Being and Nothingness
존재와 무
Jean-Paul Sartre's main philosophical work, published by Gallimard in 1943 under the German occupation, with the subtitle "An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology". It distinguishes the being of things, "being-in-itself", from the being of consciousness, "being-for-itself", and argues that consciousness is the freedom that brings "nothingness" into the world and that human beings cannot escape this freedom. It is famous for its analysis of "bad faith", the attitude that hides one's own freedom, and of the "look" of the other. Building on Heidegger's Being and Time, it became the philosophical foundation of French existentialism; Marxists such as Lukács criticised it, and Sartre himself later sought to join existentialism with Marxism in the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
In depth
Why did this book become the scripture of existentialism?
Being and Nothingness is regarded as the most important philosophical expression of French existentialism. The slogan Sartre offered the public right after the Liberation in his 1945 lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism", that human beings have no essence given in advance and are what they make of themselves, "existence precedes essence", has its philosophical ground in this book. The English Wikipedia names this slogan, the concept of "bad faith" and the exploration of "nothingness" as the book's central ideas.
Its relation to Nietzsche is not direct but underlies the whole. Sartre's existentialism is atheist. Since there is no God, there is no designer to fix human nature in advance and no outside value to justify our acts. Sartre took what Nietzsche called the "death of God" as the condition in which human beings must create values alone. At the same time he dissected the human desire to become God. The for-itself wants to be both as solid as the in-itself and conscious, a being that is its own cause, God; but that is a contradiction and cannot be achieved. As the book concludes, in the words the French Wikipedia quotes: "Man is a useless passion."
L'homme est une passion inutile.
How was it written?
According to the English Wikipedia, Sartre read Heidegger's Being and Time as a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941 and said that this reading set the course of his own philosophy. The French Wikipedia reports that many of the book's metaphysical ideas came from the notes of his War Diaries, and that much of the manuscript was written on the first floor of the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés during the occupation; Simone de Beauvoir used the same room for the same reason, as it was better heated. The book's example of the café waiter is tied to that workplace.
Sartre promised an existentialist ethics to follow but never wrote it. Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and Sartre's posthumous Notebooks for an Ethics partly fill the gap. The Korean translation is titled 존재와 무.
What does it argue?
Sartre divides being into two regions. Being-in-itself is the being of things: it simply is what it is. Being-for-itself is the being of consciousness, which is always consciousness of something and keeps a distance from itself. By questioning, expecting and denying, consciousness brings "nothingness" into the world. Concrete absences, a friend who is not in the café where we were to meet, the answer "no one came", are examples. As the French Wikipedia quotes, Sartre wrote that this possibility of human reality to secrete a nothingness that isolates it was given a name by Descartes, after the Stoics: "freedom". Human beings are therefore not free to stop being free. Man is "condemned to be free".
l'homme est condamné à être libre
The attitude that flees the weight of this freedom is "bad faith" (mauvaise foi). The café waiter who is a little too quick and a little too eager plays at being a waiter as an inkwell is an inkwell. Bad faith is dressing up one's own choices as the necessity of things, using a social role, one's past self or one's temperament as an excuse. Sartre also argued that Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious merely moved the same problem to a "censor".
Part three deals with other people. The moment I am caught in another's "look" I become an object for him, and the centre of the world slides away from me. Love and desire, sadism and masochism are analysed as failed attempts to seize the other's freedom. The terms "in-itself" and "for-itself" come from Hegel, but for Sartre the two are never reconciled.
How did Marxists read it?
In post-war France the Communist Party and Marxists distrusted the book's individualist concept of freedom, since it started from the choices of an isolated consciousness rather than from social classes and history. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, György Lukács went to Paris in 1949 to debate existentialism and Marxism with Sartre, and in the same years he criticised existentialism in Existentialism or Marxism? as the philosophy of a bourgeois intelligentsia in crisis. Lukács's placing of Heidegger on the line of irrationalism in The Destruction of Reason belongs to the same context.
Sartre's own road ran the other way. In the early 1950s he became a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party, broke with it over the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he called Marxism "the unsurpassable philosophy of our time" and placed existentialism as a region within it. The French Wikipedia notes that the usual division between this "second philosophy", which moved from the individual to the social, and the "first philosophy" of Being and Nothingness has been challenged since the mid-2010s by readings that see the subject of Being and Nothingness as already a subject in a situation, between a past and a future.
The book also drew criticism from colleagues. Albert Camus was Sartre's friend but started not from an ontological system but from the concrete experience of "revolt", and in the end the controversy over The Rebel split him from Sartre. Heidegger rejected Sartre's reading. Even so, Christian existentialists such as Gabriel Marcel acknowledged the book's importance, and in a 1999 French poll it ranked thirteenth among the hundred best books of the twentieth century.