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Being And Nothingness

Being And Nothingness

List Price: $17.00
Your Price: $11.56
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I'm being generous
Review: This is, for most people, an unwieldy, incomprehensible, impenetrable, and virtually unreadable book. That said, it also contains one of the most revolutionary and incontestable phenomenolgical theories ever devised, and it can be yours in exchange for a "mere" two months of your life. Sound like a good deal? Well, it's not. Unfortunately there was nobody around to tell me "don't jump!" as I was about to plunge headlong into this book, with obsessive-compulsive and monomaniacal desire to get through it. Apparently, I wanted to prove something to myself and others, by putting a tattered and heavily underlined copy of _Being and Nothingness_ back on my bookshelf, and being able to say "I read that". These types of motivations may be the only force in the known universe powerful enough to propel a man through a book such as this. And it's a good thing I read it when I was still young enough, stubborn enough, and crazy enough to do so.
.........This brings me back to my praise of this book, and its lofty, creative theories. Yes, it has its problems in the area of readability, and this is particularly inexcusable because it was written in the second half of the twentieth century. However, we must not forget that it was Sartre who first coined the theory "being unto other" as an explanation for the phenomenon of human temporal experience. This, as it turned out, was an enhancement and fortification of Heidegger's phenomenological theory of "being-unto-death", and was able to incorporate this older and influential theory into a new and more comprehensive theory of the self. Keep in mind that Sartre does not necessarily contradict Heidegger's theories, but instead corrects their narrow, one-dimensional nature by adding to and expanding upon them. The end result is a comprehensive and all-encompassing theory of being, which is a sort of fusion between the theory of being-unto-death and being-unto-other. The last 200-300 pages of this book are particularly brilliant in explaining this flexible, agile theory, accounting for every possible type of interaction between human feelings of isolation/self-conscious otherness and history/death. Sartre realizes that it is futile to try to narrow down an all-encompassing theory of existence into a few powerful determining concepts. Instead, Sartre presents us with a system that is able to account for many more secondary, but important, factors in the formulation of existential being.

Strange as it may sound, I would recommend that a reader who is pressed for time, but still curious about this philosophy, to start reading this book about 500 pages in. Many will vehemently disagree, but a skilled veteran of reading philosophy should be able to start this book about 2/3 of the way in and still pick up the vast majority of important concepts. You may ask, how can I justify buying a book when only 1/3 of it is worth reading? Well you'll just have to trust me on this one. Start reading about 500 pages in, save yourself about 6 weeks worth of aggravation, get all of the important concepts on the relationship between death and the self, and thank me later. Overbloated as it may be, the last 1/3 of this book alone is easily worth the price of admission. So go ahead and try it, if you dare!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: The 20th Century's greatest Philistine...
Review: Why would anyone bother with a 'thinker' who attacked Flaubert and Proust for not putting trite social, socialistic commentary into their masterpieces (see that massive chunk of tragically stupid, anphetamine-powered Marxo-Freudian rigmarole 'The Family Idiot'), a fool who wrote that Nabokov should have stayed in Russia to help Lenin build 'the workers paradise' (the same Eden that welcomed Gumilyov and Mandelshtam, you'll remember)? Sartre was a blind, vulgar dunce...a man who endorsed terrorist violence (Fanon; the fashionable murderer Che G.)and pulled a treadbare, shoddily second-rate 'philosophy' over the eyes of intelligent people who should really have known better. A falsely profound, bourgeois Philistine--that's Sartre in a nutshell.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Sartre's intersubjective transcendental relationship
Review: With Being and Nothingness, Sartre attempted to explain the relationships between beings and world (transcendent). Has he succeeded? In some areas yes, and in some no.

Where this book is helpful is in the explanation of the origin of consciousness, how we derive to a proper foundation of knowledge with the transcendences accurately understood.

Where this book flaws is in its explanation of his "bad faith", which you eventually find out that even "good faith", is bad faith. His reasonings remain sketchy even with his attempt to explain this which is to have absolute knowledge as this would no longer be a "faith" but unrefutable knowledge. But then how are we to reach an absolute truth through perceptions which are not agreed upon with by everyone, and as Sartre explains in his book, others exist in the world because actions or questions of yourself prove the existence of others?

All these are left unresolved, however the book is overall a great insight into the mind of an influential philosopher.


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