2. Reconsidering the transcendental

Before considering Sartre's account of nothingness and ‘the not’ in Being and Nothingness, it is worth examining Sartre's earlier discussion of transcendentality in his critique of Husserlian phenomenology in his 1936 essay The Transcendence of the Ego, published seven years before Being and Nothingness.Footnote ¹¹ Contrary to Husserl's postulation of a transcendental I which unifies and personalises conscious experience, in this early essay Sartre (Reference Sartre, Williams and Kirkpatrick1972, p. 38) argues that ‘phenomenology does not need to appeal to any such unifying and individualizing I’ precisely because ‘consciousness is defined by intentionality’. For Sartre (Reference Sartre, Williams and Kirkpatrick1972, p. 37), the very fact that the transcendental structure of consciousness is defined by intentionality means that there cannot be a ‘transcendental I’ or inner self that sits ‘behind each consciousness [as] a necessary structure of consciousness’. Following Husserl's axiom that ‘all consciousness is consciousness of something’, Sartre (Reference Sartre, Williams and Kirkpatrick1972, p. 41) argues that transcendental consciousness is only consciousness by virtue of it being conscious of something which transcends consciousness itself: ‘consciousness is not for itself its own object. Its object is by nature outside of it’.

Thus, if consciousness is conscious of an ‘I’ (e.g., when a conscious being consciously says ‘I think’), such an ‘I’ would by definition not be an ‘I’ that is transcendental. If a conscious being is conscious of an ‘I’, this ‘I’ would by definition be transcendent and not transcendental, it would be an object which transcends the consciousness of the conscious being – hence Sartre titles his essay The Transcendence of the Ego. For Sartre (Reference Sartre, Williams and Kirkpatrick1972, pp. 36, 41), transcendental consciousness is properly transcendental and conscious if and only if it is ‘without an I’: There is no room for an ‘I’ in consciousness. Anticipating his later characterisation of consciousness as ‘a total void (since the entire world is outside it)’ in Being and Nothingness (BN, p. 16/12/23; cf. BN, p. 9/7/17), Sartre writes in the conclusion of The Transcendence of the Ego:

This characterisation of the transcendental as a universal structure applicable to ‘everything’ is one that very much echoes the pre-Kantian conception of transcendentals as universal properties of everything in medieval metaphysics: Indeed, as we shall further see below, there are remarkable parallels between Sartre's account of the ‘not’ (non) and nothing(ness) (néant) in Being and Nothingness and the pre-modern notion of transcendentality in the scholastic account of the divine names of the one, the true, and the good.Footnote ¹²

While there are some differences in his later understanding of transcendental subjectivity, Sartre still conceives of transcendentality in terms of nothing(ness) in Being and Nothingness (BN, pp. 159–162/127–129/139–141, 325/259/264; see also Gardner, Reference Gardner2009, pp. 14–16, 90, 96, 99, 134–135). As its subtitle indicates, Being and Nothingness is not simply concerned with the transcendental structure of intentionality and consciousness: It is An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology that is concerned with both phenomenology and ontology – with both consciousness and being. Being and Nothingness, as Jonathan Webber (Reference Webber and Zahavi2018, pp. 295–296) describes it, ‘concerns the ontological structure of reality itself as well as the ontological structure of our consciousness of reality’, a work in which Sartre ‘turn[s] his philosophical attention from the structures of experience to the structures of reality itself’.Footnote ¹³ As such, Being and Nothingness may be regarded as a speculative philosophical treatise which presents an account of the ‘transcendental’ not just in the Kantian sense of being the conditions for subjective cognition or conscious experience – what Sartre calls the ‘phenomenon of knowledge’ (phénomène de connaissance), but also in the pre-Kantian sense of being the universal properties that can be predicated of all being – something very much similar to what Sartre calls ‘the structure of being’ (la structure de l’être) that is the focus of Being and Nothingness (see BN, p. 17/13/23). ‘Sartre's claim in Being and Nothingness is, therefore,’ as Sebastian Gardner (Reference Gardner and Webber2011, p. 59) notes, ‘that transcendental conditions must be construed ontologically’.

