Death and Situation

Abstract

As an “essay in phenomenological ontology” ¹ Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant is concerned with the structures of Being in so far as Being presents itself, i.e., in so far as it is given in experience. As a phenomenology, Being and Nothingness deals only with presentations, and as a descriptive enterprise, it cannot handle metaphysical problems. Thus Sartre gives us extensive descriptive analyses of the self, the body, the various concrete relations with the alter ego (love, language, desire, etc.), but he does not attempt to analyze questions of the ultimate origin, purpose, or meaning of reality. Since the character of his investigation is descriptive, and since Sartre’s method takes the standpoint of the individual consciousness, the question of what is within and outside our experience becomes transposed into the problem of what is within and outside my experience, I as experiencing consciousness. What is within the experience of my fellow man may be in principle inaccessible to my direct experience and vice versa. A crucial case in point is the problem of the experience of death. My experience of death is always my experience of the death of the Other, the death of a fellow man. The experience of my death as a phenomenon, Sartre claims, can only be a phenomenon for the experience of the Other, whether that Other is friend, relation, associate, stranger, or part of the anonymous “public.” If “my” death is thus outside my possible experience, in what sense is my death a possible object for my phenomenological investigation ?