Aquila - Two Problems of Being and Nonbeing in Sartre's

8/6/2019 Aquila - Two Problems of Being and Nonbeing in Sartre's...

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International Phenomenological Society

Two Problems of Being and Nonbeing in Sartre's Being and NothingnessAuthor(s): Richard E. AquilaSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Dec., 1977), pp. 167-186Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107159Accessed: 02/04/2009 22:07

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TWO PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING INSARTRE'S BEING AND NOTHINGNESSIn Being and Nothingness' Sartre undertakes a description of hu-man existence and its relation to the world with which it is presented.The term 'being-for-itself' designates the kind of existence with whichSartre is concerned. The main claim he makes is that being-for-itselfis really a kind of non-being: to be or to exist in a way which is char-acteristically human (or, at least, in a way which is characteristic of aperson) is, in an important sense, not to be at all. Unfortunately, Sar-tre uses the term 'being-for-itself' to cover two distinct problems in

Being and Nothingness: the problem of the being of human (qua per-sonal) consciousness and the problem of the being of human beings(qua persons) themselves. It seems clear that Sartre wants to sayboth that the being of human consciousness is a kind of nonbeing andthat the being of human persons is a kind of nonbeing. Commentatorson Sartre have, in my opinion, failed to recognize the very great dif-ference between these two claims. I shall try to show that the twoclaims are not in fact as closely related as is generally thought andalso that both, and especially the second, possess an ontological sig-nificance which has not always been appreciated.

I.The claim that the being of the for-itself is really a kind of non-being is sometimes taken merely as the claim that human conscious-ness necessarily involves an awareness of negative states of affairs ofcertain sorts:

Knowledge entails that the object known is held at a distance from the personwho knows it: he distinguishes the object from himself, and he thereby formsthe judgment, 'I am not the object.' This distance at which the object is heldis the gap or nothingness at the heart of the For-itself.2Sometimes Sartre's claim is identified with a much stronger assertion,namely that it is human consciousness which is responsible for thevery being of the negative states of affairs which it encounters:When the existentialists say that human being is different from the being ofthings, they are saying simply that it is human beings who set up the contrast1 L'Etre et le Neant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). Quotations are from, and parenthetical

references to, Hazel Barnes's translation (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968),which is a reprint of a translation originally published in 1953by Philosophical Library,Inc.2 Mary Warnock, The Philosophy of Sartre (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), p. 61.167


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168 PHILOSOPHYANDPHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCHbetween things-what is-and what is not but could possibly come to be, i.e.,non-being.3On either interpretation, the claims Sartre makes about the "nothing-ness" of consciousness and those which he makes about the nothing-ness of persons would apparently be just different ways of puttingthe same point: that human consciousness necessarily involves a cer-tain sort of "nihilating" behavior in the face of the world.It will generally be agreed, I think, that this approach to Sartre'sclaims about the nothingness of the for-itself fails to do justice to theontological intent of those claims. Sartre does not merely point out,for example, that consciousness is, and involves an awareness of be-

ing, something distinct from whatever is its object at any moment. Healso insists that, in an important sense, the only appropriate responseto the question, 'What more is consciousness than its object at anymoment?', is the reply,'Nothing more!'. Thus:In the internal negation the for-itself collapses on what it denies .... Inshort the term-of-origin of the internal negation is the in-itself, the thing whichis there, and outside of it there is nothing except an emptiness which is dis-tinguished from the thing only by a pure negation for which this thing furnishesthe very content. (p. 245)4Sartre makes the same point about the being of persons. It is notjust that a person lacks identity with the objects of his awareness atany moment. Nor is it that he is necessarily aware of various sorts ofnegative states of affairs involving such objects. In addition to this,according to Sartre, a person also fails to be anything more than the

totality of such objects:But if I represent myself as him, I am not he; I am separated from him as theobject from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me fromhim. (p. 103)As soon as we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legitimate judgment,based on inner experience or correctly deduced from a priori or empirical pre-mises, then by that very positing we surpass this being-and that not towardanother being but toward emptiness, toward nothing. (p. 106)Two points are involved, I believe, in Sartre's insistence that con-sciousness, though always distinct from whatever may be its object,is nevertheless nothing more than the object. First, a state of con-3 Frederick A. Olafson, Principles and Persons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

Press, 1967), p. 99. Cf. Robert C. Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 265. Another suggestion by Solomon, namely that con-sciousness is "nothing" for Sartre in that it is not a possible object of conscious, isconsidered at the beginning of section III of this paper.