As opposed to Kant's ‘modern’ account of the transcendental in the first Critique which is ‘occupied not so much with objects as with our mode of knowledge of objects’, pre-modern scholastic metaphysics (what Kant called the ‘transcendental philosophy of the ancients’) conceived of ‘transcendentals’ as the essential properties of things themselves (Kant, Reference Kant and Smith1929, p. 59 [B25], emphasis added). As Kant notes in the first Critique, this ‘older’ transcendental philosophy is most famously expounded in the scholastic proposition ‘quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum’ – ‘every being is one, true, good’ (Kant, Reference Kant and Smith1929, p. 118 [B113]). According to this medieval thesis, the terms of oneness, truth, and goodness are ‘transcendentals’ (transcendentalia), which are ‘common notions’ (communissima) that are universal properties of all things: They are called ‘transcendentals’ because they ‘transcend’ the Aristotelian categories in terms of their universal applicability. Insofar as ‘every being is one, true, good’, the notions of ‘oneness’, ‘truth’, and ‘goodness’ are said to be coextensive with ‘being’.Footnote ¹⁴

Unlike other predicates or adjectives such as ‘happy’, ‘blue’ or ‘runny’, each and every being can be predicated with ‘one’, ‘true’, and ‘good’. While it would be odd to say that a chair is ‘happy’, that a handshake is ‘blue’, or that a sentence is ‘runny’, all of these things could be predicated with the scholastic transcendentals. Everything can be said to be one insofar as they are a thing: every thing is one thing or indeed a unit with some level of unity or oneness (every chair is one chair, every handshake is one handshake, every sentence is one sentence). In a similar way, according to the scholastic medieval outlook, even if things are not fully or ‘actually’ good, everything has the potency to be good. Thus, everything can be predicated with ‘goodness’ (‘that is a good chair’, ‘that is a good sentence’, “there is a good handshake”). Likewise, all things can be said to be ‘true’ – or, so to speak, ‘truthful’ (‘that is a true chair’, ‘a true sentence’, ‘a true handshake’): There is some level of truth in all things insofar as they (‘truly’) exist and are intelligible – that they contain some sense of ‘truth’.

According to this scholastic outlook, insofar as oneness, truth and goodness are coextensive with being, there is a convertibility between these transcendental common terms. For instance, we can say that the true friend is also the good friend, and a good chair or a true chair would be a chair – one chair – that is whole and complete (as opposed to being incomplete, broken or indeed fragmented – not one). For the scholastics, this convertibility of the transcendentals is ultimately rooted and grounded in God: For God is supremely one, true, and good. God is the transcendent perfection and exemplary definition of oneness, truth, and goodness – the measure by which we measure the oneness, truth, and goodness of all created things: For scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and his teacher Albert the Great, creatures and created things can be said to be one, true, or good only by virtue of their participation in God's divine perfections – the so-called ‘divine names’ – of Oneness, Truth, and Goodness (Aertsen, Reference Aertsen2012, pp. 674–675; see also Aertsen, Reference Aertsen1996).Footnote ¹⁵

As opposed to this scholastic theological outlook which saw God's presence everywhere in the reflection of the transcendental properties of all things, Sartre was famously an avowed atheist, in his own words, someone with ‘a phobia about God who saw his absence everywhere’ (Sartre, Reference Sartre1967, p. 62). Indeed, in Being and Nothingness – Sartre's self-declared attempt to develop a ‘truly atheist philosophy’ – we can find something akin to a direct opposite of scholastic theology: Instead of reflecting the divine perfections of oneness, truth, and goodness, in Sartre's ontology all things signify the omni-absence of God (Beauvoir and Sartre, Reference de Beauvoir, Sartre and O'Brian1985, p. 436, see also pp. 437–438). As we shall see in the following sections, the traditional divine names of God as the one, the true, the good are replaced by nothingness in Sartre's atheistic ontological outlook: Whereas scholastic metaphysics saw God as the transcendent source of the oneness, truth, and goodness we find in the material world, ‘nothingness’ is defined as ‘the origin and foundation’ of the ‘not’ (non) which Sartre postulates as a universal predicate or even a universal condition of all determinate being.Footnote ¹⁶

