Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
Being and Nothingness
For-itself and in-itself; the look of the Other; bad faith.
Introduction
Sartre began the book after his release from a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941, drawing on his reading of Husserl and of Heidegger, whom he had studied in captivity; it appeared in Paris in June 1943 with the subtitle “An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology”. Its more than 700 pages are known for concrete scenes: a café waiter who plays at being a waiter as an example of bad faith, the absent friend Pierre whom one seeks in a café, and the person caught looking through a keyhole, who feels shame under the gaze of another. It ends with an “existential psychoanalysis” and a promised ethics that Sartre never published in his lifetime.
Connections
Builds on
- Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology1913 · Edmund Husserl
- Being and Time1927 · Martin Heidegger
Taken up in
- Existentialism Is a Humanism1946 · Jean-Paul Sartre
- The Ethics of Ambiguity1947 · Simone de Beauvoir
- The Second Sex1949 · Simone de Beauvoir
- Black Skin, White Masks1952 · Frantz Fanon
- Critique of Dialectical Reason1960 · Jean-Paul Sartre
- Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism1995 · Lewis R. Gordon
Criticized in
- Phenomenology of Perception1945 · Maurice Merleau-Ponty
More works by Jean-Paul Sartre
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made