JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

6 NothingnessThe title of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is taken from the openingparagraphs 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. Theyare 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 betweenbeing and nothingness.Sartre subjects this clean Hegelian dialectical reasoning to Heideggeriancriticism in Being and Nothingness. The phenomenological concept ofnothingness is not the dialectical concept of nothingness. Nevertheless, inreading the ways in which nothingness is introduced into the world by beingin-itselfit 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 inquirywithout an inquirer, no search without a seeker and, in at least a minimalhermeneutic sense, the questioner already knows the answer to the questionin order to seek for it. Sartre argues in the passages below from Being andNothingness that it is questioning that fundamentally discloses nothingness.Nothingness is presupposed by questioning in three ways: The answer tothe question may be negative, the questioner is (paradigmatically) in a stateof ignorance or non-knowledge, truth is limited by non-truth, or the false. It isSartre’s view that negative existential propositions depend upon non-beingor nothingness rather than the reverse. The phenomenological is prior tothe linguistic.