We have just noted how in part two the notebook addresses the issue
of contingency that had held Sartre’s interest since high school. In part
one, theCarnetdoes so with three consecutive claims that are more
stated than argued and probably served as aides-memoire for the young
teacher. First, it urges against Spinoza that “one can sense (sentir)
contingency as the stuff of our thoughts just where [Spinoza] senses
necessity.” In other words, we have a pervasive experience of contin-
gency which will surface in Roquentin’s feeling of “nausea” at the
gratuitous being of the tree root in the novel by that name. Once Sartre
is armed with Husserlian “intentionality,” it will be difficult to dismiss
this experience as a purely psychologicalErlebnis. Henceforth, it will
remain a signature feature of what will be called “existentialist” thought.
A syllogism follows: “If something (abstractly) can be in a contingent
manner, then everything is able to be in a contingent manner. But this
world is in a contingent manner. Therefore...” This is an inversion of
the traditional argument from contingency to necessity, namely, that if
anything is contingent, something must be necessary because if every-
thing were contingent, nothing would exist at all. Sartre is echoing
Russell’s witty riposte to the metaphysical question posed by Aquinas,
Leibniz and Heidegger, each in his own way, “Why is there anything at
all rather than nothing?” with the rather cavalier, “Why not?” Sartre will
address this metaphysical issue inBeing and Nothingness. Unlike Russell,
though he agrees that the question is unanswerable, Sartre considers it
meaningful. Indeed, it is the metaphysical distillation of the experience
of contingency that focused Sartre’s thought for most of his life.
Last comes the quasi argument: “Anything could be otherwise. But
nature does not vary and always returns to the same forms. Moreover,
there are no unrealized possibles (even less so are there compossibles [as
Leibniz insisted]) without a consciousness to think them. In effect, 1 st,
they do not have existence; 2 nd, they do not have being because only
consciousness gives being” (ESviii: 19 ). Already, Sartre seems to be
distinguishing “being” (which he seems to equate with Descartes’s
“formal essence”) from “existence” (which is characteristic of conscious-
ness or “Spirit” or, later, “being-for-itself ”).^15 This critique of
(^15) In part two Sartre explicitly distinguishes existence from being, with the terse remark that
“what is does not exist. For example, an idea” and then adds Descartes’s famous distinction
between formal and objective essence (which the latter introduces to warrant his
A lost treasure 55