ABSTRACT
M. Jean-Paul Sartre tries to tell readers what the world is like in general, without providing a system, but merely by extending his description of the particular vaguely and indefinitely outwards. Consciousness without some awareness of the body to which it is contingently attached, to which it belongs, would not be capable of being consciousness of the world. In the part of Being and Nothingness entitled ‘Quality as a revelation of Being’ Sartre devotes many pages to a description of the viscosity of things, and to an explanation of how it is that readers necessarily use the viscous as a symbol of the nature of the world in general. Sartre connects the realization of pointlessness or absurdity with the realization by each of them of his own ‘facticity’, that is to say of the particular contingent facts which are true of each one of them.
