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Howdy! Good use of my ‘toon. And I like the bent of your blog. Good exploration.
best,
Priscilla
I’ve had many fits of questioning “Who am I?” I finally figured it out (don’t call the cops). The following is a summary of my extrapolations on my readings of Sartre (thanks for the opportunity to comment).
Non-being is subsequent of being (and there in lies the self-consciousness/divinity connection). Amazingly, it was only after struggling with Being And Nothingness that I was able to make this distinction. Here’s some of the “road map” that moved me to this realization.
I agree with Sartre, especially with his concept
“intentionality of consciousness.” I equate “intentionality” with the freedom of self-consciousness,–the freedom to be conscious of divinity, and the freedom to be conscious of the divinity that resides “in every self-consciousness.” Keeping Sartre in mind, here is some further commentary on the divinity/self-consciousness connection:
Knowledge is found everywhere except in the being of the for-itself. Worldliness, spatiality, quantity, temporality, instrumentality, etc. arise in consciousness as objects for the for-itself, but the for-itself can never become a conscious object—just like a knife blade cannot cut itself. Were it not for the inherent nothingness found in the being of the for-itself, there would not be a consciousness of knowledge. Sartre has described the for-itself as the “pure reflection of nonbeing,” and it is this negation of being which let’s knowledge come into the world. In this respect, the knower-known dichotomy is reduced to mere fabrication, since the knower does not exist. “For-itself nothingness” permits consciousness of reality, but the for-itself remains just outside the reach of that reality because there is no knower to be known.
Ironically, Sartre interpreted being-for-itself as proof of the non-existence of God. Actually, what I got out of his reasoning was that freedom (restricted by its environment) is all that we are. We are the being that is being what is not, while not being what is because we are free to be conscious of everything else. Bogged down with this baggage, though, we cannot be surprised to find the human psyche in a constant struggle with existential issues, unsatisfied desires, and questions! This burden, if indeed it is a burden, is not insignificant; without this baggage there would be no questions,—and without questions there would be no God attribute of openness/freedom; there would be no comprehensibility of the universe!
What God’s freedom is defining here is God as Immanent (the phenomenal world) and God as Transcendent (the God of all religions). All we can know about Transcendent God is that God exists. The space of logical implication tells us that much. On the other hand, we can know a great deal about God’s Immanence because that’s what we deal with on a day-to-day basis. Everyday, as a self-conscious being, we participate in inquiry, analysis, conscience, and imagination.
“…for-itself can never become a conscious object—just like a knife blade cannot cut itself…”
- the concept/essence of the knife blade precedes its existence. The essence of being does not. Not because it is precluded from objective/conscious inquiry but because it is not.