Eight hundred pages, published in occupied Paris in 1943, in a technical vocabulary largely borrowed from Heidegger and Husserl and then bent. It is the most important book of the existentialist movement and one of the least read to the end.

What reading it is like

Hard in a specific way, and knowing which way helps.

The difficulty is not that the ideas are subtle — several are simple once stated. It is that Sartre writes in a phenomenological register that assumes you have read Being and Time, coins terms freely, and then keeps them running for hundreds of pages. The Introduction is the hardest part of the book and it comes first, which has stopped more readers than anything else in it.

Skip the Introduction on a first pass. Start with Part One, Chapter Two — the analysis of bad faith, with the waiter — which is self-contained, vivid, and the best writing Sartre ever did. Then Part Three, Chapter One, on the look. Those two chapters are why the book matters, they are about a hundred pages between them, and they can be read cold.

After that, if you want the system: Part Four on freedom and the situation, then the Introduction, which makes sense once you have seen the machinery being used.

The Hazel Barnes translation of 1956 is the one most people have; Sarah Richmond's 2018 translation is better on the technical terms and is worth the difference if you are working with them.

The machinery, briefly

Two kinds of being, and the whole book runs on the distinction.

Being-in-itself — en-soi — is what a thing is. Solid, complete, identical with itself, no gap in it. A stone.

Being-for-itself — pour-soi — is consciousness, and its defining feature is that it is not identical with itself. Consciousness is always consciousness of something and therefore always at a distance from itself. It is, in the formula, what it is not and is not what it is.

That sounds like wordplay and is doing real work: you are never simply your past, your role, or your properties, because being conscious of them puts distance between you and them. The gap is where freedom lives, and it is also what makes the flight from freedom possible.

Nothingness is that gap. Not a thing, and not a mystical entity — the non-coincidence of consciousness with itself, and the possibility of negation that follows from it. His example is looking for Pierre in the café and finding the whole room organized around his absence.

The two set-pieces

The waiter, Part One Chapter Two. A café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, too eager, too exactly the movements of a waiter. He is playing at being a waiter, and what he is fleeing is that he is not one — not in the way an inkwell is an inkwell. The analysis is the clearest statement anywhere of bad faith.

The look, Part Three Chapter One. You are peering through a keyhole, absorbed, not thinking about yourself at all. Then you hear footsteps. In that instant you become an object for another consciousness, and shame appears — not shame about anything, but the immediate recognition of having been seen. Sartre's claim is that this is how other minds are known: not inferred, but undergone.

The chapter that follows takes it somewhere bleak. If the Other's look makes me an object, then every relation with another person is an attempt to possess a freedom that cannot be possessed, and love, desire, sadism and masochism are all failing strategies in the same game. This is where "hell is other people" comes from — the line is from the play Huis clos, not from here, and it is a conclusion of this argument.

Key passages

Introduction, III–V — being-in-itself and being-for-itself.

Part One, Chapter One — the origin of negation; Pierre absent from the café.

Part One, Chapter Two — bad faith; the waiter; the woman on the date.

Part Two, Chapter One — the for-itself's relation to its own past.

Part Three, Chapter One — the look; shame as the mode of access to other minds.

Part Three, Chapter Three — concrete relations with others. The bleakest stretch.

Part Four, Chapter One — freedom and the situation; the coefficient of adversity.

Part Four, Chapter Two — existential psychoanalysis; the fundamental project.

Conclusion — man as a useless passion.

What is contested

Whether the account of freedom survives the situation. Sartre insists freedom is untouched by circumstance because circumstance only constrains outcomes. Critics from Merleau-Ponty onward argued that a self is formed by its situation before it chooses anything, so the freedom is more constrained than he admits. Beauvoir made this argument in 1947 and Sartre effectively conceded it in 1960.

Whether relations with others must fail. Part Three argues that every relation is an attempt at an impossible possession. It is a strong conclusion resting on the claim that the look objectifies necessarily, and the promised volume on ethics that might have softened it was never finished.

How much is Heidegger. Sartre takes Dasein, being-in-the-world, and the analysis of anxiety, and puts them to a use Heidegger rejected explicitly in the Letter on Humanism (1947). Whether that is development or misappropriation is still argued.

Whether the ontology is needed. The famous chapters work without the apparatus, which is why they are anthologized on their own. A reader can get everything useful from bad faith and the look and never form a view on the in-itself.