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Being and Nothingness

L'Être et le néant — An essay in phenomenological ontology

Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (Paris, under German occupation) · French · Systematic phenomenological treatise in four parts

Tradition: French existentialism / phenomenological ontology

Being-for-itself is the freedom that always precedes essence — we are condemned to be free, and bad faith is the flight from this freedom

Being and Nothingness is Sartre's most ambitious philosophical work — over seven hundred pages of phenomenological ontology distinguishing being-in-itself (the dense, fully-given being of objects) from being-for-itself (the empty, self-conscious, freedom-defined being of consciousness). The book's most famous analyses include the waiter performing the role of a waiter as a case of bad faith (mauvaise foi), the gaze of the other as the foundation of objectification, the body as one's perspectival situation in the world, and the dictum that we are "condemned to be free" — radically responsible for what we make of ourselves because there is no human nature that precedes our choices. Together with Camus's Myth, this is the central philosophical work of post-war French existentialism.

Author

Editions cited

  • Being and Nothingness (Sarah Richmond, Washington Square Press / Atria, 2018)
  • Being and Nothingness (Hazel E. Barnes, Philosophical Library, 1956 — long-standard)
Compare this work

School Embodiments

Existentialism · 55%
Phenomenology · 25%
Dialectical Materialism · 5%
Constructivism · 10%
Absurdism · 5%
Continental Philosophy · 8%
Existentialism 55%

The most ambitious systematic statement of French atheist existentialism. The doctrines of radical freedom, bad faith, the look, and existence preceding essence are Sartre's contributions to the school.

"Man is condemned to be free... condemned because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." (Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946 — formula consonant with B&N)
Phenomenology 25%

Sartre studied Husserl and Heidegger in Berlin in 1933–34; Being and Nothingness is recognisably a phenomenological-ontological project, with extensive engagement with both predecessors.

"All consciousness is consciousness of something." (Being and Nothingness, Introduction §1, citing Husserl's principle of intentionality)
Dialectical Materialism 5%

Sartre's later Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) attempted an integration with Marxism; Being and Nothingness is the philosophical preparation for that later turn, and Marxist readers (Lukács, Adorno) engaged it as such.

"Existence precedes essence." (Sartre's slogan, crystallised in 1946; the position is developed at length throughout Being and Nothingness)
Constructivism 10%

A weaker but genuine resonance: Sartre's position that human beings construct their values through choices rather than discover them is the existentialist version of a broadly constructivist meta-ethics.

"There is no human nature... not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence." (Existentialism is a Humanism, paraphrasing B&N)
Absurdism 5%

Sartre and Camus shared a Parisian intellectual milieu and broke publicly in 1952 over The Rebel. The early work of both shares a diagnosis of the modern philosophical situation, even where the prescriptions diverge.

"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being — like a worm." (Being and Nothingness, Introduction §6)
Continental Philosophy 8%

Continental-philosophical tradition.

Internal Tensions

The book's formal apparatus is famously elaborate and the doctrine of radical freedom famously hard to square with the experience of constraint, mental illness, structural oppression, and unfreedom of various kinds. Sartre himself began moving toward a more dialectical, social account in the 1950s; the Critique of Dialectical Reason is in large part his attempt to provide what B&N could not. Modern readers vary on whether Being and Nothingness is the great philosophical statement of human freedom or an overstated metaphysical position the later Sartre wisely qualified.

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I. Time

Part Two of B&N analyses temporality at length. For the for-itself, time is not a homogeneous medium but the ecstatic structure of consciousness — past as the facticity one is, present as the negation of what one has been, future as the project one is becoming. Time is real, relational, and ineliminable from the for-itself's mode of being.

Attributes
Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Relational Grain: Continuous Freedom: Non-Deterministic Traversability: Linear Direction: Uni-directional Dimensionality: One
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II. Space

Space is treated as the field of one's situation — the body is the perspectival anchor from which the world is revealed. The famous analysis of "the look" (Le Regard) has the gaze of the other restructure my entire spatial situation.

Attributes
Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Relational Curvature: Flat Dimensionality: Three Locality: Local
◉

III. Matter

Being-in-itself — the dense, self-identical being of objects — is substantival. The famous opening of Nausea (1938) and Part One of B&N treat material existence as sticky, sufficient, indifferent, full. Matter is the positive pole against which the for-itself's nothingness is contrasted.

Attributes
Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Substantival Conservation: Conserved Dimensionality: Three Locality: Local
◎

IV. Observer

The Sartrean observer is the for-itself: embodied, plural (co-existing with other for-itselves through the look), radically active, knowing immediately through pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. The agency is unambiguously active: we are our choices. Moral authority is constructed; there is no pre-given good. Metaphysical agency is None — the famous closing line of the book identifies the desire for being-in-itself-for-itself with the impossible desire to be God.

