Being and Nothingness

What does it mean to exist when there is no fixed human essence or divine anchor? Jean‑Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, argues that consciousness is not a thing but a nothingness that opens onto the world. You are not a solid self like a stone or a chair; you are the gap between what is and what could be. This gap—what Sartre calls the for‑itself—is what makes imagination, freedom, and despair possible.

Consciousness as Nothingness

Hazel E. Barnes, in her lucid commentary, reveals how Sartre replaces Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” with the pre‑reflective cogito—the direct, non‑positional awareness that accompanies every act of consciousness. Before you ever say “I,” you are already conscious. This pre‑reflective awareness shows that consciousness has no substance: it exists only as consciousness of something. It is pure translucence—open, outward, and self‑revealing without being an object to itself.

Being‑in‑Itself and Being‑for‑Itself

From this, Sartre distinguishes two fundamental modes of being. Being‑in‑itself (the mode of things) is solid, opaque, and complete—it simply is what it is. Being‑for‑itself (the mode of consciousness) is the perpetual movement of nothingness that allows self‑awareness and freedom. You exist as a lack, thrown into a world of plenitude. This separation, this asymmetry, explains why things are contingent and why human consciousness alone can imagine what is not, question, and choose.

The Origin of Negation

Negation, for Sartre, is not a logical function but an existential act. When you enter a café expecting Pierre and fail to find him, you experience his absence as real. That nothingness does not arise in logic or language—it is a lived nihilation performed by you. The world is organized by what you seek and fail to find; questions and possibilities are forms of negation. Nothingness comes into being through consciousness itself.

Freedom, Anguish, and Responsibility

Because consciousness is a lack, it is free. You are condemned to freedom: there is no pre‑given essence to dictate your choices. But this freedom terrifies you. Anguish arises not from external danger but from the realization that you can at any moment choose otherwise—and thereby define the meaning of your past and the shape of your future. Responsibility for all you are rests entirely on your choices.

The Structure of Time

Sartre transforms time from a background container into an existential structure. The present is not an instant but the for‑itself’s presence to being—a flight away from the inert in‑itself. The past (facticity) is what you have been and cannot deny; the future is the horizon of possibilities that give your present meaning. These three dimensions form what Sartre calls the “circuit of selfness.” You live them together: your future projects reinterpret your past and organize your present action. Time flows because consciousness perpetually transcends itself.

In Sartre’s ontology, you are not a given self moving through a predetermined world. You are the power to nothing‑ize, to invent, to refuse what is. That power—terrifying, magnificent, and impossible to escape—defines what it means to be human: to be both nothing and the creator of meaning.

Once you recognize that consciousness has no essence and that you are condemned to freedom, the next temptation is to flee from that fact. Sartre calls this flight bad faith. It is not merely lying to yourself; it is a fundamental distortion of how you live your own being.

How you lie to yourself

In ordinary lying, one person deceives another. In bad faith, the deceiver and deceived are the same person. You simultaneously know and do not know what you are doing. Sartre’s examples make this vivid: the waiter who performs “being a waiter” so perfectly that he treats himself as an object; the coquettish woman who allows a man’s hand to rest on hers but suspends recognition of its sexual meaning. Each avoids confronting freedom by freezing part of themselves into thing‑ness and denying responsibility for the rest.

Bad faith vs the unconscious

Freudian psychoanalysis would explain these contradictions by invoking an unconscious. Sartre rejects this. To posit a censor that hides truths from consciousness just displaces the problem. For him, bad faith is a choice—a lived posture of self‑deception that exploits the dual structure of your being: your facticity (what you are) and your transcendence (what you can be). You use one to evade the other.

Patterns of evasion

Two main strategies govern bad faith. First, objectifying yourself: you reduce yourself to a fixed essence (“I am a coward,” “I am a mother”) and deny future freedom. Second, excusing yourself: you explain actions through causes (“my upbringing,” “society”) to escape responsibility. But consciousness is transparent; it cannot totally hide from itself. Bad faith is unstable—it must constantly oscillate between pretending to be thing and pretending to be pure freedom.

Authenticity: accepting the risk of being

Authenticity means refusing this oscillation. It requires acknowledging that your being is both facticity and transcendence, and that your projects create meaning within the constraints you inherit. Sartre’s existential heroes—Orestes in The Flies or Garcin in No Exit—achieve authenticity not through enlightenment but through brutal confrontation with their own freedom. To live authentically is to act without appealing to excuses or immutable natures: to recognize yourself as the author of your life.

Bad faith is humanity’s most common refuge. Every routine, title, or social role can become a mask that conceals freedom. But it is also unstable, because consciousness, by its nature, cannot stop knowing what it does. The possibility of authenticity will always haunt your self‑deceptions.

