synopsis:

The central idea of this philosophical book, which is strongly influenced by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger is the opposition between objective things and human consciousness, the latter being a non-thing insofar as its reality consists in standing back from things and taking a point of view on them. Because consciousness is a non-thing (which is a somewhat better translation of Sartre's "neant" than the literal translation, "nothingness"), it does not have any of the causal involvements that things have with other things. This means that consciousness and thus humans themselves are essentially free, and that any attempt by an individual person or a philosophical theory to believe otherwise is a form of self-deception, or "bad faith."Humans are born without essence and therefore ‘existence is prior to essence'. Humans have to create their own essence by making choices. Ironically, the freedom of human consciousness is experienced by humans as a burden ("Man is condemned to be free"). Human projects, therefore, consist in the impossible attempt to become a free consciousness, such as when a person tries to become an intellectual or a parent or to play any other determinate social role. Because the impossibility of this attempt to become a conscious thing - in Sartre's terminology, which was influenced by Heidegger's, a ‘en soi', (‘for-itself-in-itself')- does not prevent humans from being irresistibly drawn to undertake it, Sartre declares that "man is a useless passion." In this book he also states that ‘God necessarily does not exist', a conclusion which necessatly must be drawn from his philosophical system.

on this book:

This book was the first in which Sartre systematically put into words his philosophy and it became the bible of twentieth century atheistic humanist existentialist thinkers. Although some of his arguments are fallacious, this book strongly influenced western literature and thinking. Later Sartre tried to combine his philosophy with marxism, in which he never really succeeded.