Being and Nothingness

• 1. Introduction

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  Being and Nothingness landed in Paris bookshops in 1943, while Jean-Paul Sartre's city was still under German occupation. The book ran to hundreds of dense pages and carried a subtitle in the tradition of academic philosophy: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. It was not an obvious candidate for popular readership. Yet it became Sartre's most influential philosophical work and the single most important non-fiction expression of his existentialism.

  Sartre had conceived much of it while a prisoner of war, reading a German philosopher in a German camp. That philosopher was Martin Heidegger, and the encounter changed everything. What questions did that captivity plant in Sartre's mind? Why did he believe that humans are, in his own words, condemned to be free? What is bad faith, and why did he argue that being a moral person was among its most severe forms? And what does nothingness, a concept that sounds like pure abstraction, have to do with the café waiter carrying his tray like a tightrope walker?

• 2. A Book Born in Captivity

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  Martin Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927, and Sartre did not read it until 1940 and 1941, during his time as a prisoner of war. Sartre later attributed the entire course of his subsequent philosophical inquiries to that encounter. Heidegger used the method of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology as a lens for examining the nature of being itself, and Sartre absorbed both men's ideas before pushing decisively beyond them.

  Husserl had argued that consciousness is always intentional, meaning it exists only as consciousness of something. Sartre accepted this but drew a different conclusion. For Husserl, there was still a transcendental ego lurking inside consciousness. Sartre rejected that entirely. If consciousness can only be consciousness of something, then there can be no hidden self inside it. Any ego must be a structure that exists outside consciousness, so that consciousness can then be conscious of it.

  Sartre was also deeply skeptical of what he saw as Heidegger's implicit optimism. Heidegger had described a hypothetical state of personal fulfillment through what he called a re-encounter with Being. Sartre found this unconvincing. In his reading, human beings are haunted by a vision of completion he labeled the ens causa sui, a Latin phrase meaning a being that causes itself. That is the concept many religions and philosophers identify as God. For Sartre, this completion is forever out of reach. The book's title points straight at that gap: being and nothingness are the two poles between which human existence is stretched.

• 3. Bad Faith and the Café Waiter

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  Sartre illustrated his most celebrated concept with a figure anyone could picture: a waiter in a Parisian café. Watch him closely, Sartre urged. His movements are a fraction too precise, his attention a little too eager, his walk a self-conscious imitation of mechanical stiffness while he balances his tray with the recklessness of a tightrope walker. "He is playing," Sartre wrote. "But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café."

  This performance is what Sartre called bad faith. It takes two main forms. The first is convincing oneself that one is not what one actually is. The second is conceiving of oneself as an object, identifying completely with a job, a social role, or an economic class, and thereby denying one's freedom. Sartre's position was that no human being is their role. A speaker is not identical with speaking; a grocer is not identical with grocery. Existence, in his formulation, precedes essence.

  Sartre extended this analysis to ethics with characteristic bluntness. Being a moral person, he argued, requires denying authentic impulses and submitting one's actions to the will of another. He characterized conventional ethics as a tool the bourgeoisie uses to control the masses, and he called morality as normally practiced "the faith of bad faith." Bad faith also arises when people define themselves entirely through their past, treating a self that no longer exists as if it were the real one. Authentic existence demands holding together three things at once: what one is, the roles one plays, and the nothingness that separates pure existence from any fixed identity.

• 4. Nothingness and Freedom

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  Nothingness, in Being and Nothingness, is not an abstraction. Sartre insisted it is an experienced reality. The absence of a friend in a room is a concrete nothingness, not merely a failure of expectation. So is the inability to see for a person who is blind; that nothingness is part of the total shape of a life in a world. It enters reality through consciousness, through the being-for-itself, which Sartre defined as the nihilation of being-in-itself.

  Sartre's argument is that asking questions is the activity that introduces nothingness into the world. Every question opens the possibility of a negative answer. "Who is entering? No one." That "no one" is not a mere linguistic trick; it is a mode of being that only consciousness can bring about. Things, the being-in-itself, cannot question. Only the being-for-itself does, and by doing so it holds itself at a distance from the world.

  This structure is what makes freedom both absolute and agonizing. Human beings exist within an overall condition of nothingness that allows for free consciousness, yet they are simultaneously constrained to make continuous, conscious choices in the physical world. That gap between pure spontaneous thought and the constraining world of action is the source of anguish. People flee this anguish through action-oriented constructs: necessity, destiny, determinism, God. They become, in Sartre's list, the Bourgeois, the Feminist, the Worker, the Party Member, the Frenchman, each acting out a chosen character. Sartre's recipe for fulfillment was to escape all quests by completing them, forcing order onto nothingness through what he called the spirit of seriousness, though he acknowledged that consciousness is probably grounded more in spontaneity than in stable seriousness.

