"Being and Nothingness:
An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology" by Jean-Paul Sartre, summary

This book is a fundamental philosophical treatise, proclaiming the unconditional primacy of human existence over essence. Humanity is primordially deprived of a predetermined nature. Alone with solid material objects like a table or a cobblestone, the individual discovers their own consciousness as a gaping crack in nothingness, which continually demands an agonizing choice of actions for the sake of personal self-definition. The philosopher conceived the initial concept for thirteen years, beginning in 1930, and published the completed work in occupied Paris in 1943.

The Search for Being and the Discovery of Emptiness

The world is exhausted by a series of manifestations. It is pointless to seek a hidden, unknowable essence of the Kantian type behind the visible surface of objects. The dense substance of objects simply rests in a profound immobility, eschewing any becoming, containing no internal fissures, remaining equal to itself, and requiring no external support for its massive presence. The subjectivity of a living individual is structured differently. It appears as pure activity, directed outward, toward a wooden desk standing by the window or a pack of twelve cigarettes. The pre-reflective act of counting excludes the contemplation of one’s own thought.

Any sincere question introduces into the fullness of the objective environment the possibility of a negative answer, revealing an invisible layer of pure non-existence around the thinking subject.

A regular at a café steps into the establishment for a business meeting with a friend at four o’clock. Inside, the friend is simply absent. Pierre’s familiar face doesn’t appear amid the clouds of tobacco smoke, causing the tables, mirrors, white plates, and faces of strangers to instantly fade into the indifferent background, yielding primacy to the fleeting figure of the absent individual’s nonexistence. The emptiness of a pocket containing thirteen hundred-franc notes instead of the expected fifteen hundred francs is revealed in a similar way. A purely human judgment begets destruction. A storm shifts masses of sand, an earthquake displaces layers of soil, shattering a Japanese porcelain vase on the floor only for a witness to treasure the fragile shard of clay.

Anxiety attacks and salvation in bad faith

Dizziness is fundamentally different from fear. On a mountain trail, a traveler is frightened by crumbling stones, the sudden slip of a heavy boot down a steep slope. A tormenting anxiety concerns only oneself. Walking along an abyss, a person trembles with the sudden discovery of his own freedom, aware of the complete absence of causal barriers capable of guaranteeing his salvation from a wild, momentary impulse to plunge downward toward his own destruction. At the gaming table, a past decision does not bind a casino patron at all. Yesterday’s vow to quit lies behind him like a ghost, demanding constant confirmation by the power of thought from absolute nothingness.

Escape breeds false faith. Overwhelmed by anxiety, the subject tries to hide their own uncertainty under the reassuring mask of an inanimate world of objects. A young woman on a date offers her hand to her suitor, discussing lofty spiritual impulses and transforming her own hand into an immobile piece of flesh. The fingers rest like a potsherd. Similarly, a nimble waiter in a white apron exaggerates the mechanical gait of an automaton, deftly balancing a tray to completely merge with the social role of a shop assistant, protecting himself from the abyss of momentary choice. Sincerity turns out to be nothing more than a cunning attempt to freeze in the solidity of an object, sacrificing living freedom for the sake of an immobile status.

Sometimes a frightened person willingly pretends to be an object to escape the burden of free choice. Deception destroys itself. Immersed in a shaky belief of its own making, consciousness is perfectly aware of the performance being played out, maintaining in a non-thetical transparency the fact of its constant elusion from the truthful recognition of its true spontaneity and incessant mutability. The fragile, saving veneer instantly crumbles like a house of cards. The psychological determinism invented by armchair scientists serves only as a convenient refuge from the excruciating existential loneliness in the face of the harsh reality of moment-by-moment free self-determination in the midst of unpredictable events.

Metamorphoses of Time and the Illusory Nature of the Self

Internally, consciousness lacks the density of a granite boulder and is defined through the constant unraveling of its own being. Identity excludes the inner presence of a witness. The emerging distance between reflection and reflector within a pre-reflective act proves to be the thinnest slit of pure nothingness, thanks to which a person always finds themselves at some elusive distance from any completed state of their own psyche. Factuality fetters this impulse. At birth, the subject did not choose the fact of their appearance, finding themselves thrown into a specific historical point amidst a causeless accumulation of alien things. The bitter taste of chance is constantly experienced as an involuntary attack of nausea.

Lack permeates human reality everywhere, giving rise to an insatiable thirst for the monolithic stability of a stone block. Desire demands that the void be filled. Secretly, the individual strives to become an indestructible synthesis of thing and thought, to transform into the absolute cause of itself — that is, to realize the contradictory design of the God-man, doomed to inevitable defeat due to the inner irreconcilability of two principles. The endless cycle of self-consciousness relentlessly hurls the wounded subject through a resistant external world toward the unattainable peace of complete possession. The ego remains a purely external phenomenon. With one’s gaze, the individual discovers traces of one’s own self among household objects, like an old, dented hat left on a round wooden table or someone else’s jacket.

