Being and Nothingness

Introduction

Being and Nothingness (French L'Être et le Néant) is Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical work, published in 1943 in German-occupied Paris. The book is the most systematic theoretical formulation of existentialist philosophy in the twentieth century. Subtitled An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, it deploys the methodological resources of Husserlian phenomenology and the philosophical framework of Heidegger's Being and Time to develop an extended analysis of consciousness, freedom, bad faith, interpersonal experience, and the structures of human existence.

The book is one of the longest and most demanding works of twentieth-century philosophy — over 700 pages in the original French — and combines systematic philosophical analysis with vivid concrete examples that have entered the broader cultural imagination (the waiter who plays at being a waiter; the woman on a date who pretends not to understand; the man peering through a keyhole who hears footsteps in the hall).

Form, length, date, language

Being and Nothingness is a single treatise of approximately 250,000 words in French, structured in four major parts plus an Introduction and Conclusion. The work was composed substantially during Sartre's 1940–1941 imprisonment in a German POW camp (where he read Heidegger's Being and Time in detail for the first time) and the years immediately following; it was published in 1943 under the German occupation, with the censor apparently judging it too abstract to be politically dangerous.

The original language is French in Sartre's distinctively forceful prose style. The new English translation by Sarah Richmond (Routledge, 2018) replaced the older Hazel Barnes translation (1956) and has become the standard scholarly reference.

Why it was written

Being and Nothingness is Sartre's attempt at a comprehensive phenomenological ontology — a systematic analysis of the basic modes of being and their interrelations, developed through analysis of the structures of consciousness. The starting point is the distinction between two fundamental modes of being: being-in-itself (être-en-soi; the mode of being characteristic of non-conscious things) and being-for-itself (être-pour-soi; the mode of being characteristic of consciousness). The relation between these modes, and the structures that arise from consciousness's distinctive self-relation, organize the analysis throughout.

The broader project is the systematic articulation of human freedom and its conditions. Where Heidegger had focused on the structures of Dasein without giving extensive attention to freedom as such, Sartre puts freedom at the center: consciousness is structurally free, and the analysis of what this freedom means, how it can be fled, and what it requires is the principal theme of the work.

Structure and argument

Introduction: The Pursuit of Being. Sartre opens with the methodological framework: the phenomenological starting point (consciousness is always consciousness of something), the rejection of the noumenon (there is no thing-in-itself behind the appearances), and the basic distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself.

Part One: The Problem of Nothingness. The analysis of the nothing (le néant) that consciousness introduces into being. Consciousness is structurally a kind of nothingness — not a substance but a self-relation that distances itself from what it is conscious of. The famous extended discussion of bad faith (Chapter 2) develops the analysis of how consciousness flees its own freedom by treating itself as a fixed thing rather than the open activity it actually is.

Part Two: Being-For-Itself. The detailed analysis of consciousness's mode of being. Chapter 1 (Immediate Structures of the For-Itself) develops the basic phenomenology; Chapter 2 (Temporality) analyzes the temporal structure of consciousness as past, present, and future projection; Chapter 3 (Transcendence) develops the analysis of consciousness's relation to its objects.

Part Three: Being-for-Others. The phenomenology of interpersonal experience. The famous analysis of the look of the Other (Chapter 1) presents the encounter with another consciousness as fundamentally the experience of being seen — of becoming an object in the other's consciousness in a way that constitutes a fundamental dimension of my self-experience. Chapter 3 develops detailed phenomenologies of love, indifference, hate, sadism, and masochism as concrete modes of relation to the other.

Part Four: Having, Doing, and Being. The analysis of human action, the relation between freedom and the situation, the project of self-creation. The famous discussions of existential psychoanalysis (which Sartre proposes as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis) and of human projects as expressions of a fundamental choice of being belong to this part.

Conclusion. The closing reflections raise the question of the relation between phenomenological ontology and ethics; the projected ethics was never written in the form Sartre originally envisioned.

Key passages

• Introduction, sections III–V — the basic distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself.
• Part One, Chapter 2 — the extended analysis of bad faith, with the famous waiter example.
• Part Two, Chapter 2 — the analysis of temporality and the for-itself's relation to its past.
• Part Three, Chapter 1 — the analysis of the look of the Other.
• Part Three, Chapter 3 — the phenomenology of concrete relations with others (love, indifference, sadism, masochism).
• Part Four, Chapter 1 — the analysis of freedom and the situation.
• Part Four, Chapter 2 — the project of existential psychoanalysis.

Reception history

The initial French reception of Being and Nothingness was substantial within philosophical circles; the broader cultural reception came in the immediate post-war years through Sartre's 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism and through the broader existentialist moment in French intellectual life. By the late 1940s Being and Nothingness had established Sartre as the leading French philosopher of his generation.

The international reception was slower. The English translation by Hazel Barnes (1956) made the work available to anglophone readers but was widely criticized for translation choices that obscured important arguments. The new Sarah Richmond translation (2018) has substantially improved access. The major recent scholarly engagement (Christina Howells, Iris Murdoch, David Detmer, Sebastian Gardner) has restored serious philosophical attention to the work after a period in which it had been overshadowed by Heideggerian phenomenology in continental philosophy and largely ignored by analytic philosophy.

The broader cultural reception of Being and Nothingness extends well beyond academic philosophy. The concepts of bad faith, radical freedom, and the look of the Other have entered general moral and psychological discourse in ways that transcend Sartre's specific philosophical framework.

Contemporary engagement

The standard French text is in the Gallimard edition. The standard English translation is now the Richmond (2018); the older Barnes (1956) remains in use pedagogically. Major recent scholarly work includes Sebastian Gardner's Sartre's Being and Nothingness: A Reader's Guide (2009), David Detmer's Sartre Explained (2008), the substantial work of Christina Howells and Iris Marion Young, and the relevant chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Christina Howells, ed., 1992). Active scholarly debates concern the interpretation of bad faith, the analysis of interpersonal experience, the consistency of Sartre's account of freedom, the relation between Being and Nothingness and the later Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the contemporary applicability of Sartrean phenomenology.

Further reading

• Sartre — the author
• Existentialism — the tradition
• Heidegger — the philosopher whose Being and Time shaped the work
• Being and Time — the predecessor work
• Authenticity — the value at issue throughout
• Free Will — the condition Sartre's analysis presupposes and analyzes

The most systematic theoretical formulation of existentialism. Sartre's major philosophical work.