Last week we began “tripping the dialectic fantastic” with a consideration of existence and essence; a couplet made explicit through Sartre’s famous expression “existence precedes essence”. This weeks couplet is also inspired by Sartre, as we will see in the following text from a first drafting of my second book*: for Sartre, the lack of existence (or non-being) might be perceived as void like – and it is this no-thing-ness that offers our greatest possibility of being….
Nothingness and Potential
When we first encounter the existential tradition and consider the etymological root’s opposite (non-existence) we might immediately think of death. As posited by Yalom (2010, pg 7), “though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.” There is much in our tradition considering existence as being ‘book-ended’ by non-existence, and knowledge of this propels us to make something of what is between. And yet for Sartre (1943) it is not death but ‘nothingness’ that forms the basis of our existence – and accepting this is the basis of becoming real. As we have just explored, born without essence, “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Sartre, 1946/2007, pg28). As we will come to explore in this couplet, it is our nature as no-thing-ness that means we are essentially free.
When we consider the word ‘nothing’, it can convey an absence. Welwood (2002) points out that the human tendency is to feel this no-thing-ness as a lack; a deficiency that we try to fill or correct. We only have to remember occurrences of boredom or waiting – two experiences that put us in touch with our no-thing-ness (Barnett, 2012). Like his existential kin, Sartre posits nothingness as the “sine qua non of vitality” (Cooper and Adams, pg 2005). How so? If our basic human reality is not a solid something with a psychic structure and content, that means there is not even an “I”; instead there is a relationship with Being based on the recognition that consciousness is not its objects (Cannon, 2012). This recognition might be worded like a bodily feeling of being here (like a presence to being), what Sartre came to call pre-reflective consciousness (1943). The “psyche is nothing but reflection, but this doesn’t not mean it is nothing” (van Deurzen, pg 175, 2012). The ‘being here’ sets up a ‘being there’ – the experience of an “I” in a world. In some ways, we are taking on the role of ‘creator’. With no God, we define ourselves once we undergo our own, self-creation. It was Heidegger that described human beings as openness and possibility; characteristics that might help us elucidate what he meant to convey in his notion of Dasein (there-being). Dasein is not substantial, but a potentiality that projects itself into the future and onto the world (van Deurzen and Arnold-Baker, 2005). To describe a human being in this way introduces that our existence is both inherently nothingness and potential.
An expression you might come across is Sartre’s conception of existence as an upsurge: a becoming and bursting forth into the world. Our no-thing-ness means that we are also “distinctive, irreplaceable and inexchangeable with a unique potential that we bring to the world” (Cooper, 2003, pg 11). Born without blueprint for our existence, what we can make of ourselves may only be limited by the scope of our capacity to imagine our potential, although in practice, we are firmly grounded in the world (Tantum and van Deurzen, 2005 pg 125). Kierkegaard suggested that it is through the tension between the infinite (possibilities) and the finite (the facts) that self is created. There are many versions of ‘Helen’ that can be conceived by my imagination; and yet that future ‘me’ will be contingent on the relationship between imagination (or possibility) on the one hand, and necessity on the other (van Deurzen and Arnold-Baker, 2005).
