Being and Nothingness

Being AND Nothingness

Translation by the Center for Arab Unity Studies

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author asserts the individual’s existence as prior to the individual’s essence (“existence precedes essence”) and seeks to demonstrate that free will exists.

While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927).

Heidegger’s work, an ontological investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology (Edmund Husserl was Heidegger’s teacher), initiated Sartre’s own philosophical enquiry.

Born in Paris in 1905, Sartre was a professor of philosophy when he joined the French Army at the outbreak of World War II.

Captured by the Germans, he was released, after nearly a year, in 1941. He immediately joined the French resistance as a journalist.

In the postwar era Jean-Paul Sartre – philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist – became one of the most influential men of this century.

He died in Paris in 1980.

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.

Being AND Nothingness

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