Indeed, Sartre shows that if there are species of nothingness in the world at all - from absences to obstacles, failures to flaws - then it is because we, as consciousnesses qua ‘nothing’, effectively bring them in to the world. In this first ‘episode’, we will introduce this existential encounter with being-in-itself through the story of Sartre’s most famous protagonist: Roquentin, the anti-hero of his first novel Nausea, whose meeting with a tree root in a public park marks the start of a unique philosophical adventure…Įpisode 1, Part 2: A Broken-Down Car, A Café, Euclidean Geometry: Being-For-Itselfįor Sartre, if consciousness is consciousness of something, then considered all on its own consciousness is strictly speaking nothing. This ‘something’ is what Sartre calls being-in-itself, and it constitutes one the two most fundamental categories of his ontology in Being and Nothingness. Yet originally this ‘something’ is not a thing that we know anything about it is not an object we can domesticate both intellectually and practically. Over the course of the five days, students will also progressively become acquainted with Sartre’s most cherished theme - freedom - and will ideally leave the course with a sense of what Sartre means when he says, infamously, that each of us is ‘condemned to be free’.Įach lecture or ‘episode’ is divided into two halves, with Robert taking the first and Steven the second, including dialogue between them but also discussion with the audience.Įpisode 1, Part 1: Nausea, Roquentin and the Tree Root: Being-in-Itselfīeing and Nothingness begins with the following insight: if anything at all exists, then it is because we, as conscious subjects, are conscious of something existing.

Each ‘episode’ will present a key philosophical theme - from negation to temporality, bad faith to existential psychoanalysis - and will interweave Sartre’s phenomenological descriptions of everyday scenarios with an account of the conceptual architecture that gives them meaning. In this course, students will be introduced to Being and Nothingness as a series of ‘episodes’ at once disturbing and hilarious, tragic and heartening. But a closer look at this ostensibly dense philosophical masterpiece reveals a cast of weird and wonderful characters caught up in vividly filmic situations that could have come straight from the script of a sit-com or a soap-opera. Later, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing would praise the book for its uncanny ability to send him straight to sleep at night.

When Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was first published in 1943, some Parisian shopkeepers took to using the hefty tome as a means of weighting their fruit scales.

Being and nothingness 1943