#nihilation

By Jason Christopher Burrows

Solo TTRPG about exploring a post-apocalyptic world and recovering memories. When your character takes damage, you destroy part of your character sheet. Filled with existential horror and generally bleak vibes

By Jason Christopher Burrows

Solo TTRPG about exploring a post-apocalyptic world and recovering memories. When your character takes damage, you destroy part of your character sheet. Filled with existential horror and generally bleak vibes

Hello again everyone who might be reading this.  For this week’s blog post I will be discussing Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas of how existence precedes essence, and how that further plays into Sartre’s understanding and philosophy on consciousness.  Before we begin directly addressing the question of existence at all, we must first come to understand the methodology and approach that Sartre takes when observing and documenting this phenomenon (existence).  I use the word phenomenon, not sparingly, because existence is within itself a phenomenon according to Sartre.  He uses a very specific methodology to come to this conclusion, Phenomenological Ontology. This, broken down into simpler terms, reads “experientially coming to understand the ‘meaning’ of being”.  For him, begging the question of “What is existence?”, should also be appended to the question of “what does existence mean?”. Undertaking these two vastly important questions is such an undertaking for Sartre that understanding existence from experience, seems, at least for him, a very logical conclusion.  He notes that we find our-self, alive in the world first.  Which means for him that existence precedes essence, and that existence itself, is the primary reality upon which every one of humanities ideas of essence are implicitly based.  But should we take this a step further we find ourselves confronted with two very strong demagogues in direct opposition to this theory.  The first, and the one directly addressed by Sartre himself in this reading, is religion, which I will address in a moment, and the second is science.

How does Science confront the notion that existence precedes essence?  It is simply because science would argue that the existence of the natural world is predicated on the notion of universal natural laws of physics, and biology.  In response to this predicament, we must ask ourselves questions, as Sartre would.  Questions like, “How do we verify these laws to be truthful without experiencing some sort of phenomena first?”, and “If the observance of phenomena is the product of some mode of perception, doesn’t that mean we must exist, before we can experience it?”  In this instance, I would suppose so.  Furthering the arguments laid out by Sartre, especially given the fact that we can all observe and experience these phenomena, these scientific phenomena, with some degree of certainty.  This means that not only are we using our own existence to lend to things like, other people, and ideas, our perceptions of their essence within reality, we come to the conclusion, or should by this logic, that we must exist first so that we can lend to things their essence after the fact.  Now, this is not to say that science is not real or correct in some way, this is simply an argument justifying the supposition that experience of existence itself, is more operative within the objective realm than scientific principle.  The scientist must be born first, before they can learn science, before they can experience scientific phenomena by which they ascribe the facticities of any scientific element to be true. They must exist, before they can develop the perceptual essence of things.

This argument can also be laid in front of religion as well, as I said I would later address.  And the notion, that one must experience the phenomena of god before validating its essence to be true is the same logical and phenomenological argument used against the predication of the essence of science as well as religion.  Therefore, for the individual, it is not a question of preordained omnipotence, but rather a logical understanding that one must be born to experience god.  With religion however we also run into other problematic undertakings of the perceptual and experiential understanding of god, and verifying it to be true.  Unlike with the scientific phenomena, religious phenomena are not repeatable by anyone and do not always reveal the same and continuous experiences the way that scientific experimentation can yield results. And for Sartre, even less operative in the objective realm than science.  Sartre says that the understanding of existence must be an atheistic understanding first, otherwise, the answer to the question of “What is existence?” will always be subject to an individual’s a-priori subjectivity, and idea of god, which for Sartre, is not a genuine philosophical inquiry.  The question no longer becomes an actual question, but a reiteration of that persons’ predispositions after the fact of their birth, after the fact of them already having been thrown into existence.

How do these notions now, play into Sartre’s undertaking to answer the question of consciousness? For Sartre, simply put, consciousness is the ongoing efforts to distinguish between things, and perceptions, including the self, and everything else.  The conscious, is also nothing.  It is not a tangible thing.  This concept is rather difficult sometimes for people to really understand, because our conscious feels so real to us and so crucial to our perceptual reality.  But I ask you, any of you to  show me your consciousness.  Let me see a picture of your consciousness or hold it in my hands.  It is something that within itself is not a thing.  It a beautiful notion because it allows, or rather, disallows, the same principles of things, to be applied.  But what does that mean?  Through something being distinguished by our conscious, and our perceptions, there always applies a principle called nihilation, or the negation of something.  For example, a roll of toilet paper continues to be so, as long as it is not a rhinoceros. This is rather silly to think about, but think of it more plainly, is a coffee cup also an airplane?  Is an oil lamp also a cupboard? No of course not. If something is, it is also equally not something else.  Sartre says that “The For-itself is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of being”. Within this statement, he is essentializing two different things.  He is equating the For-itself to consciousness, and the In-itself to an inanimate, whilst asserting that the two, consciousness, and inanimate are in constant nihilation, constant negation between each other.  And so, through the permission of perceptual distinctions, we arrive at the nothing (the conscious) nihilating everything else.   This is why the conscious is nothing, because if it were something, it would also not be another.  This isn’t true however because the conscious cannot itself be nihilated.  

This process of nihilation through the conscious (not of it) is how we come to develop the world around us. It is how we perceive, as well as experience.  And, if this were true, is how we come to experience and create the essence of our existence, it is how we phenomenologically come to question the underlying meaning of our own perceptions, and our essence, after we have been thrown into the world.

In conclusion of this discussion, I leave you with a song by Jean Paul Sartre Experience called ‘Fish in the Sea’.  It is about coming to understand things and materializing the essence of things in an experiential way.  And although there are always different perceptions and perspectives, we all come to ‘find things out’ the same way.  Experiencing phenomena, and creating the essence of the world.

Nihilation

Status: Active

Vocalist: Anna Nihil (2015-present; as well as Carsten Pintér)

Country: Germany (Bayern)