This essay turned out to be a lot shorter than I had thought it would be and, so, I will just post it now. I may rewrite some of it later, though.

The Same River Twice: A Cursory Essay on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness

In the free act of annihilating essence, one should be careful not to become The Abyss. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existential philosophy was revolutionary in so far that it sought to abolish Determinism, but, ultimately, too fixated upon the nothingness at the heart of Being not to imperil becoming an ideology in its own right. As much as any person might cherish the boundless freedom that non-being allows for, Sartre’s Ontological claim that nothingness is intrinsic to Being must be partially rejected. A person has the fragments of recorded experience which constitute memory. There is an ever-changing assemblage of affects that constitutes The Self. When we consider what, for lack of a better term, can be described as “the human soul”, we are not confronted by The Void; we discover the immanent presence of a self that is always in the process of differentiating. Negation merely delimits Ontology. It allows for freedom but is not all that is requisite for it. Just as we are condemned to be free, we are condemned to exist. The true nihilation of the Self would mean suicide. That such an action can be considered to be the purest expression of freedom is absurd.

In the quest for liberation, one should be careful in regards to what one destroys. Existentialism is a radical Ontological philosophy that culminated with the publication of Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s philosophy does hazard that its adherents may fall prey to the pathology of Nihilism. Nihilism can be best described as Ontological pessimism. It is not so much a philosophy per se as it is a philosophical disposition. Even if the human experience can ultimately be considered to be negative, that any person should accept such a state of affairs should illicit sympathetic intervention. If the human condition really turns out to be absurd, then such circumstances should incite rebellion. You must choose to live in spite of the Absurd. The only other option is, again, suicide. Negation can take on the character of self-destruction. Who do we decide to become and to no longer be? Individuation is a serious process. To truly actualize upon the effectively limitless human potential for freedom means not to relentlessly nihilate every facet of The Self, but to continually develop The Self. Negation merely delimits who we are. We become through a process of existential attestation and affirmation.

Life before and after death describes The Abyss. The unfathomable nothingness of total non-being describes The Void. Neither The Abyss nor The Void bestow humanity with freedom. They are abstract concepts that should be used to delimit agency. Freedom is not born out of The Abyss; It recommences in spite of it.