Being and Nothingness (1943)
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943 L’Être et le Néant
The Argument in One Paragraph
Reality, Sartre argues, splits into two irreducibly different kinds of being. On one side there is being-in-itself — the solid, opaque, fully positive world of things that simply are what they are. On the other side there is being-for-itself — human consciousness, which is not a thing but a hole in being, a “nothingness” that consciousness introduces into the world whenever it questions, denies, or projects possibilities. Because consciousness is this nothingness, it cannot be determined by anything — not its past, not its environment, not its body. It is, structurally, absolutely free. That freedom is the source of anguish, the origin of bad faith (our flight from freedom into the pretence of being a thing), and — once the Other enters the picture through “the Look” — the source of the fundamental conflict between human beings. The whole project of being human, Sartre concludes, is a doomed attempt to become the impossible synthesis of in-itself and for-itself — to be God. We fail. “Man is a useless Passion.”
What the Book Is About
Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s attempt to write a first philosophy — an ontology that describes the basic structures of reality from the ground up. He begins in an argument with Husserl, whom he thinks stayed trapped in the subject. Sartre wants to get outside: he splits being into two regions and then spends six hundred pages tracing what follows.
The in-itself is easy to describe because there’s nothing to describe. It is. It is what it is. A stone is a stone. It has no distance from itself, no questions about itself, no possibilities. It is “full, opaque positivity.”
The for-itself — consciousness — is the opposite. It is defined by the fact that it is not what it is and is what it is not. When I am conscious of this table, I am not the table; there is a gap, a distance, a nothingness that separates me from it. When I remember my past, I am no longer that past; a nothingness separates me from it too. Consciousness is that nothingness. It is a permanent non-coincidence with itself.
From this one ontological difference, the rest of the book unfolds. Because consciousness is nothingness, it cannot be causally determined — there is nothing there to push around. So we are free. But freedom is not a property we have; it is what we are, whether we like it or not. And we mostly don’t like it. The discovery of our own freedom is anguish — not fear of something specific, but vertigo at the realization that nothing outside me is deciding what I will do next.
So we flee. The flight is bad faith — we pretend to be things. Sartre’s most famous vignette: the café waiter whose every gesture is too precise, too studied, who is “playing at being a café waiter” as if the role were something he could just be. Or the woman on the date who lets her hand rest dead in the man’s, pretending that her hand is just a thing while she talks about ideas — fleeing the moment of decision by splitting herself in two. Bad faith is not lying to someone else (lying requires knowing the truth); it’s the stranger, more structural project of believing your own excuse.
Then, in Part Three, the argument turns. Until now Sartre has described consciousness as if it were alone in the world. But consciousness encounters others. And the encounter is not, as Heidegger’s Mitsein would suggest, originally cooperative. It is originally conflictual. This is the argument of “the Look.”
Imagine you are kneeling at a keyhole, spying on someone in the next room. You are pure subject: your world is organized around your project, the keyhole, the desire to see. Then — footsteps in the corridor behind you. Someone is looking at you. Instantly your entire world rearranges. You are no longer the subject organizing the scene; you are an object in someone else’s scene. You feel shame. Your possibilities have been stolen. The Other has reduced you to a fact.
From this, Sartre derives a brutal account of love, desire, sadism, masochism — all failed attempts either to enslave the Other’s freedom (so I can recover my own subjectivity without threat) or to surrender my own freedom into the Other’s possession (so I don’t have to carry it anymore). None of it works.
The last part of the book unifies all human action into a “fundamental project.” Every person is secretly trying to achieve one thing: to be both totally free (for-itself) and totally self-identical (in-itself) — to be, in other words, God. This is the hidden structure behind every ambition, every desire. It is also, structurally, impossible. Consciousness cannot coincide with itself without ceasing to be consciousness. Hence the famous closing: “Man is a useless Passion.” We are burning ourselves up trying to become something we cannot be.
But Sartre refuses to end in despair. The last pages open onto ethics. Once you see through the “spirit of seriousness” — the belief that values exist out there in the world, fixed, waiting to be discovered — you can take responsibility for creating them yourself. Total responsibility is terrifying, but it is also the only honest way to live.
Key Concepts
- Being-in-itself (l’en-soi). Solid, full, opaque positivity. Being that “is what it is.” Has no inside, no potentiality, no relation to itself. Things are in-itself. Your body, as a biological object, is in-itself. Your past, once lived, is in-itself.
- Being-for-itself (le pour-soi). Human consciousness. The being “for whom in its being there is a question of its being.” Defined as “being what it is not and not being what it is.” A permanent gap, a non-coincidence, a nothingness.
- Nothingness (le néant). Not a thing, not a region. The introduction of negation into the world by consciousness. “Nothingness lies right inside being, in its heart, like a worm.” Every question, every lack, every expectation presupposes it.
- Facticity. The in-itself dimension of the for-itself: your body, your place of birth, your past, your language, your situation. What you didn’t choose. Freedom isn’t the absence of facticity — it’s what you do with it.