4 It is clear from the context that the "internal negation" in question is the struc-ture of consciousness.


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170 PHILOSOPHYANDPHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCH(4) 'The being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Noth-ingness.' (pp. 57-8)(5) Therefore, ndgatites 'derive their origin from an act, an expectation, or a

project of the human being; they all indicate an aspect of being as it ap-pears to the human being who is engaged in the world.' (p. 59)"Negatites" are just negative states of affairs. Sartre's example is thecase of someone's absence from a certain cafe. Negative states ofaffairs can be objects of perception on Sartre's view, and when theyare they possess an objective (cf. pp. 40, 42), transcendent (p. 59)reality. Nevertheless, Sartre argues that this reality must be con-ferred upon them just to the extent that they involve an objectivenegativity. Premise (2) contains the reason for this: such negativity(Nothingness) cannot be found merely from an examination of thepositive realities which any negative state of affairs involves, forexample a certain person and a cafe in our example. Thus Sartre'sargument centers on an awareness of the need for a distinction be-tween states of affairs, or at least negative ones, and the particularswhich they involve.If Sartre's argument indicates an awareness of the distinction be-tween a state of affairs and the particulars which it involves, it alsoindicates unclarity concerning the ontological issues which this dis-tinction raises. Sartre takes it for granted, in premise (3), that if thereis a distinction between a negative state of affairs and the particularswhich it involves, that distinction can only be accounted for by anappeal to something over and above the state of affairs in question.It might be argued that this is simply mistaken. All that our ontologydemands, we might argue, is just that we do grant objective onto-logical status to the distinction between particulars and states of af-fairs. States of affairs, that is, are just different sorts of entities fromthe particulars which they involve, and that is all there is to the mat-ter. Sartre's own position with respect to the ontological status ofnegative states of affairs is in fact rather ambiguous. He grants onthe one hand that they do possess an objective, transcendent reality.Yet in his argument he takes it for granted that the distinction be-tween a negative state of affairs and the particulars which it involvescannot be accounted for by appeal to the domain of "being-in-itself."In doing so Sartre assumes that what has being-in-itself can only bethe particulars which a state of affairs involves, not the state of af-fairs itself, and this seems tantamount to withdrawing the admissionthat he has already made. The upshot is of course that negative states


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Two PROBLEMS OF BEING AND NONBEING IN 171SARTRE'SBeing and Nothingness

of affairs are relegated to a status somewhere, yet impossibly, in be-tween that of the for-itself and the in-itself: though something "ob-jective," 'Non-being exists only on the surface of being' and, one can,indeed, exhaust the domain of what strictly speaking has being'with-out finding there the least trace of nothingness' (p. 49).It is clear that Sartre's difficulty concerning the distinction be-tween a negative state of affairs and the particulars which it involvesis a general difficulty about states of affairs not confined to the caseof merely negative ones. The reason for Sartre's almost exclusiveattention to negative states of affairs is that he uses the notion of a"negative"state of affairs so broadly as to include virtually all statesof affairs. Consider,for example, a line segment from A to B. So long,according to Sartre, as what I am seeing is just the line regarded asa single entity (as 'immediate object of intuition'), no negativity isinvolved. But once I distinguish between the points A and B, and viewthem in relation to one another, I have apprehended "negativity."Inthis sense, Sartre concludes, even the apprehension of distance in-volves an apprehensionof nonbeing (pp. 54-5).It seems clear that thedistinction that Sartre is trying to draw here is just the distinction be-tween seeing the distance between A and B an seeing that A and B aredistant from one another. The object of awareness in the former ofthese cases is a line segment with A and B as its end points; the ob-ject of the latter is a certain state of affairs involving those endpoints. The real issue raised by the possibility of the latter sort ofawareness is therefore a general difficulty concerning the distinctionbetween particularsand states of affairs.It is also clear that Sartre regards all states of affairs as sharingin the same sort of ambiguous ontological status that he attributes toexplicitly negative states of affairs. Thus considering the very generalquestion of our awareness of any distinction at all between one par-ticular and another, Sartre first observes that the sorts of relationswhich are here in question can never be discovered by means of anexamination of the particulars to be related: 'The determinative rela-tion of the this therefore can belong neither to the this nor to thethat; it enfolds them without touching them, without conferring onthem the slightest trace of new character; it leaves them for whatthey are' (p. 256). This, as it stands, is just to acknowledge that astate of affairs involving two particulars is something in addition tothose particulars themselves. But Sartre immediately proceeds toconclude that such "externalnegation" 'can not appear as an objec-


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172 PHILOSOPHYAND PHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCHtive characteristic of the thing, if we understand by objective thatwhich by nature belongs to the in-itself,' hence, 'Its very exterioritytherefore requires that it remain "in the air," exterior to the For-itselfas well as to the In-itself' (p. 256).We may conclude that Sartre is indeed consciously occupied withthe problem of distinguishing between states of affairs and the par-ticulars which they involve. We should also take note of the signifi-cance of his conclusion that the distinction in question can be onto-logically grounded only through an appeal to the being of conscious-ness. That assumption, as we have seen, indicates Sartre's failure torecognize the possibility of accepting the distinction between statesof affairs and particulars as an ontologically irreducible distinction,that is, as one which requires no appeal to something over and abovethe sort of entity that a state of affairs is. But there is a further signi-ficance to Sartre's appeal to the being of consciousness at this point.For Sartre assumes, in making that appeal, that consciousness itselfis a kind of "nothing"in just the same way that the difference be-tween a (negative) state of affairs and its constituents is nothing.This is the point of premise (4) in the argument that I have set out.Now when Sartre claims that the difference between a negative stateof affairs and the particulars which it involves is nothing (cf. pp.256-7: 'if I say "The inkwell is not the table,"I am thinking nothing.')he is just acknowledging, though in an unclear way, that a state ofaffairs is something distinct from the complete collection of entitieswhich are involved in that state of affairs. We should be led to sus-pect, then, that if consciousness itself is the primordial "nothing"inSartre's thought, then to say as much is in effect to acknowledge thatconsciousness of an object is not any sort of particular, but ratherjust a state of affairs which involves some particular.It might be objected that my interpretation overlooks the pheno-menological orientation of Sartre's work. Sartre is concerned withthe being of objects as phenomena,as objects for a consciousness. Hispoint, one might argue, is simply that a necessary condition for theexistence of states of affairs as objects of consciousness is a certainamount of activity on the part of consciousness. Apart, that is, fromthe existence of human expectation and projection, there would be nosuch thing as an awareness of states of affairs as opposed to partic-ulars. So only in this sense, it might be said, does the being of nega-tivity outside of consciousness derive its origin from the originalnegativity which is consciousness. It seems to me that this objection


