The origin of Negation and the question of being

Aims:

• The question of being

• Ontology before epistemology

• Dasein, concerned about its very being
• Sartre’s negation brings value into experience

Routes to existential freedom:

• The question of being

• Reassessing what kind of being we ourselves and our world have

• Dasein is the being which is concerned with its own being

• its being is a question for it, and therefore itself and its world are seen in terms of the problem of how to determine its own being (how to project itself into what it is to be)

• Nothingness

The question of being

• Heidegger: we have neglected the question of being

• The question of the meaning of being
• The question: what is there?

• This matters because the questions we do ask are determined by an assumption of what is (what being is)

• And this assumption is unexamined

• So all our ways of asking questions (and finding questions) are made problematic by a lack of interrogation

• Most importantly, the epistemological question

• By choosing the epistemological question, we have predetermined being as always either subject or object

• Everything is either subject, knower, cognizer, thought
• Or object, known, cognized, thinker

• Heidegger asks: is this really the most fundamental way of being of phenomena (of what appears and can appear)?

• This is the meaning of the question of the meaning of being

Nothingness

• “The question can be put in these terms: Is negation as the structure of the judicative proposition at the origin of nothingness? Or on the contrary is nothingness as the structure of the real, the origin and founda- tion of negation?” (7/38)

• The question is whether the phenomenological world is made up only of beings, and then judgement applies negation to them
• Or whether nothingness belongs to the real world of phenomena, prior to judgment
• “ask ourselves whether it causes non-being to appear at the heart of being or merely limits itself to deter- mining a prior revelation.” (9/40)

• Sartre borrows Husserl’s notion that identity is not added to raw material of experience as a judgment, but belongs primordially to the intentional structure of consciousness

• So there is no non-essential seeing, no experience of things which is not of them as possessing identity

• The question of negation is whether we first see positive beings and then judge them to be not, or to be absent

• Or whether the experience of something as not there is primordial (there is nothing underlying it, more fundamental)

• Sartre talks about questioning and destruction to note that while these are subjective in the sense that they rely on the activity of a subject, they are primordial in that there is no way to
• When we investigate the world, we interrogate it as to its being

• Why is my car not working means what is the being that is the source of its non-function
• “What I expect from the carburetor, what the watchmaker ex- pects from the works of the watch, is not a judgment; it is a disclosure of b ·'ing on the basis of which we can make a judgment.” (7 38-39)

• Involved in the questioning of being is the possibility that the answer is not something but nothing

• the possibility is that it is not a being preventing its function, but the absence of being

Why nothingness matters

• It is not only the purely positive being that makes up reality
• It is also value and possibility

• Neither of these are positive, but their meaning in what is not

• When we ss we do not only see as, but we also see as what is lacking and what could be