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Review

Rating: 9

Sartre does what few before him have, and builds an entire system of philosophy.

One of the most influential books of 20th-century philosophy, Being and Nothingness, and others by Sartre, has probably been read by more beginning students of philosophy than any other. Sartre’s approach to philosophy is eclectic, but he has unique solutions to some of the problems he is attempting to solve, particularly his treatment of the problem of how to handle the negation, a problem of great interest to Hegel, and carried over to a phenomenological setting by Sartre. His discussion of the “experiencing” of negation has to rank as one of the most interesting in contemporary philosophy. It is a topic also that Sartre apparently thought so important that he included it in the first chapter of the book. He does however prepare the reader for the analysis in an introduction to the book. Therein, he argues for the dissolving of the distinction between being and appearance, and to reject (in Nietzschean terms), “the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene”. This discussion also shows Satre’s training in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. The move away from the dualism of appearance and essence, and appearance and being has its consequences of course, and it is these consequences that Sartre expounds upon briliantly in the rest of the book. One of these, interestingly, is the existence of an infinite series. The dualism of being and appearance is replaced by Sartre with the new dualism of finite and infinite. The appearance is finite, but to be grasped as an appearance of that which appears, says Sartre, it requires the series of appearances as infinite.

In addition, Sartre also discusses his reasoning behind his rejection of the idealism of Berkeley. Having reduced reality to the phenomenon, namely that the phenomenon is at is appears, he discusses why the Berkeley move to equate being with appearance is not a tenable one, in spite of the simplicity of such a move. His discussion expands on the famous Husserlian axiom that consciousness is always directed toward something. But Sartre goes beyond Husserl, and this is because he feels he needs to answer those who state that the requirement of consciouusness does not imply that the requirement is satisfied. He takes Husserl’s notion of intentionality, and asserts that consciousness of consciousness of something is equated with intentionality, but that the object is what he terms a “revealed-revelation”: it reveals itself as already existing when consciousness reveals it.