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overlooks the ontological orientation of Sartre's phenomenology.Sar-tre makes that orientation clear at the very beginning of Being andNothingness. There he argues at length that the mere fact that werestrict ourselves to objects as objects of consciousness does not im-ply that those objects lack a being of their own, and that all talkabout the being of such objects is really just talk about the being ofconsciousness. The opposite is rather the case on Sartre's view: thebeing of consciousness depends upon the independent being of its ob-ject (pp. 21 ff.). This independence,Sartre even concedes, extends tothose negative states of affairs which we apprehend as objects (p. 59).That such states of affairs derive their being from the being of con-sciousness does not preclude their existing, once produced by con-sciousness, as objects in their own right:

In addition destruction, although coming into being through man, is an objec-tive fact and not a thought. Fragility has been impressed upon the very beingof this vase, and its destruction would be an irreversible absolute event which Icould only verify. There is a transphenomenality of non-being as of being. (p.40).It is part of Sartre's view, then, that even a phenomenologicalorientation must grant that objects of consciousness have a being oftheir own. What then could account for Sartre's special treatment ofstates of affairs as objects of consciousness? States of affairs becomeobjects of consciousness only through consciousness; but the samecan be said about any object at all. The only difference, apparently,is that on Sartre's view a certain amount of projective and expectativeactivity is required in the case of the former sorts of objects. Themere apprehension of objective being, Sartre seems to grant, does notrequire such activity,but the genuine apprehensionof states of affairsdoes require it. The most that could be gotten from this point, how-ever, is that the being of states of affairs as objects of consciousness(as "phenomena") depends on human activity in a way that nothingelse does. But if the fact that the being-in-itself that concerns Sartrein Being and Nothingness is the being of mere "phenomena" iscompatible with its being something external to consciousness andhence "in-itself," then why should the fact that Sartre's concern islimited to merely phenomenal states of affairs be incompatible withthe supposition that those states of affairs possess a "being-in-itself"?Yet Sartre, as we have seen, denies that they do. The only explanationseems to me to be that Sartre is just unclear about the distinctionbetween states of affairs and the particulars which they involve, andthis unclarity leads him to think that the former are "in themselves"


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174 PHILOSOPHYAND PHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCHreally nothing at all. The same unclarity, I have suggested, leads himto think that consciousness is also nothing at all.

Sartre's claim that consciousness is really a kind of "nothing" snot, of course, completely clarified by the claim that consciousnessis a state of affairs and not any sort of particular. For Sartre is alsoof the opinion that consciousness is, if a state of affairs, a very uniquesort of state of affairs. But the remainderof Sartre's claim is cap-tured in the claim that consciousness is a state of affairs involvingsome object of consciousness and nothing else besides. If I have beencorrect in my interpretation so far, it would be impossible to confirmthis interpretation in any very direct way. Sartre, in my view, wasnever clear enough about the distinction between states of affairs andthe particulars they involve to formulate explicitly the view that Iam attributing to him. But I have tried to show how my interpreta-tion is supported by Sartre's perception of some close ontologicalconnection between the problem of negative states of affairs and theproblem of human consciousness. In any case, I offer the interpreta-tion as the only really intelligible way to do justice both to Sartre'sinsistence, in the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, that con-sciousness of an object presupposes that there actually be some ob-ject of consciousness and also to his insistence that consciousness ofan object is distinguishedby nothing from that object. Consciousnessis the fact that there is awareness of objects, and the fact that thereis awareness of objects is a state of affairs involving those objectsand nothing else besides:

[F]or consciousness there is no being outside of that precise obligation to bea revealing intuition of something ... (p. 23).Thus the very meaning of the for-itself is outside in being, but it is throughthe for-itself that the meaning of being appears. This totalization of being addsnothing to being; it is nothing but the manner in which being is revealed(p. 251).Thus knowledge is the world. To use Heidegger's expression, the world and out-side of that-nothing. But this "nothing" is not originally that in which humanreality emerges. This nothing is human reality itself as the radical negation bymeans of which the world is revealed. (p. 251).That Sartre's claim that the being of consciousness is really a

kind of nonbeing is a way of saying that consciousness of objects isa state of affairs involving some object and nothing else besides hasperhaps been what sympathetic commentators have meant to say in


