Being and Nothingness

"This is a book that was published during the Second World War in occupied Paris by Sartre, who has since become known as a great existentialist thinker alongside his lifelong friend and lover Simone de Beauvoir. Being and Nothingness became the Bible of existentialism. It was last translated into English some 60 years ago, which is surprising. The first translation, by Hazel Barnes, is the one I owned as a student. As far as we knew, that was what Being and Nothingness was. But Sarah Richmond has taken on this phenomenal task of translation. It’s a huge book and very difficult, in parts. The latest translation is over 800 pages long. The way Sarah Richmond translated Being and Nothingness wasn’t by going to to the existing translation by Hazel Barnes and trying and improve it. Instead, she went to the French. When she had difficulties, she would then see how Hazel Barnes had dealt with it. The result is a much clearer version of a very difficult book than the one that existed before. She discusses one of the reasons for this difficulty in her translator’s introduction. Sartre wrote in very long sentences at times, a stylistic tic possibly more common in French than in English. For clarity, Richmond felt free to break those up into shorter sentences. When you read the book having read large parts of the of the previous translation, it feels like putting on a pair of new glasses. Suddenly things come into focus that were a bit fuzzy before. It’s not always clear exactly what’s going on, but I think a lot of the new-found clarity has to do with this way of breaking the sentences down. It makes it much, much easier to follow. The hardest bit of the book, probably, in any translation, is Sartre’s own introduction, which is just about impenetrable. It’s probably deliberately impenetrable. I don’t know that there’s any way of translating the introduction that would make it palatable to an ordinary reader. But Being and Nothingness has got these amazing novelistic passages. Most famously, there’s the example of the café waiter. Sartre is sitting in a café, watching a waiter who he thinks is in ‘bad faith.’ It’s a kind of self-deception, a denial of his own freedom to be other than he is in terms of his role and what other people expect him to be. A big theme for Sartre is that human beings are much freer than they realize. In fact, human beings don’t have any essence: we are an empty space that gets filled up by our choices, if you like. Most people act most of the time as if they aren’t free, in all kinds of respects. They’re determined by their history, by their location, by what other people think of them, by their social role, and so on. Sartre’s big argument is that human beings are fundamentally free to make of their lives what they want to make of them. It’s a particular variety of self-deception to play out a pre-given role rather than to make choices yourself. So Sartre’s sitting in the Deux Magots or Café de Flore or wherever it is in Paris, watching the waiter and imagining that this is what’s going on with him. It’s slightly patronising towards the waiter, of course, but it’s a very famous passage. Perhaps the waiter was thinking ‘Oh, there’s someone sitting there playing out the role of a philosopher writing in a café.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Sartre was a novelist as well as a philosopher, and there are long passages in this book which are accessible and feel very rich in detail. He’s using a scenario to make a philosophical point. There’s another famous example with a voyeur looking through a keyhole at what’s going on in the room beyond, his consciousness completely immersed in the events unfolding in the room. He hears footsteps behind him, and he’s suddenly acutely aware of the look of the other—the shame of a ‘looked at look,’ as Sartre puts it. This is all tied up with why we couldn’t possibly be solipsists, believing we’re the only people in existence in the world. There’s a psychological reality to our involvement with other people, how other people’s judgments of us make us partly what we are. We are fundamentally aware of being part of a group of people, with all the problems that entails. That’s another example of one of these passages which are more accessible to read and very memorable. There are these moments of clarity and drama in the book, as well as a jungle of very abstract Hegelian and Heideggerian prose, which is very difficult to find your way through. In another famous example, somebody goes into a cafe looking to meet Pierre. But he isn’t there, and the experience of the cafe is completely one of what’s not there rather than what is. We have this simple idea that when we perceive things, we perceive what’s in front of us. Sartre makes the point that there’s a more projective sense of our interaction with the world. Everywhere he looks, Pierre isn’t there. Pierre’s absence is almost physical: it’s a concrete nothingness that forms an important part of our conscious experience of the world, the absence as much as the presence. It’s a beautiful moment. These passages really come to life in this new translation because they’re so elegantly done. I suspect there are very few people who have read Being and Nothingness from cover to cover, and if they have, it’s probably because they have professionally committed to being commentators on Sartre. “For Sartre, our thinking is to