Abstract

This is a reissue of Professor Natanson’s 1951 monograph, the first such study of Being and Nothingness to appear in English. After an introductory essay on the nature of existentialism, the author begins a brief but lucid exposition of the major issues of Sartre’s masterwork: the quest for a phenomenological ontology, temporality, nothingness, the problem of the Other, the Self, including the categories of freedom, situation, and death, and the nature of existential psychoanalysis. The remainder of the book is devoted to an evaluation of Sartre’s enterprise from the viewpoint of Husserl’s phenomenology. Natanson’s fundamental objection hits upon a point which clearly distinguishes Sartre from Husserl, viz., the former’s insistence that intentionality be understood as justifying a metaphysical realism through a kind of ontological argument whereby consciousness is consciousness of transphenomenal Being, the realm of the en-soi. According to Natanson, this crucial Sartrean move is not phenomenological except in a Hegelian sense. And if the influence of Heidegger’s concept of "revelation" is admitted, the author points out that this, too, is a distortion of Husserlian method. In fact, he finds Sartre’s book a methodological melange of quasi-phenomenology, "revealing intuitions" of Being, and outright psychologism.