = LS 26A): in other words, bodily beings, their internal constitution (substance and qualities), and their reciprocal and cyclical transformations. At the same time, this physics will be a theology.6 In this way, even if commentators permit themselves recourse to the expressions “Stoic ontology” or even “Stoic metaphysics,” in fact Stoic thinking about being explodes the categories that would constitute ontology or metaphysics. Nevertheless, even if Stoicism denies a beyond to physics, it cannot avoid having to think about something that falls outside of it.
According to a well-known doctrine, the Stoics distinguished the category of “being” from that of “subsistence” (διαιροῦνται κατὰ γένη τό τε ὂν καὶ τὸ ὑφεστός, LS 27F = SVF II.322). The category of τὸ ὑφεστός (what subsists), by contrast with τό ὂν (what is), takes its name from the verb ὑφίστημι. It consists of incorporeals, of which the Stoics distinguish four species: time, sayable (lekton), void, and place (LS 27D). Corporeals (beings) and incorporeals (subsistents) are ultimately ranged under a supreme category, “something” (τὸ τί, SVF II.329-334, LS 27A-D), which therefore subsumes being and nonbeing, since incorporeals “are not” (SVF II.335).
1.3 The Place of Incorporeals in Stoic Ontology
Where do the Stoics study incorporeals, that is, nonbeings? First, the privileged locus is obviously dialectic, with the study of lekta, of signifieds. As Plutarch notes, although (Stoic) philosophers frequently make predicates and conditional and conjunctive propositions their objects of study, and assign them to the logical part of philosophy, they nevertheless declare them nonbeings.7 At first glance, we might think that this is neither surprising nor worrying for the Stoic edifice: among the “theoretical” disciplines, physics studies beings, and, alongside it, dialectic concerns itself with what we say and think about being. Insofar as these signifieds do not fall within being, dialectic concerns itself with what is not, but which is all the same a “something” that refers to being.
However, the other three incorporeals (time, place, and void) are “naturally”—we might say—addressed by physics, since all three of them are connected to bodies or to the movements of bodies. Place is “what is completely occupied by a being, or what can be occupied by a being and is entirely occupied by one or by several” (SVF II.503 = LS 49A), while void is “what is capable of being occupied by a being but isn’t occupied” (SVF II.505 = LS 49B).8 Movement “is a change in place, either in whole or in part” (SVF II 492; cf. SVF III, Apol. Sel. 7), and time is an interval of movement (κινήσεως διάστημα, SVF I.93, II.509 = LS 51A). In this way, and certainly against their inclination, the Stoics found themselves unable to conceive of what for them is a full and continuous being without referring to forms of nonbeing. Nor does it suffice to expel the void outside of the established kosmos: nonbeing endures as time and as place, without which it is impossible to think about movement. In this way human reasoning is unable to think about being without referring to nonbeing.
Is this penumbra of nonbeing that necessarily accompanies the thought of being merely human,9 or must it also be attributed to divine thought? If the active cause is both a body immanent in all the parts of the universe and rational and providential, it must be able to think the events it causes, which are themselves sayables and not beings (LS 55A-E). Thus it cannot cause them without thinking them for itself, without which no logos would be possible. If we posited a hiatus between human and divine rationality, such that the former could not dispense with nonbeing, while the latter, while remaining a final rational order, would unfold without thinking its own movements, like Aristotle’s final cause among beings devoid of sensation (Met. 12.7), then we would lose what rightly differentiates Aristotelian and Stoic teleologies, namely the existence of an ethical community shared by humans and gods, and, in particular, by the god who encompasses and governs the rest, the “designing fire,” present as “breath” (pneuma) in the established cosmos: Zeus (LS 46). Suppose that we did not share with the gods, and therefore with the cosmic god, the same self-aware rationality, articulating judgments in accordance with sayables, and thinking the incorporeals connected to movement . It would then be difficult to believe that the gods were our co-citizens in the cosmic city and that we could, for example, assent to their volition, since, without judgment on their part, there could be no question for them of assent or volition, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense. Thus the Stoic universe, in its various phases, is supposed to be a plenum of being, which satisfies the Parmenidean requirement of the continuity of being—it is not more here than there or less here than there (Parm. fragm. 8, 22-5). It is nevertheless conscious and conscious of itself as a totality; otherwise it could not exercise Providence. But this cannot happen without an intervention of nonbeing, without recourse to incorporeals.
We might say, from a Sartrean point of view, that Stoicism is not only one example among others of the misguided effort to think an in-itself-for-itself as totality but also—by means of the place it accords to nonbeing—a sign of what ontology needs in order to break free from this effort.
This appears to be the principal reason why the convergence of the Stoic theory of incorporeals with Sartre’s ontology of negation particularly merits investigation, and why Stoic incorporeals were destined, so to speak, to attract Sartre’s attention. However, this “destiny” was also the result of contingent encounters.
