Être et le néant, L'. Sartre's best-known philosophical work, published 1943. Subtitled ‘Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique’, it embodies the main preoccupations of his ‘classical’, Existentialist period. Despite its balanced title, the work's primary concern is not with being, the fixed, self-identical être-en-soi of physical objects and entities, which earns about six of the text's 660 pages, but rather with le néant, the ‘nothingness’ of human consciousness as it constructs a world out of the brute ‘being’ which confronts it. In epistemological and ontological terms, Sartre is trying to steer a course between (objective) realism and (subjective) idealism. But it is the psychological aspect of the text which is of more general interest.
For Sartre, consciousness is radically free: free, through its capacity to imagine, to construct a meaningful human world, free also to construct a life, a self, a project of being-in-the-world. But the consequences of radical freedom are total responsibility and an inability ever to achieve peaceful self-identity. One reaction is angoisse. Furthermore, consciousness does not simply have the physical world to contend with, it also has other consciousnesses with their projects, plans, and imagined future lives. Human relations are presented in terms of conflict, of attempts at mastery of the other, be it through evidently power-based intentions such as sadism and oppression, or, more disturbingly, through apparently desirable attitudes such as love or tolerance. All these, in Sartre's description, are riddled with inauthenticity and alienation; relations with others are never free from the desire to dominate or be dominated. This grim picture is what we try to mask from ourselves in mauvaise foi (bad faith), a form of self-deception which is the commonest kind of inauthenticity. All this, says Sartre in a famous footnote, does not exclude the possibility of an ethics of deliverance and salvation. But L'Être et le néant is not the place to find it.
[Christina Howells]
