ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter, we examined Sartre’s phenomenology. Sartre’s views on consciousness allowed him to reject traditional rationalistic views, which he considered reductive of the human experience. Now that we understand the phenomenological positions related to consciousness, we can now turn our attention to Sartre’s ontology, i.e. his theory of being, as he exposes it in his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness. His aim is to provide the reader with as complete a description as possible of being, using the phenomenological views that he exposed earlier in The Transcendence of the Ego. Sartre claims-many times-that his project is not metaphysical in nature. By this, he means that he is not looking for a justification of existence or some sort of explanation as to why being is rather than not-an explanation that would lie beyond this world and this existence for metaphysics. Instead, he dismisses such questions by insisting on the fundamental contingency of everything that exists. Even his starting point, the human being, is purely contingent, gratuitous, de trop. In Nausea, Roquentin’s discovery of this state of affairs is partly responsible for his sickness. If an explanation of the existence of beings, and human beings in particular, is thus not Sartre’s concern-for there is no such explanation-it remains that a description of being and its different modes is both possible and necessary.