- Bad faith (la mauvaise foi). Self-deception about one’s own freedom. Pretending to be a thing in order to escape the anguish of having to choose. Not a lie to others but a structural, metastable attitude toward one’s own condition.
- The Look (le regard). The Other’s gaze, which transforms me from subject into object. The origin of shame, the beginning of being-for-the-Other. Not primarily a visual event — a shift in ontological status.
- Anguish (angoisse). The lived awareness of one’s own freedom. Not fear (which has an object) but vertigo at the absence of anything deciding what one will do.
- The fundamental project. Every human life, Sartre claims, is organized around one deepest choice of what to be. “Existential psychoanalysis” is the method of decoding that choice.
- The desire to be God. The structure of every fundamental project: to achieve the impossible synthesis of in-itself and for-itself — to be self-grounding, fully free and fully solid. This is why “man is a useless Passion.”
Key Quotations
- “Being is. Being is itself. Being is what it is.” — the full, lapidary definition of the in-itself.
- “The being of consciousness… is a being for whom in its being there is a question of its being, insofar as this being implies a being other than itself.” — the canonical definition of the for-itself.
- “Nothingness lies right inside being, in its heart, like a worm.” — negation is not outside the world; it’s introduced into the world by us.
- “Bad faith is a matter of constituting human-reality as a being that is what it is not, and is not what it is.” — the precise structural definition of self-deception.
- “The Other is, as a matter of principle, the one who looks at me.” — other people are not, primarily, known; they are felt through the shift from subject to object.
- “My original fall is the Other’s existence.” — the first “fall” isn’t Eden, it’s being seen.
- “We are condemned to freedom.” — the central slogan of the book, and of Sartre’s thought.
- “Man is fundamentally the desire to be God.” — the diagnosis of every fundamental project.
- “Man is a useless Passion.” — the book’s last word on the human condition.
Metaphors That Carry the Argument
| Metaphor | What it signals | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Pierre’s absence in the café | Nothingness is introduced into being by expectation. The café is “haunted” by Pierre’s not-being-there — but only because I came looking for him. | Part I, Ch. 1 |
| The café waiter | Bad faith as a social performance. He is playing at being a waiter because he cannot actually be one the way a rock is a rock. | Part I, Ch. 2 |
| The voyeur at the keyhole | The Look. The instant the subject becomes object, and shame is born. | Part III, Ch. 1 |
| The viscous (slime) | The in-itself threatening to engulf the for-itself. The horror of freedom being bogged down, sucked in, assimilated by inert matter. | Part IV, Ch. 2 |
Who He’s Arguing With
- Husserl. Sartre admires him but thinks he stayed trapped in a “phenomenalist” idealism — locked in the cogito, unable to get to being itself. Sartre’s ontological split is meant to force phenomenology back into contact with the real.
- Hegel. Sartre takes the master-slave dialectic and turns it into the Look, but rejects Hegel’s dialectical optimism. For Sartre there is no synthesis at the end of the conflict between consciousnesses. The conflict is the structure.
- Heidegger. The deepest debt, and the sharpest break. Sartre borrows the vocabulary of Dasein and being-in-the-world, but rejects Mitsein (being-with) as an originary structure. For Sartre, the Other is not given alongside me; the Other arrives as an ontological shock, and that shock is conflict, not community.
- Freud. Sartre spends a whole chapter demolishing the unconscious. If I repress something, who is doing the repressing? A second, repressing consciousness? Then where does its decision to repress come from? The unconscious, Sartre argues, is just bad faith with better PR.
How It’s Written
Dense, Teutonic, relentlessly dialectical — and then, without warning, cinematic. Sartre writes like a man who has read too much Heidegger and is refusing to apologize for it, but every forty pages he drops a vignette (the waiter, the keyhole, Pierre) that is as vivid as anything in the novels. The form is part of the argument: the paradoxical formulations (“is what it is not and is not what it is”) are trying to name a reality that ordinary declarative prose cannot name, because ordinary declarative prose is built for the in-itself.
Connections
- Sartre — the philosophical magnum opus, written during the Occupation. The novel Nausea is its vestibule; the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism is its pamphlet.
- Kant — Sartre inherits Kantian freedom (the will that can defy every inclination) but strips out the moral law and the transcendental “I.” Where Kant grounds freedom in reason, Sartre grounds it in nothingness.
- Dostoevsky — The Underground Man and Ivan Karamazov are case studies in consciousness-as-nothingness, freedom-as-torment, and bad faith. Sartre never escapes Dostoevsky’s gravity.
- Kafka — The Trial is what being-for-the-Other looks like as literature: Joseph K. is permanently under the Look, permanently an object in someone else’s universe.
Lineage
- Predecessors: Descartes (the cogito), Hegel (master-slave), Kierkegaard (anguish), Husserl (phenomenology), Heidegger (Sein und Zeit), Freud (as negative interlocutor).
- Successors: Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex applies the Look to gender), Merleau-Ponty (corrects Sartre on the body), Frantz Fanon (the Look as colonial gaze, Black Skin, White Masks), Lacan (the mirror stage as a partial answer to the Look), later feminist and post-colonial theory.