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"First published in French in 1943 Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Être et le Néant is one of the greatest philosophical works of the twentieth century. In it, Sartre offers nothing less than a brilliant and radical account of the human condition. The English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote to a friend of "the excitement - I remember nothing like it since the days of discovering Keats and Shelley and Coleridge". What gives our lives significance, Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, is not pre-established for us by God or nature but is something for which we ourselves are responsible. Combining this with the unsettling view that human existence is characterized by radical freedom and the inescapability of choice, Sartre introduces us to a cast of ideas and characters that are part of philosophical legend: anguish; the 'bad faith' of the memorable waiter in the café; sexual desire; and the 'look' of the other, brought to life by Sartre's famous description of someone looking through a keyhole. Above all, by arguing that we alone create our values and that human relationships are characterized by hopeless conflict, Sartre paints a stark and controversial picture of our moral universe and one that resonates strongly today. This new translation includes a helpful Translator's Introduction, notes on the translation, a comprehensive index and a foreword by Richard Moran."--Book jacket.… (more)
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Very good, deep and slow reading, but worth it
Being and Nothingness is 800 pages, and provides an existentialist theory of the self, others, freedom, time, ethics, and psychoanalysis.
In some
Many of the statements seem to violate the law of non-contradiction, and it seems that Sartre has written it this way to give it the air of profundity that these contradictions seem to gain in mystic circles, or among those pretending to understand something they do not. However, if one perseveres, things can be usually reconciled with logic, if we understand these contradictory properties as being held at different times, or in different senses. What Sartre really means though is left to some extent to the guess work of the reader, and could be written in plainer and less ambiguous terms.
The two main concepts integral to this work are "being-in-itself" (borrowed from Heidegger), and "being-for-itself". The former is described as "being what it is" (and corresponds to the physical and unconscious part of us (though the existence of the unconscious is denied)), and the latter being described as "not being what it is, and being what it is not" (and corresponds to the conscious). It is around these two aspects of the self that whole work revolves.
Another recurring concept is the "figure and ground" of Gestalt psychology, which is used in conjunction with a variety of ideas. Unlike the concepts of "being-in-itself" and "being-for-itself", this serves as an aid to understanding things intuitively.
What then are the "Being and Nothingness" of which the title consists? The answer to this is not a single answer, as various things are stated as being and nothingness. The first answer appears to be that the material part of us "being-in-itself", is the being, while the consciousness "being-for-itself" is the nothingness. The appparent contradictions in this are presumably intentional, and, I think only apparent. A second sense in which the world is "Being and Nothingness" is identified in time. The instant itself is a temporal nothingess, due to its lack of temporal extension, while the measurable duration of time is being, due to its temporal extension. This of course has implications for human existence, and consciousness, as thought and ideas are processes that exist in the human mind with temporal extension, and not as point-like instants. Secondly, matter exists in the extension of time, with the revolving of electrons around their spheres and the effect of the exclusion principle, but in the temporal instant has no such materiality properties. Much of the profundity of this work is achieved by rewording quite obvious things like this so that they appear to be paradoxes. This isn't to say that the work is useless though, as it provokes thought and provides new vantage points on existence, however this could be done with plainer verbiage and in far fewer pages.
Among the influences that can be seen in this work are Henri Bergson, from whom Satre's upsurge of being seems to inspired, Heidegger (whose Being and Time Sartre's system builds upon), Freud, and variety of other thinkers.
I would not recommend this work as an introduction to Existentialism, due to its inaccessibility – Camus's essay on the Myth of Sisyphus would be more suitable for this purpose. However, for those with a sufficient interest in Existentialism to tolerate long, predominantly dry, systematical works, this book would be suitable. Before emabarking on this endeavour though, it would be worth noting that Sartre abandoned this system soon after composing it.