Mystic Nothingness serves as an ideal goal, unlike Sartre’s everyday concept
Evidence
We may note that the mystic’s use of the concept of Nothingness differs from those already mentioned in (1) applying the concept in the form of negative definition to the ultimate reality, The One; (2) presenting the loss of personality, which is a species of Nothingness, as an ideal goal; (3) giving an irrational (one might almost say sensational) cast to the whole experience. Without passing judgment on the validity of the mystic approach, we can at any rate observe that here, as with Sartre, the concept of Nothingness, while continuing to be a denial of “everything,” becomes all important and heavy with consequence. One may hazard guesses as to how all of this came about. Probably here too it is in part due to observation of the logical interdependence of Being and Non-Being. If the One is to be different from all of Being, then it is not Being. The loss of self is probably due partly to the same cause (if we are to be one with God, then we must be not-self) as well as to a desire to escape from the responsibility for one’s own being. Perhaps too, observation of the way in which the senses tend to merge with one another, to become pain or numbness if intensified too much, also the fact that sound becomes silence if carried too high or too low may have strengthened the feeling that there is an absolute surrounding Nothingness which has somehow significant characteristics. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 54
Categorization
- DEFINE: Crisply distinguishes three senses of the mystic Nothingness: negative definition of The One, loss of personality as goal, and irrational cast — set against Sartre’s usage.
- XREF: The claim that losing selfhood is partly a flight from responsibility for one’s own being ties directly to bad faith, the backbone of Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s ethics. — connects to: Sartre secularizes and democratizes what mysticism reserved for privileged experiences; The For-itself is a particular privation, not a general Nothingness.
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Sartre secularizes and democratizes what mysticism reserved for privileged experiences; The For-itself is a particular privation, not a general Nothingness.