On Negation… A Short Treatment on Existentialist Theory

Beginning with Sartre and ending with Kierkegaard is my way of working backwards to gather an understanding in a way that considers the contemporary as the standard. For this treatment Kierkegaard supports Sartre...

• I would also like to add the supportive statement that existentialism or existentialist theory is not one in which one should situate themselves inside. It is extremely explorative, and not always in the most positive ways. Dive as deep as you feel you can but understand the need to pull yourself out. 

“My consciousness is not restricted to considering the negative. It constitutes itself in its own substance as the annihilation of possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility.For that reason, I must arise in the world as a Not; it is as a not that the slave first apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watching him. There are even men (caretakers, overseers, gaolers), whose social reality is uniquely that of the Not, who will live and die, having forever been only a Not upon the earth."(Sartre, 1957)

• Sartres' soliloquy raises many question and possibilities of understanding of self-negation, but also of societal negation. The process by which a human being is deemed to be a “nothing” in the eyes of society. This also forces one to consider the propensity to negate oneself in preparation of his own negation from society.

"Others, so as to make the Not a part of their subjectivity, establish their human personality as a perpetual negation. This is the meaning and function of what Scheler calls “the man of resentment” — in reality, the Not. But there exist more subtle behaviors, the description of which will lead up further into inwardness of consciousness.” (Sartre, 1957)

• How often is the Black or Brown being regarded as a nothing in the eyes of the society in which he wishes to be a part of? Are his attempts at connection futile knowing that society views him as a thing that is incapable of the ability to meaningfully connect with others?

• What does this mean to the Black and Brown being who wishes to connect but is unable to do so because of how society views him? 

• To have experienced the aforementioned societal negation, one has to understand the confines or limits of the society in which he is negated. He has to understand that the crowd, or society” is the group dynamic where untruths are prominent, if not common place. The lie of collective unity demonstrates itself in full view when a crowd gathers because the lies that are adhered to become a necessary part of life. It is the mechanism by which this negation happens and is perpetuated. 

“There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also the truth, and that in truth itself, there is need to have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth, so that even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all to get together in a crowd — a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed, a voting, noisy, audible crowd — untruth would at once be in evidence” (Kierkegaard, 1957)

-Yogabrofessor

Hatfield, H., & Kaufmann, W. (1957). Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. ˜the œGerman Quarterly, 30(4), 299. https://doi.org/10.2307/401786