The aim of Sartre’s magnum opus, Being and Nothingness , is to describe the conditions of the Being-for-itself, as the conditions of consciousness. The task of this essay will be to elucidate and characterize Sartre’s description of the for-itself. The structure of the for-itself will be elucidated according to its opposition with the in-itself through the examination of the concepts of Nothingness, Human Freedom, and Bad Faith. Consequently, following an analysis of language, as in the idea of language in Sartre’s writing and the role of language in consciousness, it will be determined that it is consciousness in the mode of conceptual language that the for-itself uses it distinguish itself from the in-itself. It is consciousness in the mode …show more content…
This is to say that the possibility of Nothingness will affect our questioning of existence itself (36). However, Nothingness, as in the negation of Being, is not derived from lived experience itself. It is, rather, a result of purely psychic operations on the part of man, in the form of the determination ‘X is not’ (37). In this sense, one cannot say that Nothingness is, or is not, but instead that Nothingness is made-to-be. The being that ‘makes’ Nothingness is precisely (human) consciousness (57). When asking questions (Sartre uses the example of a man questioning the carburetor of his car), a disclosure of Being is made on the basis of which a judgment is arrived at. However, the possibility of the disclosure of Being necessarily entails the possibility of the disclosure of non-being. Considering the carburetor, I question whether there is nothing there in it. This is to say that my question presupposes a pre-judicative comprehension of non-being, a tacit apprehension of Nothingness. Similarly, the concept of destruction follows the same structure of the disclosure of non-being, whereby what was is now reduced to ‘nothing’ (39). This disclosure of Being/non-being constitutes man’s relation to existence itself; the way in which non-being is disclosed to man is by way of acts of nihilation, the apprehension of Nothingness. More importantly, however, it is only man, through consciousness, that is able to posit the disclosure of non-being, since it is in fact Nothingness, and it is only man that nihilates (40). Sartre’s example of Pierre’s absence from the café seeks to show that the act of nihilation, as the apprehension of non-being, does not occur because of a negative judgment (i.e. I do not apprehend non-being because Pierre is not present in the café), but that the