Jean-Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness

It is perhaps indicitave of my predilection for systemic ontology that I see art in literature, and vice-versa.  How many ideas really exist, after all?  Two opposing forces?  The eight trigrams that come from those forces?  The 64 relationships between those eight?  At any rate, there is a limit.  And it is no more strange to say that the fundamental idea 艮 captures the nature of both the mountain and the stomach, than to say that Bach is fundamentally the same as Escher, or, as I have done in this blog, to say that Gibbon is fundamentally a Persian rug, Müller is a torn photographic collage, and Le Clézio an Impressionist painting.

So perhaps I can be forgiven for taking a similar approach to Sartre.  No doubt he would approve; his extended efforts to isolate the exact nature of visqueux are of essentially the same nature, after all.  What is this book?  It is philosophy, of course, but that definition is no more helpful than to say that something visqueux is slimy.  Sartre's philosophy is of a very different form from that of Kierkegaard's or Russell's.  Although he seems to be trying to prove something, it cannot be said that he succeeds.  His "proofs" rely so heavily on definitions that he himself has tendered, that what is contained in this book is not True, but rather a crystallization of what Sartre sees to be true.  It is often opaque, reductive, and inextricably tangled.  It would be easy to see it as merely a heap of recurving wires that go nowhere and prove nothing.

But to dismiss Sartre's work as such would be akin to trying to read it upside-down.  From that perspective, the words have no shape, let alone a greater meaning.  The key to understanding words is to look at them from the right perspective, and this is especially true of Sartre.  What is contained in Being and Nothingness is not fine, sound, indisputable ideas; it is rather a perspective, a way of looking at existence.  It reveals marvelous vistas, and opens up entire hallways filled with doors to insight on the nature of being--but only if you look at it right.  This book is not its words; it is the point-of-view that allowed the words to be written.  The words themselves are as anamorphic as that modern trend in art exemplified by Bernard Pras, or Tim Noble and Sue Webster.  They are heaps of seemingly unrelated things that spring to life if one stands in the right spot or shines the right light.

Which means that, just as in the works of Noble and Webster, there are three requisite elements for the installation of this art: the seething mass of wires, the point at which one must stand to see them properly, and the shadow that they create.  Sartre's version of reality is just as concerned with what is not, with nothingness, as with what exists.  He wants us to see the shadow that existence casts even more than he wants us to see existence itself.  And that shadow is the truth revealed when the light of Sartre's vision is cast through existence onto the wall of our own experience.