Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology

806 pp. Translated from the original French by Hazel E. Barnes. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre that is regarded as the beginning of the growth of existentialism in the 20th century. Its main purpose was to define consciousness as transcendent. Being and Nothingness is clearly influenced by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being. In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of 'completion,' what Sartre calls the ens causa sui that religions identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one finds oneself inserted in being (with a lower case 'b'). But consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body; it is no thing. Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize that which is not, but could be.