Attributes
Time Instance: Single Space Instance: Single Knowledge Extent: Immediate Knowledge Retainment: Immediate Physicality: Embodied Agency: Active Number: Plural Metaphysical Agency: None
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V. Energy

Not theorised. Sartre presupposes standard physical energetics within the analysis of the situated body.

Attributes
Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Substantival Conservation: Conserved Dispersibility: Irreversible
⧉

VI. Information

No cosmic informational structure, no providence. The individual life is a project that ends with death (Part Four), and Sartre is firm that death is "an absurd fact" — the radical interruption of a project, not a transition to anywhere.

Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational Cosmic Conservation: Non-conserved Personal Conservation: Non-conserved Granularity: Continuous

Personas that cite this work

Jean-Paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir

Films that reference this work

Persona (1966)

Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint

Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.

94%
Protagoras of Abdera
32/34
91%
Bruno Latour
31/34
85%
Thomas Kuhn
29/34
85%
Han Feizi
17/20
83%
Theophrastus
25/30
82%
Donna Haraway
28/34

Computed school proximity

The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.

79%
Epicureanism
22/26
76%
Nihilism
20/26
71%
Relationalism
20/26
70%
Postmodernism
20/26
68%
Cyrenaicism
19/26
68%
Deconstruction
19/26
66%
Cybernetics
19/26
66%
Sophism
19/26

How Being and Nothingness resolves each dilemma

51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 6 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.

Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.

Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive

Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.

Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree (31/202)
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
The heat death of the universe — entropy maxed out, no further work possible — is among the more sobering implications of mainstream physics. Whether it is structurally inescapable depends on what kind of finitude the cosmos has.
Both time and matter are unbounded; 'running out' is misframed.
On this view, the cosmos has neither a temporal horizon nor a material exhaustion point. The framing of running out presupposes bounds that the cosmos doesn't have. Energy gradients perpetuate; new configurations emerge; the categories that make heat-death scary don't apply at the cosmic scale.
Roads not taken Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing. (47%) · Time both has and lacks bounds depending on the level you ask at; finitude is conventional. (26%) · The cosmos has bounds; heat death is a real horizon. (12%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree (31/202)
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Whether we can grow our way out of resource constraints — or whether the cosmos sets limits the economy ultimately must obey — depends on what kind of finitude matter has.
Resources are practically inexhaustible on cosmic scales; terrestrial limits are engineering.
On this view, matter and time are both unbounded at the largest scales. Terrestrial resource limits are real engineering and political constraints but not metaphysical ones; the cosmos can in principle support whatever expansion intelligence is capable of.
Roads not taken Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time. (47%) · The finitude question is level-dependent; resource ethics happens at the level that constrains us. (26%) · Resources are finite in the strict sense; living well requires accepting the limit. (12%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree (31/202)
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
If we owe future people a habitable planet and the material means to flourish, and the cosmos is bounded in ways that make those obligations impossible at some scale, the obligation and the possibility come apart. Where they come apart turns on what kind of finitude we live in.
Both time and matter are unbounded; we cannot in principle owe more than is possible.
On this view, the cosmos has the resources to support whatever flourishing future generations are capable of, given sufficient time and intelligence. The impossibility concern is misplaced; the real questions are about trajectories and choices, not about resource ceilings.
Roads not taken Time is unbounded but matter is not; we can owe more across long time than the matter can provide. (47%) · The owing-and-possibility question is level-dependent; we owe what is appropriate at the level we act on. (26%) · The cosmos is bounded; our obligations to future generations are bounded with it. (12%)
6 mainstream positions
Do you really choose? The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. 69% Are addicts responsible for their addiction? The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. 69% Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do? An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. 69% How much weight do future people deserve? Time arises from events or from a deeper substrate — the future is not yet. 32% Is regret rational? The past is not a thing now; regret is the present holding what is no longer. 32% Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them? Past species no longer exist; what we owe is to the present and the future. 32%
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is the world created from nothing? Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. 55% Is the physical world fully real? Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting. 55% Does matter have intrinsic moral standing? Matter is morally considerable insofar as it is created or conserved good. 55% What is money? Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. 54% What is a nation? A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. 54% What makes someone male or female? Sex is a real biological kind with given content. 54% Should we edit the human germline? Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. 54%

Observer · 37 dilemmas · 3 distinctive

Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.

Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree (29/202)
What makes someone the same person over time?
When dementia hollows out memory, when a coma resolves with no recall, when you imagine being uploaded — the question of whether the surviving person is still you turns on what kind of thing the 'you' was to begin with.
There was never a fixed self to either preserve or lose.
On these views, what we call a self was always a stream of experience, a constructed narrative, a process — never a thing whose continuity could be the question. Dementia, upload, transformation, death are stages in a process, not events that either preserve or destroy …
Roads not taken You are your body — continuity is bodily continuity. (36%) · You are a soul — what persists through change is the non-bodily aspect. (29%) · You span moments — identity is a pattern that need not be located at a single now. (9%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree (29/202)
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Loss of memory, of recognition, of the cognitive patterns that made the person — does this end the person, or merely the person you knew? The answer turns on what makes someone who they are.
There was no fixed person to lose; care is owed to whoever is here.
On these views, the person their spouse married was never a fixed thing whose continuation could be tracked across time. There has always been a stream of experiences, a developing character, a construction. Dementia is one of the more visible changes in the process; the …
Roads not taken Same body, same person — even when the cognitive pattern has changed. (36%) · The soul persists; the cognitive change is the body's, not the person's. (29%) · The person is the pattern across moments — diminished pattern, diminished person. (9%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree (29/202)
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The Star Trek transporter problem: a machine scans your body atom by atom, transmits the pattern, builds an exact duplicate at the destination, and dismantles the original. Whether you arrive at the destination or die in the scanner is the question; the answer depends on what you are.
There was no fixed you to either survive or fail to; the question is malformed.
On these views, the question presupposes a fixed self whose continuity is the issue. There isn't one. The teleporter case feels more troubling than ordinary sleep, dementia, or growth, but the framework is the same: a stream of experience stops at the scanner, a new …
Roads not taken Different body, different person — you died in the scanner. (36%) · The soul accompanies the person; engineering can't transfer it. (29%) · You are the pattern; the pattern survives the substrate change. You arrive. (9%)
28 mainstream positions
Could causation work backwards? Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural. 68% Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us? The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction. 68% Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it? The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description. 68% Is environmental damage ever truly permanent? Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation. 66% Can a civilization recover from collapse? Civilizational complexity is hard to build and easy to lose; recovery is at best partial. 66% Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally? Entropy is what time is. The moral weight, if any, is the weight of working against the current. 66% When does a person begin? A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. 54% What is marriage? Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. 54% Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally? Moral obligation tracks the relations one is in; distance does matter, structurally. 50% Can prayer for someone far away affect them? Prayer changes the pray-er, not the prayed-for. 49% Are coincidences ever more than coincidence? Coincidence is exactly what the math says it is. The pattern is in the noticer. 49% What is our place in nature? Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. 48% Should we colonize space? Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. 48% Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination? Genetic modification is cultivation by other means. 48% Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom? The observer is in time; foreknowledge across times raises real freedom problems. 46% Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless? Meditators are bounded observers reporting unusual brain states; the 'timeless' is metaphorical. 46% Does prayer change God's mind? If there is an addressee at all, it is in time; prayer is communication, and may genuinely change what comes next. 46% Are the dead morally present to the living? Observers are bounded by their own moment, and no further agency makes the dead present. 44% Is reality fundamentally digital? No — continuous fields, classical limits, analog deep structure. 37% Are there indivisible units of experience? No — continuous Jamesian stream, phenomenological lived time. 37% Is memory stored or reconstructed? Reconstructed — continuous re-narrating, no fixed engrams. 37% Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans? Animal minds are real because biology is the substrate of mind. 32% Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious? Brain tissue can in principle do what brains do; the question is integration. 32% What happens to "you" when you die? Death is genuinely the end. 30% Could an AI have a mind that matters? No — mind is what a biological brain does, and an LLM has no brain. 30% Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it? Trust the practice, not the practitioner. 14% Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge? 'Revelation' is a category communities construct for what counts as authoritative. 14% Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces? Whether an LLM 'knows' is the constructive question the practice has to answer. 14%
6 unaligned
Does history have a direction or meaning? Schools split: 37% / 23% / 19% — How is knowledge of reality produced? Schools split: 25% / 17% / 13% — Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal? Schools split: 15% / 14% / 4% — Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed? Schools split: 65% / 16% / 10% — What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize? Schools split: 44% / 16% / 14% — Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species? Schools split: 40% / 28% / 14% —
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets? Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone. 51% Does deleting your data online destroy something real? Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys. 51% Could the dead, in principle, be brought back? The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible. 51% Is forgiveness ontologically possible? The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away. 51%
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