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strategineer's review against another edition
1.0
Not my cup of tea. Philosophy should be understandable, this text is incomprehensible.
Maybe if was downing absinthe with Sartre and his crew back in the forties when this was written, I would "get" it. As-is though, this is pretty hard to get through.
Maybe if was downing absinthe with Sartre and his crew back in the forties when this was written, I would "get" it. As-is though, this is pretty hard to get through.
sofiraier's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Este también lo leí para el tp de la facu, y obviamente no lo leí todo, por eso no le doy calificación.
Che que pesado Sartre! es denso como él mismo, y encima pretencioso. Creo que no hay forma de leer este libro con placer, porque es realmente rebuscado y denso, lentísimo para leer. También es bastante repetitivo, lo cual lo vuelve más denso, pero a la vez te ayuda a aprehender bien la teoría o los conceptos. Lo que sí genera placer es haberlo entendido después de tanto esfuerzo, como que me siento más inteligente ahora y siento que puedo con todo.
Reconozco igual que Sartre era un crack y su teoría un gran trabajo filosófico, con la cual concuerdo y me hace sentido, pero esa necesidad de los filósofos y de ciertos autores de ser tan pretenciosos y complicar de más la escritura de su texto para que parezca más complejo me parece cualquiera.
Shout out to Derin McNabb, el pelado gringo de youtube que me ayudó a acompañar su lectura y entenderla mucho mejor. Recomiendo.
Che que pesado Sartre! es denso como él mismo, y encima pretencioso. Creo que no hay forma de leer este libro con placer, porque es realmente rebuscado y denso, lentísimo para leer. También es bastante repetitivo, lo cual lo vuelve más denso, pero a la vez te ayuda a aprehender bien la teoría o los conceptos. Lo que sí genera placer es haberlo entendido después de tanto esfuerzo, como que me siento más inteligente ahora y siento que puedo con todo.
Reconozco igual que Sartre era un crack y su teoría un gran trabajo filosófico, con la cual concuerdo y me hace sentido, pero esa necesidad de los filósofos y de ciertos autores de ser tan pretenciosos y complicar de más la escritura de su texto para que parezca más complejo me parece cualquiera.
Shout out to Derin McNabb, el pelado gringo de youtube que me ayudó a acompañar su lectura y entenderla mucho mejor. Recomiendo.
radbear76's review
2.0
I tried but at a quarter of the way in I gave up. Someone smarter than I may understand what he's talking about but to me it was blithering contradictory double talk.
generalheff's review against another edition
5.0
I love this book; though I have yet to read any more Sartre I have a feeling I will love this author too.
In short, I believe this book is an astonishingly honest description of (at least my version of) the human condition. Sartre’s descriptions of bad faith (how we ignore our inherent freedom to act differently in the majority of what we do) and his extraordinarily perspicacious examination of our being-for-others (particular in his description of ‘the look’ as that which renders us an alienated object-self in the mind of another person) changed how I think about myself. Acknowledging that there is no hidden ‘self’ to aim at but that I am merely creating my self by my actions is perhaps obvious but something which had never been placed in so sharp a relief for me. It is this in particular that has been very helpful in focusing my own thoughts on my life goals and made me face up to the fact that decisions can only be given to me by myself and worrying about “proving” to myself that what I’m doing is the right move is fruitless. Acknowledge your nothingness, as Sartre would say, and stop living in bad faith.
Of course, what I have discussed above is the concrete, applied side of Being and Nothingness, in other words what led to the establishment of existentialism as a doctrine with a following well beyond the small pool of people interested in the nitty-gritty of philosophy. However, all of this brilliant insight is couched in an extremely challenging, technical work of philosophy. I have read Hegel and Heidegger, who feature prominently in this work, and I struggled to keep up with this book. Without a solid grounding in continental philosophy I think reading much of this work would be not only difficult but down right pointless. The following Indiana University lectures helped deal with the aspects of Sartre related to Husserl (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/19119) but the later sections of the book were a slog to say the least at times, particularly as the aforementioned lecture notes have very little detail on the back half of the book.
