Summary: Being and Nothingness
Published in 1943, Being and Nothingness seeks to answer the question: ‘What is being?’. Sartre explores this by examining consciousness, nothingness, and the existence of others, alongside behaviours such as bad faith and shame. To achieve this, he employs a phenomenological approach influenced by his reading of Heidegger.
Other works: Existentialism Is a Humanism The Imaginary
Sartre begins by highlighting a key contribution of phenomenology: by reducing the existent to the series of appearances through which it manifests itself
1, phenomenology eliminates the dualisms that have long troubled philosophy (being/appearance, thing-in-itself/phenomenon, interior/exterior, subject/object). These are replaced by the monism of the phenomenon.
In this framework, all appearances are of equal value. For instance, force is understood as nothing other than the totality of its effects. As a result, the dualism between being and appearing can no longer be sustained in philosophy. Appearance refers not to a concealed reality but to the total series of appearances
2.
Similarly, the dualism of power and act is abolished: Everything exists in act
3. For example, Proust’s genius lies entirely in his work itself, not in any supposed potential to produce works.
The starting point of Being and Nothingness is precisely this question: What is the being of this seeming, once it is no longer opposed to being? Or, more simply: What is being?
Indeed, the being of the phenomenon escapes the condition of the phenomenal; it is transphenomenal. This poses a genuine philosophical question. How can it be answered?
To address this, we must examine consciousness. For if, as Sartre defines it, consciousness is the transphenomenal dimension of the subject's being—not a particular mode of knowledge, such as inner sense or self-knowledge
4—then understanding the nature of consciousness as this transphenomenal being is essential to understanding being itself, insofar as it is also transphenomenal.
The question thus arises: What is consciousness?
Sartre draws on Husserl's fundamental insight:
All consciousness, as Husserl demonstrated, is consciousness of something. In other words, there is no consciousness that does not posit a transcendent object; put differently, consciousness itself has no content 5.
For instance, a table is not located within consciousness, even as a representation. A table exists in space, next to the window
6.
The first task of philosophy, then, is to expel things from consciousness and restore the true relationship between consciousness and the world: Consciousness transcends itself to reach an object
7. For this reason, Sartre’s philosophy cannot be called idealism. If all consciousness is consciousness of something, then subjectivity does not constitute the objective. To be conscious of something is to confront a concrete and full presence that is not itself consciousness
8. This is why pure subjectivity would dissolve into nothingness
9.
From this perspective, as Heidegger observed, we always possess a pre-ontological, immediate understanding of being. The phenomenon of being, like any primary phenomenon, is directly revealed to consciousness
10.
However, the phenomenon of being must be analysed to elucidate its meaning.
Sartre introduces a crucial distinction, asserting that being is divided into two incommunicable regions
11: being-in-itself and being-for-itself.
Being-in-itself refers to the mode of being of things, which simply exist without any reflection upon themselves—in other words, without consciousness. Being is not a relation to itself; it simply is. It is an assertion that cannot assert itself, as it is entirely self-contained. We will summarise this by stating that being is in itself, meaning it does not refer back to itself as self-consciousness. It merely is.
12. This mode of being adheres to the principle of identity: Being is what it is
13. For instance, a door is a door, and nothing more.
Being-for-itself, on the other hand, characterises the mode of being of humans, as they possess consciousness. Through the act of self-reflection, humans define themselves as being what they are not and not being what they are
14. By becoming aware of themselves, they create a distance from themselves. Consequently, they are split, simultaneously the one who observes and the one who is observed.
1 L’Etre et le Néant, Gallimard, Paris, 1943, Introduction, I, p.11
2 ibid.
3 ibid, III, p.17
4 ibid.
5 ibid.
6 ibid.
7 ibid., p.18
8 ibid, V, p.27
9 ibid., p.28
10 ibid, VI, p.30
11 ibid.
12 ibid., p.32
13 ibid.
14 ibid.