A Hole Within Being: Consciousness as Nothingness in Sartre's Being and Nothingness

Abstract

Among Sartre's best-known theses in Being and Nothingness is his claim that the world of experience contains what he calls “négatités,” little pools or pockets of nothingness. The most famous example of a négatité is Pierre, the friend who is absent from the café. Sartre's conviction that there are négatités all around us has another side, often obscured from view: I mean his (apparent) conviction that we ourselves are a kind of non-being or nothingness. In this paper I try to shed some light on this Sartrean thesis by connecting it to perennial problem in metaphysics concerning the status of holes, shadows or absences — in short, non-beings. However I see more than mere analogy here. Sartre's view, as I understand it, is that we literally are a type of hole. We are holes in the sense that we are the kinds of nonbeings that require beings as our hosts. More accurately, it is being and not beings that host the holes that we are. Ordinary holes have some particular material thing as their hosts: cheese or fabric. Yet our “host” is not any particular being (cheese or fabric) but being itself: the in-itself [en soi].