“Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being”

The expression “Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being” states a central paradox of the account: nothingness is neither a thing nor an external force, but an event through which being becomes present to itself as questioned. Consciousness is that questioning, and human reality is the being through which it occurs.

Definition and Context

The sentence identifies nothingness with an act rather than an entity. Being-in-itself, isolated in its total positivity, cannot produce new being or undergo an event through itself; the text makes nothingness the singular exception. It comes to being through being, specifically through a particular being constituted as human reality.

The Act of Nihilation

The expression gathers together the preceding description of nothingness as a break in being. The for-itself does not coincide with itself: it exists as an elsewhere in relation to itself, sustaining a reference between reflection and the reflecting within one act. This break is not a passage to another being. It is the self-relation through which the for-itself is constituted, and which the text calls an ontological act when the in-itself degenerates into presence to itself.

Nothingness therefore has no independent being to support it. It is “made-to-be” through a nihilating act, borrowing its existence from the being it puts into question. The formula’s repetition of “by being” carries this dependence into its grammar: being is both what is questioned and that through which the questioning becomes possible.

Human Reality and Significance

The expression also locates the act in human reality. A particular being can bring nothingness to being only insofar as it is itself the original project of its own nothingness. Human reality is thus not a separate substance that creates nothingness from outside; it is the being whose existence makes this self-questioning possible.

The sentence compresses the chapter’s account of consciousness into a concise formulation: nothingness is not discovered as one discovers a being, because it is not an object among objects. It is the constitutive break by which being is questioned and presence to itself becomes possible. Its apparent paradox is therefore essential to its meaning: nothingness is not, yet it is sustained by being as the act through which being can be put in question.