Knowra Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 philosophical work analyzes consciousness, freedom, and human existence through an ontology distinguishing being-in-itself from being-for-itself.
Being-in-itself : Sartre’s term for the self-contained, nonconscious being of things. It names the mode of being Sartre contrasts with conscious human existence.
Bad Faith : Self-deception in which a person evades their freedom by treating themselves as fixed or determined. Sartre’s analysis shows how people flee the unsettled freedom of being-for-itself.
Jean-Paul Sartre : French philosopher, novelist, and playwright associated with existentialism and twentieth-century political thought. He wrote this work as a systematic account of consciousness, freedom, and being.
Determinism : The view that events, including human actions, are fixed by prior conditions and laws. Sartre rejects explanations that erase the agent’s responsibility by making choice inevitable.
Existential Psychoanalysis : Sartre’s interpretive method for uncovering the fundamental project that gives a person’s actions coherence. It applies the book’s account of freedom to the interpretation of individual lives.
Being-for-itself : Sartre’s term for conscious being, which relates to itself and is not fixed like a thing. It captures the distinctive, self-questioning existence analyzed throughout the book.
Nothingness : The absence or negation that consciousness discloses within being, rather than a separate substance. It is the gap through which consciousness distances itself from facts and possibilities.
Edmund Husserl : German philosopher who founded phenomenology and developed the analysis of intentional consciousness. Sartre draws on Husserl’s account of consciousness while revising its philosophical implications.
Essentialism : The view that things or people have defining natures that determine what they are. Sartre opposes a fixed human essence that would precede individual existence.
Existentialism Is a Humanism : Sartre’s 1946 lecture defending existentialism against criticisms of moral and political irresponsibility. It recasts the book’s difficult ontology as a public argument about responsibility.
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