3. Determination as negation

Alluding repeatedly to what Hegel (Reference Hegel and Miller1969, p. 113) called the ‘infinitely important’ proposition of Spinoza ‘omnis determinatio est negatio’ (‘all determination is negation’), in Being and Nothingness we find Sartre attributing a universal – or even ‘transcendental’ – predication of the ‘not’ or ‘nothingness’ to all things as determinate beings (BN, pp. 48/38/49, 261–262/208/221, 572/458/480; cf. Gardner, Reference Gardner2009, p. 63). As Sartre writes in his section on ‘Determination as Negation’ in Being and Nothingness:

What makes a being a determinate being – what makes it this rather than that or those – is negation.Footnote ¹⁷ Insofar as every concrete particular thing is not the abstract totality of all things (what Sartre calls ‘the ground of the world’ here) and that all things are determinate or indeed determinable – that each thing is intelligible as a potential ‘this’ as opposed to an indeterminate ‘undifferentiated ground of being’ (BN, p. 258/205/218), every thing can be predicated with the ‘not’: Every thing is not everything.Footnote ¹⁸ Every thing that can be determined as a this rather than a that (‘it is this and not that’) – or indeed as a this rather than the whole world (‘it is this and not everything’) – can be universally predicated with a ‘not’.Footnote ¹⁹

This predication of ‘not’ to things is precisely something we can find in the famous café scene in Being and Nothingness, where Sartre speaks of an ‘intuitive discovery’ of ‘the not’ (le non).Footnote ²⁰ To quote Sartre's observation of Pierre's absence from their scheduled appointment at some length:

The absence or ‘not’ of Pierre gives rise to the café observer's awareness of the ‘are not’ of the various elements in the café: the persons and their faces ‘are not’ Pierre, the table is not Pierre, the chair is not Pierre, and indeed the café itself is also not Pierre.Footnote ²¹ For Sartre, Pierre's absence from the café is not a simple negation: It is not a subjective determination of a ‘this’ or ‘that’ but ‘an objective fact and not a thought’ (BN, p. 40/33/43). Pierre's absence in the café is one which brings to our attention not only the subjective fact that the various entities in the café are not Pierre (as perceived by the observing subject), but also the objective fact that all determinate beings can be predicated with the not (non) insofar as they are not the abstract indeterminate totality of all things.Footnote ²²

Inasmuch as Pierre's phenomenological non-being highlights the ontological condition of determination as negation, for Sartre it is nothing less than a manifestation of nothingness as ‘a structure of reality, the origin and foundation of negation’: Just as Pierre's non-being in the café is in some sense the ‘origin’ of the observer's awareness and attribution of the ‘not’ to various beings in the café, ‘nothingness’ is ontologically speaking ‘the origin and foundation of negation’ which enables consciousness to apprehend and experience things as determinate beings – as opposed to an undifferentiated ground of indeterminate being (BN, p. 38/31/41). As Joseph Catalano (Reference Catalano1985, p. 13) writes in his commentary on Being and Nothingness: ‘Only nothingness, for Sartre, can be perfectly clear and perfectly reveal reality’.

To the extent that negation is understood ‘not as one thing among other things but as the rubric of a category that governs the organisation and division of great masses of being into things’, it may be said that for Sartre all determination – or even all ‘meaning’ – is predicated, conditioned and made possible by negation as a manifestation of nothingness (BN, p. 60/48/59, translation modified). Not unlike how transcendental perfections such as ‘oneness’, ‘truth’, and ‘goodness’ are not ‘things among things’ but overarching universal properties which structure all existent things in scholastic metaphysics, Sartre's ‘nothingness’ is a ‘rubric of a category’ which – transcendentally – ‘governs the organisation’ of all things: Just as all things may be predicated as ‘one’, ‘true’, or ‘good’ according to medieval scholasticism, for Sartre all determinate beings can be predicated as ‘not’ insofar as they are not everything.Footnote ²³ But whereas the scholastic transcendentals refer and point back to God as the source of the oneness, truth, and goodness that is found in all being, Sartre's universal predicate of the ‘not’ is one which ‘refers back to’ (renvoyé) the ‘nothingness, as a structure of reality, the original and foundation of [all] negation’ (BN, p. 38/31/41).Footnote ²⁴