There are several ways in which this couplet of nothingness and potential as the ground of our being may present in our work with clients. As Heidegger states, nothing stands between the present self and the future self, and this potential also causes anguish. This remains a burden throughout life as we must “reconsider and re-choose possibilities again and again” if we are to live resolutely, creatively and authentically (Weixel-Dixon and Strasser, 2005 pg. 235). A therapy with an existential thrust therefore offers a broader outlook than one that is essentialist or solution-focused. “We are always in transformation and capable of altering the direction we take” (van Deurzen and Arnold-Baker, 2005 pg 169). Furthermore, clients that are prone to concretising their sense of identity will not open to exploring the possibilities in relating to their world. At the heart of the daseinanalysis approach (see the work of its originator Ludwig Binswanger and colleague Medford Boss) distress is the blocking or constriction of potentialities. The aim of therapy is thus to illuminate where life is unlived, and a client awakening to the whole spectrum of world-relating possibilities. Yet we know from our own experience as being-in-the-world that clients create and cling to ideas about who they are to offset uncertainty: freedom without solid ground is very unsettling! As Heidegger says there is nothing that fundamentally secures our existence. As a self-making activity, I am not a stable thing. I am nothing, a “not yet” (noch nicht) that is always unsettled, always in the process of making myself. Clients that begin to strip back their beliefs about who they are and who they need to be often fear the emptiness that lies beneath. How helpful it can be to “prescribe” boredom! “Boredom rests upon the nothing that interlaces existence; its dizziness is infinite, like that which comes from looking down into a bottomless abyss” (Kiekergaard, 1987 pg 291). As Barnett (2012) surmises, we can become “fed up…filled by emptiness” (pg 58), and yet this boredom puts us in touch with both finite and infinite dimensions of human experience. “Boredom … is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open” (Brodsky, 1995). Leaning into boredom (fully) exposes the lie that time is passing and we are not moving; and it reveals how we are always experience-ing, in flux, unfolding. Riding this tension allows people to find a balance or at least to make up their mind about where they want to be in relation to the universe, thus answering ‘how are we to live?’. Those of you who are familiar with the work of Donald Winnicott might be making links with the usefulness of play to recognise nothingness as an opportunity to recover spontaneity rather than paralysis of anxiety; to “repudiate the spirit of seriousness” (Sartre, 1943 pg 706).
Before we leave the abyss (!) I would like to make mention of two more facets. The first is what Sartre describes as moments of ‘double nothingness’, when self and world change together (1943). When I first read Being and Nothingness I couldn’t fully comprehend Sartre’s descriptions of “purifying reflection”. It is only recently, coming back to this material now as a meditator that I get a better grip on things. Cannon (2009) in her exploration of nothingness as a ground of change describes how “I find that I am no longer what I was, and that I am no longer in the process of becoming what I was about to become. I take a different perspective on both past and future. It is as though I am suspended over an abyss, grasping in order to let go and letting go in order to grasp a new way of being in the world” (pg 198). It is as if we have to leap first, and that takes courage. This links to the second facet, and the oft used phrase ‘non-being’. As Hoffman et al (2015) point out, both infiniteness and nothingness are two sides of the same ‘non-being’ coin. Paul Tillich (who we met briefly earlier) explores this classic example of paradox in existential thought in his text The Courage to Be (1952). Although focusing more on the courage to be in the face of non-being (that leap) he also points toward the connection with the ground of being as infiniteness. For many existentialists, the allure of the being/nonbeing paradox is the foundation for striving to be (Hoffman et al., 2015).
For those of you familiar with Gestalt practice you might have in mind Perls’ idea of the fertile void. I often ask trainees to notice which of the two words their attention rests on: is no-thing-ness rich and fertile; or is it empty and terrifying?
In thinking how to round up this couplet, the words of Madison and Barnett (2012) resonated: a curiosity as to why we are seemingly not bothered by our non-existence before birth and yet so very anxious about what we will become after! “The nothingness before I existed may be irrelevant since there was no “I” then, but once “I” exist, there is an “I” to compare being with the imagined infinity when I will never be again” (Madison and Barnett, 2012 pg 235). Can we turn toward non-being in a way that is not nihilistic but rather hopeful? Can we face our finitude with a ‘sober anxiety’ Heidegger (being and time). Some say we can (see Have Carel’s work on the phenomenology of illness for example); unleashing the revitalisation or what Rollo May term “intentionality” (1969) toward living. As Andy Warhol once said “I’m sure I am going to look into the mirror and see nothing…everything is nothing” (cited in Barnett, 2012 pg 55). Certainly, there is an invitation from the existential literature for ‘self-recovery’ (Sartre, 1943); to feel no-thing-ness as a powerful, open presence and meet the instability and ambiguity of the human condition (Welwood, 2002).
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* With a working title “Humanistic psychotherapy: from first to second order change”