Hitting the Slopes with Sartre and Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

The general impression that one gets from reading commentaries on Being and Nothingness – which was the same impression that I was left with after my own engagement with the text – is that it seems incredibly difficult for readers to totalize its content. Although the thesis of the text is straightforward enough – that one’s ontological structure, as being-for-itself, “is not to be what I am and to be what I am not” (BN 492), such that all aspects of the existence of the for-itself are reducible to this structure (i.e. the temporal nature of the for-itself, its orientation towards the future, is itself implied within that structure since what the for-self is is yet to come in the future – so the for-itself is what it is not (yet)) – Sartre insists on discussing various aspects of existence that, in the end, do not confirm or conform to his thesis. It is almost as if the ontological proof was an afterthought to his phenomenological insights since his rather simplistic and highly dualistic ontology is frequently at odds in the text with his phenomenological descriptions. For example, in his “Foreword” to Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior, Alphonse de Waelhens explains the difficulty that one faces in trying to reconcile Sartre’s insights into corporeity with his ontological conclusions. On the one hand, Sartre’s theses concerning the nature of corporeity – “conceived essentially as a dialectic opposing the body-as-instrument (in a very particular sense) to the body-as-given-in-bare-fact (corps facticiteé) – appear to be exceptionally fruitful and capable of finally allowing us to understand how existing consciousness can be an inherence and a project at the same time” (SB xix). The problem arises when one tries to understand these theses about corporeity in the framework of Sartre’s ontological arguments: “What is unfortunate is that it is difficult to see how these theses can be understood or accepted as soon as one situates oneself, as one must, in the general framework of Sartrean ontology.