Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness Summarized

Published in 1943, Being and Nothingness:  A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is considered a cornerstone of the philosophy of  existentialism. If Nausea is his most important fictional work, this is his most non-fictional  book. While in a German prison in the 1940s, away from all the fightings, Sartre sat down and read  one of the most difficult philosophical books, Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time,  in which the German philosopher settled on the idea of death giving life a meaning it lacks. 

In other words, to be authentically alive, one must fully realise death. So Sartre  wrote his book in reaction to Heidegger but most crucially in response to the religious  notion that we are created by god. Sartre says, no, we are nothing prior to our birth or being. 

We are born first, and then we become something that has an essence. We have no divine essence  or divine creator. Like a flower, we germinate, grow and blossom to become a flower,  but nobody plants us, we are self-made.

Sartre also responds to the psychoanalysis  movement led by Sigmund Freud who argued that beneath the conscious mind, there  is a whole new and hidden world called the unconscious mind where all sorts  of suppressed emotions, repressed urges and thoughts are kept. According to  psychoanalysts such as Freud and Carl Jung, the unconscious is a much bigger pot  than the conscious mind. In other words, we are only aware of a fraction of what’s going on  inside our minds.

Sartre says that is rubbish. He argues that we do not have a hidden self floating  in the unconscious cave or soup, but we are what we know. Anything we are not conscious of is  not us.

So Sartre agrees with Rene Descartes, I think, therefore I am. But unlike Descartes,  Sartre doesn’t believe in innate knowledge from birth. For Sartre existence precedes essence. 

We are born, and then we develop the self. Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher, was  Sartre’s teacher at one point. Husserl’s philosophy, called phenomenology, argues that our  consciousness is always conscious of something.

When we know something, we know something,  an object or idea or an image. This goes back to Kant who divided knowledge into two: the  world of phenomena which is knowable through our animal senses and perception, and noumena  which is the unknowable world of things in themselves. So phenomenology is the philosophy  of consciousness through the world of phenomena that we get to know through our senses, which  removes or ignores the unknowables such as god or afterlife or even the psychoanalytical hidden  unconscious posited by Freud.

So for Sartre, our consciousness is rooted in objects, not some  divine essence or hidden unconscious. So Sartre says consciousness is tied to objects.  It doesn’t come from itself and neither from god.

But Sartre also adds that not  only consciousness allows us to be aware of the world, but consciousness is also  aware of itself as a kind of transparent phenomenon. Not only is it aware of objects but  simultaneously it’s aware of this awareness. It knows that it knows.

It’s like a camera  that can see but also knows that it can see. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre starts  with nothingness as the basis of existence, then moves on to how we fill this void  with social role or fake identity and finally he also rejects psychoanalysis  of Freud. But first, what’s nothingness.

To Understand Nothingness let’s imagine an  object we call MrSelf who bumps into objects and obstacles like rocks in space. Through  these random collisions, it shapes itself into something. Quote: “Nothingness carries  being in its heart.

”—Jean-Paul Sartre. To understand Sartre, let’s go back to Martin  Heidegger. The German philosopher said that our existence can be summed up by two ends: birth  and death.

So we exist in time. In other words, our life is finite meaning we have limited  time as a being. So being and time are two sides of the same coin so to speak.

One cannot  separate existence from time. Sartre takes this as a starting point and then just focuses on the  being itself, but instead of talking about time, he shifts his focus to nothingness. Since we have  no divine essence or purpose, we exist as nothing.

In other words our nothingness makes us totally  free to float around. But this nothing being has to deal with the external world, such as objects  and other people, which curtail our freedom. Through our interactions with the world  and other people, we have to make choices, which limits our freedom but also causes us  to feel anxiety.

To escape these constraints or this limit on our freedom, we escape into  our imagination, or rely on someone else for guidance or defer authority to a figure such  as god to make choices for us. In other words, existence is like walking in the wilderness  that’s full of dangers and pitfalls which limit our freedom so to escape this  non-freedom we seek answers in our mind, by imagining things or inventing things. This  often leads us to act unconsciously or take roles in life or take refuge within an identity  given to us, like nationality, job, activist etc like some flushed out characters in a novel. 

I’m a YouTuber because I want to fill the void of my existence. We take on roles in order to  escape our anguish for the lack of choices but also for the abundance of choices we experience.  So since we are sandwiched between an unbridled imagination or thought and tightly constrained  world and regulated actions, we develop a sense of self.

In other words, the self is created  by free thoughts floating in nothingness, colliding with the unfree outside world of  existence. Hence we are beings in nothingness. A good analogy might be a planet.

It started  as a misshapen rock floating about, until it lost its edges through gravity or collisions  with other objects in space and took a more spherical shape and found a stable orbit in  which it can exist. Although, for Sartre, humans are different because we exist, not  like an object-in-itself like a rock or a tree, but we also exist for-itself, which means we  are also our aware of our existence. To escape this awareness, we take a role, like a teacher,  which means we exist in-itself.

In other words, we fulfil a role, which means we exist for others,  not for ourselves. But we can never fully become a thing in-itself. We can only manage it for a time  and we have to convince ourselves to be a teacher, a thing in-itself.

In an attempt to become a  teacher, a Frenchman or a YouTuber, we try to convince ourselves to be what we are not. This  is bad faith.  So we come out of nothingness, but we want to be something.

To fill the  void, we almost fake it, which is bad faith. Bad faith, for Sartre simply means living a false  existence or self-deception which is also close to a Marxist notion of false consciousness  prevalent among the working class who buy into their pride in nationalism or identity  as peaceful, moral citizens or good workers which prevent them from rebelling against an  exploitative system. Marx wanted all workers to unite to overthrow the system but they rarely  did.

