Even if you're not an angst-addicted poet from North Beach, Being and Nothingness offers you a deep conversation with a brilliant mind-unfortunately, a rare find these days. The waiter who detaches himself from his job-role sticks in the reader's memory with greater tenacity than the lengthy discussion of inauthentic life and serves to bring the full force of the argument to life. In the first argument, he develops the nothingness theory. Sartre adopts phenomena but criticizes earlier phenomenologists, particularly, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger for focusing much on empiricism.
It is a conscious choice, he claims, to live one's life "authentically" and in a unified fashion, or not-this is the fundamental freedom of our lives.ĭrawing on history and his own rich imagination for examples, Sartre offers compelling supplements to his more formal arguments. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre highlights the concept of consciousness and how objective descriptions of humans are incomplete.
Basing his conception of self-consciousness loosely on Heidegger's "being," Sartre proceeds to sharply delineate between conscious actions ("for themselves") and unconscious ("in themselves"). Some of his arguments are fallacious, others are unclear, but for the most part Sartre's thoughts penetrate deeply into fundamental philosophical territory. Though the book is thick, dense, and unfriendly to careless readers, it is indispensable to those interested in the philosophy of consciousness and free will. Jean-Paul Sartre, the seminal smarty-pants of mid-century thinking, launched the existentialist fleet with the publication of Being and Nothingness in 1943.
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