Outline for Reporting

1. Life
2. Works
3. Foundational Philosophy
a. Consciousness
i. Reflective
ii. Pre reflective
b. Being
i. for-itself (‘pour-soi’)
1. Sartre presents the in-itself as existing without justification
independently of the for-itself, and thus constituting an absolute
‘plenitude’. It exists in a fully determinate and non-relational way.
This fully characterizes its transcendence of the conscious
experience
ii.  in-itself (‘en-soi’)
1. the for-itself is mainly characterised by a lack of identity with
itself. This is a consequence of the following. Consciousness is
always ‘of something’, and therefore defined in relation to
something else. It has no nature beyond this and is thus
completely translucent. Insofar as the for-itself always transcends
the particular conscious experience (because of the spontaneity of
consciousness), any attempt to grasp it within a conscious
experience is doomed to failure.
c. Nothingness
i. Sartre (BN, 9-10) discusses the example of entering a café to meet Pierre
and discovering his absence from his usual place. Sartre talks of this
absence as ‘haunting’ the café. Importantly, this is not just a psychological
state, because a ‘nothingness’ is really experienced. The nothingness in
question is also not simply the result of applying a logical operator,
negation, to a proposition. For it is not the same to say that there is no
rhinoceros in the café, and to say that Pierre is not there. The first is a
purely logical construction that reveals nothing about the world, while the
second does. Sartre says it points to an objective fact. However, this
objective fact is not simply given independently of human beings. Rather,
it is produced by consciousness. Thus Sartre considers the phenomenon
of destruction. When an earthquake brings about a landslide, it modifies
the terrain. If, however, a town is thereby annihilated, the earthquake is
viewed as having destroyed it. For Sartre, there is only destruction insofar
as humans have identified the town as ‘fragile’. This means that it is the
very negation involved in characterizing something as destructible which
makes destruction possible. How is such a negation possible? The answer
lies in the claim that the power of negation is an intrinsic feature of the
intentionality of consciousness.
d. Bad Faith
i. Among the different types of project, that of bad faith is of generic
importance for an existential understanding of what it is to be human.
 This importance derives ultimately from its ethical relevance. Sartre’s
analysis of the project of bad faith is grounded in vivid examples. Thus
Sartre describes the precise and mannered movements of a café waiter
(BN, 59). In thus behaving, the waiter is identifying himself with his role
as waiter in the mode of being in-itself. In other words, the waiter is
discarding his real nature as for-itself, i.e. as free facticity, to adopt that of
the in-itself. He is thus denying his transcendence as for-itself in favour of
the kind of transcendence characterising the in-itself. In this way, the
burden of his freedom, i.e. the requirement to decide for himself what to
do, is lifted from his shoulders since his behaviour is as though set in
stone by the definition of the role he has adopted. The mechanism
involved in such a project involves an inherent contradiction. Indeed, the
very identification at the heart of bad faith is only possible because the
waiter is a for-itself, and can indeed choose to adopt such a project. So the
freedom of the for-itself is a pre-condition for the project of bad faith
which denies it
e. Fundamental Project of Man
4. Existential Phenomenology

a. Is there a common thread to these specific features of Sartre’s

phenomenological approach? Sartre’s choice of topics for
phenomenological analysis suggests an interest in the phenomenology of
what it is to be human, rather than in the world as such. This privileging of
the human dimension has parallels with Heidegger’s focus upon Dasein in
tackling the question of Being. This aspect of Heidegger’s work is that
which can properly be called existential insofar as Dasein’s way of being is
essentially distinct from that of any other being. This characterisation is
particularly apt for Sartre’s work, in that his phenomenological analyses
do not serve a deeper ontological purpose as they do for Heidegger who
distanced himself from any existential labelling. Thus, in his “Letter on
Humanism”, Heidegger reminds us that the analysis of Dasein is only one
chapter in the enquiry into the question of Being. For Heidegger, Sartre’s
humanism is one more metaphysical perspective which does not return to
the deeper issue of the meaning of Being.
b. Sartre sets up his own picture of the individual human being by first
getting rid of its grounding in a stable ego. As Sartre later puts it
in Existentialism is a Humanism, to be human is characterised by an
existence that precedes its essence. As such, existence is problematic, and
it is towards the development of a full existentialist theory of what it is to
be human that Sartre’s work logically evolves. In relation to what will
become Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s early works can be seen as
providing important preparatory material for an existential account of
being human. But the distinctiveness of Sartre’s approach to
understanding human existence is ultimately guided by his ethical
interest. In particular, this accounts for his privileging of a strong notion of
freedom which we shall see to be fundamentally at odds with Heidegger’s
analysis. Thus the nature of Sartre’s topics of analysis, his theory of the ego
 and his ethical aims all characterise the development of an existential
phenomenology. Let us now examine the central themes of this theory as
they are presented in Being and Nothingness

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 The philosophical career of Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) focuses, in its first phase, upon
the construction of a philosophy of existence known as existentialism. Sartre’s early
works are characterized by a development of classic phenomenology, but his reflection
diverges from Husserl’s on methodology, the conception of the self, and an interest in
ethics. These points of divergence are the cornerstones of Sartre’s existential
phenomenology, whose purpose is to understand human existence rather than the world
as such.