University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2004 Sartre and the Nothingness of Consciousness Matthew Dale Massey University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Massey, Matthew Dale, "Sartre and the Nothingness of Consciousness. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2004. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2284 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Matthew Dale Massey entitled "Sartre and the Nothingness of Consciousness." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Philosophy. Richard E. Aquila, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John Nolt, James Bennett, Les Essif Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Matthew Dale Massey entitled “Sartre and the Nothingness of Consciousness.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Philosophy. Richard E. Aquila Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John Nolt James Bennett Les Essif Accepted for the Council: Anne Mayhew Vice Chancellor and Dean of Graduate Studies (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) SARTRE AND THE NOTHINGNESS OF CONSCIOUSNESS A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Matthew Dale Massey December 2004 ABSTRACT Sartre’s claim in Being and Nothingness that consciousness is nothingness is typically understood as meaning either that consciousness is not itself, that it is not its objects, that it is not its past, or that it is some sort of state of affairs. Although these interpretations of Sartre are often presented independently of each other, I argue that one can combine several of them in order to arrive at the best understanding of Sartre’s treatment of consciousness. Such an understanding treats consciousness as the state of affairs that is its facticity transcending itself toward its objects. One could also combine the four typical interpretations of Sartre so that consciousness for him is a different state of affairs, specifically the state of affairs that is the appearance of objects along with their various indications. This second way of understanding Sartre’s treatment of consciousness seems inferior to the first way, though, since the former can account for what seemingly motivates the latter. In order to do so, one must utilize certain aspects of Husserl’s description of consciousness, a description that Sartre actually rejects. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Phenomenological Ontology and Metaphysics 9 Chapter Two: Consciousness as Not Itself 53 Chapter Three: Consciousness as Not Its Object 79 Chapter Four: Consciousness as Not Its Past 109 Chapter Five: Consciousness as a State of Affairs 143 Conclusion 175 References 180 Vita 184 iii INTRODUCTION In Being and Nothingness, Sartre claims that consciousness is nothingness. Some examples of this claim are the following: Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being- that is, precisely consciousness or for-itself. It is an absolute event which comes to being by means of being and which, without having being, is perpetually sustained by being.1 The for-itself in its being is failure because it is the foundation only of itself as nothingness.2 The For-itself can never be its Future except problematically, for it is separated from it by a Nothingness which it is.3 The For-itself is nothing more than this translucent Nothingness which is the negation of the thing perceived....Thus in the perception of the object the For-itself acknowledges itself to itself as not being the object, while in the unveiling of the Past, the For-itself acknowledges itself as being the Past and is separated from it only by its nature as For-itself, which can be nothing.4 But if the For-itself is to be the nothingness whereby ‘there is’ being, then being can exist originally only as totality.5 ...in order for its determination as the nothingness of being to be full, the for-itself must realize itself as a certain unique manner of not being this being.6 There are many possible interpretations of what he means by the nothingness of consciousness and of what leads him to say that, but four interpretations seem most supported by the text and most frequently emphasized by commentators. 1Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press, New York, 1956, p. 126. 2Ibid, p. 139. 3Ibid, p. 186. 4Ibid, p. 200. 5Ibid, p. 251. 6Ibid,p. 260. 1 One of those interpretations centers on Sartre's claim that consciousness is not itself, a second one on his claim that it is not its object, a third one on his treatment of it as not its past, and a fourth one on Sartre’s description of consciousness in a manner that can be put using such general ontological terms as ‘relation,’ ‘state of affairs,’ and ‘event.’ It should be noted that the first three interpretations explain the nothingness of consciousness by means of it not being something while the fourth one explains it in terms of what it is. The type of thing that the fourth interpretation treats consciousness as being, then, must be such that it somehow is nothing. It should also be noted that the first of these propositions- that consciousness is not itself- is of course very different from the other three. For one thing, presumably just about everyone agrees that consciousness-or, for that matter, anything at all-is not (except in special cases) its own object and not its own past, and most would at least be open to the suggestion that consciousness is an event or a relation, whereas hardly anybody is inclined to agree that consciousness-or, for that matter, anything at all-is not itself. Secondly, while Sartre himself emphasizes the connection, it is hardly clear why anyone should agree that, just because consciousness is not its past, or not its object, or is a state of affairs, it is therefore nothingness. The question then naturally arises whether either Sartre's insistence that consciousness is 'not itself' or his insistence that it is 'nothingness,' or both, are not just melodramatic ways of saying something to which one might more readily agree. For instance, one might take the claim that consciousness is not its past simply to mean that 2 consciousness is free and not determined by anything in the past. Such a reading of Sartre is found in the following; A pederast is not a pederast, since, in his most intimate consciousness, he knows that there is no compulsion for him to be what he is. He is not what he is, for human nature escapes all definition and refuses to see in its act any destiny whatsoever.7 Although an assertion of such freedom is hardly non-controversial, equating such freedom with consciousness not being itself or with it being nothingness would surely be melodramatic. But, alternatively, perhaps one should rather suppose that Sartre draws the connections that he does precisely because he means to assert two additional claims which are neither melodramatic nor ones with which many would be inclined to agree, namely, that consciousness is in some sense its object, and is its past, in addition to not being them. As already noted, each of the four previously-mentioned interpretations of Sartre’s treatment of consciousness as nothingness has support from commentators. One can find acceptance of the first interpretation, that the nothingness of consciousness signifies that consciousness is not itself, in the following passage by Klaus Hartmann: Consciousness is appearance-to-self, presence-to-self…Sartre’s meaning is expressed once more in a pictorial account, in which presence-to-self is interpreted as a being with a ‘fissure’…What is meant…is a fissure within consciousness…, a fissure within a unity. What separates is an ‘ideal distance,’ a ‘nothing’… Nothingness regarded as a fissure is, first, separation-a relationship of otherness between things. The separated entities, however, must make up a unity if consciousness can be presupposed as a unity of immanence. The separated entities are not each the "other" of the other, their relationship is not one of otherness, because the other 7 Wilfrid Desan, The Tragic Finale, Harper and Row, New York, 1960, p. 26. 3 maintains an identity with the one. Thus, this unity is, by its very form, a whole negating something which is no Other for it.8 It seems clear that the nothingness of consciousness is being taken here as its not being the very thing it is identical with-itself. Some commentators have taken a more minimalist approach to the claim that consciousness is not itself, treating that claim as simply making the epistemological point that consciousness is necessarily aware of not being whatever it is conscious of. This epistemological take on Sartre would entail that consciousness ‘is not’ itself, since, as we shall see in Chapter Two, consciousness is always necessarily consciousness of itself.