Being and Nothingness

"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being--like a worm." Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, 56.

Being "calls" to us from non-being, but only in the most attenuated sense. Apprehending what is (or appears to be) opens the door to speculation as to its negation and/or what it occludes or lacks. The perception of depth or three dimensionality creates expectations of surplus: what is inside or lies on the other side of this object? The "encounter" with absence spurs the imagination: it is the impetus of the fictional mode we call "metaphysics."

Ontological speculation involves the testing of our perceptual limitations: it is an exercise of human freedom--the freedom to interrogate our given environment and to discover (or invent for it) new interiors and new surfaces. Every exercise of human freedom is, ipso facto, an instance of human freedom--evidence that human beings are, despite all circumscription, in some genuine sense, free.

In what sense? Here, Peter Berger demonstrates himself an acute interpreter of Sartre:

"... the dramatic model of society at which we have arrived now does not deny that the actors on the stage are constrained by all the external controls set up by the impresario and the internal ones of the role itself. All the same, they have options--of playing their parts enthusiastically or sullenly, of playing with inner conviction or with 'distance,' and, sometimes, of refusing to play at all. Looking at society through the medium of this dramatic model greatly changes our general sociological perspective. Social reality now seems to be precariously perched on the cooperation of many individual actors--or perhaps a better simile would be that of acrobats engaged in perilous balancing acts, holding up between them the swaying structure of the social world" (Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 138).

Every exercise of hermeneutics offers an opportunity to enact human freedom. Likewise, every deviation from the script of one's social role opens new possibilities in a given life.

Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing may also come from something and, from that "somethinged" nothing, may come something new.