2 Sartre’s Readings of Stoicism before Being and Nothingness
Sartre’s loan record at the library of the École Nationale Supérieure on the rue d’Ulm from November 1924 to June 1928 displays a solid education in classical philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) starting already in 1924–5, independent of his preparation for the agrégation in 1927–8, when Plato was on the program.10 From his first year at the ENS we note loans not only of canonical works but also of the canonical commentaries of the period (Léon Robin [1923] for Plato and Octave Hamelin [1920] for Aristotle). He also directed his reading toward Hellenistic philosophy with Lucretius and Guyau’s La Morale d’Epicure (1878) at the end of this first year. The Stoics appear later, in April 1926, when Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus are taken out, and the Sceptics make their entry in May 1927, when there are loans of Brochard’s book (1887) and Cicero’s Academica in the original Latin.
We also know that during his schooling at the ENS, Sartre very rarely visited the Sorbonne except in order to attend Émile Bréhier’s courses on the Stoics, which particularly interested him (Sartre 1981: xliii). As far as his loan records go, this influence only appears in April 1928, at which time he appears to have relaxed his rigorous study of Plato in order to briefly take out Bréhier’s Chrysippe (1910), von Arnim’s SVF (1903–24), and Cicero’s De Natura Deorum. More surprisingly, he also took out Karl Reinhardt’s Poseidonios (1921, in German) and Brochard’s Études de Philosophie Ancienne et Moderne, in which two articles are consecrated to Stoic logic (Brochard 1912: 221–51). Admittedly, we have not found any sign that Sartre took out Bréhier’s book on incorporeals (which first appeared in 1908), but our reading of Sartre’s text will show that Bréhier’s analyses undoubtedly guided Sartre’s understanding of this aspect of Stoic thought, first and foremost in his approach to the Stoic lekton.
3 Stoic Incorporeals in Being and Nothingness
3.1 An Explicit Incorporeal: The Lekton
The Stoics distinguished the signified (σημαινόμενον) from the signifier (σημαῖνον) and from “what happens to be there” (τυγχάνον, LS 33B = SVF II.166). The signifier is a body (a mass of air structured by a certain tension, which permits articulation); “what happens to be there,” namely the referent, is another body; and, finally, the signified, in other words the lekton, is incorporeal. For example, the hand, whatever its arrangement, is a body, but the content of the proposition “the hand is cut off” is an incorporeal. As an incorporeal, it is of course a nonbeing situated between two existent bodies, namely the sonorous sign and the reality to which the signified refers. In his discussion, Bréhier places particular emphasis on this innovative and paradoxical aspect of Stoic logic, though perhaps he exaggerates this feature with formulations whose spirit we rediscover in Sartre. Thus, in his second chapter, which is devoted to the theory of “sayables,” he makes the following comment:
Judgment alone is true, in effect. Now, judgment is a sayable, and the sayable is an incorporeal. So right from the start, we find ourselves in non-being. True things, and by obvious analogy false things, namely simple or complex judgments, “are not anything.” (Bréhier 1962: 20–1)
In his footnote, Bréhier refers to the text by Plutarch that we have already cited (n.7), but he forces the translation: the Stoics do not say that judgments “are not anything,” but that they are not beings (êtres) or existents (étants) (ὄντα δ’ οὐ λέγουσιν εἶναι). They are “somethings”; they belong to this supreme category of “something” that subsumes beings and incorporeals. In his desire to acknowledge the originality of Stoicism, Bréhier appears to push Stoic nonbeings toward a nothingness that would almost correspond to “not something.” How then does Sartre use the lekton?
In Sartre, this notion appears explicitly at the beginning of the first part of Being and Nothingness, precisely in the context of an interroga tion of the problem of nothingness.11 The end of the Introduction identifies the ontological implications of modern thought’s tendency to reduce the dualism of being and phenomenon. For this it focuses on the most advanced form of this reduction, namely phenomenology. Now, for Sartre, at the end of the Introduction, this reduction leads to another dualism, that of the being-in-itself as the being of phenomena and the being-for-itself as the being of consciousness. The being of consciousness can be discerned in its specificity in the structure of intentionality and what Sartre calls the “pre-reflective cogito.” It is then defined as transparency to itself, “absolute of existence,” “pure appearance,” and “having nothing substantial” (Sartre 2011: 23). However, this first type of being is not sufficient and cannot account for the reality “of a concrete and full presence which is not that of consciousness” (Sartre 2011: 27). In order to account for this, it is necessary to identify another type of being, whose characteristics can be discerned in the very heart of the experience of this presence. This being is defined by Sartre as “being-in-itself,” and its primary characteristics are given as follows: “Being is. Being is in itself. Being is what it is” (2011: 33). The first point refers us to the fact that being is not derived from the possible or the necessary and that it is therefore contingent in a particular sense. The second refers us to being’s internal structure, an immanence that comes before all determination and all affirmation, for which reason it is impossible to apply a system of categories to being. The third refers us to its co-determination with that which is not it. Being-in-itself possesses an absolute solidity: it is “full positivity,” which means that it knows no alterity and “never posits itself as other than an other being; it cannot support any relation with the other” (Sartre 2011: 33). This third trait refers us to being’s indifference to determination, and particularly to external determination, a dimension which will be very important for the theory of nonbeing and its relation to the Stoic theory of incorporeals.
