Sartre's Nothingness

"Nothingness can be nihilated only on the foundation of being; if nothingness can be given, it is neither before or after being, nor in a general way outside of being.  Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm."  Jean Paul Sartre

But what is nothingness?  It seems like a simple enough question to answer.  It is that which is not.  It is the absence of something...anything.  But what are we to make of Sartre's statement that "nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being"?  In a reality defined essentially by the fact that it exists, in a universe filled completely with Being, where does non-existence come in to play?  How can there be such a thing as nothing?  Being simply is what is.  Unto itself it suffers no lack or excess of anything.  It is the fullness of everything.  It is complete.  It is.  What possible commerce could it have with nothingness?

Yet, we're all quite familiar with the concept.  Let's say you're sitting around in your living room with a spouse or a friend, and at some point this person insists that they heard a knock at the door.  You get up to check, and then you come back and tell them, "there was nothing there" or maybe "there was no one there."  You had opened the door and found this absence of a person, this nothingness on your doorstep.  You shrug, and then go back to reading your book without giving it a second thought.  Well, it's precisely this sort of commonplace occurrence that Sartre asks us to stop and give some fresh consideration to.  

Now the first thing to notice here is that this nothingness doesn't make its appearance until you open the door.  Prior to that there is only being beyond the door...the porch, the steps, the front walk, the whole wide world out there.  It is only when you open the door expecting to find someone there, that you in fact find no one.  Those few cubic feet of space above your doorstep don't acquire meaning as an absence of a person until you open the door and give them that meaning.

Sartre illustrates this point time and again with the idea of a wallet.  Let's say my wallet is in my pocket right now and it has thirteen dollars in it.  The wallet, the money, it is what is.  The thirteen dollars is not too much or too little.  It simply exists.  But then I pull the wallet out, and I could have sworn I had fifteen dollars, or I had hoped to find fifteen dollars, or maybe I just needed fifteen dollars.  I have now discovered the absence of these two dollars.  Either from want or expectation, my wallet, which only a moment ago was absolutely complete in its being, is now short two dollars.

The conclusion is obvious.  It is through us, through our perceptions, that nothingness comes about.  It is because we were looking for someone beyond the door, that we found no one.  It is because I was looking for fifteen dollars in the wallet, that I found the actual amount come up short.  At this point, though, Sartre cautions us not to just dismiss nothingness as a quality of our judgement, a simple disparity between reality and our expectations of it.  He insists that this nothingness is a fact.  If we consider a few other scenarios concerning our door, perhaps we'll see what he means.

Let's say we answer the door, and we actually do find someone on the other side.  Our perception of the world beyond the door converges on this person.  They are the figure to which everything else becomes the ground.  They are the focal point of our attention.  This attention may drift in tangents, something they're carrying in their hand, their clothes, their car in the driveway, or any number of things depending on the person we find.  But these tangents connect and lead back to the person.  We perceive the world beyond the door as though it were arranged around this person.

Now, let's say we were to go to our front door now and just open it and look out.  We're not opening it to see if someone is there.  We're not expecting to find anyone.  We're just randomly looking out, and any number of things could grab our attention.  We could watch a bird settling on the telephone line with a slight flutter.  Or our attention could drift to the clouds or the traffic passing along the street in front of the house, even the refreshing breeze that sweeps in.  Our attention draws these things into focus for a moment, and then lets them go as it moves on.  We're just gazing serenely out the door, and no specific thing arrests our attention, demanding that our awareness of the world converges on that point.  

But when we return to our original scenario, where we opened the door and found no one, we find that something else happens.  We again find the same converging phenomenon at work that we found when we were greeted by a visitor, but we find now that our perception of the world has arranged itself around this void, this nothingness where we expected to find someone.  This non-existent shadow of a person is the figure to which everything else becomes the ground.  This nothingness pursues us wherever we look.  We think maybe someone is hiding in a bush, playing a prank.  We see nothing there.  The world converges around this empty space we discover behind the bush.  In short, we perceive this nothingness; we experience it.  If we were in a poetic mood we could return to the person in the living room and inform them, "I encountered nothingness on our doorstep.  I found nothingness haunting me wherever I looked in the world, and before this nothingness I saw the world itself fade away before my very eyes."

So we see that while nothingness originates with us, and is sustained by our perception, it is still a very real experience.  When you say, "There was no one there", you are speaking a clear and undeniable fact.  There really was no one on your doorstep.  And yet, there is still the temptation to dismiss this as simply failed expectations.  The void was only on your doorstep because you posed the possibility that you might find someone when you opened the door.  Well, this is precisely where Sartre's analysis of consciousness comes into play.

You'll recall that we established that consciousness was always removed from the focus of its awareness, as a subject to an object.  This perpetual withdraw from being creates a certain ...decompression of being, which allows us to slip this nothingness between us and being.  In the next post on this matter, we'll explore this further, and see how this ability of the mind to deviate from Being is a crucial part of the nature and function of consciousness, as well as a crucial part of our free will.