To Be and Not to Be: An Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology

This book is a short, simplified explanation of Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Etre et Ie neant. (Being and Nothingness). The persistent curiosity of the reading public about a movement which became popular some twenty years ago and is now affecting psychoanalysis and theology, seems to indicate that our age is far from having exhausted the subject, or even assimilated its basic elements. Existentialism is at once the sternest and most hopeful of philosophies. "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himselfIn fashioning myself I fashion man When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind- in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility." The import of our acts, whether casually littering a national park with rubbish or actively defying a directive of the Supreme Court, measured by existentialist philosophy assumes personal as well as global significance. In an age which has not done with the throes of adjustment, whether labelled segregation or apartheid, some of the existentialist reverence for man as the measure ought to be examined by thoughtful people of good will everywhere.