This ontological dualism between two types of being, namely the in-itself and the for-itself, poses the double problem of their connection and their unity. However, consideration of the in-itself does not open any pathways forward and that of the for-itself is too little developed in the Introduction to furnish any. It is only in Part I that a pathway appears, that of the presence of nonbeing in the heart of the de facto unity of being (such as it manifests in the structure of being-in-the-world). Nonbeing appears as a specific dimension, whose status and origin require investigation. The first approach shows that every dimension of nonbeing is inscribed in the human relationship to being and the essentially interrogative character of this relationship: it presupposes the possibility of a “no” (Sartre 2011: 39). The exteriority of this “no” with regard to the previously established ontological determinations leads Sartre to question whether the lekton is a “type of existence” (Sartre 2011: 41) adequate for characterizing the negative dimension, capable of appearing as a correlate of every interrogation, inasmuch as this correlate presents itself in the form of a judgment:
Negation would simply be a quality of judgment and the expectation of the questioner would be an expectation of a judgment-response. As for nothingness, its origin would be in negative judgments, it would be a concept establishing the transcendent unity of all these judgments, a propositional function of the type: “X is not.”
Thus negation would be “at the end” of the judicative act without being, for all that, “in being.” It is like an unreal inserted between two full realities, neither of which claims it: when being-in-itself is asked about negation, it refers to judgment, since it is only what it is—and judgment, a psychic positivity in its entirety, refers to being, since judgment articulates a negation concerning being, which is therefore transcendent. Negation, the result of concrete psychical operations, sustained in its existence by these very operations, unable to exist by itself, has the existence of a noematic correlate: its esse resides wholly in its percipi. And nothingness, the conceptual unity of negative judgments, could not have the least reality, unless it were that the Stoics confer on their “lecton [sic].” Can we accept this conclusion? (Sartre 2011: 40–1)
The lekton which, for the Stoics, is a nonbeing correlate of every judgment (axiōma), regardless of whether it is affirmative or negative, is mobilized by Sartre to think the status of nothingness as the correlate of negation. Sartre’s reasoning is as follows: nothingness cannot supervene on being merely as the correlate of a negative judgment, since otherwise it would have the same status as a Stoic lekton.
Sartre refuses such a reduction to the dimension of subjectivity (the lekton being assimilated, in this perspective, to Husserl’s noema in its unreal character). On the one hand, judgment is merely one form derived from a more fundamental “pre-judicative” attitude (Sartre 2011: 41); while on the other, as a psychical phenomenon, it cannot explain the upsurge of nonbeing, since, taken on its own, it partakes of being as “a concrete psychical event” (Sartre 2011: 45). This latter point resembles the manner in which, for the Stoics, the act of judging is an internal movement of the soul, which is a body, and therefore a being. The question of the origin of nothingness therefore remains untouched. Yet this does not stop Stoicism from being a meaningful point of reference, as further convergences with other types of incorporeals will show. The incorporeals’ dimension of nonbeing, borrowed as much from Bréhier as from the Stoics, is radicalized, rendered more problematic, but not evacuated as meaningless.
3.2 Some “Implicit” Incorporeals: Space and Time
Beyond his explicit reference to the lekton and with the exception of incidental references to sunkhusis 12 (Sartre 2011: 202) and pneuma (Sartre 2011: 532), Sartre’s direct references to the Stoics always return to existential and ethical problems. However, nonbeing is central to Sartre’s thought, and Being and Time as a whole deploys an entire system of figures for nothingness.
One thinks in particular of “nihilation” as the inner structure of consciousness (Sartre 2011: 116), of so-called internal negation (Sartre 2011: 311) as an original relation of consciousness to being and as foundation for the asymmetrical unity of the in-itself and the for-itself. However, it is in the form of “external negation”—which leaves “untouched” the beings to whose determination it contributes (Sartre 2011: 122, 219)—that we encounter space and time. These are not the subject of a single continuous discussion, but rather of one differentiated according to various levels of analysis.13
Although space is a determination and framework of spatial determinations for each this, it is merely a nonbeing: not a way of differentiating being, but, on the contrary, of manifesting its indifference (Sartre 2011: 220–1). Just as, for the Stoics, bodies are not affected in their internal dynamism by incorporeals, Sartre’s being-in-itself, because of its “solidity,” is indifferent to all which is not it. For this reason, every being that exists in the manner of the in-itself is itself indifferent to that which is not it in its very being.14 In this way space is simply the manner in which, at the heart of the world, concrete in-itselfs are indifferent to what is not them, in accordance with their type of being. Neither the in-itself nor the for-itself are space, which, as geometric space, is merely “pure nothingness” that leaves being-in-itself untouched and realizes the indifference of being (Sartre 2011: 536).
For their part, the Stoics distinguished void from place and space. The void is “what is capable of being occupied by a being but isn’t occupied, or an interval (διάστημα) empty of body, or an interval that isn’t occupied by a body”; place is “what is occupied by a being and coextensive with what occupies it”; and as for space, it is “an interval that is in part occupied by a body, in part unoccupied,” or else “the place of the largest body” (SVF II.505 = LS 49B). We find an echo of these definitions when Sartre, following Heidegger, discusses distance as a so-called négatité: a structure of nonbeing that is constitutive of the concrete real (Sartre 2011: 58). Moreover, it would probably be possible to extend this comparison to other Stoic definitions.
