Freud- being and non-being
...on-being meaning what there is not (nothingness). Nothingness does not within itself have being, yet being supports it. It is within the world of for-it-self and is the recoil from fullness of self-contained being which allows consciousness to exist as such. Consciousness “carries nothing within itself” and “must be its own nothingness” (Being and Nothingness, 28). Sartre implies with this sentence that the role of self -consciousness is at the same time self-nihilating. Consciousness also reveals itself to be different from being as it can detach itself or disengage itself from being by imagining the non-real, by questioning and by doubting. Understanding what something is also involves grasping what is not (non-being). “In so far as man detaches himself from or denies the world, he is able to put himself outside being” (Being and Nothingness, 24). This nothingness is the ultimate foundation of man’s freedom, for it keep him from being totally self-coincident like a thing. “Man is free because he is not himself but presence to himself” (BN, 440). In other words, human reality can detach itself from and transcend what is, “put itself outside of being”, precisely because it is not locked into simple being. We illicit non-being through detachment, another form of this detachment is what Sartre has called nihilation. This meaning that when consciousness exists it is done so by the consciousness making nothingness. It is between that and the object of which it is conscious. This inevitably makes nihilation that by which consc...