JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Phenomenology81consciousness itself. By that we need not understand that consciousness “derivesfrom nothingness.” There can not be “nothingness of consciousness” beforeconsciousness. “Before” consciousness one can conceive only of a plenum of being ofwhich no element can refer to an absent consciousness. If there is to be nothingness ofconsciousness, there must be a consciousness which has been and which is no moteand a witnessing consciousness which poses the nothingness of the first consciousnessfor a synthesis of recognition. Consciousness is prior to nothingness and “is derived”from being. 5One will perhaps have some difficulty in accepting these conclusions. But consideredmore carefully, they will appear perfectly clear. The paradox is not that there are “selfactivated”existences but that there is no other kind. What is truly unthinkable ispassive existence; that is, existence which perpetuates itself without having the forceeither to produce itself or to preserve itself. From this point of view there is nothingmore incomprehensible than the principle of inertia. Indeed where would consciousness“come” from if it did “come” from something? From the limbo of the unconscious orof the physiological. But if we ask ourselves how this limbo in its turn can exist andwhere it derives its existence, we find ourselves faced with the concept of passiveexistence; that is, we can no more absolutely understand how this non-conscious given(unconscious or physiological) which does not derive its existence from itself, cannevertheless perpetuate this existence and find in addition the ability to produce aconsciousness. This demonstrates the great favor which the proof a contingentiamundi has enjoyed.Thus by abandoning the primacy of knowledge, we have discovered the being ofthe knower and encountered the absolute, that same absolute which the rationalists ofthe seventeenth century had defined and logically constituted as an object of knowledge.But precisely because the question concerns an absolute of existence and not ofknowledge, it is not subject to that famous objection according to which a knownabsolute is no longer an absolute because it becomes relative to the knowledge whichone has of it. In fact the absolute here is not the result of a logical construction on theground of knowledge but the subject of the most concrete of experiences. And it is notat all relative to this experience because it is this experience. Likewise it is a nonsubstantialabsolute. The ontological error of Cartesian rationalism is not to have seenthat if the absolute is defined by the primacy of existence over essence, it can not beconceived as a substance. Consciousness has nothing substantial, it is pure “appearance”in the sense that it exists only to the degree to which it appears. But it is preciselybecause consciousness is pure appearance, because it is total emptiness (since the