some degree spread across the world. ” But this is a very important book historically, and it’s also inspiring and thought-provoking in many ways, not merely because of the existential themes about human choice. Many people think those claims have been exaggerated—the degree to which we are free to choose how we think of ourselves. The thoughts he has about the nature of the mind have present-day sympathizers. For Sartre, our thinking is to some degree spread across the world. It’s not as if our thoughts are exactly in our head. It’s not as if there is a reality that we then describe—that’s a Cartesian picture. Rather, we are in the world connected with reality, not picturing reality all the time. Elsewhere, he also wrote very interestingly about imagery and the mind. Sartre is writing about how we understand a human life. Although this book is threateningly abstract in places, it’s also fundamentally practical. It’s about the nature of what it is to be human. He may be wildly wrong, but he is definitely worth engaging. He’s a major thinker who throws out all kinds of highly original ideas, often mangling other thinkers when he talks about them in the process. It’s as if they are there simply as catalysts to his own thought. “Although this book is threateningly abstract in places, it’s also fundamentally practical. It’s about the nature of what it is to be human.” When it comes to Sartre’s thoughts on death and how we experience it, he has some memorable phrases. At death you become ‘prey to the other’. There’s a sense that you are only what you do and have done, not what you might have done. While you’re conscious and alive, you can always choose to subvert other people’s expectations. When you die, who (or what) you were falls completely out of your hands. Your entire identity becomes fixed by other people’s view of what it was. Up until the moment of death, you could always deny the way people thought about you, the categories and labels they projected onto you. Sartre was fundamentally opposed to categories, to labels, to people constraining how you think of yourself by their version of what you are. Even if you don’t believe he’s completely right about human life, elements of his philosophy can be liberating, for sure. And he’s the kind of philosopher, like Nietzsche, that inspires people. For me personally, I became interested in studying philosophy because I wanted to try and understand some of Being and Nothingness and Sartre’s ideas, which were difficult to understand without a formal philosophical education. I actually switched from a Psychology course to Philosophy at university partly to be able to attend lectures on existentialism. You’d be surprised how many philosophers have been inspired by Sartre, even though they’ve gone on to become very different sorts of philosophers from him. “Like Nietzsche, Sartre is the kind of philosopher who once you’ve studied his work, however much you like it or dislike it, you remember it” Like Nietzsche, Sartre is the kind of philosopher who once you’ve studied his work, however much you like it or dislike it, you remember it. You apply or refuse to apply his ideas to your life. There are many philosophers you can read and think, ‘Okay, that was really interesting’, but their work is unlikely to make you live differently. Personally, I don’t apply Kant’s moral thought to my life, for example. John Stuart Mill is closer to Sartre in that respect. His little book On Liberty does have quasi-existential themes about the importance of choosing for yourself rather than having other people choose your life for you. That’s a very attractive way of thinking about the value of choice. Once he’s said it, you go, ‘Oh, of course! An empty room is an empty room because someone is not there—it’s not just because it hasn’t got any furniture.’ It’s usually because you’re looking for something or someone and this colours your whole consciousness. It’s a different experience. Sartre was very much within the phenomenological tradition. This is something that Sarah Bakewell , another author that we’ve chosen as one of the top books in past years , talks about in her book At The Existentialist Café . For the phenomenologists, accurate description of how things seem to us was incredibly important. This is the reason why there are these highly-detailed descriptions of real life or real-life type scenarios in Sartre. He’s trying to capture what our consciousness is actually like, not what is it is theoretically, but what it feels like to be a human being experiencing the world. Yes, if you’re interested in reading Being and Nothingness , I strongly recommend that you read Sarah Bakewell’s excellent At the Existentialist Café first. That’ll give you a lot of the context and an overview of some of the key ideas within it as well. If you don’t want to read that, at least read her Five Books interview about existentialism because that, again, will give you a good overview of where Sartre sits in this tradition. Yes. The absolutely fascinating book I’m reading at the moment is Henry Hardy’s In Search of Isaiah Berlin . Henry Hardy had this incredible relationship with Isaiah Berlin. Most of Berlin’s ideas were made public in lectures, radio talks and essays that were published all over the place, not necessarily in philosophical journals. They appeared in magazines, often in several different versions. For over 25 years or more, Henry Hardy worked closely with Isaiah Berlin to bring these out in the form of edited books—to add appropriate footnotes giving sources, and so on. Berlin was a very brilliant, eclectic thinker who was constantly drawing on quotations and allusions to different thinkers. Sometimes he got them slightly wrong and Henry Hardy worked with him to make a more scholarly version of his work and allow it to be disseminated to a much wider readership. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He’s done an amazing service in that, and this book is his memoir, as it were, of that process. It’s really fascinating for anybody who’s interested in Isaiah Berlin’s writing. You see how much work Henry Hardy was doing and how much it was the result of a negotiation with Berlin who was an eccentric character in many ways. Hardy can be a quite self-deprecatory writer. He’s prepared to admit when he made mistakes and did things that annoyed Berlin. That’s all in the book as well in extracts from letters. This makes for an absolutely absorbing book, which does also discuss some of Isaiah Berlin’s fundamental ideas, in particular the notion of pluralism, which was very important to Berlin’s thinking. This is the idea that there is no one true ‘final solution’—an unfortunate, but deliberately chosen, phrase, that stressed the existence of many incommensurable ways of living. Liberalism is a philosophical stance that tolerates different views of the good life and Berlin was very much in the liberal tradition of thinking. Some people accused him of a kind of relativism where anything goes, but Berlin was keen not to become a complete relativist. What pluralism is in relation to relativism, that kind of delicate question, Hardy discusses from the most informed position possible because he worked very closely with Berlin and with his writings. And because Henry Hardy is a highly intelligent thinker in his own right, he engages critically with Berlin’s ideas, and points out when he’s being inconsistent. So this book is a delightful read. Even when it seems to be just discussing the copyright or of a particular essay or something very specific, it’s also about the way that these two people worked together. Though it may require a special taste, it’s a book I recommend. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Another book I enjoyed which was not conceived as a philosophy book but has philosophical implications and is, at times, quite philosophical is by Jaron Lanier. It has a ridiculous title, Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now , which is the (mildly irritating) refrain of the book. I suspect nobody’s going to do it. This is a book by a very brilliant insider in the world of Silicon Valley, who argues there are some kinds of social media (he singles out Facebook in particular) that are structurally pernicious. He believes there are no minor tweaks that will make these forms of social media morally acceptable. He shows how the way Facebook is dependent on a certain model of advertising—a certain model of data collection and of manipulation of the people using them—inadvertently produces terrible political and other consequences. Now, that’s not overtly philosophical, but in discussing the morality of these accidentally-pernicious systems, I think he’s very much entering the realm of moral philosophy. There are questions about truth and reality, and about what we believe in the age of fake news, and so on. “The way Facebook is dependent on a certain model of advertising—a certain model of data collection and of manipulation of the people using them—inadvertently produces terrible political and other consequences” Lanier’s angle on the mechanisms by which these things get promulgated is highly informed. He provokes real, interesting philosophical questions about how we experience truth and reality and how we interact with each other in the digital age. In spite of the ridiculous title, this is a philosophically very interesting book, and is very readable. Another book that was published this year that has received some attention is Julian Baggini’s How the World Thinks . This is an argument for global philosophy and how it can inform our thinking. Baggini has explored a range of ideas, some of which have traditionally been thought of more as religious ideas. This book advocates being broader and not so parochial about what counts as philosophy and how it impacts on our lives. “We would all benefit from greater awareness of not just how many different ways of doing philosophy there are in the world” This is very much in the tradition of books like one I recommended in a previous selection , Bryan van Norden ‘s Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto and, to some degree, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach us About the Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh. There seems to be an interesting phenomenon in popular writing about philosophy today. Peter Adamson’s ‘ History of Philosophy without any gaps ’ podcast is very much in the same mode. There’s a building awareness that what has passed for philosophy within academic circles is predominantly just a Western slice of philosophy. We would all benefit from greater awareness of not just how many different ways of doing philosophy there are in the world, but how many significant philosophers there have been who were not in that great Western tradition."