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TwoPROBLEMSFBEING NDNONBEINGN 175SARTRE'SBeing and Nothingness

pointing out that consciousness for Sartre is a sort of "pure inten-tionality"5and nothing else besides. Thus:[I]f for a moment we should try to give consciousness a kind of being whichwould belong to itself alone, we should have a form of nothingness, a puretranslucidity. But precisely because it is pure translucidity, this consciousnessis inevitably intentional, i.e., "pointing towards" that which is beyond con-sciousness . . . It is because consciousness needs its object in order to exist asconsciousness that the being of such an existence is merely the being of the in-tentional object . . .6He calls it a "nothing" because all physical, all psychophysiological, all psychicobjects, all objective truths and values are transcendent to it. There is no long-er an "inner life," and consciousness is wholly a self-transcending, spontaneousactivity that intends a world of meaning and value for itself.7But putting Sartre's Point in the way that I have makes it clearerthan such formulations do just what ontological issues are beingraised by Sartre's claims.8Thus it also provides a better foothold forundertaking any critical assessment of those claims. It is Sartre'sclaim that consciousness is, with respect to its ontological status, avery unique sort of existence. It is a "nothing"in a world in whicheverything else is something (excepting, of course, those "objective"negativities which seem in Sartre's world really to be neither quite

here nor there). But if my suggestions have been correct, then at leasta good part of Sartre's reason for regarding consciousness as uniquein this way lies in a consideration of something which consciousnesshas in common with any other state of affairs. Consciousness lacksidentity with the complete collection of "somethings" which it in-volves in just the same way that any state of affairs lacks identitywith the entities which it involves. The claim that the whole being ofconsciousness consists of a "pure intentionality"runs the risk of ob-scuring this point. It leaves open the possibility that a state of con-sciousness is not a state of affairs at all, but rather some sort of par-

5 For a nonexistentialist defense of the view that "thought" at least involves"pure intentionality" cf. W. J. Ginnane, "Thoughts," Mind, LXIX, July, 1960, pp 372-90.6 Wilfrid Desan, The Tragic Finale (New York: Harper & Row, 1960; reprint ofedition originally published by Harvard University Press in 1954), p. 31.7 James M. Edie, "Sartre as Phenomenologist and as Existential Psychoanalyst,"

in Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (eds.), Phenomenology and Existentialism(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 153.8 Joseph S. Catalano comes a little closer than such formulations by emphasizingthat consciousness involves something that is 'more than the sum total of its parts.'

A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" (New York: Harper &Row, 1974), p. 53. Catalano seems to suggest, however, that the "totality" in questioninvolves consciousness and an object as two distinct parts.


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176 PHILOSOPHYANDPHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCHticular. The claim that some sort of particular is not a something buta "nothing"may indeedbe a claim to a very radical sort of uniquenesson the part of that particular. The same claim about a state of affairsseems just to be a way of acknowledging that it is indeed a state ofaffairs and not any sort of particular at all.One might of course object that the ontological peculiarity ofconsciousness on Sartre's view does not lie simply in the fact thatconsciousness of an object is a state of affairs and not any sort ofparticular; it lies in the fact that consciousness of an object is a stateof affairs involving that object and nothing else besides. This, unfor-tunately, reduces Sartre's claim to a merely quantitative one. It is apeculiarity of any state of affairs that it be something "more"thanthe particulars which it involves. What is allegedly peculiar aboutconsciousness, then, would simply be the capacity of consciousness toinvolve only a single particular. It is difficult to believe that Sartrewas intending to point out such a merely quantitative difference be-tween consciousness and anything else, though I do not deny thatthis is in fact all that he has pointed out. But the difficulty with Sar-tre's claim goes even further than this. For it is just not clear thatconsciousness of an object does provide the only example of a stateof affairs involving a single object. (I take it for granted, for the sakeof sympathetic discussion, that Sartre is right in thinking that con-sciousnss does at least provide such an example.) Consider,for exam-ple, what it is for a particular to be identical with itself. A particular'sidentity with itself seems to be a state of affairs which involves thatparticular.Yet it is not clear what else it might involve over and abovethat particular. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that even"self-identity"on the part of the in-itself is something that arises onSartre's view only with the being of the for-itself:Let us note first that the term in-itself, which we have borrowed from traditionto designate the transcending being, is inaccurate. At the limit of coincidencewith itself, in fact, the self vanishes to give place to identical being. The selfcan not be a property of being-in-itself. By nature it is a reflexive . . . The

self refers, but it refers precisely to the subject. (p. 123).Certain sorts of existential states of affairs might provide furtherexamples of states of affairs involving only a single entity. Consider,for example, the nonbeing of centaurs. This we may say, though Sar-tre perhaps would not, is a state of affairs involving the propertybeing-a-centaur; it consists in the nonexemplification of that pro-perty. But what other entities it needs to involve over and above thatproperty is not at all clear. It is interesting to note that Sartre him-


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self distinguishes such "radical"states of affairs from more concreteones. The absence of a centaur from my office, as opposed to the non-existence of centaurs simpliciter, requires appeal to the for-itself asthe original ground of the negativity which it involves. Sartre grants,at least tentatively though no doubt only rhetorically, that negationsof the former sort might be accounted for without appeal to the pro-jective activities of consciousness (p. 53).