But as Bréhier emphasizes, Stoic space, whether it be empty (void) or full (place), is distinct from Aristotelian space in that it does not in itself possess any determinations, such as up or down (Bréhier 1962: 46–7). With regard to “inactive and impassive” void, Bréhier explains: “It is without action on the bodies that are in it, and attracts them neither one way nor the other; the position of bodies is thus determined not by some properties of the void in which they find themselves, but by their own nature” (1962: 47). Consequently place does not define the movement of the first elements of bodies, as in Aristotle, but “the place of body is the result of this internal activity. This attribute is determined by the very nature of body and not by its position relative to another” (Bréhier 1962: 41). Place remains a nonbeing, a mere object of thought that “here plays a role analogous to the ideality of space in Kant’s thought. Nor does place affect the nature of beings; it acts so little upon nature that for Kant it does not affect the thing in itself” (1962: 44). For Sartre,
human reality is that through which something like a place comes to things. . . . Geometrical space, in other words the pure reciprocity of spatial relations, is a pure nothingness. . . . The only concrete positioning that can reveal itself to me is absolute extension, that is to say precisely that which is defined by my own place as the center from which distances are reckoned absolutely from the object to myself, without reciprocity. (Sartre 2011: 536)15
With regard to time, we can enumerate at least five figures in Sartre,16 only some of which (the time of the world and its objectification) can be connected to the Stoics’s physical temporality. Time was defined by Zeno as “the interval of all movement,” while for Chrysippus it is “the interval of the movement of the world” (SVF II.510 = LS 51A). It nevertheless remains an incorporeal, so that, as Bréhier reminds us, the Stoics “deprived time of any real existence, and as a result, of any action upon beings” (1962: 59).
For Sartre, the time of the world or “universal time,” which reveals itself immediately as “objective temporality” (2011: 240), is the reflection onto being of the original temporality of the for-itself. Moreover, it represents the atemporality of being-in-itself. Time is therefore apprehended “on being, like a pure reflection that plays on the surface of being without the possibility of modifying it” (2011: 242). In so doing it “appears like the shimmer of nothingness on the surface of a strictly atemporal being” (2011: 253). There is thus an “absolute, ghostly kind of nothingness [néantité] in time” (2011: 242).
Thus for Sartre, as for Stoicism, time and space are nonbeings—with reference to being-in-itself for Sartre and to being as body for the Stoics.17 Yet the case of void is more problematic.
3.3 Void: A Special Case?
Void cannot in its own right be an object of study for Sartre, since the concept had been appropriated by scientific physics, and Sartre’s concepts are pre-physical. In fact, correct understanding of the problem of void entails distinguishing two levels: the anthropological and the cosmological, or—to put it another way—the intramundane level and that of the totality of being. We could say that the void, when taken as a singular instance, is also a kind of negation. It is connected to questioning as a permanent possibility of nothingness (that there is nothing here), inasmuch as we can grasp it as a particular form of absence,18 the analysis of which occupies the first part of Being and Time. This intramundane void would be that of the vase in which there is nothing, the place where what you are looking for does not appear, and so on. For Sartre, this intramundane dimension is essential,19 and distinct from the extramundane, the void as an infinite milieu. But in order to address this second dimension, first we must elaborate some metaphysical perspectives.
4 From Nihilation to Totality: Toward the Question of the pan and the holon
4.1 Nihilation
In fact all the comparisons we have just made depend on an essential point, which we have set aside until now. It is a matter of relating an ontological interpretation to a strictly modern transcendental problem (and method), even if Sartre’s relation to this problem is consistently polemical. Thus the structures of space, temporality, and the system of secondary intramundane structures—like void, distance, and absence—are ultimately analyzed from a genetic perspective, as having their origin in the for-itself, since the latter is, in its immanent structure, nihilation, and as a fundamental relation to being, internal negation. The secondary structures depend upon being-in-the-world as a synthetic structure of human existence. Now, human existence has another relation to spatiality and temporality: there is a spatialization of the for-itself because, by its existence, it gives itself its own situation and constitutes the meaning of that situation, while the temporalization of the for-itself is its most intimate structure. However, this peculiarity makes this spatiality and temporality neither merely subjective categories nor beings. It is always a matter of nonbeing, but a nonbeing that is to itself its own nothingness and that gives sense and reference to the negations of the world.
Nevertheless, this departure from ancient philosophical frameworks does not invalidate our preceding reflections. Indeed, it is with regard to the upsurge of the for-itself that Sartre hazards some propositions he calls “metaphysical,” which shift his perspective: the for-itself would be the result of the in-itself’s effort to found itself, which would lead us to a “radical reversal of idealism” (Sartre 2011: 253)—even if this reversal continues to be marked by a fundamental ambiguity—and to an ontology of singularity and the event, which is not unrelated to what has been ascribed to the Stoics. Although Sartre’s critiques in Being and Nothingness are generally directed at modern philosophy, once it becomes a matter of surpassing the structures of the for-itself, implicit and explicit allusions to ancient philosophy return forcefully in his metaphysical outlooks. For example, Sartre uses the Platonic category of the “other,” citing the Sophist, in order to express the status and the logic of nothingness in relation to being: “There is no being for consciousness outside of precisely this obligation, to be an intuition that reveals something. What does this mean, if not that consciousness is the Platonic Other?” (2011: 261). If we now try to envision the total unity of being—which includes the in-itself, the for-itself as nothingness, and the combination of what comes to being through the for-itself and what has the status of external negation (the determinations of what is)—we will find ourselves facing a problem like that introduced into Stoic cosmology by th e theory of incorporeals: in other words, the problem of the pan and the holon.
