Books - Being and Nothingness

Home > Listing Index > Books > Being and Nothingness

	Books - Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (1943) is a philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre that is regarded as the beginning of the growth of existentialism in the 20th century. The French title is L'Être et le Néant. Its main purpose was to define the consciousness as transcendent and to advocate rationalism. The work also sought to disprove George Berkeley's famous contention that "Esse Est Percipi", or "to be is to be perceived".

"Sartre’s overriding concern in writing Being and Nothingness was to vindicate the fundamental freedom of the human being, against determinists of all stripes. It was for the sake of this freedom that he asserted the impotence of physical causality over human beings, that he analysed the place of nothingness within consciousness and showed how it intervened between the forces that act upon us and our actions." (p.111) Neil Levy - Sartre (One World Publications 2002)

Analysis

Although clearly influenced by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time
, Being and Nothingness represents a significant departure to the extent that Sartre was more or less indifferent to Heidegger's central concern with Being. Additionally, Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfilment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being. In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion," what Sartre calls the ens causa sui that religions identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one finds oneself inserted in being (with a lower case "b"). But consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body; it is no thing. Consciousness can imagine that which is not (call up images in its mind, write about Emma Bovary, imagine the not-yet-existing future, etc.). Even in sex--perhaps especially in sex--men and women are haunted by a state in which consciousness and bodily being would be in perfect harmony, with desire satisfied.

Such a state, however, can never be. We try to bring the beloved's consciousness to the surface of her/his body by use of magical acts performed, gestures (kisses, desires). But at the moment of orgasm the illusion is ended and we return to ourselves, just as it is ended when the skier comes to the bottom of the mountain or when the commodity that once we desired loses its glow upon our purchase of it. There will be, for Sartre, no such moment of completion because "man is a useless passion" to be the ens causa sui, the God of the ontological proof.

Instead man will remain, as long as he lives, within the circuit of nothingness, consciousness. He will need to choose and therefore will always feel anguish,the shadow cast by his own freedom. He will try to flee this anguish through dreams of necessity, destiny, and determinism. I.e., he will be, because he must, the Bourgeois, the Feminist, the Worker, the Party Member, the Frenchman, Canadian, or American who must do what he must do. All such roles represent flights from his own freedom into some conditioned world in which action is prescribed. They are no more successful than the other dreams of completion for the self and represent what he called "bad faith" (see false consciousness) and the "spirit (or consciousness or mind) of seriousness." But consciousness is more a vertiginous spontaneity than a stable seriousness, and the man of seriousness will always be engaged in a fight between his desire for the kind of peaceful self-enclosure of a kind of portrait he paints of himself--see the gallery of Bouville's notables in Nausea--and the raging spontaneity of his no-thing consciousness that realizes it is free to overturn all its roles, pull up stakes, and strike out new paths.

Connection to No Exit

Men and women will always be in a world of other people, who can capture him within their gaze, reducing him to his external materiality. They will take his measure, call him hero, coward, nonentity, fool, etc. And then, at last, they will tote up the balance sheet of his life after his death.

Thus, for Sartre's Garcin, in No Exit, hell is other people.

Sartre's solution

Against all this Sartre can offer only the ruthless probing and dissolution of one's illusions. In this he is entirely in line with the Freud whom he otherwise critiques in Being and Nothingness. Indeed, in many respects Sartre is far more ruthless towards the self's illusions than Freud ever was. This is why the early Sartre, of the "existentialist" period (1943-50) was so often anathema to political parties, with their programs, plans, and dogmas. There could be no radical utopian experiments for early Sartre. Nor could there be the platitudes of liberal or conservative world-views. The fellow-travelling Sartre of the 1950s and after seems almost to forget the Sartre of the 1940s, and it would not be until The Family Idiot, his "existential psychoanalysis" of Gustave Flaubert that Sartre would attempt to bring together the existentialist and Marxist Sartres.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Being and Nothingness ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Being and Nothingness; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay