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.