Sartre

Consciousness is nothingness.

Existence precedes essence.

The new diversion is bad faith.

Being and Nothingness (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943)

Message

Human reality is not a thing with a given nature. Consciousness is a lack: it is what it is not, and is not what it is. Because there is no creator and no predetermined essence, existence comes first; essence is made by projects. Freedom is not a faculty added to a substance. It is the being of consciousness. That freedom is experienced as anguish. The ordinary response is bad faith: pretending to be an object (a waiter, a coward, a role) or pretending to be pure transcendence unanchored in situation. The Other’s look objectifies me; conflict is original in intersubjectivity. The impossible desire of the for-itself is to become an in-itself-for-itself—God. That project fails. “Man is a useless passion.”

Content

The book is subtitled An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. It distinguishes:

• being-in-itself (être-en-soi): opaque, full, identical with itself, without reason;
• being-for-itself (être-pour-soi): consciousness as nihilation, temporal, projective;
• being-for-others (être-pour-autrui): the look, shame, the body as object.

It then treats bad faith, the body, concrete relations with others (love, desire, hate, sadism, masochism), temporality, freedom, and value as invented rather than discovered.

Presentation

Dense, French academic prose of the 1940s, built from Husserlian vocabulary and Heideggerian structures, with sudden literary scenes (the café waiter, the woman on a date, the voyeur at the keyhole). The style is argumentative rather than aphoristic. Everyday examples carry the ontology.

Method

Phenomenological description used as ontology. Sartre starts from how phenomena appear, then claims what being must be for those appearances to be possible. He rejects the transcendental ego of late Husserl: consciousness is empty of an inner occupant. He radicalises Heidegger’s “existence precedes essence” into an atheist ethics of total responsibility.

Summary

Consciousness introduces nothingness into being. That nothingness is freedom. Because we cannot not choose, we are condemned to be free. Every value is a choice; every identity is a project that can be unmade. Bad faith is the lie we tell ourselves to escape that fact. There is no exit into a finished self.

What shaped Sartre

People: Husserl (method), Heidegger (ontology of existence; Sartre read Being and Time as a POW), Hegel via Kojève (negation, the Other), Descartes (the cogito rewritten), Simone de Beauvoir (lifelong interlocutor).

Place: Paris; the École Normale; Berlin 1933–34; Le Havre classrooms; Stalag XII-D at Trier.

Formative experiences: fatherless childhood; agrégation rivalry and partnership with Beauvoir; the shock of Husserl (“someone had cut the grass from under my feet”); capture in 1940; writing under Occupation.

Cultural events: collapse of the Third Republic, Occupation, Resistance mythos, the felt death of God already prepared by Nietzsche and by interwar secularisation.

Quotes

“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm.”

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” (the formula is fully explicit in the 1945 lecture; the doctrine is already the spine of the 1943 book)

“I am what I am not and I am not what I am.”

“The one who tries to pass off his being-for-itself as a being-in-itself is in bad faith.”

“Man is a useless passion.”

“Existence precedes and commands essence.”

On the look: I am this self which another knows; shame is the recognition that I am as I appear for the Other.