Mandarins and Nothingness

If people surround Existentialism with so much curiosity, it is because they sense in it a philosophy of scandal—a secret encouragement to exist and not to worry about what is “behind it all.” There is no God. There is only nothing. Devil take the rest. But not even he exists.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Philosophical Library, $10.00) does not satisfy these various expectations. It is, of course, not a philosophical exposé in the traditional sense, although Father Bochenski calls it “one of the philosophical classics of our time, original and technically precise.” But Sartre’s magnum opus is also a theology (with the absence of God in its center) and a drama which marks man’s futile dialogue with an impossible Being.

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Thomas Molnar

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If people surround Existentialism with so much curiosity, it is because they sense in it a philosophy of scandal—a secret encouragement to exist and not to worry about what is “behind it all.” There is no God. There is only nothing. Devil take the rest. But not even he exists.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Philosophical Library, $10.00) does not satisfy these various expectations. It is, of course, not a philosophical exposé in the traditional sense, although Father Bochenski calls it “one of the philosophical classics of our time, original and technically precise.” But Sartre’s magnum opus is also a theology (with the absence of God in its center) and a drama which marks man’s futile dialogue with an impossible Being.