Essence is a reified nothingness that knowledge neither adds nor removes

Evidence

These potentialities or probabilities, which are the meaning of being beyond being, are in-itself beyond being, and precisely for this reason they are nothings. The essence of the inkwell is made-to-be as a correlate of the possible negation of the for-itself, but it is not the inkwell and it is not being. In so far as this essence is in-itself, it is a negation hypostasized and reified; that is, it is a nothing, it belongs to the shell of nothingness which encases and determines the world. The for-itself reveals the inkwell as an inkwell. But this revelation is made beyond the being of the inkwell, in that future which is not; all the potentialities of being, from permanence to qualified potentialities, are defined as that which being is not yet without ever truly having to be them. Here again knowledge adds nothing to being and removes nothing from it; knowledge adorns it with no new quality. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 613

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sartre’s paradoxical claim that essence itself is a ‘negation hypostasized and reified’ — a nothing belonging to the shell of nothingness encasing the world — is a central ontological definition.
• XREF: Directly prefigures Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity on how essence and meaning are constituted through freedom’s negation, not given in the in-itself. — connects to: An essence is radically severed from the single appearance that manifests it; Nothingness is a supported recoil from Being that enables consciousness to exist; Nothingness is expelled from being yet gives the world its outlines (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Nothingness is a supported recoil from Being that enables consciousness to exist #expands (0.80)
• Nothingness grounds negation by being itself a negation, not an empty void #qualifies (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 215
• Nothingness is expelled from being yet gives the world its outlines #qualifies (0.75)
• Negation cannot touch the plenitude of being; nothingness is denied at being’s heart #contradicts (0.75)