ABSTRACT
Jean Paul Sartre is one with Parmenides and Plato in his contention that the chief problem of philosophy is the problem of ‘Being’. It is mainly due to his plays, stories and novels that existentialism becomes a popular literary movement after the Second World War. Sartre considers Man as a person in the world. He wants to understand Man in his total situation, though he does not think that Man could be interpreted completely in terms of material relations. Sartre characterises man as a being constituted by nonbeing. The action of questioning , absence and destruction, as elements of the being of man, show that man’s being is fundamentally the origin of nothingness. According to Sartre Nothingness, freedom and anxiety provide the conditions, which make possible the movement of bad-faith. The distinction between man and world though mutually exclusive, is not collectively exhaustive. Sartre says that his descriptions of human relations have to be understood within the perspective of conflict.
