Sartre's Ego Hole And Nishitani's Sunyata

Existentialism And Mysticism continued
Jan. '78



Sartre believed that his theory was the only theory truly compatible
with the dignity of man because his theory didn't turn man into an
object. However, according to Nishitani, the problem with that belief
was that no matter how much the self's subjectivity got stressed, as
long as the "cogito" maintained the standpoint of self-consciousness,
there would always be a tendency to turn the self into an object.
"Moreover," says Nishitani, "even though Sartre's theory appears to
preserve the dignity of man in his subjective autonomy and freedom,
the real dignity of man seems to me to belong only to one who has been
`reborn,' only in the `new man' that emerges in us when we are born by
dying, when we break through nihility." Nishitani is speaking from a
Buddhist perspective, which understands sunyata (nothingness,
emptiness) as non-ego.

The nothingness at the bottom of the self (for-itself) is not
sunyata because sunyata is not the ground of the subject. The
nothingness bound self of Sartre may be fundamentally deepened, but as
long as it makes itself present as an object of consciousness, it
remains a kind of being, a kind of object. To see nothingness in that
way is to see the self as having no ground to stand on. But, says
Nishitani, -- "the nothingness that means `there is no ground' (the
nothingness of Sartre's for-itself) positions itself like a wall to
block one's path and turns itself into a kind of ground, so we can
still say that `there is a ground.' However, only absolute emptiness
is the true no-ground (Ungrund). Only from the perspective of absolute
emptiness is the flower, stone, stellar nebulae, galactic systems, and
even life and death themselves—present as bottomless realities. True
freedom lies in this no-ground. Sartre's freedom is still bondage, a
kind of hole that has the ego projected into it like a stake driven
into the ground for the self to be tied to."-- Sartre's ego then has
more in common with bondage than it does with freedom, or so says
Nishitani, and I agree.

Absolute nothingness, as opposed to Sartre's negative nothingness at
the center of self-consciousness, is the source of real freedom. This
nothingness, sunyata, took center stage in Nishitani's book Religion
and Nothingness, and according to Nishitani (and here I will let him
speak for himself), before we can understand sunyata we must
understand that nihilty is not sunyata:

“Nihility is an absolute negation aimed at all ‘existence,’ and thus is
related to existence. The essence of nihility consists in a purely
negative (antipodal) negativity. Its standpoint contains the
self-contradiction that it can neither abide in existence nor abide
being away from it. It, nihility, is a standpoint torn in two from within.
Therein lies its transitional character. We call it the standpoint of
nihility, but in fact it is not a field one can stand on in the proper
sense of the term. It is no more than a spot we have to ‘run quickly
across’….the standpoint of sunyata is another thing altogether. It is
not a standpoint of simply negative negativity. It is the standpoint at which
absolute negation is at the same time, in the sense explained above, a
Great Affirmation. It, sunyata, is not a standpoint that only states that the
self and things are empty. The foundations of the standpoint of
sunyata lie elsewhere: not that the self is empty, but that emptiness is the self;
not that things are empty, but that emptiness is things. Once this conversion
has taken place, we are able to pass beyond the standpoint on which
nihility is seen as the far side that is beyond us (the Buddhist idea
of the ‘yonder shore’ of the sea of samsaric suffering), but a far
side that we have arrived at.” (Paraphrased from Religion and Nothingness p.137)

Sartre’s Cave-Like Ego

Existentialism And Mysticism continued
Jan. ’78

In Kierkegaard, the inner journey into subjectivity ended with a
person discovering his or her "nothingness before God." In Heidegger,
the journey ended with the appropriation of a similar nothingness--the
discovery of Being-in-the-world, the condition for any "knowing"
whatsoever. In Nietzsche, that nothingness, along with subjectivity
itself, was affirmed. The positive attributes of faith, authenticity, and
life affirmation, respectively, are not found in Sartre. Rather, the
nothingness discovered by Sartre condemned humanity to a kind of
purgatory. "The self is free from all but self," says Sartre. Here the
self is cut off from everything except from its own nothingness.

For starters, Sartre's self (for-itself) was a natural extension
of the Cartesian ego. Both Sartre and Descartes were convinced that
the ego was the absolute truth of awakened consciousness. For
Descartes, doubt (and clear ideas) became the all-important
means by which to discover truth, while for Sartre that doubt turned
into a subjective nothingness attached to ego. While Sartre was no
less committed to self-awareness than Descartes, he shifted the
foundations of that awareness away from doubt (ultimately
God for Descartes) to nihility.