So he blamed on false consciousness which prevent the workers see themselves as victims.  Today, another term often used is internalised racism or repression in which one goes against  their interest in accepting the status quo. For Sartre, bad faith means the negation of  existence as a thing for-itself.

For example when we take a role or job, we act as if  we exist for others or a thing in-itself. A waiter acts as though he or she is  someone whose only purpose is to wait. Quote: “Society demands that he limit himself to  his function… There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is as if we lived  in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly  elude his condition.

”—Jean-Paul Sartre. In other words, their entire being is reduced to  their job. This is also true in terms of social status, nationality, a fan of a sports team  etc.

For Sartre, humans as sentient beings, we cannot fully become a thing-in-itself, so  what we often do is attempt or pretend to be a teacher or a YouTuber, reducing our entire  existence to one role. This is bad-faith or self-deception. Why do we do it?

It limits our  freedom or endless choices we face in life, which is in a way a coping mechanism, because a defined  role or action can calm us down. We don’t have to worry about making choices or mistakes. In other  words, endless freedom or choices can paralyse us.

To escape bad faith, Sartre says we must accept  our existence as what it is, not something that is not. An authentic person has endless choices  at any moment as he or she is facing the future, but as a waiter, he or she limits it to one  choice which is inauthentic or bad faith. For Sartre, bath faith also includes social  norms, moral values, religious dogmas and legal obligations which limit our existential  journey of fulfillment as true authentic beings.

While social or moral values are created by  others, Sartre also considers thinking too much about our own past as bad faith. We always  limit our future projections to what happened to us in the past, so this is also bad faith. If we  had a bad romantic experience with one person, we project that onto our future partners, which is  a form of bad faith.

Proust spent his entire novel talking about the past, in an attempt to regain or  recreate his past selves or lost time. Sartre says that’s living inauthentically because you only  see yourself in the past that no longer exists, not now or future. Sartre’s philosophy  is a teleologically progressive one, similar to Hegel and Marx, that we are  heading towards perfection or completion.

Sartre spends large portion of the book talking  about sex. He treats sex as a social act, not just as biological or physical. Being for  others is another form of bad faith.

When we build relationships with others, we tend to limit our  freedom for acceptance. Sartre gives the example of a shop mannequin that we sometimes mistake  for a real person. We behave differently when we realise it’s not a person.

This shows how much  we regulate our behaviour for others, depending on the kind of relationships we have. The closer,  the more we curtail our own or their freedom to be for themselves rather for others. So our purpose  becomes being for others, not free existence per se.

We exist to maintain the happiness of the  other. For instance, you do everything to make your partner happy, which Sartre says is nothing  but emotional alienation because our entire being is taken hostage by how they make us feel and  how we make them feel. So love is nothing but a bad faith conflict or battleground for control  of the other.

You want them, and you want them for yourself, and nobody else. No wonder, Sartre  had an open relationship with Simone. In reality, Simone didn’t exercise that freedom as much as  Sartre did, which perhaps shows that men and women are different on a biological level.

Men have  millions of sperm ready at any moment while women only have one egg, which dictates the level and  intensity of sexual urge among the sexes. Sartre, however, rejects a biological reason for sex. Sex  for Sartre is our attempt to create a completion but upon orgasm you go back to square one. 

This stems from nothingness and emptiness of existence. You hike up a mountain or jump on  a bungee and at the end, it’s never complete. I think Sartre stretches it a bit by saying that  there is no biological basis for sex.

Evolution doesn’t care about Sartre’s opinion, because he  failed to procreate so his genes died with him. But Sartre does make sex different from other  basic human urges such as food and survival, because for sex to happen, you need another  person. Unless, you go the DIY route.

The third major point in Being and  Nothingness is consciousness. For Sartre, our consciousness makes us who we are. Anything  we are not conscious of or aware of is not us.

This goes against the fundamental point  psychoanalysts make that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. The unconscious  controls much of our choices and actions in life. According to Sartre, the psychoanalysis of Sigmund  Freud removed the responsibility from his patient by blaming the hidden unconscious for their  behaviour.

Sartre argues that there is a paradox in psychoanalysis that relies on patients  reporting a hidden world of unconsciousness where repressed emotions are kept. You either  know, or don’t know. If you don’t know, how can you repress those emotions, urges and ideas? 

Repressed emotions hidden in the unconscious is just an excuse according to Sartre. He says  if a patient has repressed certain emotions or urges, and they refuse to divulge such unsavoury  ideas, on some level they are conscious. So the hidden unconscious theory is flawed.

Pretending  you don’t know is self-deception for the sake of self-preservation. We lie so we can  avoid responsibility. If we self-censor or hide something in our unconscious, it  has to be a conscious decision.

You do not hide something that you do not know. We  knowingly hide treasure or past mistakes.  So for Sartre the theory of the unconscious  posited by Freud and Jung is nothing but an excuse to make their patients feel  better about their bad choices in life.

To sum up, in Being and Nothingness,  Sartre, just like Heidegger, makes a distinction between being in-itself  like non-conscious phenomena such as a tree or rock and being for-itself like humans. The  difference is that the thing-in-itself exists yet is neither aware of its existence nor has  freedom while the thing-for-itself is not only aware of its own existence but also because of  this consciousness we are condemned to be free. So Sartre’s existentialism is founded upon  nothingness in which existence comes about.