4. The ontological proof of God's non-being

The way in which nothingness constitutes ‘a structure of reality’ is closely related to the premises Sartre lays out in his ‘ontological proof’ presented in the introduction to Being and Nothingness: ‘Consciousness is consciousness of something… consciousness arises oriented towards a being that it is not. Let us call this the ontological proof’ (BN, p. 22/17/28, translation modified). Echoing his earlier argument against Husserl that the ego is not identical to transcendental consciousness as the ego is a transcendent being which we can be conscious of, in Being and Nothingness Sartre insists that insofar as a consciousness is conscious of some being, that being is by definition not the said consciousness (BN, p. 27/21/32).

As such, there is a negative ontological relation between consciousness (what Sartre calls the ‘for-itself’) and the thing which it is conscious of (the ‘in-itself’):

For Sartre, this ‘original’ negative relation between the in-itself and for-itself implies that the existence of some conscious being (the for-itself) logically entails that there is some existent being which it is conscious of – a transcendent being that is not consciousness (the in-itself) (see BN, pp. 20–23/16–18/26–29). Although it is debateable whether such a line of argument really constitutes an ‘ontological proof’ for the existence of the in-itself, one thing is clear: Sartre's ‘ontological proof’ is deliberately named as a subversion of the ‘ontological’ arguments for the existence of God as found in Anselm and Descartes (see BN, p. 7/6/16).

Indeed, Sartre's ‘ontological proof’ may be said to be nothing less than an atheistic argument against the existence of God (see Beauvoir and Sartre, Reference de Beauvoir, Sartre and O'Brian1985, p. 437; see also Gellman, Reference Gellman2009, p. 132; cf. Kirkpatrick, Reference Kirkpatrick2013, p. 162). As we have just seen, at the heart of Sartre's ‘ontological proof’ is the negative relation between the for-itself and the in-itself.Footnote ²⁵ The in-itself is by definition not the for-itself, the two ontological categories are strictly mutually exclusive: there cannot be a being that is both in-itself and for-itself – what Sartre calls an ‘in-itself-for-itself, i.e. an in-itself that would be its own foundation in relation to itself’ (BN, p. 480/384/402). To quote a well-known passage from Being and Nothingness:

The ‘in-itself-for-itself’ is regarded by Sartre as the ‘ideal of the for-itself’ because it is within the intentional character of consciousness for-itself to wish to fully grasp and comprehend the in-itself which it is not.

However, human consciousness's wish to fully grasp and comprehend being in-itself and ‘to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-for-itself’ – to transform oneself into what Sartre calls ‘God’ – is inherently futile: Such a wish to become God is, in Sartre's famous words, ‘a useless passion’ (BN, p. 797/636/662). As we have seen, according to the original negative ontological relation on which Sartre bases his ontological proof, it is impossible to attain a complete unity or coincidence of the for-itself and in-itself: if the for-itself could fully grasps the in-itself, it would by definition no longer be for-itself – as there will no longer be a transcendent being in-itself for it be conscious of. Without anything to be conscious of, the for-itself can no longer exist as consciousness.Footnote ²⁶

For Sartre, the for-itself's ‘mission to make the in-itself-for-itself exist’ – to ‘become God’ – is ‘doomed, by definition, to failure’ (BN, p. 810/646/675). This is not just because the for-itself would cease to exist should it become in-itself-for-itself, but moreover because the very existence of God qua in-itself-for-itself is (onto-) logically ‘impossible’:

Although the account of God as causa sui was one that was explicitly rejected in scholastic theology (for God is ‘uncaused’), Sartre's formulation of God qua in-itself-for-itself as the ‘unitary synthesis of the in-itself and consciousness’ is nonetheless broadly in line with the traditional theological doctrine of divine simplicity.Footnote ²⁷

According to this classical theological doctrine, God is his own being (esse): God's essence is simply his existence – what God is is that God is.Footnote ²⁸ One of the implications of the principle of divine simplicity – that God's essence and being are identical – is the scholastic teaching that God's act of understanding is identical with God's being: ‘in God to be and to understand are one and the same’ (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.14.4, sed contra). To quote Thomas Aquinas:

In this theological outlook, in God we find a perfect identity of being and understanding – or as the theologian David Bentley Hart (Reference Hart2013, p. 235) puts it in phenomenological terminology, God ‘is in himself the absolute unity of consciousness and being’. What this means metaphysically is that as finite creatures human beings only comprehend things insofar as they are drawn towards the perfect coincidence of being and understanding of God as the archè and telos of all being and consciousness (Hart, Reference Hart2013, pp. 228–234, especially p. 231; cf. Aquinas, De Veritate, I.8).