4.2 The pan and the holon
We know that the Stoics distinguished “the whole” (ὅλον), which is identical with the world as it is constituted, from “the all” (πᾶν), which is the sum of the cosmos and the void (SVF II.522-24; LS 44A). Plutarch shows himself to be particularly sensitive to the difficulties introduced by the concept of “the all” (On Common Conceptions 1073d = SVF II.525). Since it is made up of both a body and an incorporeal, its status is problematic for the Stoics: it is neither a body nor an incorporeal. Plutarch objects that it follows “that the all (πᾶν) is a non-being,” since the Stoics only give the name “being” to bodies. Moreover, whereas bodies act and receive action, the pan neither acts nor receives action. To these considerations can be added yet more paradoxes, which the Stoics embraced, such as that the pan is neither at rest nor in motion, neither animate nor inanimate. The all is certainly “something,” since it is an object of thought for the physicist, but it outstrips the two fundamental classes of bodies and incorporeals, beings and nonbeings.
With regard to Sartre, two issues should be addressed here. The first is the constitution of a void beyond or outside the world, and the second is that of the totality. The problem of extramundane void is taken up at several places (Sartre 2011: 51–3, 217–18, 670): first in a polemical manner, then in a genetic manner, before being interrogated from the point of view of the totality.
The polemical aspect is connected to Sartre’s interpretation of Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” in classic cosmological terms. Heideggerian nothingness is then viewed as a complement to being, an “infinite milieu where being would be in suspense” (Sartre 2011: 56), which approaches the Stoic conception. Sartre must show that this dimension is not pertinent to the upsurge from nonbeing; yet at the same time, it represents a real phenomenon that must be accounted for, once we have explained the origin of nothingness as decompression of being surging up at the origin of being.
The second discussion of the extramundane void accomplishes precisely this genetic explanation, when Sartre explains how nonbeing appears “alongside the world”:
In this way knowledge is the world. To speak like Heidegger, the world and outside of it, nothing [rien]. Except this “nothing” is not originally that in which human reality emerges. This nothing is human reality itself. . . . Indeed, apprehending the world already makes appear alongside the world a nothingness that supports and frames this totality . . . but this nothingness is nothing [n’est rien] other than human reality apprehending itself as excluded from being. (Sartre 2011: 217–18)
This enables Sartre to rephrase the formulae made famous by Heidegger in “What Is Metaphysics?,” namely “and nothing besides”; “and nothing further”; “and beyond that, nothing” (Heidegger 1993: 47). These formulae issue from the classic question, “How does it come about that there is something rather than nothing?” (cited by Sartre 2011: 52). This modality of appearance of nonbeing “alongside the world” is subsequently revisited in the light of various analytical registers. For each categorization that might challenge the realist position Sartre wants to establish, the counterargument is the same: it is a matter of showing that with regard to the senses, to instrumentality, and to meaning, nothing—on the strictly ontological plane—intervenes between being and consciousness, unless it be a nonbeing that neither adds nor removes anything from being.
Finally, the third discussion figures in the metaphysical outlooks of Being and Nothingness and tackles the problem explicitly in the course of answering one of the questions posed in the Introduction: “For what reason do [these two types of being] both belong to being in general?” (Sartre 2011: 32):
The for-itself is without doubt nihilation, but as nihilation, it is; it is in a priori unity with the in-itself. Thus the Greeks regularly distinguished the cosmic reality they named τὸ πᾶν from the totality made up of this reality and the infinite void that surrounds it—a totality that they named τὸ ὅλον. Of course, we have been able to call the for-itself a nothing and declare that there is nothing “outside” of the in-itself, unless it were a reflection of this nothing that is itself polarized and defined by the in-itself inasmuch as it is precisely the nothingness of this in-itself. But here as in Greek philosophy, a question must be posed: what should we call “real?” To what should we attribute “being?” To the cosmos, or to what we were just calling τὸ ὅλον? To the pure in-itself, or to the in-itself surrounded by this sheath of nothingness that we have designated as the for-itself? (2011: 670)
What is immediately striking is Sartre’s inversion of the sense of pan and holon in Stoicism,20 since the task of conceptualizing the totality formed by the being and its “sheath of nothingness” is assigned to the holon. We will not explore the reasons that led Sartre to grasp the “real” as holon and to establish on this basis the possibility of thinking about a third type of being,21 which he calls the phenomenon, the only phenomenon being “the world,” simultaneously in-itself and for-itself without being the in-itself-for-itself (2011: 672–3). Instead, we will simply note several elements that can be compared with Stoic cosmology. First, as we have just seen, by affirming the unicity of the “phenomenon” Sartre elaborates a cosmology of singularity, just as Stoic cosmology understands the universe as a single body. This dimension of singularity is one of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of Sartre. However, it has generally been viewed from the perspective of human existence. Here Sartre is close to a project announced in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir. In this letter, he envisages the project of an “ontics” (une ontique), which would lead to an “absolute neo-realism” (Sartre 1983: 51–6).
