- Length
- 688 pagesBarnes, Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press, 1956
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Being and Nothingness
The philosophical foundation of existentialism, written under occupation by a man who had spent nine months in a prison camp. Its claim is that we are condemned to be free, that nothing determines what we make of our situation, and that almost everything we do is an attempt to hide this from ourselves.
- Date
- 1943
- Author
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Region
- Occupied France
- Language
- French
- 1956 English, Hazel Barnes Standard for sixty years; in copyright Attested
- 2018 English, Sarah Richmond The current preferred version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 16 years
Written under occupation, published to little immediate notice, and within three years the philosophical foundation of the most fashionable movement in Europe.
What the book says
Six hundred pages arguing that human beings are radically free and spend most of their energy denying it. Sartre divides being into two kinds. Things simply are what they are - being-in-itself, solid, complete, coinciding with themselves. Consciousness is not: it is always consciousness of something other than itself, so it is nothing in its own right, a hole in being, and this nothingness is what makes freedom possible, because a consciousness that coincided with itself could not stand back from its situation and choose. From this comes the book's most famous analysis. Bad faith is the attempt to escape freedom by pretending to be a thing: the waiter whose movements are a little too precisely those of a waiter, playing at being one; the woman who leaves her hand in her companion's while treating it as an object not her own. Neither is lying, since a liar knows the truth they conceal; bad faith is lying to oneself, which requires being both the deceiver and the deceived. The long section on other people argues that the other's look turns me into an object, and that this is the permanent structure of being seen.
What it argues
That consciousness is not a thing and that its lack of substance is the whole of our freedom. Because consciousness is always directed beyond itself, it never coincides with what it is; a person is not a coward as a stone is grey, but has behaved in certain ways and is at every moment free to behave otherwise. This is why Sartre says existence precedes essence: there is no human nature laid down in advance from which conduct follows, only choices which retroactively constitute a character. Freedom in this sense is not liberating but crushing - it comes with total responsibility, since even a situation not of my choosing is one I must take up somehow, and there is no authority to appeal to. Bad faith is the universal response: pretending to be determined, playing a role, treating one's own past or body or social position as a thing that settles the matter.
What it answered
Being and Time 1927Martin Heidegger
Heidegger on the starting point, and Husserl on what consciousness is. His deeper target is every account that explains a person by causes - psychoanalysis, which he rewrites as existential psychoanalysis without the unconscious, since an unconscious would let a person off; and the social and biological determinisms that let anyone say they had no choice. The occupation gave the argument a setting he made explicit afterwards: never, he wrote, were the French so free as under German rule, because every action was a choice with consequences and nobody could pretend otherwise.
What answered it
Heidegger, coolly, in the Letter on Humanism. Merleau-Ponty, in detail, arguing that the freedom Sartre describes is too absolute to be real - a freedom with no degrees, in which a prisoner is as free as a free man, describes nobody's situation. Beauvoir, working from inside the same framework, showed in The Second Sex what happens to the analysis when the situation is one of systematic oppression, which is a friendlier and more damaging revision. Sartre himself moved substantially toward the material and historical account in his later work.
How it argues
By phenomenological description of situations that everyone recognises, embedded in a technical apparatus that few readers follow. The famous passages are vignettes - the waiter, the woman on the date, the man caught looking through a keyhole who hears footsteps behind him - and they work as literature as much as argument. Around them is several hundred pages of ontology in a vocabulary borrowed from Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger and used in ways none of them would have recognised. Most readers know the vignettes and not the system.
The moment
Sartre was mobilised in 1939, captured in 1940, and spent nine months in a prisoner-of-war camp where he read Heidegger and wrote and staged a play. He was released, taught, joined a short-lived resistance group, and wrote this book in Paris cafés under occupation. Its publication in 1943 attracted little attention; the liberation and the lecture Existentialism is a Humanism in 1945 made him famous almost overnight, and he spent the rest of his life as a public figure, refusing the Nobel Prize in 1964.
How it travelled
Through a movement, a magazine and a scandal. Existentialism became the intellectual style of postwar Europe, with Sartre at its centre; the vocabulary of authenticity, bad faith and the absurd escaped into journalism and fiction. The English translation of 1956 arrived after the fashion had crested. In academic philosophy his standing fell sharply from the 1960s under structuralist attack and has recovered somewhat since, with Richmond's new translation in 2018 marking a renewal of scholarly interest.
The strongest objection
Merleau-Ponty's, and Beauvoir supplies the evidence for it. Sartre's freedom admits of no degrees: a person in chains is as free as anyone, because they must still choose how to take up their situation, and there is no such thing as being partly unfree. That conclusion is required by the ontology and is false to how constraint actually works - a life in which the available choices have been systematically narrowed is not simply another situation to be assumed. Beauvoir's account of women's situation shows what the framework misses, and Sartre's own later turn toward material conditions is an implicit concession. His answer, that describing constraint as removing freedom is itself bad faith, holds the theory together at the cost of what it can describe.
Why read it
For the sections on bad faith and on the look, which are perhaps a hundred pages and are among the most vivid things in modern philosophy. The ontological apparatus is for specialists and is genuinely punishing. Read Existentialism is a Humanism first if you want the position in an evening, remembering that Sartre later regretted publishing it.
- First printed
- 1943
- First in English
- 1956
- Digitised
- No
The Critique of Dialectical Reason of 1960 revises the position substantially in a Marxist direction, and Sartre later described parts of this book as written by someone who had never been hungry.
Hazel Barnes' 1956 English was standard for sixty years; Sarah Richmond's translation of 2018 is now preferred. Both are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live and unevenly read. The analyses of bad faith, of the look and of freedom in situation are current in philosophy of mind, in social philosophy and in the literature on self-deception; the full ontology has few defenders.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and in both English translations. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the account of freedom is coherent, and whether Sartre later abandoned or developed it, is argued. How much he owes to Heidegger, and how much he misread him, has been disputed since the Letter on Humanism. The relation between his work and Beauvoir's is a live scholarly question with a substantial recent literature arguing that her contribution to the shared framework has been systematically understated. And the accuracy of the famous vignettes as descriptions - particularly the one about the woman on the date - is questioned on grounds that go beyond philosophy.