The reluctant masterwork:Being and Nothingness( 1943 )
It is probably true that Sartre’s theater won him a wider international
audience than did his philosophical treatises. This may owe more to the
size and accessibility of their respective genres. But in terms of intellec-
tual renown, especially among the French intelligentsia, no single work
could surpassBeing and Nothingness, even if, like Darwin’sOrigin of
Species, it has been more cited than read. It is not an easy read, especially
its lengthy introduction and first chapter. Though we have remarked
on the gestation of its ideas for several years, the actual manuscript was
composed in a single year.^29 In spite of its obvious resemblance to
Heidegger’smagnum opus Being and Time, both in its title and in several
of its topics, it would be a mistake to dismissBNas little more than
BTtranslated into French. As Heidegger was quick to point out,BNis
more of an ethical work and an “ontic” undertaking than his own major
work, which claims to associate the ontic with the “average-everyday”
from which his ontological project begins but where it scarcely ends.
In Heidegger’s view, Sartre, notwithstanding his protests to the contrary,
never ventures beyond the ontic and thus offers his readers at most a
philosophical psychology and not the fundamental ontology that isBT.^30
It is the promise of Heidegger’s equally unfinished work to expand our
“pretheoretical understanding of being” to a fuller articulation that
will move us beyond the stultifying categories of traditional metaphysics
like “substance,” “cause” and “time” itself, toward the being that they
conceal even as they claim to render its access possible.
Sartre’s method inBNis phenomenological with a quasi-Kantian
twist. Descriptive and sustained by arresting examples, it is likewise
“analytic” in the sense that it often argues from the fact to the conditions
of its possibility. Sartre had already employed this method inThe
(^29) See Gardner,Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
(^30) In response to Jean Wahl’s invitation to attend a meeting of the French Philsophical Society
at which Wahl was to address the topic of “the philosophy of existence,” Heidegger sent a
brief reply explaining that he was occupied with academic obligations in the current
semester. He added: “I must repeat, however, that my philosophical tendencies, though
Being and Timedeals with “Existenz” and “Kierkegaard,” could not be classified as
“Philosophy of Existence” (Existenzphilosophie)...The question that concerns me is not
that of the existence of man but that of being as a whole and as such.”Bulletin de la Socie ́te ́
Franc ̧aise de Philosophie 37 ,no. 5 (Oct.–Dec. 1937 ): 193.
Being and Nothingness 175