Where as for Kierkegaard and Heidegger, nothingness became a vehicle
for a kind of liberation, for Sartre, it shut the ego up within
itself, it condemned the ego to a cave-like existence. Sartre's
existentialism, grounded as it was in an ego/nothingness, left man
with nothing to rely on, either within himself or without. The path
toward deeper subjectivity could take Sartre no further. With no
escape from nothingness, it was almost as if Sartre condemned man to
the categories of agreeable/disagreeable, -- Kierkegaard's aesthetic
stage of life. His position on ethics, however, became an existential
humanist one, meaning that a “universal good” ought to be preferred over
acts of self-indulgence. For Sartre, man was indeed condemned, though not
in a hedonistic aesthetic sense; rather, he was condemned to be free.
Human freedom, for Sartre, was necessary to account for the movement
from nothingness to actual situatedness. Existence, how we exist, had to be
chosen, chosen from a multitude of possibilities. According to Sartre,
"the human project, suspended in nothingness, projected the self
ceaselessly outside of itself." Human beings “acted” and because of
this, Sartre was unequivocally able to state that man was indeed
condemned to freedom.

Nietzsche’s Life Affirmation

Existentialism And Mysticism continued
Jan. ’78

"Movement away from ego," although not as pronounced as in Kierkegaard
and Heidegger, was still existentialized in the philosophies of
Nietzsche and Sartre. Just how much distance opened between the
"acting agent" and the agent's ego in each of these respective
philosophies was debatable, but it was there nevertheless. Also, the
concept of nothingness played a major roll in each of these
philosophies, perhaps more in Sartre than in Nietzsche, but, even so,
Nietzsche too actualized the ego's relationship to nothingness.

Nature had a lot of meaning for Nietzsche, but only in so far as it was
understood as the "will to power." The will to power was not
selfishness; rather it took the form of
the life-affirming meaning of an impersonal will to power. Nietzsche
said, "To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion
what one is." For Nietzsche, a solitude of sorts was necessitated by this ability to
continually affirm life. Physical solitude was admirable, but
Nietzsche’s solitude was different, a more extreme kind.
Life became affirmed at the expense of self. Life affirmation
brought with it an unavoidable upsurge of nihilism, and this nihilism
replaced the self. (This was not the same thing as purging oneself in
a protest against life. That was the way of decadence and Nietzsche
would have nothing to do with that kind of self-sacrifice.) In
life-affirmation only awareness remained, and that too got affirmed.
In life-affirmation, the "how's," "what's", and "why's" lost all
validity. The values of unity, purpose, reason, faith, etc. vanished
when in the presence of this affirmation. Only a "yes" was permitted,
a "yes" to life, a "yes" to subjectivity, a "yes" to nothingness.
Nietzsche, in his characteristically one of a kind style, went
"outside" to get "inside." In his pursuit of the will to power, he
ended up at the base of subjectivity, which he called by the name
"eternal recurrence."

To be fair, a lot of negative stuff has been said about Nietzsche.
Some of it is probably true. That negativity, however, becomes
somewhat muted when you consider that Nietzsche's nihilism is not
skepticism, it is not an attack on differences; it is the destruction
of everything and, as such, is the affirmation of everything. His will
to power necessitates a constant appeal to oneself, and, in the hands
of his Ubermensch, that appeal gets expressed in the form
of "That Which Must Be Overcome." In the hands of the
rabble (Nietzsche’s terminology) that “appeal to oneself”
disintegrates into mere aggression, tyranny, violence, brutality and war.
In Nietzsche, the power to destroy is transformed into the power to create.
"Only among men of highest nobility," says Nietzsche, "is it possible to
successfully exist with a steady ‘yes’ upon one's lips;" In other words,
Nietzsche’s Übermensch was a goal for humanity to set for itself.

Heidegger's Call To Conscience

Existentialism And Mysticism continued
Jan. '78

In Martin Heidegger’s book, “Being And Time,” a comparative concept to
Kierkegaard's "despair over the despair of willing to be oneself" is found.
"Conscience calling us back to our own most potentiality for being" became,
for Heidegger, the angst-ridden call of conscience that called a person back to
a freer, richer, existence, an existence not without its share of struggle. Even
though Heidegger didn't call his journey-- a journey out of despair,
"getting authentic" shared much in common with Kierkegaard’s "getting faith;”
so much so, that I believe Kierkegaard's statement: "To become is
a movement from the spot, but to become oneself is a movement at the
spot" is just another way of saying (as quoted from Heidegger): "In the field of ontology any springing from is degeneration.”


