2. • Sartre is a phenomenologist who represents existentialism in the strict sense
• Novelist, dramatist, and social critic
3. Existential Phenomenology
To understand the world is not to understand it merely in
terms of material objects around us. Our “there” is more
than our physical there. It includes the constellation of
roles, expectations, hopes, desires, fears, emotions,
relations to others,etc. which shape the character of each
experience from moment to moment.A hammer is not just
an object in the world. What is important is how it fits into
Dasein’s world. It is a tool. It has a use.
4. Sartre’s Phenomenology
It is phenomenological because it holds to the subject
matter of experience and the first-person standpoint. He
follows the Cartesian distinction:
• Being-in-itself (être-en-soi) = the existence of things
• Being-for-itself (être-pour-soi) = the being of
consciousness (Being-for-others = one’s essential
relationships with other people).
5. Works:
Nausea (novel) – 1938
The Wall (stories) – 1939
The Flies (play) – 1943
Being and Nothingness – 1943
No Exit (play) – 1944
Roads to Liberty (novel trilogy) – 1945-49
Existentialism is a Humanism – 1946
What is Literature? (essay) – 1947
Notebooks for an Ethics (posthum.) – 1948
Search for a Method – 1957
The Condemned of Altona (play) – 1959
Critique of Dialectical Reason – 1960
6. Nausea
It is not an ordinary illness.
It is the recognition that things, phenomena, do not come
in ready-made categories, nor do they have, as a result, any
intrinsic meaning.
What is revealed is the bare existence of things, their
brute “facticity”
7. Existentialism: An Ontology
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on
Phenomenological Ontology
• It is an effort to describe the most
fundamental aspects of being:
•The being of consciousness
•The being of phenomena—or that
which appears to consciousness
8. Consciousness
“Consciousness is a being for which it is essentially a question
of its being in so far as this being implies a being other than
itself.”
“Consciousness is a being for which it is essentially a
consciousness of the nothingness of its own being.”
It is on this regard that Sartre is much closer to Husserl than to
Heidegger.
9. Husserl and Sartre: Differences
1. For Sartre, what is made manifest in consciousness is not
the essence or nature of the object but the fact of its
brute existence (facticity), not the nature of object but
the being of object.
2. Transcendental ego = for Sartre, the ego is transcendent.
But it is an object of consciousness, not a part of
consciousness.
10. “Being and Nothingness”
1. Being-in-itself = the brute existence of things. Being is
what it is.
2. Being-for-itself = consciousness
◦ Consciousness is the “for-itself”
◦ It introduces nothingness (which is something) into being
◦ Every consciousness is a ”consciousness-of”, every consciousness
is a consciousness of the “not-me”
11. Nothingness
1. Consciousness has a “nihilating” action
2. There is essentially a cleavage between between
consciousness and its object.
3. We do not discover, we decide (act of free choice)
12. Bad Faith
1. Mauvaise foi is an example of the “nihilating” activity of
consciousness
2. Also referred to as “self-deception” or being “in denial”
3. Bad faith arises in Sartre’s conception of the “for-itself”
as a being who is what it is not and is not what it is.
◦ Human existence is a mixture of facticity and transcendence. To confuse
these two is bad faith
◦ E.g. An alcoholic who thinks that we is really an alcoholic (facticity) or
who thinks that he can stop anytime he wants (transcendence)
13. Good Faith
“Good faith seeks to flee the inner disintegration of my
being in the direction of the in-itself which it should be and
is not. Bad faith seeks to flee the in-itself by means of the
inner disintegration of my being. But it denies the very
disintegration as it denies that is is itself bad faith.”
14. Freedom
1. One is only in so far as one chooses and acts.
2. We are “a choice in the making.”
3. I create my world.
4. Our freedom and responsibility is absolute, and because
of this, some people flee towards bad faith.
15. Existentialism: An Ethics of Freedom
Existence precedes essence
Man is what he makes of himself
Man is freedom and responsibility
Man must choose himself
(what he concretely does
in a situation)
abandonment, anguish
