Being and Nothingness

In *Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology*, published in 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre builds a philosophical system to support his existentialism, exploring consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the reality of "nothingness," psychoanalysis, and free will. The work is considered the most important nonfiction statement of his existentialism and his most influential philosophical text, original despite its debt to earlier thinkers.

Sartre’s thinking was shaped by reading Martin Heidegger’s *Being and Time* while a prisoner of war in 1940–41. That book used Husserlian phenomenology to examine ontology, and Sartre credited it with redirecting his own inquiries. However, he deeply doubted that humanity could achieve any state of fulfillment like Heidegger’s hypothetical “re-encounter with Being.” For Sartre, humans are haunted by a vision of completeness—what he calls the *ens causa sui*, a being that causes itself, often identified with God. Born into a material body in a material universe, we find ourselves inserted into being. Following Husserl’s idea that consciousness is always consciousness *of* something, Sartre argues there is no hidden self inside consciousness. On this basis, he critiques Sigmund Freud’s theories, claiming consciousness is essentially self-conscious.

The book has been praised for its central notion that “existence precedes essence,” its concept of bad faith, its exploration of nothingness, and its contributions to the philosophy of sex. It has also been criticized for being abstruse and for its treatment of Freud.

Sartre’s existentialism shares a starting point with René Descartes: the first thing we can be aware of is our own existence, even when doubting everything else (*Cogito ergo sum*). But Sartre breaks with Descartes by rejecting the primacy of knowledge—summed up in “existence precedes essence”—and offering a different conception of knowledge and consciousness. In *Nausea*, the protagonist’s dizziness toward his own existence is triggered by things, not thinking, and arises in the face of freedom and responsibility for giving meaning to reality.

Key ideas build on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. For both, consciousness is intentional: there is only consciousness of something. For Sartre, this means no hidden self (like Husserl’s transcendental ego) exists inside consciousness; the ego is a structure outside it, so we can be conscious of the ego.

In the introduction, Sartre outlines his theory of consciousness, being, and phenomena by criticizing earlier phenomenologists (especially Husserl and Heidegger) as well as idealists, rationalists, and empiricists. He sees phenomenology as a major achievement because it disproved dualisms that posited a “hidden” nature (like Kant’s noumenon), removing “the illusion of worlds behind the scene.” Examining phenomena, he describes two types of being: being-in-itself (the being of things) and being-for-itself (the being of consciousness). Humans can only approximate being-in-itself.

In Part 1, Chapter 1, Sartre argues that nothingness is an experienced reality, not a subjective mistake. The absence of a friend or money hints at a being of nothingness. It is not just a mental concept summing up negative judgments like “Pierre is not here.” While non-being always appears within human expectation, concrete nothingness—like not being able to see—is part of a totality (the blind person’s life), modifying that totality. In the whole of consciousness and phenomenon (Heidegger’s being-in-the-world), both exist only together. The human act of questioning puts consciousness at a distance from the world; every question raises the possibility of a negative answer, of non-being. This is how nothingness exists. Non-being cannot be part of being-in-itself or a complement to it. Being-for-itself is the origin of negation, and by bringing nothingness into the world, consciousness changes its relation to things without annihilating them.

In Part 1, Chapter 2, Sartre describes bad faith as self-deception about human reality. It can take two forms: one is making oneself falsely into something.