5 Being and Nothingness between God and the World: Perspectives and Convergences
That last idea leads us to question the relationship between the two ontologies more globally, inasmuch as both are ontologies of the individual and for this reason encounter the same problems. It is by considering one of these problems, that of the unity of being and the void (or of non-being), that we would like to finish.
5.1 On the Unity of Being and Nothingness
It seems that Sartre responds in a way to the contradictions that the Stoics, according to Bréhier (1962: 49–50), had encountered in the impossibility of thinking the unity of cosmos and void. To this end, he still affirms the internal univocal connection, on the side of the for-itself, between being and nothingness qua for-itself. Nothingness, which cannot unfold in all its forms except on the basis of an original nihilation of being, is therefore connected internally to it, not given to it as an addition. In effect,
In the case of internal negation for-itself-in-itself [the for-itself knows being in not making itself be being], the relationship is not reciprocal, and I am simultaneously one of the terms of the relationship and the relationship itself. I apprehend being, I am apprehension of being, I am only apprehension of being. And the being that I apprehend is not posited against me so as to apprehend me in turn. (Sartre 2011: 672)
If we follow Sartre’s line of thought, we will conclude that the Stoics missed the particularity of internal negation because they did not begin with the in-itself as the original determination, but rather with bodies. There cannot be body except starting from the configuration of being-in-the-world, following the original nihilation of the in-itself that the existence of consciousness forces us to postulate. Bodies are posterior to nihilation, and it is not possible to conceive of nihilation by starting from bodies without committing a hysteron proteron. One must choose: either you start from bodies in their contexture as in-itself, and then you cannot extract the nonbeing that, in a certain manner, does not come from bodies and is prior to them; or else you want to think nonbeing, but then you must start from the primary ontological form, namely the in-itself, and from its failed moment of self-foundation—what Sartre calls the “ontological act” (2011: 115), which constitutes being as “individual adventure” (2011: 669). Thus it is only by going back to the in-itself as such that we can think its internal unity with nonbeing, by starting from the metaphysical hypothesis of the upsurge of consciousness as nihilation, as the result of being’s effort to found itself and the appearance of nothingness in the world (2011: 114–15).22 Nevertheless, is there not, in the very heart of Stoicism, a direct answer to the question of the origin of negation?
5.2 The Stoic God, Possible Source of Negation
We can in fact ask the Stoics the question Sartre posed at the beginning of Being in Time: “Is negation as structure of the judicative proposition at the origin of nothingness, or is it rather nothingness, as structure of the real, which is the origin and the foundation of negation?” (2011: 41)
Contrary to what happens in Sartre, for the Stoics negation is inseparable from its place in logic, namely the negative proposition. This itself belongs to dialectic. Indeed, when it comes to defining simple propositions, Diogenes Laertius’s presentation begins with negative propositions:
Among simply propositions, the negative is that which consists of a negation and a proposition, e.g. “Not: it is day.” One species of this is the double negative. This is the negative of a negative, e.g. “Not: it is not day.” It posits “It is day.”23
Thus it is not only the case that negation is connected to the proposition but also that we cannot study the proposition without negation. In effect, negation commands the proposition as a whole and is placed before it (οὐχὶ ἡμέρα ἐστίν, “Not: it is day”); when the negative particle is inserted into the proposition, such as between the noun and the verb, we are no longer dealing with a negative proposition, but rather with an affirmation.24 Moreover, the negative particle on its own is merely a part of discourse. Therefore, it cannot be a complete sayable (in other words, a proposition), and it is not even clear that it is a lekton at all, since the canonical examples of incomplete sayables all consist of attributes.25 In fact, it is difficult even to know where to locate the negative particle among the five parts of logos identified by Chrysippus and Diogenes of Babylon (noun, appellative, verb, conjunction, and article: DL 7.57-8 = SVF II.147 and III Diog. 22). The element that cannot be conjugated or declined is the conjunction, which is defined as “a case-less part of language, which conjoins the parts of language” (DL 7.58). However, it is difficult to include the negative particle in this class, since it does not precisely join parts of a logos, but rather commands that logos as a whole (Cavini 1985: 49). Nevertheless, given that, unlike Aristotle, the Stoics assert that particles signify independently of the proposition to which they belong (Gourinat 2000: 154–5), it is plausible to think the same holds for negation, whether or not it is a conjunction. What could be its signification? The origin of negation is the act of a rational soul that denies: “The proposition takes its name from the fact that it is proposed or rejected, since he who says ‘It is day’ appears to propose that it is day” (DL 7.65 = SVF II.193).26 The origin of negation is indeed the soul’s act of rejection of a state of affairs, an act which, inasmuch as it is a change in the internal tension of a body, is simultaneously a something and a being. And what the negation signifies is that toward which the rejection points, namely the truth of the contradictory of the denied proposition (Cavini 1985: 50).
Therefore we must return to the act by which the soul is able to articulate negative propositions, and it is by this act that negations (in the sense of negative propositions) become something. But does this mean that if humankind did not exist, negative lekta not only would be nonbeings but would be nothing—in other words, would not even be somethings? Such an alternative would be true only if the human soul were the only to deny. We might suspect that this is indeed the case, since the place of negation is dialectic. Since the goal of dialectic is the avoid errors, what use could it be to a god?27 Just as god is a continuous reality, could he not govern the world by proceeding from affirmation to affirmation? In fact, he cannot: even without dialectic, it remains true that divine reason needs to deny things. Divine providence—and this is this is an essential argument for theodicy—is such that good things cannot exist without bad things that are contrary to them: the two must necessarily coexist.28 Now, unless we assert that divinity intends and wants the good without ever contemplating the bad as such, and therefore is ignorant of it, it is reasonable to impute to god thought of what is bad. Once divine thought contemplates what is bad, it must refuse it, and this act of refusal entails denying that it is good. Divine rationality cannot administer the cosmos without denying, without positing for itself (via an internal logos) negative lekta. Not only does god need lekta, and so nonbeings, in order to think, but he cannot think without denying. Nothing therefore prevents him from thinking nonbeing as such, that is the inc orporeal as nonbeing opposed to being, or from being the agency through which the incorporeal as such becomes something. In any case, nonbeing is not to be situated outside of god, but in his very activity.
5.3 Of God, of the World, and of Being: Final Convergences
The central question of god and the world thus appears at both the beginning and the end of these two ontologies. It is at the beginning inasmuch as we could ultimately bring together the Stoic God, who is identical to being and the origin of nonbeing, with Sartre’s concrete being-in-itself, taken at the moment of the absolute event of its foundation. Suppose that we set aside Stoic bodily determination and its interpretation, in accordance with the difference in Sartre between being and nothingness, between the absolute in-itself and intramundane in-itselfs. Suppose also that we set aside Sartre’s Cartesian conception of God, and return to the Stoic idea of a cause indifferent to its effect.29 Do we not then find an analogous movement in both philosophies, a production of nothingness by being (whether this nothingness be called “incorporeal” or “consciousness”), where this production is itself invested by being, nothingness is derived from being, and incorporeals have no sense except in relation to bodies?
If we now approach this issue from the other side, that of the world, the shared anti-essentialism of these two ontologies of the individual, namely Sartre’s first ontology and Stoic corporealism, leads to a conception of being that is both general and singular. In this way Sartre’s third ontological category, the “phenomenon . . . provided with two dimensions of being, the dimension in-itself and the dimension for-itself” (Sartre 2011: 673), could resonate with the Stoic category of “something.”
However, this parallel between Sartre and Stoicism involves an element that perhaps marks its limits, that is, the affirmation of the nonexistence of god, who has no place in Sartre’s cosmology. Furthermore, what Sartre calls the holon (whole)—like what the Stoics call the pan (all)—is not a unity, but the mark of the impossibility of any complete unity or integration. The totality is permanently “in a state of disintegration in relation to an ideal synthesis” (Sartre 2011: 671). This ideal synthesis is none other than the ens causa sui, which from an anthropological perspective we would call God.
6 Conclusion: Ontology and Ethics
Thus we can see that the debate between Sartre and the Stoics involves not only ethics but also ontology. These two can be brought together, as we will suggest by way of conclusion. On the one hand, we have an ontology that sets out from god as body in order to achieve an ethics of freedom as self-mastery, in connection with a cosmology of the whole and universal harmony. On the other hand, a decapitated ontology where freedom as nonbeing becomes not someone who joins the order of destiny but someone who faces it as a situation that must be embraced and a sense that must be determined in and by committed action.
Notes
1 We would like to thank all the participants of the workshop on Stoicism and French Philosophy for their stimulating interventions and especially Kurt Lampe for the considerable effort he has devoted to translation.
2 Met. 1.1-2, 4.1, 6.1 (it equally appears as the science of substance and its causes in 4.2 and the science of axioms in 6.3).
3 And not in the sense that Sartre gives this term in the conclusion of Being and Nothingness (2011: 667–9).
4 “For they only call bodies beings, since doing and undergoing belong to what is” (ὄντα γὰρ μόνα τὰ σώματα καλοῦσιν, ἐπειδὴ ὄντος τὸ ποιεῖν τι καὶ πάσχειν, Plut. Comm. not. 1073d = SVF II.525). Here the Stoics take over the Platonic “definition” of being from the Sophist (247e).
5 εἰ μὲν οὖν μὴ ἔστι τις ἑτέρα οὐσία παρὰ τὰς φύσει συνεστηκυίας, ἡ φυσικὴ ἂν εἴη πρώτη ἐπιστήμη, Arist. Met. E.1 1026a27-29. This obviously does not mean that physics was concei ved by the Stoics as the first part of philosophy: their biological metaphors for the three parts of philosophy (dialectic, ethics, and physics) suggest an interdependence but not always a hierarchy (SVF II.35-39). Moreover, the debate regarding their pedagogical sequencing (SVF II.39-44) should not be entirely conflated with this question about their hierarchy.
6 If wisdom is the science of divine and human things (SVF II.35-36), physics is the part of philosophy that corresponds to the science of divine things (SVF II.42 = LS 26C, SVF II.44).
7 Plut. Not. comm. 1074d = SVF II 335: οὐδὲν οὖν ἔτι δεῖ λέγειν τὸν χρόνον, τὸ κατηγόρημα, τὸ ἀξίωμα, τὸ συνημμένον, τὸ συμπεπλεγμένον· οἷς χρῶνται μὲν μάλιστα τῶν φιλοσόφων, ὄντα δ’ οὐ λέγουσιν εἶναι.