Such a divine unity of being and consciousness – or what Sartre calls the in-itself and for-itself – is precisely an ‘impossible and constantly indicated fusion of essence and existence’ that ‘haunts the for-itself’ as it calls the for-itself to aspire to a state of being it could never attain (BN, pp. 273/217/230–231). Whereas scholastic theology believes that the non-coincidence of essence and existence in the finite immanent world points towards the transcendent unity of essence and existence in God, for Sartre the disunity of essence and existence of things in the world signifies instead ‘a missing God’ (BN, p. 805/643/671), a ‘constantly absent being which haunts the for-itself’ (BN, p. 142/114/126). As opposed to the in-itself-for-itself operating as an ‘ideal fusion’ of consciousness and being which we find in traditional theological metaphysics, what Sartre's ontological proof underscores and articulates is the intrinsic disconnection between the for-itself and in-itself which marks the ‘universal absence’ (absence universelle) of God (Sartre, Reference Sartre and Sturm1988, p. 20). Instead of finding a reflection of God's oneness, truth, and goodness in the transcendental properties of all things, what Sartre presents in his ontology is an atheistic outlook in which the ‘absence of God was to be read everywhere’ (Beauvoir and Sartre, Reference de Beauvoir, Sartre and O'Brian1985, p. 435).

The universal absence or ‘omni-absence’ of God is precisely that which underlies Sartre's aforementioned attribution of the ‘not’ to all things.Footnote ²⁹ Although the medieval scholastics did consider the predicate ‘not’ (non) as a ‘transcategorial’ term insofar as the universality of its predication transcends the Aristotelian categories, the ‘not’ was emphatically not included among the transcendentals (Aertsen, Reference Aertsen2012, p. 43). This is because whereas transcendental properties such as the one, the true, and the good always point towards some definite – and definitive – perfection, the predicate or the determination of the ‘not’ is indefinite. In other words, the ‘not’ (non) does not point to any concrete determinate qualities or properties – as Jan Aertsen (Reference Aertsen2012, pp. 29–30) notes in his important study of medieval transcendentality, ‘indefinite names’ (nomina infinita) or indeterminate predicates such as the ‘not’ (non) ‘signify “nothing” (nihil) in the sense that do not signify any determinate matter, and “everything” (omnia), insofar as they are applicable to all matters’.Footnote ³⁰

In a sense, the medieval account of the ‘not’ as an indefinite name that does not name or signify any definite being is not dissimilar to a point made by A. J. Ayer in his early critique of Sartre's treatment of nothingness in Being and Nothingness. Echoing Carnap's famous criticism of Heidegger's assertion that ‘Nothing nihilates itself’, Ayer writes:

According to Ayer, Sartre treats ‘nothing’ as if it were an entity or some reified being. However, as Sarah Richmond (Reference Richmond, Churchill and Reynolds2013, p. 98) points out, such objections are anticipated by Sartre in Being and Nothingness when he insists that ‘we cannot concede to nothingness the property of “nihilating itself”… only being can nihilate itself, because for something nihilate itself it is necessary, in some way or other, for it to be. [But] nothingness is not’ (BN, p. 58/46/57).

