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Under the influence of Edmund Husserl and, more importantly, Martin Heidegger, Sartre developed his existentialism as an analysis of self-consciousness in relation to Being. In the 1930s he wrote several phenomenological analyses of the imagination and the emotions, which culminated in his most important philosophical work, Being And Nothingness (1943; Eng. trans., 1956). This book provided a brilliant philosophical structure for the inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction that swept postwar Europe. The book's central idea is the opposition between objective things and human consciousness, the latter being a non-thing insofar as its reality consists in standing back from things and taking a point of view on them. Because consciousness is a non-thing (which is a somewhat better translation of Sartre's "neant" than the literal translation, "nothingness"), it does not have any of the causal involvements that things have with other things. This means that consciousness and thus humans themselves are essentially free, and that any attempt by an individual person or a philosophical theory to believe otherwise is a form of self-deception, or "bad faith." |
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Burn That Butter!