ABSTRACT
In Gabriel Marcel’s eyes, Jean-Paul Sartre’s was a philosophy wholly antithetical to his own. Sartre subtitled Being and Nothingness, ‘an essay on phenomenological ontology’, and it both begins and ends with a discussion of the character of Being in general. However, most of the book is an inquiry into the character of that region of Being which Sartre calls ‘being-for-itself’: the region of human consciousness. Like Marcel, Sartre begins his inquiry by discussing the problem of dualism in the Western philosophic tradition. Modern phenomenology, especially the work of Edmund Husserl, provides, Sartre thinks, the most fruitful approach to this problem. Since freedom involves a project which nihilates or transcends the in-itself, Sartre points out that, ‘choice being identical with acting, supposes a commencement of realization in order that the choice may be distinguished from the dream or the wish’.
