Being and Nothingness

Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece!!!
Review: Sartre is one of the few great intellectuals of our time, a political thinker, novelist, playwright, and philosopher. This, Being and Nothingness is his Magnum Opus. Here he establishes that ultimately human beings are free, but that we evade our freedom by seeing ourselves as mere things or as purely transcendent subjects when in fact we are both and none simultaneously. For Sartre we are what we are not and we are not what we are. We tell ourselves that the person who did such and such a thing two years ago is not "us", that we are different. We tell ourselves that we are more than this physical thing that is our body. (Ex "yes he thought I was ugly, but I'm more than my body".) We think to ourselves I'm not what they think I am. But our freedom is encountered once we realise the totality of what we are. This is more than interesting philosophy; it is a landmark in Western Literature. Other works I like are Paul Omeziri's Descent into Illusions and Heiddeger's Being and Time.

Rating:
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!