In the ethical world, universals were extremely important (what was
good for everybody else was also good for me, but not necessarily the
other way around). For Heidegger, another universal, an existential
universal, was extremely important--the universal of death. Everybody
died and because death was a certainty, Heidegger considered it a part
of the structural whole of Dasein. When Dasein fully anticipated its
Being-towards-death, the darkness hitherto cloaking Dasein's ownmost
potential Being, lifted, and Dasein became free for authenticity.
Dasein's death-not-yet was a real part of Dasein's Being-a-whole, but,
to state the obvious, Dasein was also alive. (The similarity between
the human being's contradictory aspects for both Heidegger and
Kierkegaard cannot be denied.)

Dasein opened to authenticity only after Dasein's anticipation of
death and the nullity that Dasein was in its thrownness merged. Thrown
Dasein had a past, present, and future, but in the "moment of vision,"
time stopped. In that moment, Dasein was brought back before its
concern in the rapture that preceded all possibilities, in the rapture
that only Being-in-the-world could produce. In the they-self, Dasein
spent all its time identifying with itself. In authenticity, Dasein
was brought back before time (it's own) in Being-in-the-world. Put in
slightly different terms, in Heidegger, as in Kierkegaard, in order to
get it all, one had to first give it all up.

Causalities Of The Abyss—Or--A Revolution Made Legitimate

Jan. '78 Existentialism And Mysticism continued
Kierkegaard's Religious Stage


The third stage—religious stage:

The religious stage of life opened when the individual recognized the
insurmountable nature of the demands of ethical life. Precisely by
going inward, according to Kierkegaard, the individual moved forward
on the road to the absolute, forward en route to the abyss that
enjoined the absolute. Of those who have encountered the abyss, many
have become causalities. They returned to a life of sensuality and
immediacy, but not for enjoyment, for forgetfulness. Marching in
lockstep with their desire to "forget what cannot be forgotten" the
causalities, from that point on, would suffer an endless retreat. For
those who did not find retreat an option, however, there was still
hope. They found it in what Kierkegaard called "religiosity B."

If a relationship with the absolute is to be sustained, an intense
personal relationship (subjectivity is truth) with God becomes
necessary. But, according to Kierkegaard, a person lacks the strength
to sustain a relationship with the absolute, thus another
inexhaustible struggle ensues: the harder one struggles to attain that
relationship, the more distance that opens between God and the
struggling person. It is here that the individual becomes ripe for
Christian conversion because, for Kierkegaard, it is here that God
gets called upon for help.

The finite and the infinite come together in Jesus Christ. The fact
that in Jesus God became man and man became God was and is the
Christian paradox. Only through the affirmation of that paradox does
it become possible to sustain a relationship with the absolute. In the
"leap of faith" the individual is brought into an absolute
relationship with God. With that leap one's whole existence is forever
changed. The religious person shows no outward signs, but inside
passion grows exponentially.

Being a Christian, for Kierkegaard, was not easy. It was sustained by
the "passionate will to believe." And, for Kierkegaard, it was
precisely in doing something before God that one did nothing before
God. "In nothingness before God," Kierkegaard said, "every instant is
a revolution made legitimate." The task of religiosity was to make the
individual become wholly nothing, and exist thus before God. Standing
at the edge of this unbridgeable chasm, with one's spiritual existence
at stake, the religious person, in defiance of all reason, took the
leap— into Christ, and into salvation. Kierkegaard said, "To become is
a movement from the spot, but to become oneself is a movement at the
spot." A leap into the nothingness that binds man to God is also a
leap into that place where the opposites of infinity/finitude,
temporal/eternal, and freedom/necessity dissolve.

Life On Angst

Stages Of Self Despair
Jan. `78 Existentialism And Mysticism continued

The second stage—ethical stage:

"Into human nature," according to Kierkegaard, "was built a view to
being spirit, a forward impulse that would eventually inspire a person
to move through immediacy (the temporal) and approach the eternal
within." Man, again according to Kierkegaard, was like an apartment building
with the more hospitable living spaces being found on the upper
stories. It was an unfortunate fact of life that man preferred to live
in the cellar. Living in error and delusion was what cellar dwellers
feared least. No amount of persuasion could spark in them a desire to
climb heavenward. Rather, it was misfortune that got their attention.
Becoming conscious of the bottom (and hence despairing of being on the
bottom) began to manifest itself only after some tragedy shook the
ground of one's existence, only then would the cellar dweller be
forced into recognizing the eternal within. Once the eternal was
recognized, however, a transformation became possible, a
transformation that would eventually find one despairing at willing to
be oneself instead of not willing to be oneself.