Temporality initially unfolds in three inseparable ecstasies of a disintegrating, unified structure. The past has frozen into a monolithic substance behind. Yesterday’s oversight has become an immutable thing, devoid of the living possibilities of change, although it is precisely the current choice of goals that determines the nature of memory, imbuing past events with the meaning of a heroic prologue or a shameful mistake. The present appears as an eternal flight. The emptiness of the moment eludes capture, rushing toward future accomplishments, where the disparate objects of the study reveal themselves as useful aids or muffled obstacles. A glass on the table demands a quench of thirst.

Knowledge does not fully enrich existence, remaining an internal denial of the object contemplated before the researcher’s gaze. Man forces things to reveal themselves. Sliding on narrow wooden skis down a steep mountain slope, an athlete at breakneck speed connects disparate sections of a snowfield into a docile track, conquering the frigid elements through the fleeting instrumental appropriation of an unruly substance. The swift trail melts behind. Suddenly, the sticky substance beneath the fingers turns into a poisonous trap, threatening to suck free will into the viscous quagmire of a sugared, compromising objective existence. Pure reflection gives way to a complicit gaze, transforming mental pain into a physical affliction.

The invasion of the other and the duel of glances

A jealous man peers into the keyhole of a deserted hotel corridor. Inside, the action engulfs him. The keyhole, the lock plate, and the door serve as submissive instruments, revealing a hidden, alien spectacle, until a sudden rustle of footsteps behind him upends the situation, pinning the hunched figure to the floor with the shameful gaze of a witness. Suddenly, shame sears with a painful confession. Mastery over objects vanishes, space flows into someone else’s freedom, turning the peeping observer into a defenseless object.

Futile attempts to overcome the rift between consciousnesses trap human relationships in a vicious circle. Love dreams of captivating freedom. The lover strives to become the supreme meaning of another’s life, forcing the chosen one to voluntarily renounce their independence, until the appearance of any random passerby transforms this fragile idyll into an ordinary pair of mannequins on display. Masochism seeks salvation in enslavement. Cruel sadism vainly attempts to forcibly objectify another’s flesh through the infliction of physical pain, ultimately encountering the unbroken gaze of the victim dying under torture.

Man is forever condemned to absolute responsibility for his own choices in a world he did not create. Justifications are destroyed by the merciless evidence of his actions. A soldier mobilized to the front shares the blame for the declared war, since he always retained the option of desertion or voluntary suicide, transforming the historical disaster that befell him into a mirror image of his personal choice. There are no alibis.

Horizons of Action and the Decoding of Freedom

All human activity ultimately boils down to a profound desire to possess or be the things around us. In reality, doing turns out to be only an intermediate stage. Scientific research seizes truth like a hunter stripping naked prey caught unawares, while the consumption of a piece of bread aims to non-destructively assimilate dense external matter, transforming it into a pliable extension of the flesh. Smoking destroys dry leaves. The smoke rises as visible evidence of the gradual dissolution of the surrounding world within the person inhaling the smoke, reveling in the symbolic destruction of objects before the eyes of astonished onlookers. A generous gift turns into a sophisticated means of enslaving the gifted.

Existential psychoanalysis rejects the hypothesis of an unconscious libido, exploring the subject’s primordial choice of their own mode of presence in the world. Man is one in everything. The literary ambition of the young Flaubert cannot be explained by the random intersection of abstract temperamental traits, as the urge to write books outlines a fundamental project of escape from practical bourgeois reality into the realm of verbal imagination, where the creator exercises undivided control over the characters he creates. Every gesture expresses a holistic destiny. A passion for the pungent taste of garlic or a sudden revulsion at the viscous, cold flesh of raw oysters testify to an individual way of perceiving the dense, objective matter of the surrounding world. The individual spontaneously chooses the density of the substance he absorbs.

The individual strives to become the unshakable foundation of his own factuality, to unite conscious transparency with the immobility of stone, reproducing the contradictory concept of God as an unattainable standard for his activity. The intended undertaking ends in inevitable failure. Human reality remains a futile passion, forcing both the solitary drunkard in a tavern and the recognized leader of thousands of people to equally unsuccessfully expend energy in pursuit of the impossible synthesis of dense material peace with the free transparency of the spirit. Choice remains unjustified. Ultimately, the desire for freedom to choose itself collides with the enigma of an inevitable escape from frozen identity amid the ineradicable factual circumstances of a particular human situation. Reality confines choice within its defined framework.