“Part I: The Problem of Nothingness”In hisWar DiariesSartre had sketched the basic theme of the previous
section and of the present one when he wrote:
Anguish at Nothingness, with Heidegger? Dread of freedom with Kierkegaard?
In my view it’s one and the same thing, for freedom is the apparition of Nothingness
in the world...
So anguish is indeed the experience of Nothingness, hence it isn’t a psychological
phenomenon. It’s an existential structure of human reality, it’s simply freedom
becoming conscious of itself as being its own nothingness...Thus the existential
grasping of our facticity is Nausea, and the existential apprehension of our freedom
is Anguish.
(WD 132 – 133 )
If being-in-itself is inert, consciousness is spontaneous. In fact, this is
the profound and perduring “dualism” in Sartre’s ontology, continuing
into theCritique. But we have seen that being-for itself is intentional
and this “othering” relation to the in-itself is best experienced by the
questioning attitude, especially, as Heidegger explained inBeing and
Time, by the possibility it invites of a negative response. The negative is
not merely a function of our acts of judging as philosophy has trad-
itionally argued, but nonbeing surfaces as a new component of the real
(much as Aristotle’s “possibility” did in his response to Parmenides).^39
“The not, as an abrupt intuitive discovery, appears as consciousness
(of being), consciousness of thenot...The necessary condition for
our saying ‘not’ is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and
outside of us, that nothingness (le Ne ́ant) haunt being” (BN 11 ). The
negative judgment is not the source of the nothingness that we experi-
ence. Neither could it arise from the “plenum” that is being-in-itself.
On the contrary, Sartre insists, the source from which Nothingness
comes into the world must be its own Nothingness, namely the human
being. And what must man be in his being that nothingness may
Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-39 itself is de trop for eternity” (BNlxvi).
Between being and non-being there is no middle ground (Parmenides) but between being-
in-act and non-being there is being-in-potency. For Sartre, sinceThe Imaginary, conscious-
ness has come to play that role – in fact imaging consciousness in that earlier work – has been
the locus of negativity, possibility and lack.
182 The war years, 1939–1944