II.Assuming the correctness of the interpretation I have just de-fended, what success can we now have in relating Sartre'sclaim aboutthe nothingness of consciousness to his claim about the nothingnessof persons? It might be tempting to adopt the following line: whenSartre says that a person, though not identical with any possible ob-ject of his consciousness, is nevertheless distinguished from any suchobject by nothing, he just means that a person is distinguished fromany possible object of consciousness through his consciousness ofthat object, which is of course "nothing."This, in turn, could just beSartre'sway of saying that a person's being whatever he is, at least inany distinctively "personal"sense, is always a matter of that person'sconscious choice.9 Thus:

A pederast is not a pederast, since, in his most intimate consciousness, heknows that there is no compulsion for him to be what he is. He is not what heis, for human nature escapes all definition and refuses to see in its act anydestiny whatsoever. 10We often conceive that we have the obligation to make ourselves be what weare called. Thus a waiter, Sartre states, attempts to play the role of a waiter.... But, Sartre notes, the waiter knows that being a waiter is only a role forhim and that his consciousness is not identified with his role.llOn this approach, however, Sartre's claim that a person never "iswhat he is" turns out to be compatible with the very thing Sartre in-tends to deny by this paradoxical assertion, namely that a person iswhat he is in the same way that a nonpersonal object is what it is(p. 102).For the fact that a person's being what he is involves a freeand conscious embarkation upon a certain course of action (freelyplaying a certain role, if one will) is perfectly compatible with the

9 Another interpretation of the claim that a person is distinguished from the ob-jects of his consciousness by his very consciousness of them is that a present stateof consciousness is never its own object. I consider this interpretation at the begin-ning of Section III.10Desan, op. cit., p. 26.11Catalano, op. cit., p. 85.


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178 PHILOSOPHYNDPHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCHfact that certain people are engaged in just such an activity in thevery same way that nonpersonal things are what they are. On an in-terpretation such as the one suggested, then, Sartre would simply bepointing out that predicates like 'is a waiter' and various other dis-tinctively personal predicates can only be analyzed in terms that in-volve a reference to the choice of behaviors. This, of course, is a sig-nificant and controversial claim. But it does nothing at all to showthat the sense in which a person is whatever he might be is differentfrom the sense in which any nonpersonal thing is whatever it mightbe. Sartre, on the other hand, appears to feel that his own view doesconcern the very significance of the copula in assertions about per-sons, and not simply the predicates which enter into such assertions(pp. 103, 168).It might appear that we can do justice to Sartre's claim aboutthe being of persons by taking it in a way exactly parallel to ourinterpretation of his claim about consciousness. We might try to dothis with the aid of Sartre's distinction between the two dimensionsof personal existence, "facticity" and "transcendence." The formerinvolves, most prominently, a person's body and his bodily history.The latter involves a person's projection beyond the bodily deeds andstates of any past moment and toward his own future and the goals interms of which that future is defined for him. These two aspects ofhuman existence 'are and ought to be,' on Sartre's view, 'capable of avalid coordination' (p. 98). The body taken by itself is not strictlyidentical with the person whose body it is, and to take it as suchwould be to confuse that body 'with the idiosyncratic totality ofwhich it is only one of the structures' (p. 103). On the other hand, itis equally a confusion to conclude that, since I am not strictly iden-tical with my body, I must therefore be identical with something otherthan my body in just the same way that the body is at least identicalwith whatever it is (p. 108). This might suggest the following interpre-tation of Sartre's view: personal existence consists in the transcend-ing of a given facticity toward certain goals; this transcending is astate of affairs which involves the facticity in question as its only realconstituent; like any state of affairs, however, it is not identical withthe totality on entities which it involves. The relation, in other words,between consciousness and its object is like that between the existenceof persons and the bodies of those persons. Like the existence of con-sciousness, personal existence is not the same thing as the existenceof bodily facticities of any sort; but there is, in an important sense,nothing which distinguishes it from such facticities.


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Two PROBLEMSOF BEING AND NONBEING IN 179SARTRE'SBeing and Nothingness

The problem with this interpretation is that there is in fact some-thing on Sartre's view which distinguishes, or at least helps to distin-guish, a person from his facticity. This is a person's present con-sciousness: transcendenceis a conscious projection toward goals. Wecannot, unfortunately, appeal at this point to the claim that con-sciousness itself is nothing in order to restore our original interpre-tation. For the claim that consciousness is nothing, as I have argued,just means that the existence of consciousness is a state of affairsinvolving an object of consciousness and nothing else. But the trans-cending consciousness which is a necessary condition for the exis-tence of a person is not a consciousness whose object is the facticityof the person in question. The body is not ordinarily an object ofconsciousness (p. 430). Thus the relationship between a transcendingconsciousness and bodily facticity is not the same as that betweenconsciousness and its object, and it could not be such a parallel thatSartre is intending to express by claiming that a person is in a certainsense nothing. The existence of bodily facticity is one sort of state ofaffairs, and the existence of a consciousness which transcends thatfacticity is a distinct state of affairs (which is not of course to saythat the two are unrelated). Though there may be some point in say-ing that a transcending consciousness is really "nothing,"the pointof saying this lies, as I have argued, wholly in a comparison of atranscending consciousness and the object of that consciousness. Incomparison with the bodily facticity that is being thereby trans-cended, the transcendingconsciousness is indeed something. It is sim-ply a distinct state of affairs. To be sure, Sartre does argue that insome sense a transcending consciousness is not distinct from bodilyfacticity, at least when the latter is understood in an appropriateway: 'Being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be whollyconsciousness; it can not be united with a body' (p. 404). To thinkotherwise is to consider the body only as it is "for others" and not asit is "for itself." It is clear from Sartre's argument, however, that theonly point he is trying to make by means of such a claim is thatthough the body is not ordinarily an object of consciousness, it isnevertheless always "indicated"by those things in the world whichare objects of consciousness. It is indicated, namely, by the fact thatsuch objects are always perceived from some determinate "point ofview" and as "calling for" certain sorts of behaviors as opposed toothers (pp. 428, ff.). This argument should not obscure the fact thatthe existence of a "bodily"consciousness and of a bodily facticity isthe existence of two distinct states of affairs.