In addition to its difficult-to-read nature, the technical philosophical sections are not entirely convincing. While I identified strongly with many of the results, I was hardly convinced that these aspects of ourselves stemmed from our inherent nothingness and the dualistic ontology Sartre builds up. I don’t see why conscious beings can’t arise from being-in-itself (matter to you and me) and the way Sartre describes being-for-itself arising as the “upsurge” of being-in-itself, and the teleological way in which he suggests that the in-itself attempts to realise being-its-own-foundation through this upsurge, left me thinking that maybe Sartre didn’t quite believe in his ontology by the end. Indeed he seems to have had in mind Darwinian evolution at times in these “upsurge descriptions” - and it’s a shame he didn’t run with this idea more as it would put the philosophical ideas here more in line with current thinking. Alas these hints only shone through at times while the book was dominated by dualism for the most part. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book is at the very end where he almost seems to throw away dualism in his statements about how metaphysics (not ontology) might reveal the best way to view the scission at the heart of being into being-in-itself and being-for-itself. It is interesting to me that, while I found Heidegger’s existentialism far less rich in terms of its psychological description of how we live our lives, I found it far more philosophically robust. The way in which he (Heidegger) starts from the pre-ontological attitude of Dasein and ends up exploring phenomena as he finds them is vastly more convincing than Sartre who erects this dualistic edifice on about page 10, while claiming to be doing phenomenological ontology but crowbarring in metaphysics at the same time. I am not a professional philosopher and I imagine this could be argued both ways (obviously!), but it just didn’t seem to stand up to serious scrutiny.
Yet despite my reservations about the analysis and the philosophical outcomes of the book, I came away from reading this work looking at life a bit differently. And in the end, that seems like a valid reason to recommend hammering through an often impenetrably difficult book! Or perhaps, better still, read Existentialism is a Humanism, which I’m told contains much of the existential insight but far less of the analysis as it is aimed at a lay audience.
In short, I believe this book is an astonishingly honest description of (at least my version of) the human condition. Sartre’s descriptions of bad faith (how we ignore our inherent freedom to act differently in the majority of what we do) and his extraordinarily perspicacious examination of our being-for-others (particular in his description of ‘the look’ as that which renders us an alienated object-self in the mind of another person) changed how I think about myself. Acknowledging that there is no hidden ‘self’ to aim at but that I am merely creating my self by my actions is perhaps obvious but something which had never been placed in so sharp a relief for me. It is this in particular that has been very helpful in focusing my own thoughts on my life goals and made me face up to the fact that decisions can only be given to me by myself and worrying about “proving” to myself that what I’m doing is the right move is fruitless. Acknowledge your nothingness, as Sartre would say, and stop living in bad faith.
Of course, what I have discussed above is the concrete, applied side of Being and Nothingness, in other words what led to the establishment of existentialism as a doctrine with a following well beyond the small pool of people interested in the nitty-gritty of philosophy. However, all of this brilliant insight is couched in an extremely challenging, technical work of philosophy. I have read Hegel and Heidegger, who feature prominently in this work, and I struggled to keep up with this book. Without a solid grounding in continental philosophy I think reading much of this work would be not only difficult but down right pointless. The following Indiana University lectures helped deal with the aspects of Sartre related to Husserl (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/19119) but the later sections of the book were a slog to say the least at times, particularly as the aforementioned lecture notes have very little detail on the back half of the book.