• 5. The Look and the Other

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  Sartre used a simple, unsettling thought experiment to describe what happens when another person enters your world. Imagine seeing a mannequin and for a moment mistaking it for a real person. In that moment, your world transforms. Objects partly escape you; they now have aspects that belong to the other person and are therefore unknowable to you. The other person is, Sartre wrote, "a threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world... Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's values, over which you have no control."

  When you realize it was only a mannequin, the world seems to transfer back. You return to the pre-reflective mode of being, which Sartre compared to the eye of a camera that is always present but never seen. The cycle is continual and inescapable.

  Relationships built on "the look" are, for Sartre, often mistaken for love. What they really involve is each person maintaining the other's gaze to avoid confronting their own subjectivity. This is a form of emotional alienation in which the purpose of each participant is not to exist but to remain the object of the other's attention. At its extreme, Sartre argued, this alienation can tip into masochistic and sadistic dynamics, as participants try to prove control over a look they feel enslaved to. For sex specifically, Sartre rejected any purely biological account of desire. He described what he called "double reciprocal incarnation," a mutual recognition of subjectivity, as the true core of sexual experience. He quoted himself describing the caress as an act in which one makes oneself flesh in order to impel the other to realize her own flesh. Even here, the moment of orgasm ends the illusion, just as reaching the foot of the mountain ends the skier's experience. The ens causa sui, the perfect completion, cannot be found in sex any more than anywhere else.

• 6. Sartre Against Freud

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  Sigmund Freud noticed that his patients appeared to both know and not know the same thing. His answer was to posit the unconscious, a region of the mind where the truth of underlying traumas is actively repressed. Sartre found this solution self-defeating. If the patients resist the revelation of what they are repressing, something must be doing the resisting. Freud located that function in what he called the censor.

  Sartre quoted the problem directly: the censor must be aware of the drive being repressed, but precisely in order not to be conscious of it. What is that, Sartre asked, if not bad faith? Freud had not resolved the paradox of simultaneously knowing and not knowing. He had simply moved it one level deeper, creating, in Sartre's phrase, "an autonomous consciousness in bad faith" between the unconscious and conscious mind. The postulation of the censor was redundant because the same problem reappears at the level of the censor itself.

  For Sartre, what Freud diagnosed as repression is better understood as a feature of consciousness as a whole. Hiding something from oneself is not a specialized intra-psychic mechanism; it is the larger structure of bad faith, operating at the level of unified consciousness. Psychoanalysis therefore yields no special insight that a rigorous phenomenology cannot provide. The philosopher David Pears criticized Sartre's critique as complex but imprecisely formulated. The philosopher Thomas Baldwin argued it rests on a misunderstanding of Freud, while conceding that Sartre's attempts to adapt Freud's ideas are of greater interest than his attacks on them.

• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel described Being and Nothingness as of "incontestable" importance, ranking it among the most significant contributions to general philosophy. He singled out Sartre's analysis of bad faith as "one of the most outstanding and solid" sections of the book, arguing that it kept Sartre's arguments from floating free of human reality. Marcel also observed that Sartre had diverged from Heidegger in important ways and that his contributions were genuinely original.

  Not everyone agreed. The philosopher A. J. Ayer dismissed the book as a pretentious metaphysical thesis and "principally an exercise in misusing the verb 'to be'." The philosopher Frederick Copleston found Sartre's claim that all human actions result from free choice "highly implausible," describing his concept of freedom as both nihilistic and possibly inconsistent with his other views. The philosopher Jean Wahl challenged Sartre's arguments on the topic of nothingness specifically. By the time Sartre died in 1980, the philosopher Steven Crowell noted, the book had come to seem outdated; its emphasis on consciousness had become associated with the subjectivism that structuralism and analytic philosophy had each challenged in their own ways.

  The author Susan Sontag praised Sartre's treatment of the body and of concrete relations with others, placing it within a French tradition of serious engagement with fundamental problems. Several thinkers, including the philosophers Roger Scruton and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and the sociologist Murray S. Davis, credited Sartre with producing the first phenomenological analysis of sex. Scruton called his analysis of sexual desire perhaps the most acute in philosophy. Sheets-Johnstone suggested that Sartre's views about desire anticipated those of Michel Foucault, while also noting internal contradictions and observing that despite his critique of Freud, his views on female sexuality shared certain features with Freud's. The director Richard Eyre recalled that the book was popular among British students in the 1960s, though he noted that it usually went unread among them. The translator Hazel Barnes produced the English edition with a glossary of Sartre's special terminology, including the untranslated French terms être-en-soi, être-pour-soi, and être-pour-autrui, a contribution that shaped how anglophone philosophy absorbed the work.