The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Sartre’s classic, Being and Nothingness. Despite the extract deviating well from my previous posts on the purpose of being, I believe it is necessary to examine one’s method of perception of appearance and its transcendence to the essence of the absolute reality before I begin proposing alternative forms of society.
Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it. Its aim was to overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon. Has the attempt been successful?
In the fist place we certainly thus get rid of that dualisms which in the existent opposes interior to exterior. There is no longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object. And this true nature in turn, if it is to be the secret reality of the thing, which one can have a presentiment of or which one can suppose but can never reach because it is the “interior” of the object under consideration – this nature no longer exists. The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to other appearances, and none of them is privileged. Force, for example, is not a metaphysical conatus of an unknown kind which hides behind its effects (acceleration, deviations, etc.); it is the totality of these effects. Similarly an electric current does not have a secret reverse side; it is nothing but the totality of the physical-chemical actions which manifest it (electrolysis, the incandescence of a carbon filament, the displacement of the needle of a galvanometer etc.) No one of these actions alone is sufficient to reveal it. But no action indicates anything which is behind itself; it indicates only itself and the total series.
The obvious conclusion is that the dualism of being and appearance is no longer entitled to any legal status within philosophy. The appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself all the being of the existent. And the appearance for its part is not an inconsistent manifestation of this being. To the extent that men had believed in noumenal (an object of human inquiry - it is a posited object or event as it is in itself independent of the senses) realities, they have presented appearance as a pure negative. It was “that which is not being”; it had no other being than that of illusion and error. But even this being was borrowed, it was itself a pretence, and philosophers met with the greatest difficulty in maintaining cohesion and existence in the appearance so that it should not itself be reabsorbed in the depth called “illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene,” and if we no longer believe in the being-behind-the-appearance, the then the appearance becomes full positivity; its essence is an “appearing” which is no longer opposed to being but on the contrary is the measure of it. For the being of an existent is exactly what it appears. Thus we arrive at the idea of the phenomenon such as we can find, for example in the “phenomenology” of Husserl or of Heidegger – the phenomenon or the relative-absolute. Relative the phenomenon remains, for “to appear” supposes in essence somebody to whom to appear. But it does not have the double relativity of Kant’s Erscheinung. It does not point over its shoulder to a true being which would be, for it, absolute. What it is, it is absolutely, for it reveals itself as it is. The phenomenon can be studied and described as such, for it is absolutely indicative of itself.
Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it. Its aim was to overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon. Has the attempt been successful?
In the fist place we certainly thus get rid of that dualisms which in the existent opposes interior to exterior. There is no longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object. And this true nature in turn, if it is to be the secret reality of the thing, which one can have a presentiment of or which one can suppose but can never reach because it is the “interior” of the object under consideration – this nature no longer exists. The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to other appearances, and none of them is privileged. Force, for example, is not a metaphysical conatus of an unknown kind which hides behind its effects (acceleration, deviations, etc.); it is the totality of these effects. Similarly an electric current does not have a secret reverse side; it is nothing but the totality of the physical-chemical actions which manifest it (electrolysis, the incandescence of a carbon filament, the displacement of the needle of a galvanometer etc.) No one of these actions alone is sufficient to reveal it. But no action indicates anything which is behind itself; it indicates only itself and the total series.
The obvious conclusion is that the dualism of being and appearance is no longer entitled to any legal status within philosophy. The appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself all the being of the existent. And the appearance for its part is not an inconsistent manifestation of this being. To the extent that men had believed in noumenal (an object of human inquiry - it is a posited object or event as it is in itself independent of the senses) realities, they have presented appearance as a pure negative. It was “that which is not being”; it had no other being than that of illusion and error. But even this being was borrowed, it was itself a pretence, and philosophers met with the greatest difficulty in maintaining cohesion and existence in the appearance so that it should not itself be reabsorbed in the depth called “illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene,” and if we no longer believe in the being-behind-the-appearance, the then the appearance becomes full positivity; its essence is an “appearing” which is no longer opposed to being but on the contrary is the measure of it. For the being of an existent is exactly what it appears. Thus we arrive at the idea of the phenomenon such as we can find, for example in the “phenomenology” of Husserl or of Heidegger – the phenomenon or the relative-absolute. Relative the phenomenon remains, for “to appear” supposes in essence somebody to whom to appear. But it does not have the double relativity of Kant’s Erscheinung. It does not point over its shoulder to a true being which would be, for it, absolute. What it is, it is absolutely, for it reveals itself as it is. The phenomenon can be studied and described as such, for it is absolutely indicative of itself.
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