哲学中的虚无和自由

英文原文如下：

Nothingness and Freedom

The in-itself, then, is simply pure, self-contained being, with no reference to anything outside of it.  In Sartre’s words, the in-itself is “full positivity…It can support no connection with the other” (BN, 29).  We must turn to the question, then, of what constitutes the for-itself.  We saw above that “consciousness considered apart is only an abstraction.”  That consciousness, the for-itself, must, then, sustain some unidirectional connection to the other segment of Being, the in-itself, in order to exist in reality and not only as an abstraction.  That connection must also account for the phenomenological disclosure of the in-itself (the “objects”) to the for-itself (the “subject”).

This connection is negation, or Nothingness.  In order to see the Being of the in-itself, the “subject” must be able to contrast it with the possibility of the object not being and to contrast it with what the object in fact is not.  The in-itself, as “full positivity”, contains no negation within itself, so the negation must come from the for-itself.  We will show, however, that this connection of “nothingness” between the for-itself and the in-itself shares little in common with Heidegger’s link between Dasein and the world:

The For-itself and the In-itself are reunited by a synthetic connection which is nothing other than the For-itself itself.  The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole in being at the heart of Being…The for-itself has no reality save that of being the nihilation of being.  As a nihilation it is made-to-be by the in-itself; as an internal negation it must by means of the in-itself make known to itself what it is not and consequently what it has to be…consciousness does not have by itself any sufficiency of being as an absolute subjectivity; from the start it refers to the thing.  For consciousness there is no being except for this precise obligation to be a revealing intuition of something. (BN, 785-86)

The for-itself, or human consciousness, is nothing in and of itself.  It derives its being from its “nihilation” and resulting “apprehension” (BN, 794) of the being of the in-itself.  As in Heidegger, then, man cannot exist without the entities in the world.  It is not, for Sartre, however, the positive being of an entity, nor man’s interaction with that entity, that helps to constitute man’s Being.  It is, instead, the negation of, the contrast to, the separation from those entities that constitutes man’s Being.  The entities make a negative, rather than a positive, contribution and there is a negative, rather than a positive, relation.  What unifies the two regions of Being as Being is not their fusion, but rather the completeness of their isolation, making the region of negative Being dependent on the region of positive Being for the possibility of its existence: “A consciousness which would be consciousness of nothing would be an absolute nothing” (BN, 790).

If Nothingness is what ontologically isolates the human being from the entities in the world, how does Nothingness enter into the world?  Sartre explains that, in order for Nothingness to arise:

It is essential…that the questioner have the permanent possibility of dissociating himself from the causal series which constitutes being and which can produce only being…In so far as the questioner must be able to effect in relation to the questioned a kind of nihilating withdrawal, he is not subject to the causal order of the world; he detaches himself from Being…In order to be able to bring out of himself the possibility of a non-being…[so that] a certain negative element is introduced into the world…he must be able to put himself outside of being…Man’s relation with being is that he can modify it…Descartres following the Stoics has given a name to this possibility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it—it is freedom…through it nothingness comes into the world. (BN 58-60)

Thus, freedom for Sartre emerges as the foundational ontological premise.  In order for nothingness to enter into the world and lend the world the structure that Sartre describes, man must be constitutively free to exit being.  This radical ontological freedom stands in sharp contrast to the ontological necessity of Heidegger’s Being-in.  For Sartre, the key fact of existence is the possibility of human consciousness to exit the Being of the world, while for Heidegger, the key fact of existence is the impossibility of human consciousness to exit the Being of the world.  Whereas for Heidegger man’s interactions with the entities in the world constitute his very essence, for Sartre “Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essence of the human being is suspended in his freedom” (BN, 60).  In Sartre’s language, he strongly indicates that Being-free is indeed intended to replace Being-in as the foundational structure of Being.  Recall that Heidegger says, “Being-in is not a ‘property’ which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could be just as well as it could with it” (BT, 84).  Sartre counters, “What we call freedom is impossible to distinguish from the being of ‘human reality’” (BN, 60).  Heidegger says, “It is not the case that man ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the ‘world’” (BT, 84).  Sartre responds, “Man does not exist first in order to be free subsequently” (BN, 60).  Heidegger: “Dasein is never ‘proximally’ an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in” (BT, 84).  Sartre: “There is no difference between the being of man and his being-free” (BN, 60).

This root ontological conflict has dramatic ontical consequences for the human being.  Sartre, by freeing man from the world, frees him for action outside and independent of “the causal order of the world”.  While this may not lend the individual the power to defy the laws of physics, it does place in the hands of the individual the power to “modify” being.  The responsibility for man’s existence is placed firmly in his own hands.  The outside world takes a back seat, and the limitations that it imposes become tangential, rather than essential, to the action and the constitution of man.  Heidegger, on the other hand, sets up a far different framework:

Whenever Dasein is, it is a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call

Dasein’s “facticity”…The concept of “facticity” implies that an entity ‘within-the-world’ has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world. (BT, 82)

While “destiny” for Heidegger may or may not be fixed, it is certainly a rejection of the radical freedom of the individual to independently define his existence.  These ontical implications of Sartrean Being-free as compared to Heideggerian Being-in are closely tied to (and perhaps result directly from) the divergent ontological “subject”/“object” structures described by each thinker, which also emerged, as we saw, from the ontological concepts of Being-free and Being-in, respectively.  What I mean is that, for Sartre, facticity need not restrain man ontically because (to return to Part One of the essay) the entities within the world are merely present-at-hand and separated ontologically from man.  For Heidegger, facticity plays an essential and restrictive role in man’s ontical existence because the entities within the world are ready-to-hand, and man is closely tied to them ontologically.  The Czech thinker Jan Patocka, who was heavily influenced by Heidegger, provides a clearer explanation than does Heidegger of how a world of ready-to-hand things might lead to a deterministic rather than a free existence for Dasein: