Free ebook being and nothingness

It was published by Gallimard in , at pages weighing precisely one kilogram, which if Jean Paulhan is to be believed helped with the initial sales, since the book was being used as a weight measure at home when the normal brass weights had been confiscated by the German authorities. What sort of book is this, and what is its philosophical importance now?

Any account of its importance and genuine brilliance has to come to grips with the several different forms of obstacle to its reception today, both those intrinsic to the book and those stemming from the contemporary intellectual context. In the Paris of the s something called existentialism was not merely a school of philosophy but an entire lifestyle, encompassing literature, music, film, and a succession of political stances.

This broad influence was amplified by the fact that, in France as elsewhere, the postwar years were also the beginning of the first age of mass media and a new prominence of youth culture in European and American life. He was on television almost as soon as television came to France, and was perhaps the first major philosopher to have his own radio show. In the decades following the war in France he was rarely without an opinion or an opportunity for publishing it.

And of course he threw himself into the various political crises of his day, creating a certain notoriety and gaining enemies among both the Catholic right and the Communist left in France.

This presence as cultural reference is itself unusual for a philosopher and is an aspect of how his enduring fame is maintained even by his detractors. All philosophers wax and wane in their influence, and most can enjoy a posthumous existence in comfortable obscurity, but Sartre stands out among the notable twentieth-century philosophers for the extent to which he is still invoked for condescension, seen less as a philosopher than as a provocation to be put down both in intellectual circles and in the popular media.

Another obstacle is the sheer length and the style of Being and Nothingness. It can be an impossible and infuriating text; one can only dream wistfully of what a ruthless editor might have been able to do with its bulk.

The tone is often abrupt and peremptory, with little or no explanation given to key philosophical terms, whether German or French. In a manner that we have become used to among certain philosophers, it is as though the presumed audience for the work could only be those for whom such things as the distinction between the phenomenon of being and the being of the phenomenon is always already quite familiar, and we are being invited to appreciate the unexpected spin the brilliant author is putting on these old ideas.

It is extremely uneven as a piece of philosophical writing. Sometimes we do indeed get what look very much like arguments—powerful ones—and other times Sartre puts his powers of description to genuinely illuminating use, but too often we get bold declarations, invidious distinctions, and a fondness for paradoxical formulation that seems to know no bounds.

Sartre himself paid a price for the difficulty of access of Being and Nothingness , in the fact that readers who were curious but not prepared to take on the pages of the original had available to them a much shorter Sartrean text—a pamphlet, really—called Existentialism Is a Humanism , something dashed off and never intended for publication in the first place.

In October , in the early months of the Liberation, Sartre was persuaded by a friend to give what was to be a small public lecture on the new philosophy at the Club Maintenant. It turned into a huge event, with an overflow crowd and people being carried out after having fainted from the heat and overcrowding. Sartre spoke without notes. To help pay for the rental of the hall and the damage to the premises, the organizer prevailed upon Sartre to agree to publish a version of his remarks for sale, which he agreed to.

As a text it is full of crudities, misstatements, and willful exaggerations for effect, and soon became far and away the most famous and widely read piece he ever wrote. It is still commonly cited as representative of Sartrean existentialism by philosophers who should know better. A final obstacle to be mentioned is that so much of French thought since the s and s has proceeded from an assumed repudiation of Sartre.

Being and Nothingness is, among other things, the last great expression of the philosophy of the subject that later French thought has expended so much energy in dismantling and decentering. All of this is further reason to welcome this new translation and the opportunity it gives readers in English to encounter this book with fresh eyes, for despite its flaws it is still one of the great and engaging texts of twentieth-century philosophy.

It is a text to struggle with, yes, but when the writing is at its best it is rewarding and illuminating in ways that few major works of philosophy in the modern world can touch. Of course like any philosophical text it needs to be comprehended as a whole, but many of its famous sections on bad faith, on the look of the Other, on various self-defeating strategies of love and desire, on freedom and responsibility, on the existential psychoanalysis of qualities can be profitably read by themselves.

Today it is easy to forget how daring this text is, and the different ways Sartre expanded the possible forms of philosophical writing. This new edition makes this available to a new generation of readers.

Different philosophers will have different reasons for engaging with Being and Nothingness today. From the perspective of the history of philosophy it may be read as a remarkably ambitious attempt to inherit the phenomenology of Husserl and the early work of Heidegger, in the context of a general metaphysical picture of the world and the place of human thought and action within it.

Today one may be skeptical about the very idea of such a general metaphysical picture, and in particular the dualism of being as such and nothingness, and yet still be impressed with the creative use to which it is put and how Sartre is able to begin from these bare categories to an analysis of the difference between the categories of ordinary objects being-in-itself and the categories of human life being-for-itself.

Despite rumors to the contrary, the idea of nothingness here has little to do with despair or the contemplation of suicide. Consciousness just is this basic capacity for relatedness to the world and the distinguishing of itself from the world it is directed upon. This assertion of difference is described as part of the nihilating action of consciousness, which enables Sartre to forge his unbreakable connection between consciousness as for-itself and freedom, in action and in thought.

Are the notions of negation, nothingness, and difference being stretched here to do too many different kinds of work as we move from the more purely metaphysical structure of the world to the story of action and human subjectivity? No doubt that is a question one may and should press throughout the reading of Being and Nothingness , but what remains impressive is the richness and diversity of the phenomenon that Sartre manages in this way to bring into philosophical contact with each other, the new questions this orientation makes possible.

The same vaulting ambition that takes him from the ancient Parmenidean problem of how there can be thought about what is not, to the object-directedness of thought intentionality , to a distinctive perspective on human freedom is also what helps us formulate new questions about how the appeal to freedom can be genuinely explanatory of human action, and how we should understand the relation between the intentionality of thought and the intentionality of action, and hence the understanding of action itself as a form of thought.

Being and Nothingness is not only about human freedom, it is a text that is plainly obsessed with the question of freedom and its meaning, and organizes all its many topics around it.

In relation to freedom it is less concerned about solving the traditional problem of freedom and determinism and more concerned about understanding what is contained in the ordinary assumption of human freedom and the variety of ways it manifests itself.

Sartre is of course a novelist and playwright as well as a philosopher, and part of the originality of Being and Nothingness as a piece of writing lies in the combination of an abstract and austere metaphysical picture with an essentially dramatic sense of the source of philosophical questions as they exhibit themselves in recognizable human situations. One of his great topics is that of the question of the forms of comprehensibility of human life, and of an individual human life taken as a whole especially in his later books on Genet and Flaubert.

He is properly and profitably struck by the contradictory demands we place on the comprehensibility of human life and action, and by the question of the priority of different forms of comprehensibility we demand of ourselves and others.

The metaphysics of the in-itself and the for-itself, or the self-as-facticity and the self-as-transcendence, will have earned its philosophical keep if they are what bring into view and make available for thought what Sartre takes up in the sections of Being and Nothingness on bad faith, on the nature of shame and the self-consciousness that pertains to it, on the encounter with the Other through the look, on the internal conflicts of love and desire.

Despite how long Being and Nothingness has been a looming presence on the philosophical scene, much of it is only recently getting the attention it deserves in the anglophone world.

And his reflections on the different forms of self-consciousness thetic or positional versus non-thetic or non-positional, as originally developed in his short work The Transcendence of the Ego are entering into contemporary discussions on the nature of self-knowledge and the first-person point of view. Simone de Beauvoir , The Prime of Life , trans.

Peter Green Harmondsworth: Penguin , p. I had hoped that North American readers might not have to wait so long, but a complicated situation involving rights ownership had first to be resolved. A few revisions to the edition have been made. Spelling and punctuation have been Americanized. The new copyediting process has also allowed a number of typos from the original to be corrected, as well as a small number of errors that had come to my attention.

Some further thanks are also due to the UK editors of the journal Sartre Studies International , John Gillespie and Katherine Morris, for publishing an excellent symposium on my translation in volume 26, issue 1 ; and to the two contributing Sartre scholars, Matthew Eshleman and Adrian van den Hoven, for their careful and illuminating discussion, to which some of the recent corrections are owed.

Last, a shout-out to Daniel Rothschild, my line manager in , who generously marked the publication of this translation by organizing a celebratory, most happy event in the philosophy department at University College London.

Philip Mairet London: Methuen. Note : The numbers in superscript at the start of each chapter e. Perhaps we should not be surprised, as the Second World War was not yet over and the German Occupation was still in force in northern France. As a great deal of Sartre criticism and exegesis is now available, I will only briefly survey the content of the text. Instead I offer an overview of its reception, to provide the reader with some background to my translation, produced three-quarters of a century later.

For remarks about the practical task of translating it, challenges it has posed, and my reasons for some of my decisions, see the Notes on the Translation. Not long after that—following his legendary public lecture subsequently translated as EH in which Sartre presented a simplified version of his philosophy to a packed audience in Paris in —he became a national figure.

BN presents itself as a traditional, scholarly, and comprehensive work of philosophy. Sartre had not yet detached himself from the values of academia, and he adopts the persona of a distinguished professor who has the entire Western philosophical corpus at his fingertips. Modern thought, he tells us in his opening sentence, has [reduced] the existent to the series of appearances that manifest it. How, if at all, do statements of this highly abstract kind bear any relation to the doctrines and slogans that we associate with existentialist philosophy?

In fact, as readers are sometimes surprised to discover, the term existentialist is applied only retrospectively to the philosophy of BN, and it does not figure in the text. It does figure importantly in EH, where Sartre sums existentialism up quite simply in the famous claim that existence comes before essence. To explain this claim, Sartre an atheist contrasts it with a religious conception, according to which we are created by God.

But there is no such thing as human nature in a godless world, where Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Being and Nothingness is rather more obscure, and its subtitle— An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology —is also unlikely to help anyone without a philosophical training.

In order to account for being , Sartre is saying, we need also to acknowledge nothingness or non-being. The relationship between this ontological project and the better-known existentialist tenets that are associated with Sartre is in fact straightforward: the former provides the theoretical underpinnings for the latter. Indeed, just two years after the publication of EN in France, Sartre announces in EH his intention to defend existentialism against several reproaches.

Sartre is not too bothered by the censure of the Christians, for whom atheistic existentialism is incompatible with morality: the points Sartre goes on to make in the lecture are supposed to refute that claim. He would have been more troubled by the attacks from the political left.

In a discussion of EH that was organized specifically for Sartre to face his opponents, the Communist activist Pierre Naville raised several criticisms that have often been repeated since. In more explicitly political terms, Naville also accused Sartre of resurrecting liberalism Sartre And that was not all: Barnes also presented a series of programs about philosophy on Ohio University radio in , as well as a ten-episode television series about existentialism broadcast nationally in the United States in the s entitled Self-Encounter: A Study in Existentialism.

She even classified the memoir that she published in her eighties as a venture in Existentialist autobiography Barnes These details alone suffice to show how radically the relations between intellectuals—both within and outside academic institutions—and the wider public culture have changed since the middle of the twentieth century. Sartre and Barnes had different personalities and intellectual outlooks, but they both believed that philosophy should concern itself with contemporary human existence, and that it should correct our understanding of our existence in a way that would oblige us to live differently.

And people were hungry for these ideas, willing to attend public lectures or to learn more from the radio, newspapers, and television. The philosophy of BN, with its emphasis on human freedom, agency, and responsibility, may also have held special appeal for a postwar public open to change and desiring a fresh start. In the postwar period, the gulf within philosophy that is still often thought to separate Sartre, as a Continental philosopher, from the anglophone analytical traditions was not yet evident.

Iris Murdoch was especially alert to this similarity: It might even be argued that recent continental philosophers have been discovering, with immense fuss, what the English empiricists have known since Hume, whom Husserl himself claimed as an ancestor Murdoch 8. Along with two other German philosophers, Hegel and Heidegger, Husserl forms part of the trio—often referred to as the three Hs —with whom Sartre enters into dialogue at various points in BN, usually in order to argue for the advantages of his view over theirs.

And, some years later, when Murdoch came to downgrade her earlier opinion of Sartre, she produced a competing vignette of her own featuring M, a mother, and D, her daughter-in-law to illustrate her criticisms of Sartre Murdoch First, Sartre was often presented as a moral philosopher and, accordingly, criticized from that perspective.

Both Murdoch and MacIntyre saw him this way, while, in the US, Marjorie Grene presented existentialism as a philosophy in which the central virtue was authenticity, a line of thought that was also taken up and criticized by Charles Taylor. Sartre himself states explicitly at the end of BN and in some important footnotes that an adequate discussion of morality would have to appear in a future work, but he never succeeded in fulfilling that promise, although we have some idea of the evolution of his moral thinking from the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics Sartre Many commentators also read back into BN the optimistic moral ideas that Sartre had sketched out in EH, erroneously conflating these two texts.

More generally, the categories used within analytical philosophy and the tacitly accepted boundaries of the discipline have shaped the approach of anglophone philosophers to BN. What critics usually fail to see is that Sartre is one of the very few twentieth century philosophers to present us with a total system. The predominantly ahistorical outlook of analytical philosophy has also inflected the study of Sartre. This monstrous translation, as Jacques Derrida famously described it a quarter of a century later Derrida b: , was subsequently held against Sartre.

