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A review by generalheff
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology by Jean-Paul Sartre
5.0
I love this book; though I have yet to read any more Sartre I have a feeling I will love this author too.
In short, I believe this book is an astonishingly honest description of (at least my version of) the human condition. Sartre’s descriptions of bad faith (how we ignore our inherent freedom to act differently in the majority of what we do) and his extraordinarily perspicacious examination of our being-for-others (particular in his description of ‘the look’ as that which renders us an alienated object-self in the mind of another person) changed how I think about myself. Acknowledging that there is no hidden ‘self’ to aim at but that I am merely creating my self by my actions is perhaps obvious but something which had never been placed in so sharp a relief for me. It is this in particular that has been very helpful in focusing my own thoughts on my life goals and made me face up to the fact that decisions can only be given to me by myself and worrying about “proving” to myself that what I’m doing is the right move is fruitless. Acknowledge your nothingness, as Sartre would say, and stop living in bad faith.
Of course, what I have discussed above is the concrete, applied side of Being and Nothingness, in other words what led to the establishment of existentialism as a doctrine with a following well beyond the small pool of people interested in the nitty-gritty of philosophy. However, all of this brilliant insight is couched in an extremely challenging, technical work of philosophy. I have read Hegel and Heidegger, who feature prominently in this work, and I struggled to keep up with this book. Without a solid grounding in continental philosophy I think reading much of this work would be not only difficult but down right pointless. The following Indiana University lectures helped deal with the aspects of Sartre related to Husserl (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/19119) but the later sections of the book were a slog to say the least at times, particularly as the aforementioned lecture notes have very little detail on the back half of the book.
In addition to its difficult-to-read nature, the technical philosophical sections are not entirely convincing. While I identified strongly with many of the results, I was hardly convinced that these aspects of ourselves stemmed from our inherent nothingness and the dualistic ontology Sartre builds up. I don’t see why conscious beings can’t arise from being-in-itself (matter to you and me) and the way Sartre describes being-for-itself arising as the “upsurge” of being-in-itself, and the teleological way in which he suggests that the in-itself attempts to realise being-its-own-foundation through this upsurge, left me thinking that maybe Sartre didn’t quite believe in his ontology by the end. Indeed he seems to have had in mind Darwinian evolution at times in these “upsurge descriptions” - and it’s a shame he didn’t run with this idea more as it would put the philosophical ideas here more in line with current thinking. Alas these hints only shone through at times while the book was dominated by dualism for the most part. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book is at the very end where he almost seems to throw away dualism in his statements about how metaphysics (not ontology) might reveal the best way to view the scission at the heart of being into being-in-itself and being-for-itself. It is interesting to me that, while I found Heidegger’s existentialism far less rich in terms of its psychological description of how we live our lives, I found it far more philosophically robust. The way in which he (Heidegger) starts from the pre-ontological attitude of Dasein and ends up exploring phenomena as he finds them is vastly more convincing than Sartre who erects this dualistic edifice on about page 10, while claiming to be doing phenomenological ontology but crowbarring in metaphysics at the same time. I am not a professional philosopher and I imagine this could be argued both ways (obviously!), but it just didn’t seem to stand up to serious scrutiny.
Yet despite my reservations about the analysis and the philosophical outcomes of the book, I came away from reading this work looking at life a bit differently. And in the end, that seems like a valid reason to recommend hammering through an often impenetrably difficult book! Or perhaps, better still, read Existentialism is a Humanism, which I’m told contains much of the existential insight but far less of the analysis as it is aimed at a lay audience.
In short, I believe this book is an astonishingly honest description of (at least my version of) the human condition. Sartre’s descriptions of bad faith (how we ignore our inherent freedom to act differently in the majority of what we do) and his extraordinarily perspicacious examination of our being-for-others (particular in his description of ‘the look’ as that which renders us an alienated object-self in the mind of another person) changed how I think about myself. Acknowledging that there is no hidden ‘self’ to aim at but that I am merely creating my self by my actions is perhaps obvious but something which had never been placed in so sharp a relief for me. It is this in particular that has been very helpful in focusing my own thoughts on my life goals and made me face up to the fact that decisions can only be given to me by myself and worrying about “proving” to myself that what I’m doing is the right move is fruitless. Acknowledge your nothingness, as Sartre would say, and stop living in bad faith.
Of course, what I have discussed above is the concrete, applied side of Being and Nothingness, in other words what led to the establishment of existentialism as a doctrine with a following well beyond the small pool of people interested in the nitty-gritty of philosophy. However, all of this brilliant insight is couched in an extremely challenging, technical work of philosophy. I have read Hegel and Heidegger, who feature prominently in this work, and I struggled to keep up with this book. Without a solid grounding in continental philosophy I think reading much of this work would be not only difficult but down right pointless. The following Indiana University lectures helped deal with the aspects of Sartre related to Husserl (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/19119) but the later sections of the book were a slog to say the least at times, particularly as the aforementioned lecture notes have very little detail on the back half of the book.
In addition to its difficult-to-read nature, the technical philosophical sections are not entirely convincing. While I identified strongly with many of the results, I was hardly convinced that these aspects of ourselves stemmed from our inherent nothingness and the dualistic ontology Sartre builds up. I don’t see why conscious beings can’t arise from being-in-itself (matter to you and me) and the way Sartre describes being-for-itself arising as the “upsurge” of being-in-itself, and the teleological way in which he suggests that the in-itself attempts to realise being-its-own-foundation through this upsurge, left me thinking that maybe Sartre didn’t quite believe in his ontology by the end. Indeed he seems to have had in mind Darwinian evolution at times in these “upsurge descriptions” - and it’s a shame he didn’t run with this idea more as it would put the philosophical ideas here more in line with current thinking. Alas these hints only shone through at times while the book was dominated by dualism for the most part. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book is at the very end where he almost seems to throw away dualism in his statements about how metaphysics (not ontology) might reveal the best way to view the scission at the heart of being into being-in-itself and being-for-itself. It is interesting to me that, while I found Heidegger’s existentialism far less rich in terms of its psychological description of how we live our lives, I found it far more philosophically robust. The way in which he (Heidegger) starts from the pre-ontological attitude of Dasein and ends up exploring phenomena as he finds them is vastly more convincing than Sartre who erects this dualistic edifice on about page 10, while claiming to be doing phenomenological ontology but crowbarring in metaphysics at the same time. I am not a professional philosopher and I imagine this could be argued both ways (obviously!), but it just didn’t seem to stand up to serious scrutiny.
Yet despite my reservations about the analysis and the philosophical outcomes of the book, I came away from reading this work looking at life a bit differently. And in the end, that seems like a valid reason to recommend hammering through an often impenetrably difficult book! Or perhaps, better still, read Existentialism is a Humanism, which I’m told contains much of the existential insight but far less of the analysis as it is aimed at a lay audience.