ABSTRACT
“Metaphysics is to ontology as history is to sociology”. Sartre initially considered the project of Being and Nothingness “metaphysics,” but he ends up qualifying it as an “ontology.” This chapter presents in playing phenomenology against metaphysics in favor of ontology, and aims to make phenomenology pass through ontology in favor of metaphysics. If, by taking his first steps as a writer, Sartre quickly embraced metaphysics, which did not have great a weight under his pen, but supplied his first philosophical weapons, Sartre’s writing shuns metaphysics at one fell swoop. Sartre’s growing interest in ontology at the end of the 1930s seems to be accompanied by a growing disdain for metaphysics. Ontology would never be able to detach itself as a serious element from the rigorous science that philosophy is without keeping, in the background, metaphysics and its scurrilous investigations.
