JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

136Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsAlthough it is sometimes said about Sartre that he reifies nothingness,writes as though nothing were a thing, or something called ‘nothing’ exists,it is not his overt or professed view. Indeed, he is conscious of it as apossible misunderstanding and tries to rule it out by saying ‘Nothingness isnot’. He tries to improve on Heidegger’s famous, or infamous, dictum inWhat is Metaphysics? (Was ist Metaphysik?, 1929) that ‘nothingnessnihilates’ (Das Nichts selbst nichtet ) by saying ‘Nothing does not nihilateitself; Nothingness “is nihilated”’. Heidegger too is trying to avoid the chargeof holding that nothing in some sense exists but Sartre thinks Heideggermakes a mistake in his formulation. By saying ‘nothing nihilates’ Heideggerimparts an agency to nothing; the power to nihilate, but this agency couldhardly be efficacious unless it or that which exercises it existed. Sartre’s‘Nothingness is nihilated’ does not carry the logical or grammaticalconnotation of accomplishment. It is a putative affirmation of nothing’s nonbeinglogically consistent with that of the Eleatic presocratic philosopherParmenides (c. 480 BC). Sartre fails to observe that his passive renderingof Heidegger’s active voice may have equally incoherently construed nothingas a subject of anihilation, and hence, something that exists.Nonetheless, it is true according to Sartre that there are absences. Thereare refusals and denials, acts of imagining that things could be otherwise.For example, in the celebrated passage from Being and Nothingnessreproduced below Sartre is expecting his friend Pierre to be in a café butPierre is not there. Sartre encounters nothingness. Sartre wonders whetherthis is a judgement or thought that Pierre is absent or whether there is anexperience of Pierre’s absence, an intuition of nothingness. Sartre knowsthere is a prima facie absurdity in speaking of the experience of nothing.Nothing is not anything, so an experience of nothing would not be anexperience of anything. Nevertheless, Sartre decides that it is by sight thatthe absence of Pierre was detected. There was at least the phenomenon ofseeing 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 ofabsent friends, holes in the ground, negative and false propositions, purelyimaginary states of affairs, fictional characters as though they existedbecause nothingness possesses an appearance of being, a being itborrows from being. The appearance of nothingness depends upon theappearance of being. For example, a hole in a wall exists in a borrowed