At first a person denied the eternal within. It made demands, and
dwellers of the cellar only obeyed enforced earthly demands. But, for
some people, only a glimpse of the eternal was needed to heighten
consciousness and motivate the cellar dweller to climb out of the
cellar. The sticking point, though, was that the higher the climb, the
more one's behavior had to comply with ethical demands. Ethics, in
those airy domains, dominated the cellar dweller's experience, so much
so, that according to Kierkegaard, no cellar dweller could withstand
the downward pull. In fact, it was impossible for anyone to withstand
the downward pull of the aesthetic way of life for very long. All
climbers fell victim to the despair of wanting to be oneself, the
eternal part of the self. That part of the self could never be fully
attained. Tapping into a higher power--a divine power, was the
climber's only hope, and for that he had to enter life's religious stage.

Heidegger didn't call Dasein's movement toward authenticity ethical,
but breaking through the they-self barrier certainly wasn't unethical,
and one might go as far as to say that without that break, ethics
might not even be possible. In Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage of life,
everybody wanted to be somebody else until the despair over the loss
of earthly particulars, up to and including one's own life, forced the
individual to confront the eternal within. Likewise, in Heidegger, a
loss of another kind (a despair of another kind) produced the same
result. For Heidegger, it was (at least initially) fear and anxiety
that forced Dasein into extra meaningful levels of existence. The fear
that emerged from turbulence, entanglement, and alienation forced
perspective upon Dasein. Dasein began to see itself as a foreign
substance, totally replaceable, totally in vain. Anxiety turned into
anguish, and anguish into dread. Once the they-self was totally
transparent to Dasein, Dasein became free to understand the world in a
different way, a way that would send Dasein deeper into itself.

On The Journey Inward The Spirit Is Pulled In Two Directions At Once

Existentialism And Mysticism continued
Jan. `78

Kierkegaard's Stages of Life and Heidegger's They-Self
The first stage—aesthetic stage:

According to Kierkegaard (I'm paraphrasing here)--when an
individual--for the purpose of laying hold of something great outside
himself in the world-- abandoned himself to immediate sense
gratification, his enthusiasm was aesthetic. When, on the other hand,
the individual gave up everything to save himself, when he chose to
live according to universal principles instead of temporary pleasures,
then his enthusiasm was ethical. An ethical relationship was an
absolute relationship belonging to the individual while the aesthetic
relationship took the form of a relative relationship belonging to the
world.

Both of these relationships, for Kierkegaard, represented "stages in
life," stages that were not just journeyed through, but lived right
now in what Kierkegaard called a "synthesis." Depending on how a
person chose to live out his life, one or the other of these stages
would dominate. As different as these stages were, however, they had
something in common. They both were accompanied by an unwelcome
phenomenon. Because the stages pulled the individual's spirit in two
directions at once, dissatisfaction was always the result. The
individual, by giving a disproportionate weight to one stage, lived
life in tension. That tension, that angst, haunted experience. To make
matters worse, it was impossible to live an ethical life free from the
aesthetic. Doom and gloom resulted for those people who tried and
failed. According to Kierkegaard, nobody possessed enough strength to
live totally ethically. Aesthetic attraction was just too powerful.

The aesthetic life could be, and for the most part was, lived within
the categories of agreeable/disagreeable. Living within the pressures
of outward circumstance was full of dissatisfactions. For instance, we
(humanity as type) wished for privileges that we did not have--to be
famous, rich, and in love, to be happy and content. In short, we did
not want to be who we were. We wanted to be someone else.
Unconsciously, we despaired over "not wanting to be who we were." The
"surface of existence" where momentary happiness was found, would
never overcome the discontent built into Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage
of life.

Like Kierkegaard's aesthetic despair, Heidegger's Dasein was first
caught in the temporal, worldly, environment of the they-self—it's own
thrownness. In that environment publicness—idle talk, leveling down,
and a false sense of security,--closed Dasein off from knowing the
world in a deeply subjective way. Dasein knew everything in the
they-self, except what needed to be known, and without that knowledge,
Dasein could not escape the they-self. But, when Dasein's false sense
of security collided with bad times, turbulence arose, and Dasein was
able to see things differently. Specifically, it began to see the
difference between "not knowing," and "the knowing of not knowing,"
and with that kind of understanding, eventually, Dasein was able to
see through the they-self, into a deeper, more meaningful subjective
existence.