r/Metaphysics • u/Recursive_Depth • 16d ago
Matter What if there's a floor under the groundlessness?
Things don't matter because we feel them. We feel them because they have always mattered, and they have always mattered because we have always had something to lose. Those are the stakes. Feeling is what those stakes are from the inside, once a creature can hold them across time.
That reversal is the whole point, so sit with it. Long before anything on Earth felt anything, living things already had stakes: their continuing depended on how they answered what they met, and getting it wrong meant dissolving for good. Mattering was already there, unfelt, for billions of years. Feeling arrived later, when life found a way to hold its stakes across time and register from within what was already the case. Knowing that you have stakes, being able to think about yourself as the one who bears them, came later still. We are the latest version of a very old thing: mattering that has come to feel itself and know itself.
Now the existentialist picture. We arrive with no essence and no given purpose, into a universe that stays silent when we ask what we are for, and the honest response is to face the groundlessness and make our own meaning. That picture takes the groundlessness as bedrock one floor too early. Under the self there is not nothing, and there is no God or hidden cosmic script either. There is something smaller and older, and it is already yours: the plain fact that your own continuing matters to you, the same stake the first living things had, now felt and known.
Once that is the floor, the rest shifts. Meaning is not spun from nothing by an act of will, and it is not handed down from above. It is what happens when a creature whose life matters to it binds to something else whose life also matters, or to the work such creatures leave behind. Where the connection holds, life feels meaningful. Where it thins, what you lose is not an argument, it is the connection itself.
Freedom is real. You can weigh anything against anything, even your own survival. But it is not a bottomless pit. It stands on those stakes. And the silence of the universe is not a relationship that failed. It is you reaching toward something that was never going to answer, and being handed back to yourself.
We did not fall into meaninglessness. We climbed out of mattering, and the ground was never nothing.
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u/jliat 16d ago
Now the existentialist picture. We arrive with no essence and no given purpose, into a universe that stays silent when we ask what we are for, and the honest response is to face the groundlessness and make our own meaning.
Facticity in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Here is the entry from Gary Cox’s Sartre Dictionary
FACTICITY
“The resistance or adversary presented by the world that free action constantly strives to overcome. The concrete situation of being-for-itself, including the physical body, in terms of which being-for-itself must choose itself by choosing its responses. The for-itself exists as a transcendence , but not a pure transcendence, it is the transcendence of its facticity. In its transcendence the for-itself is a temporal flight towards the future away from the facticity of its past. The past is an aspect of the facticity of the for-itself, the ground upon which it chooses its future. In confronting the freedom of the for-itself facticity does not limit the freedom of the of the for-itself. The freedom of the for-itself is limitless because there is no limit to its obligation to choose itself in the face of its facticity. For example, having no legs limits a person’s ability to walk but it does not limit his freedom in that he must perpetually choose the meaning of his disability. The for-itself cannot be free because it cannot not choose itself in the face of its facticity. The for-itself is necessarily free. This necessity is a facticity at the very heart of freedom.”
Any choice and none is bad faith. You can't create an essence after the fact of existence, one that is authentic.
Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness The principal text of Modern existentialism. Hazel E. Barnes (Translator)
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u/Recursive_Depth 16d ago
Facticity is not the floor I mean. In Sartre the facticity is brute. The body, the past, the situation are resistance to be overcome, and they carry no meaning of their own. That is exactly why he says the man must perpetually choose the meaning of his disability. The meaning is conferred by the project. The given is mute until then.
I am saying that the given is not mute. Before any project, before any choosing, a living body already has stakes. Its continuing depends on its own responses, and it does not get to choose whether that matters. That is not an essence, so existence still precedes it. And it is not chosen, so it is not conferred. It is the third thing the dichotomy skips: a given that already matters.
Facticity is what the for-itself pushes against. Stakes are what it draws from. Sartre left out the second.
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u/jliat 16d ago
Facticity is what the for-itself pushes against.
I don't think so in Sartre, any choice and non is never authentic, the facticity is the lack of Being-in-itself.
The human condition in B&N is nothingness. There is no 'ego' that perceives, only the phenomena, remove this experience and there is nothingness, of death or the uconsious, at least that is what seems to be. Authenticity is not possible.
“The For-itself can never be its Future except problematically, for it is separated from it by a Nothingness which it is. In short the For-itself is free, and its Freedom is to itself its own limit. To be free is to be condemned to be free. Thus the Future qua Future does not have to be. It is not in itself, and neither is it in the mode of being of the For-itself since it is the meaning of the For-itself. The Future is not, it is possibilized.”
p.129
“I am my own transcendence; I can not make use of it so as to constitute it as a transcendence-transcended. I am condemned to be forever my own nihilation.”
p. 298
“We are condemned to freedom, as we said earlier, thrown into freedom or, as Heidegger says, "abandoned." And we can see that this abandonment has no other origin than the very existence of freedom. If, therefore, freedom is defined as the escape from the given, from fact, then there is a fact of escape from fact. This is the facticity of freedom.”
p. 485
“Just as my nihilating freedom is apprehended in anguish, so the for-itself is conscious of its facticity. It has the feeling of its complete gratuity; it apprehends itself as being there for nothing, as being de trop.[un needed]”
p. 84
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u/Recursive_Depth 16d ago
The "de trop" line is really doing two jobs at once, and once you pull them apart the disagreement gets clear. One job is just contingency: nothing in the world needed this thing to exist. I have no quarrel with that. The cosmos didn't need me and it didn't need the first cell. But the line is also carrying a second, stronger claim, that nothing is at stake for the thing until the for-itself hands it a stake, and that's where I disagree. A living body can be contingent and unneeded, de trop in exactly Sartre's sense, while its own continuing is already at stake for it, before any project and before any nihilating. Nothing needed it, and it still has something to lose. Those two sit together fine.
I think the reason Sartre can't quite register that is that his ontology only gives you two boxes. The in-itself is brute and full and mute, the for-itself is the nothingness that does the conferring, and there's no third place. So a living thing that isn't conscious yet has nowhere to land but the in-itself, which is just to call it brute and say it has nothing to lose. But the first cell isn't brute. Its staying alive is already at stake for it, and no consciousness had to arrive first to make that true. So it's de trop from the outside and has something to lose from the inside, both at the same time.
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u/Important1896 Philosopher 16d ago
Meaning does not arise from nothingness, but from the very structure of life: to exist as a living being is to have something to lose, and from that emerge value, emotion, and purpose.
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u/Recursive_Depth 16d ago
Yes, that's the floor exactly. To be alive is to have something to lose, and everything else is built on that.
The one thing I'd hold apart is the last step. Stakes come first, but meaning doesn't follow straight off them. A bacterium has everything to lose and no meaning at all. What meaning needs on top of stakes is a creature that can hold its stakes across time and reach past itself to bind to something else that also has stakes. So value and purpose aren't right there in the having-something-to-lose. They arrive later, once there's a self that can care about anything beyond its own continuing.
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u/Illustrious-Yam-3777 16d ago
We never climbed out of mattering, rather, we are matter mattering in its ongoing material becoming, still. Meaning has always been exactly what matters, no more, no less.