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180 PHILOSOPHYNDPHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCHWe remain, then, with what appear to be two necessary conditionsfor the existence of a person: the existence of bodily facticity and the

existence of a consciousness which transcends that facticity. We may,if we like, take the claim that a certain consciousness "transcends"agiven facticity simply as the claim that the objects of that conscious-ness "indicate" he facticity in question. (Those objects are, for exam-ple, perceived from a point of view defining the location of some par-ticular body.) Is it Sartre's view, then, that the existence of a personwith a certain bodily history and a certain present consciousnesssimply consists in the coexistence of certain bodily facts and certainconscious states which "indicate" those facts? Or is there some fur-ther relation involved in our saying that some particular conscious-ness, which may indeed "indicate" a given facticity, actually doestranscend that facticity and thereby constitute the existence of a per-son? Either alternative seems to be ruled out on Sartre's view. Forit is Sartre's view that to identify the existence of a person eitherwith the existence of a certain bodily facticity or with the existence acertain consciousness is tantamount to regarding a person as some-thing that is what it is in just the same way that nonpersons are whatthey are. Both identifications are forms of "bad faith" (pp. 97-9). Butif to regard the existence of a person in either of these ways is mis-takenly to regard it as having an objective being-in-itself, then pre-sumably the same would hold for any attempt to identify a person'sexistence with the mere conjunction of some bodily facticity and aconsciousness which succeeds in "indicating" that facticity. Such aconjunction would simply be a state of affairs involving both of theoriginal states of affairs. The same difficulty clearly holds for thesecond of the alternatives that I mentioned.For if a person's existencesimply consists in some relation obtaining between a certain bodyand a certain bodily consciousness, then once again the existence ofa person would simply consist in the obtaining of some particularstate of affairs.There would, to be sure, be some point on this view in saying thatpersons are "nothing."For none of the elements which constitutes aperson's existence on this view will itself be a person. But this is justto say that the term 'person' does not function as an ordinary refer-ring expression, and the same can clearly be said about a numberof nonpersonal terms. Furthermore, there is also another reason forconcluding that, while this may be a view that is supported by muchof what Sartre says, it is a view which he cannot ultimately maintain.


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The reason is that, as I have argued, states of affairs do not have anyobjective status of their own on Sartre's view. They have a beingwhich is always constituted by the consciousness which apprehendsthem. But insofar as states of affairs derive whatever reality theyhave from the consciousness which apprehendsthem, it is difficult tosee how the existence of a person could consist of a state of affairs inwhich present (and past) bodily behavior is consciously transcendedtoward the future.

III.At this point the objection may once again arise that I am over-estimating the ontological significance of Sartre's claims. Sartre, itmight be said, is not dealing with the question of the being of personssimpliciter. He is concerned only with the being of persons as objectsof awareness. The claim that a person is "nothing"might then justbe Sartre's way of saying something about a person's awareness ofhimself, not a way of saying anything about what a person really isor is not. It might, for example, be a way of saying that a person isalways conscious of a certain lack of identity with the objects of hisconsciousness, whatever those objects might be. We have alreadyseen, of course, that it is impossible to pretend that Sartre refrainsfrom all claims of ontological significance in Being and Nothingness.But it is especially difficult to adopt such an interpretation in thepresent case. For Sartre after all maintains that any attempt to iden-tify an object of consciousness with oneself is a matter of "badfaith,"and bad faith, Sartre clearly states, is a case in which one attempts tohide the truth from himself (p. 89). Thus it is not simply that one isalways conscious of a lack of identity with the objects of his con-sciousness. In addition, the consciousness of this lack of identity iscorrect: one is not identical with any such object. It might also beargued, of course, that when Sartre points out that it is correct todeny one's identity with whatever may be the object of his conscious-ness at some moment,he simply means to point out that in any aware-ness of an object one's consciousness of the object is never itself anobject of consciousness.12 n the first place, however, this is a claimthat Sartre had already made in the Introduction to Being and Noth-ingness without any appeal at all to talk about the "nonbeing"of thefor-itself (pp. 12-13). Furthermore, the claim in question is clearly

12Solomon,op. cit., p. 265,calls this the "innocent" nterpretationof Sartre'sclaim.


