Being and Nothingness

⚖The case for it

The waiter who performs being-a-waiter a little too precisely is the scene readers name first, and bad faith becomes a thing they catch themselves in afterward rather than a term they learned. The keyhole scene does the same work for the look of the Other, one reviewer calling it “understanding for the first time what’s going on, in life, in general.” Radical freedom reads as bracing rather than abstract once you attach it to the decision you are avoiding. The illustrative passages are genuinely novelistic, embedded in the argument like scenes.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Readers report rereading the same paragraph three or four times before it resolves, and call the hyphenated coinages “convoluted for the sake of being convoluted.” Nothingness as an ontological category strikes many as unearned. The freedom doctrine is attacked for ignoring the material and psychological constraints people actually live under. His pages on sexuality and the body read to some as personal revulsion rather than phenomenology. Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel are assumed. The Barnes translation, which most reviews were written against, is the one readers call dense past readability; Richmond’s is newer and longer.

— the honest librarian

19h

honest hours

27

sittings