Sartre and Nagarjuna, Being and Emptiness
June 21, 2016 Endless Further
In his commentary The impact of Buddhism on Western philosophy is still a relatively new field of study. J. Jeffrey Franklin of the University of Colorado in “Buddhism and Modern Existential Nihilism: Jean-Paul Sartre Meets Nagarjuna” * delves into the subject. According to the abstract, Franklin’s essay contends “that modernist nihilism owes a largely unexamined historical debt to the nineteenth-century ‘discovery’ of Buddhism. It demonstrates that Jean-Paul Sartre’s nihilism was influenced by a debate that occurred as part of the Western struggle to assimilate Buddhism: the nineteenth-century nirvana debate.”
I bring this up because Jean-Paul Sartre was a key figure in Western philosophy of the 20th century, a founder of French Existentialism, and today is the 111th anniversary of his birth. Sartre died in 1980.
He was also a novelist and playwright. During the early part of World War II, Sartre was imprisoned by the Germans, escaped and joined the resistance movement.
How deeply Buddhism may have influenced Sartre, I don’t know. And I can’t get access to Franklin’s paper. However, I am aware that Sartre’s ‘nothingness’ is comparable to the Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) in some respects, but we should not carry this comparability too far.
Hazel Barnes in the 1943 English translation of Being and Nothingness writes,
If an object is to be posited as absent or not existing, then there must be involved the ability to constitute an emptiness or nothingness with respect to it. Sartre goes further than this and says that in every act of imagination there is really a double nihilation. In this connection he makes an important distinction between being-in-the world and being-in-the-midst-of-the-world. To be in-the-midst-of-the world is to be one with the world as in the case of objects. But consciousness is not in-the-midst-of-the-world; it is in-the-world. This means that consciousness is inevitably involved with the world (both because we have bodies and because by definition consciousness is consciousness of a transcendent object) but that there is a separation between consciousness and the things in the world.”
This comes close to emptiness and interdependence but doesn’t go all the way. It seems dualistic to me. For Nagarjuna, emptiness demolished all notions of separation and distinction, even though he recognized it was not possible to avoid using such terms. An article on Buddhanet says, “All phenomena have a relative as opposed to an absolute existence . . . Nagarjuna used the dialectic method to ruthlessly negate all pairs of opposites.” This is correct but I don’t understand how the article can go on to say that “Sunyata is the absolute reality.”
Emptiness is not a truth so much as it is a condition or state of existence. We can say it is an aspect of reality, but even that is problematic. Previously, I have quoted the famous verse from Chapter 24 of Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Verses on The Middle Way, “Whatever arises through interdependency is emptiness. However, this is a conventional designation. It is the meaning of the Middle Way.” These words summarize Nagarjuna’s whole philosophy as he identifies the non-duality of the relative and absolute or ultimate truth. But the next verse in the chapter is equally important:
Whatever does arise through interdependency does not exist. Therefore, something that is not empty does not exist.”
In his commentary on the verse, Buddhist scholar Jay Garfield** says,
Nagarjuna is asserting that the dependently arisin is emptiness. Emptiness and the phenomenal world are not two distinct things. They are, rather, two characterizations of the same things. To say of something that it is dependently co-arisen is to say that it is empty. To say of something that it is empty is another way of say that it arises dependently.”
The way I see it is that absolute reality is the absence of an absolute reality. The ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth. And emptiness is relative, which, as I have also mentioned before, Nagarjuna expressed as sunyata-sunyata or the emptiness of emptiness.
Anyway, it’s Sartre’s birthday. Thought I would pass that along.