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182 PHILOSOPHYNDPHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCHcompatible with a position that Sartre repeatedly denies, namely thata person is whatever he is in just the same way that nonpersons arewhat they are. For the claim that a person is never aware of his pre-sent consciousness as an object of consciousness is obviously com-patible with the claim that a person is presently conscious in justthe same way that various nonpersons are whatever they are at somemoment. Finally, the claim in question does not, by any reasonablestretch of the imagination, imply that a person who takes himself tobe identical with some present object of consciousness is in "badfaith."There is, I think, only one interpretation of Sartre's claim aboutthe nothingness of persons which is compatiblewith the various otherclaims that he makes. This is simply that no proposition which dealswith an object in a distinctively personal way is, for Sartre, capableof being either true or false in the usual sense. Propositions whichdeal with objects as persons presuppose certain truths on Sartre'sview. They presuppose truths about bodily facticities and conscious-nesses which transcend those facticities. When those presuppositionsare mistaken, we might then say that the proposition in question isfalse, but there is no correspondingcriterion for the truth of that pro-position (as opposed to the truth of its presuppositions). Such a pro-position, for Sartre, always expresses something in addition to itsfactual presuppositions. But in an important sense, I shall argue,there is nothing more that it expresses: it expresses no additionalfacts; at most it expresses some present attitude or resolution on thepart of the proposition's utterer.A purely literary confirmation of this view can be found in theplay Dirty Hands."3Hugo's finger pulls a gun's trigger in this play,occasioning the death of Hoederer,an official of the Proletarianpartyto which Hugo belongs. Prior to the moment in which Hoederer iskilled, Hugo had actually planned the death of Hoederer, which heregarded as a politically desirable goal. He had also, prior to thatmoment, at least regarded his own behavior as motivated by thisplan. Hence he regarded his planning to kill Hoederer as a genuineintention to ill Hoederer, and no mere wishing or desiring. But now,once Hoederer is dead by Hugo's hand, Hugo puzzles over the ques-tion of his own responsibility. He wonders whether he has in fact

13 Les Mains Sales (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Quotations are from, and parentheticalreferences to, the translation by Lionel Abel in No Exit and Three Other Plays (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1955).


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performed a murderousact. Orwas the deed rather merely a piece of"pure behavior?"Did I even do it? It wasn't I who killed-it was chance-But me? Where doesthat put me in the thing? It was an assassination without an assassin . . . . Iwonder whether I really killed him at all. (Act VII, pp. 240-241)Yes. I really drew my finger back. Actors do that too, on the stage. Look here:I cock my forefinger, I aim at you. It's the same gesture. Perhaps I wasn't real.Perhaps only the bullet was .... Where is my crime? Does it exist? And yet Ifired. (Act VII, pp. 241-242)Hugo's reflection on all of the facts of the matter gives him no guid-ance. But it is not, he admits, that there is something about thosefacts which he has failed to understand:Rather . . . I understand it too well. It's a door that any key can open. I courdtell myself, if I had a mind to, that I shot him out of political passion .(Act VII, p. 241)It might be thought that Hugo's problem is a purely epistemo-logical one. One might, that is, take Sartre to be raising no more thana question concerning the possibility of one's knowledge of his ownpast deeds. But that Sartre is raising a very different question is evi-dent from the way in which Hugo finally solves his problem. The playcloses with Hugo's acknowledgment that there are in fact no past

deeds which he might either succeed in knowingor fail to know in thepresent:If I openly claim my crime .. . and am willing to pay the necessary price, then[Hoederer] will have the death he deserves .... I have not yet killed Hoederer,Olga. Not yet. But I am going to kill him now, along with myself. (Act VII, pp.247-248)Thus what Hugo acknowledges, at the play's end, is that a decisionabout the occurrence or nonoccurrence of some action is just not atall a decision that some event of a certain peculiar sort has in fact

occurred. It is just one's own present projection toward future be-haviors. In this sense an action has no objective existence apart fromthe "judgments"about it which our present projects express. But onSartre's view, the ascribability of action to a person is a necessarycondition for regardinganything as a person in the first place (p. 613).Being and Nothingness contains a statement of just the same posi-tion about the ontological status of persons:If I say, "Paul is fatigued," one might perhaps argue that the copula has anontological value, one might perhaps want to see there only an indication ofinherence. But when we say "Paul was fatigued," the meaning of the "was"leaps to our eyes: the present Paul is actually reponsible for having had thisfatigue in the past. If he were not sustaining this fatigue with his being, hewould not even have forgotten that state; there would be rather a "no-longer-being" strictly identical with a "not-being." The fatigue would be lost. (p. 168)


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184 PHILOSOPHYANDPHENOMENOLOGICALESEARCHIt might be tempting to read in this passage only a claim much milderthan the one I am attributing to Sartre. One might, for example, takeSartre merely to be claiming that the truth of statements about thepast can never provide an objective resolution of questions aboutpresent existence. Thus, similarly, the point of Dirty Hands wouldreduce to Hugo's realization that his present political commitmentwill never be determined by settling whether his deeds have reallybeen politically motivated ones. But Sartre makes it clear that hisclaims are much stronger than this. For he tells us explicitly, in thepassage just quoted, that he is concerned not merely with the bearingof past deeds on present existence, but also with the very meaning ofthe claim that some deed has in fact occurred. Apart from presentprojects of the appropriate sort, he says, there is just no such thingas Paul'shaving been fatigued at some point in the past. By that veryfact, of course, it also follows that there is no point at which Paulmight have said that he is fatigued, at least in any sense of 'is' of thesort employed when we make a judgment about what some non-person is (p. 172), .e., when we try to express the "ontologicalvalue"of "inherence"by such a judgment.

