Sartre, Jean-Paul

(1905-1980) French existentialist; atheist. Wrote 1. The Transcendence of the Ego, 2. Nausea, 3. Theory of the Emotions, 4. Being and Nothingness, 5. Critique of Dialectical Reason, 6. No Exit, and 7. Existentialism Is Humanism . Develops a "phenomenological ontology " centring on a reflexive analysis of consciousness, wherein "consciousness of something" is distinguished from the self-consciousness that is reflexively implicit or "mirrored" in "consciousness of something." As being-in-itself, the world is everything that is given meaning or structured by being-for-itself in the act of consciousness. As free and transcending self-consciousness, being-for-itself is nothingness. When one becomes self-conscious, one reflects on the pre-reflective consciousness of something else. The self of which I become conscious is not the subject performing the reflection, but its intentional object which has emerged in retrospect. In-itself it is nothingness. Though the world is objective, what it is in-itself (its structure) must be conferred by the knower as the creator of all meaning in the act of knowing. There is no antecedent human nature as a substantial self, as in Descartes , or transcendental self, as in Kant or Husserl . Also there is no God, whose essence is existence. There is only man, whose consciousness is existence without essence (i.e., nothingness). Existence is not the fact of existing in the usual sense. Existence is consciousness, and consciousness is nothingness. "Existence precedes essence." Essence (i.e., meaning, or what something is, etc.) must be chosen. Consciousness for-itself must choose itself by its acts or choices; this implies freedom. But freedom exists only as consciousness acts in relation to the world. Man is only as he "defines himself by his goals," i.e., only as he chooses his future.