Sartre's néant refers not to some reified being but to the gap or indeed the ‘Nothing’ that – as Ayer says – ‘separates’ the in-itself and for-itself (see BN, pp. 65/52/63, 128/102/114). As we saw earlier in Being and Nothingness, ‘nothingness’ must not be understood as ‘one thing among other things’ (BN, p. 60/48/59). Sartre's ‘nothingness’ refers not to a being but to a relation – to the ontological relation of not: that the for-itself is not the in-itself, a relation which only the for-itself (and not the in-itself) is aware or indeed conscious of.Footnote ³¹ As such, in Sartre's ontological schema, the determinate predicate of ‘not’ may be said to function as a transcendental because it does signify something definite (and definitive) that is beyond the concrete phenomenal entities: namely, the non-coincidence of consciousness and being, the original negative ontological relation between the in-itself and for-itself.Footnote ³² Unlike the ‘real’ absence of Pierre or what Sartre calls the ‘abstract’ absence of the Duke of Wellington and Paul Valéry from the café, God's absolute absence is ontological and not just ontic (BN, pp. 42–43/34–35/45). As opposed to the ‘ontic’ or ‘relative’ absences of Wellington, Valéry, or indeed Pierre, the absolute absence of God is not just the non-being or non-appearance of an (ontic) entity, but a definite and definitive ontological necessity (cf. Gardner, Reference Gardner2009, pp. 204–205).

The necessary non-being of God (which marks the negative ontological relation between the in-itself and for-itself as well as the ontological impossibility of any absolute coincidence between being and consciousness) is for Sartre the ontological – or even transcendental – condition which enables consciousness to apprehend being: The for-itself can only be conscious of being because it does not coincide with – that it is not – being in-itself.Footnote ³³ As opposed to reflecting the perfect unity of being and intelligibility represented by God – what Sartre calls the ‘ideal fusion’ of in-itself-for-itself, the ‘not’ (non) which Sartre attributes to all determinate being is one which signifies the nihil, the non-being of God which represents the absence and impossibility of any perfect coincidence between being and consciousness (cf. Beauvoir and Sartre, Reference de Beauvoir, Sartre and O'Brian1985, p. 442). The universal predicate of the ‘not’ signifies that God is not,Footnote ³⁴ that it is not God but nothingness (nihil) that is the origin of all meaning and determination.Footnote ³⁵

However, unlike the scholastics’ God, Sartre's nothingness is not the uncaused cause and origin of all being and their transcendental properties. As we just saw, Sartre insists that nothingness cannot nihilate itself and only being can nihilate itself: nothingness can only come about through the nihilation of being.Footnote ³⁶ As such, for Sartre, nothingness has its origin in being and fundamentally derives its existence from being:

Even though Sartre does not provide a reason or explanation for the emergence of nothingness in Being and Nothingness,Footnote ³⁷ from this passage we can see that it is within the capacities or even the character of being in-itself to nihilate or negate itself to bring into existence the for-itself, which in turn introduces nothingness into the world of determinate beings through negations: Although Sartre holds that nothingness arrives in the world through (par) consciousness, nothingness ultimately has a pre-subjective source in being itself.Footnote ³⁸

As such, Sartre's notion of ‘nothing(ness)’ operates as a transcendental in the sense of being ‘the structure of experience’ (à la Kantian transcendentality) as well as ‘the ontological structure of reality itself’ (à la scholastic transcendentality).Footnote ³⁹ Nothingness is for Sartre not just a product or feature of human consciousness and cognition, but a mind-independent dimension of reality that is embedded in being itself – even if it is one that needs human consciousness (or what scholastics call the intellectus) to be ‘noted or felt’ (BN, p. 64/51/62; see also Gardner, Reference Gardner and Webber2011, p. 56).Footnote ⁴⁰ As a reflection of the negative ontological relation which underlies all being, the ‘not’ operates as a transcendental property that is found in each and every determinate being: ‘The necessary condition for the possibility of saying “not” is that non-being should be constantly present, within us and outside us, that nothingness should haunt being’ (BN, p. 44/35/46). Just as being is ‘haunted’ by nothingness, the ‘not’ is for Sartre an atheistic transcendental which conditions, structures, and indeed ‘haunts’ all determinate being. Parallel to the way in which the transcendental properties of oneness, truth, and goodness refer to the perfect coincidence of being and consciousness which scholastic theology calls ‘God’, in Sartre's ontology we find the transcategorial predicate of the ‘not’ (non) playing the role of a transcendental which signifies the nihil – the nothingness which marks the ‘universal absence’ and non-being of God.