In conjunction with other evidence including, importantly, EH , this usage was thought to warrant dismissal of BN as a philosophy resting on outdated and unacceptable humanist premises. The anti-humanist criticism was one among several lines of attack within a broader critical backlash against Sartre that was at its height in the s and s, in both France and the English-speaking world.

Feminist theory provided a different kind of opposition about which more later. Insofar as it involves Sartre, the so-called Humanism Debate begins in when Jean Beaufret a French philosopher with an interest in German thought wrote to Heidegger with the intention of reestablishing a dialogue between French and German philosophy after the disruption of the Second World War.

He simply notes in a Kantian manner that it raises questions we cannot answer. It begins by analyzing two distinct and irreducible categories or kinds of being: the in-itself en-soi and the for-itself pour-soi , roughly the nonconscious and consciousness respectively, adding a third, the for-others pour-autrui , later in the book.

Being-in-itself and being-for-itself have mutually exclusive characteristics and yet we human reality are entities that combine both, which is the ontological root of our ambiguity. The in-itself is solid, self-identical, passive and inert. One can see why Sartre is often described as a Cartesian dualist but this is imprecise.

The principle of identity holds only for being-in-itself. The for-itself is an exception to this rule. The category or ontological principle of the for-others comes into play as soon as the other subject or Other appears on the scene.

The Other cannot be deduced from the two previous principles but must be encountered. Praxis is dialectical in the Hegelian sense that it surpasses and subsumes its other, the practico-inert. Thus speech acts would be examples of praxis but language would be practico-inert; social institutions are practico-inert but the actions they both foster and limit are praxes. The Other in Being and Nothingness alienates or objectifies us in this work Sartre seems to use these terms equivalently and the third party is simply this Other writ large.

The concepts of praxis, practico-inert and mediating third form the basis of a social ontology that merits closer attention than the prolix Critique encourages. Sartre's gifts of psychological description and analysis are widely recognized. His early studies of emotive and imaging consciousness in the late s press the Husserlian principle of intentionality farther than their author seemed willing to go.

For example, in The Psychology of Imagination , Sartre argues that Husserl remains captive to the idealist principle of immanence the object of consciousness lies within consciousness , despite his stated goal of combating idealism, when he seems to consider images as miniatures of the perceptual object reproduced or retained in the mind. If emotion is a joke, he warns, it is a joke we believe in. These are all spontaneous, prereflective relations. They are not the products of reflective decision.

Yet insofar as they are even prereflectively conscious, we are responsible for them. And this raises the question of freedom, a necessary condition for ascribing responsibility and the heart of his philosophy. But it would be better to speak of it as criterion-constituting in the sense that it grounds the set of criteria on the basis of which our subsequent choices are made.

It resembles what ethicist R. Sartre's use of intentionality is the backbone of his psychology. And his psychology is the key to his ontology that is being fashioned at this time. In fact, the concept of imaging consciousness as the locus of possibility, negativity and lack emerges as the model for consciousness in general being-for-itself in Being and Nothingness.

That said, it would not be an exaggeration to describe Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, so important a role does imaging consciousness or its equivalent play in his work.

Sartre was a moralist but scarcely a moralizer. His earliest studies, though phenomenological, underscored the freedom and by implication the responsibility of the practitioner of the phenomenological method.

Thus his first major work, Transcendence of the Ego , in addition to constituting an argument against the transcendental ego the epistemological subject that cannot be an object central to German idealism and Hussserlian phenomenology, introduces an ethical dimension into what was traditionally an epistemological project by asserting that this appeal to a transcendental ego conceals a conscious flight from freedom.

Authenticity is achieved, Sartre claims, by a conversion that entails abandonment of our original choice to coincide with ourselves consciously the futile desire to be in-itself-for-itself or God and thereby free ourselves from identification with our egos as being-in-itself. In our present alienated condition, we are responsible for our egos as we are for any object of consciousness.

The former is egoistic, Sartre now implies, where the latter is outgoing and generous. This resonates with what he will say about the creative artist's work as a gift, an appeal to another freedom and an act of generosity. It is now common to distinguish three distinct ethical positions in Sartre's writings.

The first and best known, existentialist ethics is one of disalienation and authenticity. It assumes that we live in a society of oppression and exploitation.

The former is primary and personal, the latter structural and impersonal. As Merleau-Ponty observed, Sartre stressed oppression over exploitation, individual moral responsibility over structural causation but without denying the importance of the latter. Admittedly, it does seem compatible with a wide variety of life choices. We could say that authenticity is fundamentally living this ontological truth of one's situation, namely, that one is never identical with one's current state but remains responsible for sustaining it.

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