Book: Being and Nothingness

Overview
Published in 1943, Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s major work of phenomenological ontology. Drawing from Husserl’s intentionality and debating Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein, Sartre examines the basic modes of being and the structures of consciousness as they show themselves. He rejects any pre-given human essence or divine ground and argues that the world is contingent, that consciousness is a negation at the heart of being, and that human reality is radically free, responsible, and uneasy in its own ambiguity.

Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself
Sartre distinguishes two fundamental modes: being-in-itself (en-soi) and being-for-itself (pour-soi). Being-in-itself is brute, opaque, self-identical, and indifferent; it simply is what it is. Being-for-itself is consciousness: a translucent, self-relating openness that distances itself from what is. Consciousness is not a thing but a relation to being; it is pre-reflectively aware of itself while being directed toward the world. The ego is not a substance lodged inside consciousness but a construct of reflective activity. Human reality, as for-itself, is defined by lack, project, and the continual surpassing of itself beyond what it is.

Nothingness and Negation
Central to Sartre’s ontology is nothingness. Nothingness is not a property of the world but is introduced by consciousness through its capacity to negate. In the famous example of not finding Pierre at the café, the absence is not discovered like a thing; it is constituted by a nihilating act that makes a hole in being. Questioning, doubting, and denial all presuppose this original power to detach oneself from what is given. Nothingness thus reveals human freedom and also underwrites anguish: realizing that it is up to us to separate and define, we discover that there is no foundation outside our own acts.

Temporality and the Self
The for-itself temporalizes itself in three ek-stases. The past is facticity: the sedimented choices and conditions that we cannot change. The future is transcendence: the horizon of possibilities we project. The present is the slipping unity of a pursuit. The self is not a fixed essence but the unity of a project pursued across time. At its limit, the for-itself fantasizes an impossible synthesis, being-in-itself-for-itself, the self-caused being of God, that would reconcile pure freedom with solid identity. This unattainable ideal haunts desire and fuels self-deception.

Bad Faith
Bad faith (mauvaise foi) names the characteristic self-deception by which we flee our freedom and ambiguity. We pretend to be a fixed thing (mere facticity) or pure freedom without limits (mere transcendence). Sartre’s portraits include the overly conscientious waiter who plays at being a waiter as if his role exhausted him, and the woman who suspends a decision by treating her hand as an inert object. Bad faith is not simple error but a motivated oscillation that conceals from itself what it knows. Authenticity would consist in lucidly assuming both facticity and transcendence without reducing one to the other.

The Look and Others
With others, the for-itself becomes being-for-others. The Look (le regard) of the other objectifies me, revealing me as an object in the world and awakening shame. Interpersonal relations are structurally conflictual because each consciousness seeks to secure itself as subject by making the other an object. Love, desire, sadism, and masochism are analyzed as unstable attempts to possess the other’s freedom or to surrender one’s own.

Freedom, Value, and Responsibility
Sartre insists that we are “condemned to be free.” Constraints and facticity shape situations, but they never dictate choices; value arises from projects we undertake. We are wholly responsible for what we make of what is made of us. The book closes with a sketch toward an ethics grounded in freedom, suggesting that a genuine morality would acknowledge our shared condition without appealing to transcendent norms.