Being & Nothingness : Jean-Paul Sartre

Being & Nothingness. In that work, Jean-Paul Sartre attempts to straighten out a question that had eluded Descartes, Kant and Leibniz, and to a lesser extent Heidegger and Bergson: What is the relation of being to its nothingness? Bergson, for example' posited the act of duration, in which organization is melodic, involving a multiplicity of interpretations. Anyone who has been in a meetings, knows there are always competing perspectives and interpretations of events. Sartre, however, points out that if we talk of "temporality" then duration, as a multiplicity of interpretations, must presuppose "an organizing act".

Kant, in contrast to Bergson, did not see a synthesis in a multiplicity and the organizing act. At issue, for organization theory, is the terrain of "collective memory." For Bergson, the past interpretations cling to those of the present, penetrating the present in the form of memory, which is "ekstatically in the Past." What is ekstatic? For, Sartre's theory of temporality and organizing, ekstatic is not one, but three dimensions. And this is one of many contributions he makes in Being & Nothingness.

Sartre's contribution was to move from the philosophy of "I think, therefore I am" to "I think; therefore I was". The problem for organization studies is to answer the question of how is it that organizations change and are interpenetrated by permanence (what does not change In-Itself), and collective memory (that is being perpetually restoried), in time? Duration of organization presupposes an organizing act which is antenarrative, foreshadowing the nihilation of In-Itself and the becoming For-Itself. Organizing is the multiplicity and interpenetration of Being & Nothingness.

This book, I love a lot.