8 Regarding place and void, see further below.
9 Recall that spoken discourse is nothing more than translation into sound of internal discourse (SVF II.135).
10 Our warmest gratitude to Stéphane Toulouse et Sandrine Iraci for their help in consulting the borrowing archives of the ENS.
11 The term appears twice in Being and Nothingness (2011: 41), with the spelling “lecton.” This passage was first elaborated in Carnets de la drôle de guerre (War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, 1995: 395–6). The connection there between the lekton and the original nihilation of being is clearer (three explicit citations) than in Being and Nothingness. The lekton is used there to summarize the classic philosophical position regarding negation.
12 This term is used to describe the soul’s mode of being, which is characterized by an interpenetration of parts (LS 48C).
13 See especially Sartre 2011: 220–1, 293–4, 305–6, 346–7, 535–41.
14 There are particular figures: “abolitions,” “apparitions,” and movement. However, these figures are comprehended at first as internal determinations of the in-itself (Sartre 2011: 243–4, 248–50).
15 Here we are in a specific analytical register, namely that of the human meaning of things for freedom and the manner in which such a meaning affects being-in-itself or, to borrow Sartre’s terminology, the “brute existent.” Now, what human freedom adds to being is “a meaning” given by the end pursued. Now, this meaning is the fruit of freedom, in other words of a certain nihilation, a dissociation from the chain of causes and motives, which introduces a “nihilating coloration of the given” (Sartre 2011: 523).
16 There is original temporality (Sartre 2011: 142–85), the historicity of temporality as it reveals itself to reflection (2011: 193), psychic temporality (2011: 193–5), the time of the world (2011: 240–52), simultaneity and physical time (2011: 306). A final figure is that of the time of freedom, with a reworking of historicity and recuperation of the figure of the instant (2011: 510–12).
17 However, Sartre’s in-itself must not be carelessly assimilated to Stoic body. The Sartrean body is an intramundane determination that concerns existence, not being. Some corporeal attributes, including the internal dynamism of bodies and cosmos, cannot be ascribed to being-in-itself, whose character of being in-itself prevents any affirmation about itself except the for-itself’s decompression of being.
18 The difference between void and absence is related to the manner in which, for Sartre, absence is always human (Sartre 2011: 43–5, 317–20, 382).
19 This is the basis of his polemical argument against Heidegger.
20 At least in Bréhier’s interpretation and analysis of this topic (1962: 49–51).
21 Sartre’s inversion is perhaps related to his awareness of the connection constituting the Whole. In Plato, whom Sartre had read intensively, the term holon designates the totality, which is constituted by an internal connection (this is the term used in Parmenides and Sophist in particular), which Plato opposes to to pan as the simple sum of parts. Likewise, in Theaetetus 204a-205a, it is this distinction between the sum (to pan) and the whole (to holon) that serves as the point of departure for a discussion of the problem of their identity in terms of quantity.
22 The distinction between ontology and metaphysics is one of the essential aspects of the “metaphysical outlooks” in the conclusion of Being and Nothingness (Sartre 2011: 669).
23 DL 7.69. See the discussion by Gourinat 2000: 211 n.2, whose reconstruction of the text we follow: <καὶ τῶν μὲν ἁπλῶν ἀξιωμάτων, ἀποφατικὸν μὲν ἐστὶν τὸ συνεστὸς ἐξ ἀποφάσεως> καὶ ἀποφατικὸν μὲν οἷον “οὐχὶ ἡμέρα ἐστίν.” εἶδος δὲ τούτου τὸ ὑπεραποφατικόν. ὑπεραποφατικὸν δ’ ἐστὶν ἀποφατικὸν ἀποφατικοῦ, οἷον “οὐχὶ ἡμέρα <οὐκ> ἔστι”· τίθησι δὲ τὸ “ἡμέρα ἐστίν.” Compare the text at SVF II.204, LS 34K.
24 When I say “It is not day,” I am affirming the truth of this proposition, but when I say, “Not: it is day,” I am denying the truth of the proposition that follows. See Gourinat 2000: 211–13, Cavini 1985: 49–50.
25 A complete sayable must be grammatically finished (cf. Alessandrelli 2013: 119–20), which clearly could not be the case with the negative particle, whose incompleteness is obvious. Furthermore, the list of incomplete sayables includes “predicates, accidents, and whatever is obtained by their division” (Philo of Alex. De Agricultura 139 = SVF II.182). Thus negation, which is neither a predicate nor an accidental attribute, is not found here.
26 ὠνόμασται δὲ τὸ ἀξίωμα ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀξιοῦσθαι ἢ ἀθετεῖσθαι· ὁ γὰρ λέγων Ἡμέρα ἐστίν, ἀξιοῦν δοκεῖ τὸ ἡμέραν εἶναι. Compare the translation of Gourinat 2000: 195.
27 When it was said, “If there were dialectic among the gods, it would be no other than that of Chrysippus” (DL 7.180), the implication was that the gods have no need of dialectic.
28 As Chrysippus elaborated in his treaty On Providence (Aulus Gellius 7.1 = SVF II.1169 = LS 54Q).
29 Sartre alludes to this doctrine, although in a different context (2011: 427).
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