In addition to its difficult-to-read nature, the technical philosophical sections are not entirely convincing. While I identified strongly with many of the results, I was hardly convinced that these aspects of ourselves stemmed from our inherent nothingness and the dualistic ontology Sartre builds up. I don’t see why conscious beings can’t arise from being-in-itself (matter to you and me) and the way Sartre describes being-for-itself arising as the “upsurge” of being-in-itself, and the teleological way in which he suggests that the in-itself attempts to realise being-its-own-foundation through this upsurge, left me thinking that maybe Sartre didn’t quite believe in his ontology by the end. Indeed he seems to have had in mind Darwinian evolution at times in these “upsurge descriptions” - and it’s a shame he didn’t run with this idea more as it would put the philosophical ideas here more in line with current thinking. Alas these hints only shone through at times while the book was dominated by dualism for the most part. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book is at the very end where he almost seems to throw away dualism in his statements about how metaphysics (not ontology) might reveal the best way to view the scission at the heart of being into being-in-itself and being-for-itself. It is interesting to me that, while I found Heidegger’s existentialism far less rich in terms of its psychological description of how we live our lives, I found it far more philosophically robust. The way in which he (Heidegger) starts from the pre-ontological attitude of Dasein and ends up exploring phenomena as he finds them is vastly more convincing than Sartre who erects this dualistic edifice on about page 10, while claiming to be doing phenomenological ontology but crowbarring in metaphysics at the same time. I am not a professional philosopher and I imagine this could be argued both ways (obviously!), but it just didn’t seem to stand up to serious scrutiny.
Yet despite my reservations about the analysis and the philosophical outcomes of the book, I came away from reading this work looking at life a bit differently. And in the end, that seems like a valid reason to recommend hammering through an often impenetrably difficult book! Or perhaps, better still, read Existentialism is a Humanism, which I’m told contains much of the existential insight but far less of the analysis as it is aimed at a lay audience.
paladintodd's review against another edition
Made one chapter. No idea what he's talking about.
blackenedwhiplash's review against another edition
2.0
I could relate to some of the philosophical ideas in this book, but other ideas seemed way too either inaccurate or felt like something Sartre didn't actually believe but wrote down anyway. Also, I don't know if it's just the translator or if Sartre's original work had the same problem, but the writing is very bland and repetitive. Someone should send the translator a thesaurus. Certain words kept repeating and coming up so many times I found myself not even taking in the literature anymore and instead just counting how many of each word kept coming up. Sartre's ideas about negation are interesting, but I'm not really sure how it actually holds up in reality. I like to think of his philosophy about how humans are surrounded by nothingness and that is why humans can make their own meaning as just there being a void that humans feel need to be filled, and so it gives them the will to find or create a meaning. But that's my take on it, though Sartre relates it to the whole negation thing. I guess I would recommend this book to someone who wanted to know more about existentialism or at least be introduced to the real existentialist philosophy and not the oversimplified, entirely cynical stereotypes of existentialism found in web comics and other internet media. But for the most part, this book just couldn't sit well with me, I couldn't get past the writing.
magnetgrrl's review against another edition
I will be reading and rereading portions of this book for the rest of my life.
jwave08's review against another edition
2.0
Ok ok ok, this was difficult. This is at a considerably different level of writing than my mere mortal brain can handle. I spent time trying to understand, then I started just trying to finish it. In my attempts of #100YearsOfBooks, I wanted at least one **heavy** text - I should not have chosen this one.
With that, I enjoy exploring ones self and having deep philosophical conversations. So, the spark notes of this was very helpful. I would not recommend this to anyone - even if you are quarantined with just the book in the room, I no sooner light it on fire for the entertainment of that.
I did leave this "experience" with some new insight though; or maybe old insight with new purpose. Even a slightly better understanding of those around me, and for that is good, right? Being moral is unauthentic; try that out in your head for size.
Because being is something the non-being would be. And by being non-being, is my nothingness entering in?
You may be asking "what?", and you would be right.
With that, I enjoy exploring ones self and having deep philosophical conversations. So, the spark notes of this was very helpful. I would not recommend this to anyone - even if you are quarantined with just the book in the room, I no sooner light it on fire for the entertainment of that.
I did leave this "experience" with some new insight though; or maybe old insight with new purpose. Even a slightly better understanding of those around me, and for that is good, right? Being moral is unauthentic; try that out in your head for size.
Because being is something the non-being would be. And by being non-being, is my nothingness entering in?
You may be asking "what?", and you would be right.
julialandi13's review against another edition
5.0
A must read if you’re interested in existentialism. Dense and will probably take some time to get through but definitely worthwhile.