When was Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre published?
Being and Nothingness was published in 1943. Sartre had developed much of its core ideas while a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, where he read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927).
Questions about Being and Nothingness
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What does bad faith mean in Being and Nothingness?
Bad faith, as Sartre defines it in Being and Nothingness, is self-deception about human reality. It takes two forms: convincing oneself one is not what one actually is, or identifying completely with a social role or occupation and thereby denying one's freedom. Sartre's famous example is a café waiter who plays at being a waiter rather than acknowledging that his existence exceeds his role.
What does existence precedes essence mean in Sartre's Being and Nothingness?
In Being and Nothingness, the phrase means that who a person is, their essence, is defined by what they do, their existence. Sartre rejected the idea that a person has a fixed nature determined before or independent of their choices. It represents a break from Descartes's primacy of knowledge.
How did Sartre's Being and Nothingness critique Freud's theory of the unconscious?
Sartre argued that Freud's concept of the censor, the mechanism that actively represses unconscious material, is itself a form of bad faith. The censor must know what it is hiding in order to hide it, which reproduces the same paradox of simultaneously knowing and not knowing that the unconscious was invented to solve. Sartre concluded that what Freud called repression is better explained as bad faith operating at the level of unified consciousness.
What is the ens causa sui in Being and Nothingness?
The ens causa sui is a Latin phrase meaning a being that causes itself. Sartre used it in Being and Nothingness to describe the impossible ideal of completion that haunts human existence. It is the concept many religions and philosophers identify as God, and Sartre argued that human beings perpetually fail to achieve it, which is why he called man a useless passion.
How was Being and Nothingness received by other philosophers?
Reception was sharply divided. Gabriel Marcel called it of incontestable importance and ranked it among the most significant contributions to general philosophy. A. J. Ayer dismissed it as a pretentious metaphysical thesis. Frederick Copleston found Sartre's view that all human actions result from free choice highly implausible, and by Sartre's death in 1980, the philosopher Steven Crowell noted it had come to seem outdated due to challenges from structuralism and analytic philosophy.