Being and Nothingness

“Appearance doesn’t hide essence but reveals it: it is the essence. The essence of an existent is no longer a power embedded deep inside it; it is the manifest law governing the succession of its appearances, the principle of the series.”

Sartre uses the Husserlian technique of phenomenology to understand existence. This means that he bases his philosophy of consciousness on how it can be understood through experience. In this quotation, Sartre argues that essence—the thing that gives life purpose and direction—is derived from experience. The existent is the person who exists. They are not driven by a force that has been endowed since before birth, something that lives inside the soul. Instead, their essence is created as they interact with the world.

“We must not conceive of this determination of consciousness by itself as a genesis, or a becoming, because that would require us to suppose that consciousness is prior to its own existence.”

This passage provides the foundation for Sartre’s theories of being-in-itself versus being-for-itself. He argues that human consciousness is being-for-itself, meaning that because they exist, they have consciousness—the two emerge simultaneously. Sartre is speaking directly to the philosophy of Aristotle, which provided the basis for understanding consciousness up until this point. Consciousness was viewed as something that was endowed by God, and self-knowledge was refined by the position of the self in relation to all other things.

“Being is not one ‘structure among others,’ a moment of the object: it is the very condition of all structures and all moments; it is the foundation on which the characteristics of the phenomenon will be made manifest.”

In this quotation, Sartre is referencing Hegel’s theories on the relationship between the abstract and the concrete. He argues that all things contain both their being and their negation. Humans are, at once, both being and nothingness. Rather than reducing existence to an essence or set of