Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre (1994-06-21)

This book is really a propaganda piece whose primary objective was to rouse French people to resist German occupiers. Published under enemy censorship, it reads between the lines as an appeal to French guilt about not facing up to their responsibilities. Sartre risked his life in the underground and hoped that his fellow countrymen would get the same message. It was written deliberately in a pseudo-Germanic, Heidegger-type complicated style to fool German censors into thinking that it was a work of philosophy. Philosophy really seeks knowledge. But being is not apprehended through knowledge and has nothing even to do with philosophy. The very word "ontology" is an oxymoronic joke. It means "knowledge of being," but being by definition cannot be known. As Sartre says, being does not exist, it simply is.

In one passage, Sartre uses as an example of free will a person who chooses not to associate with Jews. Sartre knew that this obvious burlesque of Nazism would have been taken seriously only by a censor brainwashed under the Hitler Youth movement. The book is a classic example of how to write in code and make it appear something else. It serves as an inspirational guide for authors and speakers living in controlled societies.

Here is an example of how such code words could be applied. It is almost impossible to be heard on a radio talk show, unless you agree with the host and heap praise on him or her. Suppose that the host favors intervention in Iraq and you oppose it. What can you do to get on air? The answer is to agree with the host but in an absurd way so as to expose subtly the illogicality of the policy. For example:

Host: Jane in Toledo, go ahead.
Caller: Love your show, Fred. I just wanted to say that it doesn't matter how many of us must die. The important thing is that finally we have peace in the Middle East.

Do you get the idea how to achieve being and avoid nothingness?

Sartre declares himself an atheist. But his mystical nothingness which ties in with guilt feelings sounds like religion in new bottles.

Although he presents some important ideas in this too-big work, Sartre the closet Cartesian, whose systematization of existential thought make Camus and Marcel abandon the label altogether, writes so badly that even his idol Heidegger seems readable by comparison. You're better off with someone else's summary of Sartre's philosophical thought; this book isn't worth the effort.

Why would anyone bother with a 'thinker' who attacked Flaubert and Proust for not putting trite social, socialistic commentary into their masterpieces (see that massive chunk of tragically stupid, anphetamine-powered Marxo-Freudian rigmarole 'The Family Idiot'), a fool who wrote that Nabokov should have stayed in Russia to help Lenin build 'the workers paradise' (the same Eden that welcomed Gumilyov and Mandelshtam, you'll remember)? Sartre was a blind, vulgar dunce...a man who endorsed terrorist violence (Fanon; the fashionable murderer Che G.)and pulled a treadbare, shoddily second-rate 'philosophy' over the eyes of intelligent people who should really have known better. A falsely profound, bourgeois Philistine--that's Sartre in a nutshell.

Sartre could have been more concise with his words, so I didn't have to toil so painfully through such a large body of text. I would say that Sartre is incredibly over-rated, but he did have some very meaningful tid-bits that made the drudgery worth it-- so I gave it 3 stars instead of two.

Being and Nothingness is a difficult but great book. This edition is terrible. It omits some of the central passages of this classic. For instance, the beautiful section on the 'Patterns of Bad Faith' are deleted. If you carefully read the inside of the jacket, it does say it is an abridged edition. That would not be bad if they deleted unimportant sections. Instead the publisher deleted key sections which they reprinted in their edition of Essays in Existentialism. So you are forced to buy two of their books.
If you want a copy of Being and Nothingness, get the Washington Square Press edition or the Routledge edition.

This is, for most people, an unwieldy, incomprehensible, impenetrable, and virtually unreadable book. That said, it also contains one of the most revolutionary and incontestable phenomenolgical theories ever devised, and it can be yours in exchange for a "mere" two months of your life. Sound like a good deal? Well, it's not. Unfortunately there was nobody around to tell me "don't jump!" as I was about to plunge headlong into this book, with obsessive-compulsive and monomaniacal desire to get through it. Apparently, I wanted to prove something to myself and others, by putting a tattered and heavily underlined copy of _Being and Nothingness_ back on my bookshelf, and being able to say "I read that". These types of motivations may be the only force in the known universe powerful enough to propel a man through a book such as this. And it's a good thing I read it when I was still young enough, stubborn enough, and crazy enough to do so.
.........This brings me back to my praise of this book, and its lofty, creative theories. Yes, it has its problems in the area of readability, and this is particularly inexcusable because it was written in the second half of the twentieth century. However, we must not forget that it was Sartre who first coined the theory "being unto other" as an explanation for the phenomenon of human temporal experience. This, as it turned out, was an enhancement and fortification of Heidegger's phenomenological theory of "being-unto-death", and was able to incorporate this older and influential theory into a new and more comprehensive theory of the self. Keep in mind that Sartre does not necessarily contradict Heidegger's theories, but instead corrects their narrow, one-dimensional nature by adding to and expanding upon them. The end result is a comprehensive and all-encompassing theory of being, which is a sort of fusion between the theory of being-unto-death and being-unto-other. The last 200-300 pages of this book are particularly brilliant in explaining this flexible, agile theory, accounting for every possible type of interaction between human feelings of isolation/self-conscious otherness and history/death. Sartre realizes that it is futile to try to narrow down an all-encompassing theory of existence into a few powerful determining concepts. Instead, Sartre presents us with a system that is able to account for many more secondary, but important, factors in the formulation of existential being.