Sartre’s account of temporality explains how you exist as an unfolding rather than a substance. You are not a series of moments stitched together but a self that temporalizes itself. Time flows because consciousness projects itself beyond what is.

Past, present, future: the circuit of selfness

The past is your facticity: the sum of choices you have made and facts you cannot change. The future is the horizon of your possibilities: what you are not yet but strive toward. The present is your active relation to both—a presence to being that is also flight from being. These are not three containers of time but interrelated dimensions of a single circuit. You reinterpret your past through your projects, and your projects acquire meaning only against the backdrop of what you have been.

The future as project, not representation

You do not see the future the way you see an image. The future haunts your actions as the lack you are striving to fill. Standing on a tennis court, your posture already anticipates the future shot. Writing a sentence, your hand shapes itself around the next words. The future is a possibility that organizes your present; it is the meaning that pulls you forward, not a photographic preview of coming events.

Static and dynamic temporality

To grasp time, Sartre distinguishes static before/after order from dynamic becoming. The static structure gives logical sequence (“A before B”), but the dynamic flow—where a present becomes past and a future arrives—exists only through the for‑itself. Consciousness disperses itself across these dimensions, a “diasporatic” being whose unity comes from its self‑relation. Time is therefore the form of existence itself, not a neutral backdrop.

The instant and conversion

Sometimes, a single decision collapses one life‑project and inaugurates another: the instant of conversion. It is both an end and a beginning. You see this in Raskolnikov’s confession or in a sudden religious calling. Such instants reshape the past retroactively—they are not effects of prior causes but spontaneous re‑creations of meaning. Sartre calls this power “nihilation”: the act by which you introduce nothingness into reality and thereby bring time into being.

Your temporality is therefore freedom itself unfolding. Each choice “nihilates” the old self and establishes a new horizon. You cannot exist without time because you are the being that is its time—a movement toward possibilities that never arrives at completion.

Human existence is never solitary. Sartre’s analysis of the Look reveals that your sense of self depends on others even as it threatens to enslave you. The moment another person looks at you, your world changes: you become aware of yourself as an object in their field.

The shock of the Look

Sartre’s famous keyhole example captures this: you lean to spy through a door, absorbed in your project, when footsteps behind you freeze you in shame. You have become seen—an object of another’s consciousness. The shame does not depend on moral codes; it is the ontological experience of becoming for‑others. From this primitive scene, Sartre builds his social theory: consciousness is co‑constituted with others' freedom.

Shame, pride, and alienation

Shame reveals that the Other’s look defines you externally; pride appears when you try to reclaim that objectivity as your own. Yet both feelings presuppose the same structure: your being depends partly on another’s gaze. The world itself also shifts: objects that were organized around you now orient toward the Other’s point of view. The Look reorganizes reality.

Other as Object and Other as Subject

You perceive others in two incompatible ways: as objects (bodies, tools, gestures) and as subjects (freedoms). The craftsman’s hammer or a passerby’s ring reveals another life behind it. But when the other actually looks back, the poles reverse — his subjectivity annihilates your role as pure subject and makes you object. This oscillation is endless: you cannot dominate nor abolish it.

Love, desire, and conflict

Love tries to resolve this contradiction by desiring to become the freely chosen object of another’s love. You want the Other’s freedom to affirm you absolutely. But love fails because you can never own another’s freedom. Erotic desire dramatizes this: in the caress, each tries to incarnate the other’s subjectivity in flesh. When reciprocity collapses, the relation degenerates into sadism (forcing the other’s objectness) or masochism (pleading to be object). Both fail because they still presuppose freedom.

Being‑for‑others therefore defines the social condition: an oscillation between exposure and domination, vulnerability and objectification. Even solidarity or community (“the We”) arises only as fragile reconciliations within that primordial conflict. Every human bond plays out this ontological drama of freedom meeting freedom.

Freedom for Sartre is absolute, but it never floats in a void. You always exist in a situation—a web of physical bodies, social institutions, and other consciousnesses. The body, especially, mediates between your facticity and your transcendence.

The lived body

Your body is not an object you own but the very means by which you inhabit the world. As you reach for a glass or climb stairs, space aligns itself around your projects. Psychologist Kurt Lewin’s term “hodological space” captures this organized field of paths and obstacles. When you trip, your body’s contingency confronts you; when you act gracefully, the body disappears into motion. Thus your body is both your past (facticity) and your current possibility of acting.

The body for others and flesh

Others perceive your body as an instrument among instruments—as an object inserted into social and functional contexts. Yet in intimate contexts—pain, clumsiness, sexuality—the body manifests as flesh, the sheer contingency of being alive. Flesh appears when instrumentality collapses: in obesity, disgrace, or nakedness. It is the reminder that you are not pure project but also brute existence—a being‑in‑itself opened by consciousness.

