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Jean-Paul Sartre at 100
Sartre’s Being & Nothingness: The Bible of Existentialism?
Christine Daigle discusses some of the key concepts and ideas in Sartre’s most important philosophical book.
June 1943, occupied France. A writer named Jean-Paul Sartre sees his latest philosophical manuscript, Being and Nothingness, a “phenomenological essay on ontology”, 722 pages of fine print (in the original French edition), published in the midst of World War II. The presentation wrapper on the early reprint of 1945: “What counts in a vase is the void in the middle”!
This wasn’t the first of Sartre’s writings to make some waves. His article on Husserl’s phenomenology from 1936-1937, ‘The Transcendence of the Ego’, had made quite an impression in philosophical circles. Its author cleverly re-appropriated Husserl’s goal of going back to the things themselves by kicking the ego out of consciousness and carefully delineating the various modes of consciousness and its encounter with the world.
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