ABSTRACT
In the nearly 75 years since its publication, interpretations of Being and Nothingness have widely proliferated, yet none have gone uncontested or emerged victorious. So much so, Sartre’s sympathizers may rightly suspect that Being and Nothingness remains poorly understood and detractors may feel vindicated in the claim that much of the text is incoherent. The central ideas that comprise Being and Nothingness gestated for approximately ten years; however, the bulk of the text (722 pages in the original French) was written in under two years (Contat and Rybalka 1974: 82), or possibly in under a single year (Gardner 2009: 4). The extent to which the published version refined the original manuscript may be forever unknown, as the original manuscript is widely considered to be lost. It is possible, albeit controversial, that some revisions were made by Simone de Beauvoir. What we do know is that Sartre generally did not spend much time rereading and revising philosophical texts (Sartre 1978: 7) and this leads to unnecessary repetition and lengthy sidebars that break from the main line of inquiry. Consequently, one can easily lose the main thread of analysis or fail to notice how a series of examples, separated by many pages, systematically relate to one another, e.g., the crag (BN: 482/629) and skiing (BN: 513/667) examples. 1 Once more, in a few crucial instances, Sartre seems to temporarily forget or ignore having said things earlier in the text, only to remember or reintroduce them later. This adds to the repetitive feeling and can make the text appear more inconsistent than it really is.