Freedom within situation

Sartre insists that nothing limits freedom except the meanings you assign. Your birthplace, class, gender, even oppression are factual givens, but their significance arises from how your projects interpret them. The Jewish person defined by antisemitic society must still choose how to assume or resist that identity. You are neither pure victim nor omnipotent creator—you are the synthesis of freedom and situation. Contingency is the very material of choice.

Pain, illness, and psychic time

Pain reveals how bodily facticity reclaims consciousness. Lived pain is not a thing located somewhere; it saturates meaning itself. When you reflect on pain, you objectify it into “illness”—a psychic reality extended in time. Sartre calls this objectified structure the “psychic body.” It is how suffering gains rhythm, patterns, and social recognition, becoming part of who you are for yourself and others.

Freedom, then, is not unlimited power but perpetual interpretation. You are always rewriting the meanings of your body, place, and history. The question is never whether you are free, but how you use that freedom within the given world that also defines you.

For Sartre, to act is to give meaning to being. Each action announces a project—a way of overcoming lack by shaping the world. Action, value, and knowledge are different names for the same movement of transcendence.

Action as projection of non‑being

Every act presupposes what does not yet exist. Constantine founds Constantinople not because of deterministic causes but because he envisions an absent end—the imperial center—that organizes the materials around him. Causes and motives count only within this context of projected meaning. You act not because of what is, but because of what is missing. Freedom is this continual positing of non‑being.

Value and desire

Values do not exist prior to choice; they arise as horizons for projects. Desire is the form that value takes when it moves you. You long for the good, beauty, or love because you lack them—and by lacking, you create their significance. The artist’s work, the lover’s devotion, and the scientist’s discovery all express the same structure: the transformation of absence into purpose. Because consciousness is lack, it endlessly generates ideals.

Doing, having, and appropriation

Sartre extends this logic into everyday acts. To do is often to have. You make, buy, or destroy in order to possess being. Money, art, even destruction (like potlatch or burning possessions) become ways to assert mastery over the world. Possession aims to fuse the subjective and objective: to be an in‑itself‑for‑itself, a god‑like completeness that consciousness forever misses.

Knowledge and internal negation

Knowing, too, is an act of negation. To know an object is to realize it as “that which is not me.” This internal negation generates the world of qualities and tools. Matches become instruments for lighting because your future project invests them with potential. The world of meanings arises from this interplay between nothingness and being; consciousness realizes being by separating from it.

Thus, your life’s meaning is not discovered but created. Values, knowledge, and possessions are expressions of the same ontological process: making being through negation. Every choice you make affirms what matters, and in doing so, reveals who you are.

How can we understand a person if freedom has no deterministic causes? Sartre’s answer is existential psychoanalysis—a method to uncover the fundamental project that gives coherence to a person’s life. This project is not an unconscious drive but a free, organizing choice that manifests through actions, tastes, and values.

Beyond Freud and Adler

Freud revealed depths of motivation but reified them as inner things. Adler replaced instincts with a drive for power, yet both treated traits as permanent. Sartre reverses this: what psychology calls a drive or complex is an effect of how someone has chosen to exist. If a person lives through inferiority, it is because they have freely adopted that posture toward the world. The analyst must therefore interpret actions symbolically to find the original project beneath.

The task of analysis

Existential psychoanalysis reads life as a text. Every gesture, preference, or habit testifies to an underlying decision. Flaubert’s obsession with style, Dostoevsky’s oscillation between pride and abasement, a patient’s illness—all express a single structure of being. The goal is not to assign blame but to make explicit the coherence you already live implicitly. Consciousness always knows its project pre‑reflectively; analysis only translates that luminous knowing into conceptual form.

Conversion and change

You cannot cure bad faith or neurosis by mere willpower within the same project. Voluntary "cures" often fail because they reinforce the old pattern. Genuine transformation requires an existential instant—a new choice that nihilates the previous self and reconstitutes time anew. In life or therapy, all real change is creative self‑reconstitution, not mechanical adjustment.

Death, contingency, and meaning

Sartre rejects Heidegger’s claim that death gives life its authenticity. Death is not a project you can seize; it is pure facticity that belongs to others’ interpretations. Your meaning after death lies in their gaze, not your own. This final alienation underscores his central point: existence precedes essence, and essence ends when existence ceases. Freedom’s only limit is contingency—the brute fact of being at all.

Existential psychoanalysis thus crowns Sartre’s system by returning ontology to human life. It shows how every biography, every choice of style or love, is a creative articulation of freedom within situation. You are not deciphered by causes but by the story you write with your acts—and you can always rewrite it.