Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This sustained and distinctively Buddhist challenge to the ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre s Being and Nothingness resolves the incoherence implicit in the Sartrean conception of nothingness by opening to a Buddhist vision of emptiness. Rooted in the insights of Madhyamika dialectic and an articulated meditative (zen) phenomenology, Nothingness and Emptiness uncovers and examines the assumptions that sustain Sartre s early phenomenological ontology and questions his theoretical elaboration of consciousness as nothingness. Laycock demonstrates that, in addition to a relative nothingness (the for-itself) defined against the positivity and plenitude of the in-itself, Sartre s ontology requires, but also repudiates, a conception of absolute nothingness (the Buddhist emptiness ), and is thus, as it stands, logically unstable, perhaps incoherent. The author is not simply critical; he reveals the junctures at which Sartrean ontology appeals for a Buddhist conception of emptiness and offers the needed supplement."