The force of the point may be more evident when we contrastwhat Sartre says about the ontological significance of statementsabout persons with what he says about the significance of statementsabout bodily facticity and consciousness. Not only statements aboutbodily facticities, but also statements about past consciousness, per-form, on Sartre's view, an ordinary fact-asserting function. In a cer-tain sense, indeed, both assert a "being-in-itself":The grief which we had-although fixed in the past-does not cease to presentthe meaning of a for-itself, and yet it exists in itself with the silent fixity of thegrief of another, of the grief of a statue . . . . The past psychic first is; andthen it is for itself-just as Pierre is blond, as that tree is an oak. (p. 174)Here, Sartre is granting,even a past mode of being-for-itself, a paststate of consciousness, can be regarded as possessing a being-in-itself of sorts. This, as I see it, can only be Sartre's admission that astate of consciousness is, though a mode of subjectivity, also an ob-jective fact: it is a state of affairs which actually obtains or obtainedat some moment of time. To be sure, Sartre restricts this admissionto the case of either past consciousness or the consciousness of others.

But this, clearly, is simply because Sartre, like Wittgenstein, deniesthat one's own "ascription"of present consciousness to himself, asfor example when I tell you that "I am in pain," is to be regardedas a way of stating some fact about oneself. Unlike Wittgenstein, of


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course, it is not Sartre's view that such a self-ascription is merely asubstitute form of pain-behavior.14 It is rather an expression of,though not an assertion about, some altered state of awareness of theworld (pp. 437-8). But the point remains that Sartre's view aboutfirst-personal ascriptions of conscious states is perfectly compatiblewith the view that conscious states have an objectively present exis-tence. If his claim were not compatible with this view, then he couldnever consistently maintain, as he does, that assertions about the pastexistence of conscious states may have an objective truth value.It is clear, then, that Sartre draws a very sharp distinction be-tween assertions about the mere existence of conscious states (andbodily facticities) and statements which ascribe such states to actualpersons. That there is at this moment a state of consciousness trans-cending, toward certain goals, a given bodily facticity is a state ofaffairs which either does or does not obtain at this moment. The ob-taining of such a state of affairs, Sartre takes pains to insist, is apresupposition of any talk about persons qua persons. But any talkof the latter sort-for example, the ascription of a consciousness

transcending some body to a person whose body that actually is-does not perform the function of affirming a state of affairs whicheither does or does not obtain at some moment. What it expresses,over and above the sorts of "presuppositions" I have mentioned, isjust yet another case of conscious transcendence toward the future.This, I suggest, is the only interpretation which does justice to Sar-tre's claim that a person never is anything in the way that nonpersonsare something, even though not-being anything in this way is also away of not-being something that one "is": human reality is a 'beingwhich is what it is not and which is not what it is' (p. 100). A person,on this view, never is what he is in that no assertion about a person(qua person) is the affirmation of a state of affairs which either doesor does not obtain. In this sense a person is "nothing." But a person is,nonetheless, also in a sense "something." He is something at least inthe sense that statements about persons presuppose certain affirma-tions of states of affairs which either do or do not obtain.

14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., tr. by G. E. M. Ans-combe (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958), par. 244: 'The verbal expressionof pain replaces crying.'


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186 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICALRESEARCHIV.If I have been correct in interpreting Sartre's view in Being and

Nothingness, then Sartre's claim that the being of the "for-itself" isreally a kind of nonbeing actually amounts to two radically differentsorts of claims. First, the claim that the being of consciousness isreally a kind of nonbeing is just the claim that a state of conscious-ness is a state of affairs involving an object of consciousness andnothing else besides. I have tried to show that Sartre's failure to putthe point in just this way rests on his own unclarity concerning theontological problems raised by any distinction between states of af-fairs and the particulars which they involve. I also tried to show that,while a number of commentators may well have intended such aninterpretation of Sartre's view, their failure to put it in just this wayobscures the issues which are raised by Sartre's claim that the onto-logical status of the for-itself is unique. I argued, further, that theproblem of the being of persons (qua persons) in Being and Nothing-ness differs from the problem of the being of consciousness in a waynot generally recognized by commentators. That the being of con-sciousness is a kind of nonbeing on Sartre's view is compatible withregarding the existence of consciousness as an objective fact thoughnot necessarily a fact which is an object of consciousness). But theexistence of persons (qua persons) on Sartre's view is not an objec-tive fact. Both of Sartre's claims are significant ontological claimswhich might well be put by saying that the being of the for-itself isreally a kind of nonbeing. They are not, as is often thought, claims ofa far less significant sort garbed in an obscure language. The claimsare, nonetheless, significantly different from one another in a way notgenerally recognized by commentators and, perhaps, by Sartre him-self. RICHARDE. AQUILA.THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE.

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Aquila - Two Problems of Being and Nonbeing in Sartre's