Pour soi

Being and Nothingness

Cover of the first edition
Author	Jean-Paul Sartre
Original title	L'Être et le néant
Translator	Hazel Barnes
Country	France
Language	French
Subject	Ontology
Published	1943 (Gallimard, in French) 1956 (Philosophical Library, in English)
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	638 (Routledge edition)
ISBN	(Routledge edition)

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's main purpose is to assert the individual's existence as prior to the individual's essence ("existence precedes essence"). His overriding concern in writing the book was to demonstrate that free will exists. While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, an ontological investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology (Edmund Husserl was Heidegger's teacher). Reading Being and Time initiated Sartre's own philosophical enquiry.

Though influenced by Heidegger, Sartre was profoundly sceptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfilment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being. In Sartre's account, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion", what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, literally "a being that causes itself", which many religions and philosophers identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in a material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being. Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to make them appear, or to annihilate them.

Sartre's existentialism shares its philosophical starting point with René Descartes: The first thing we can be aware of is our existence, even when doubting everything else (Cogito ergo sum). In Nausea, the main character's feeling of dizziness towards his own existence is induced by things, not thinking. This dizziness occurs "in the face of one's freedom and responsibility for giving a meaning to reality". As an important break with Descartes, Sartre rejects the primacy of knowledge, as summed up in the phrase Existence precedes essence and offers a different conception of knowledge and consciousness.