Strange as it may sound, I would recommend that a reader who is pressed for time, but still curious about this philosophy, to start reading this book about 500 pages in. Many will vehemently disagree, but a skilled veteran of reading philosophy should be able to start this book about 2/3 of the way in and still pick up the vast majority of important concepts. You may ask, how can I justify buying a book when only 1/3 of it is worth reading? Well you'll just have to trust me on this one. Start reading about 500 pages in, save yourself about 6 weeks worth of aggravation, get all of the important concepts on the relationship between death and the self, and thank me later. Overbloated as it may be, the last 1/3 of this book alone is easily worth the price of admission. So go ahead and try it, if you dare! A final note: I edited this review as of November 2010 to give it 5 stars instead of 4, becuase in the fullness of time I have come to appreciate the importance of this work even more. It has been infinitely useful in my research and writings as a theologian.

If you want to learn about existentialism, you might want to bypass this book. Existentialism is not hard to understand, though Sartre goes out of his artsy-fartsy way to make it all but incomprehensible.

I expected better of Sartre, since his plays and fiction are so well done and make for enjoyable reading. And who knows: in the original French, his ideas may have come across much more readily. But in English translation, "Being and Nothingness" is all but unreadable. It is clearly aimed at specialists, snooty philosopher majors who don't mind reading 800 pages of torturous nonsense. My question: of what use is philosophy if those of us in the real world can't comprehend it? One could be forgiven than philosophers are more interested in intellectual snobbery than they are in actually saying anything of consequence. Perhaps that's why Nietzsche is so widely read. He at least knows how to make a point.

It's said that Sartre "moved on" from the views he expresses in his masterpiece, which makes one wonder why we should be bothered to read it.

Makes for a nice doorstop, though, I must say.

I began reading this book for a course in college. I keep coming back to it and read tidbits. I think this book was banned by the Catholic Church because Jean-Paul is in my opinion the boldest man to ever live. Very sharp book--some of the sentences make me think over and over and over again. This book is not to be strived at.

OK quality, but I really miss page numbers. Especially annoying because I am writing my dissertation and wanted to use the kindle version to search for specific concepts in the text and take down the references, but without pagination, this is much more tedious work than it needed to be.

"Being and Nothingness" reminds me of a fine meal with a bad dessert. You end up saying, "Can't I come away with more than fruit?" In a metaphoric sense, I wish there were more dark chocolate sprinkled in, more cream, more butter. But this is a common criticism of Sartre and I don't mean to belabor the point.

"Being And Nothingness" is definitely an old time classic. It is Sartre's Chef D'oeuvre. This book belongs in every library and on every book shelf. I would highly recommend it for every person that harbors an interest and passion for stimulating thoughts and philosophy.

With so much inauthenticity inherent in modern societies, difficult a read as this is, it is worth the plowing. And plowing we must. There are many paths to the mountaintop of self-actualization. The renowned philosopher points a studied finger. I would contrast this classic with his lesser known autobiography, "The Words"...unimaginably poignant poetry guised in the cloak of prose.

This book is a confused and tangled mass of almost utter nonsense. Take the time to think about what Sartre is "saying" and see if it makes any sense. I found it to be utterly incoherent and unilluminating. If we are to deal at all productively with difficult issues, our foremost concerns must be clarity and intellectual honesty. This book lacks both.

I started studying existentialism (Albert Camus' novels) my senior year in high school (1969), and the following year, as a freshman at UC San Diego, I moved on to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. In addition to studying existentialism, I also studied Marxism under the iconic neo-Marxist Professor Herbert Marcuse. I was a radical left-winger, but it was Professor Stan Lyman's course (and book), A Sociology of the Absurd, that motivated me to major in sociology. Professor Lyman taught existential phenomenology, and I loved the idea of applying existentialism to society and culture.

To make a long story short, I long ago left behind both Marcuse and Marxism (replaced by Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard) and Sartre and existentialism (replaced by Eastern spiritual philosophy). And I eventually become an expert in both sociopolitical and mystical philosophy.

Once an individual begins to study (and hopefully practice) philosophies such as Hindu Advaita Vedanta (particularly Ramana Maharshi) and Kashmir Shaivism (particularly Abhinavagupta); Zen (particularly Huang Po) and Tibetan Buddhism (particularly Longchen Rabjam); and great iconoclastic mystics (particularly Meister Eckhart, J. Krishnamurti, and Adi Da Samraj), existentialism will be realized for what it is--kindergarten crap when measured against the aforesaid Dharmas.

When Sartre was close to passing, he abandoned his existential ethic and turned to religion: the Jewish Kabbalah (which I am also an expert on). If you're smart, you won't wait until your deathbed to jettison existentialism (and/or its cousin, postmodernism) for the greener pastures of esoteric mystical philosophy. And if you want a single book that puts it all together and has a comprehensive Spiritual Reading List that points you to the most demystifying texts, get a copy of Beyond the Power of Now: A Guide to, and Beyond, Eckhart Tolle's Teachings.

Because I got nine negative votes--but no comments--I'll further shred Sartre. There is not, and cannot be, such thing as Nothingness. If you believe there is, then you're guilty of what Ayn Rand calls "The reification of Zero." When Ramana Maharshi, the great Hindu sage, was asked about the encounter with the void (or blank), his reply was: "Who sees it?" Realize the Seer, or Buddha-nature, and you'll transcend the existential angst that plagues those stuck in the "intermediate zone" of "nothingness."

Sartre not only failed to understand nothingness, but he was equally clueless regarding Being. It takes no effort to BE (all effort is becoming, successive change of state). When one can effortlessly remain aware (be awareness) for a length of time, then the natural radiant energy of awareness (or consciousness),Spirit-power, begins to flow, en-Light-ening the yogi. The term Nirvana means the "end of becoming" (in other words, Being). The Buddha was timelessly, happily, rested in, and as, radiant Being, while Sartre, enmeshed in becoming, self-contraction, the separate-self sensation generated by the avoidance of Being, the recoil from Infinity, could only write about the state, dilemma, and angst of Narcissus, the separate, suffering one forever contemplating his own image instead of the radiant Light of Being.