Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
Published 1943 · 928 pages · 315,396 words · about 22 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Essays & Criticism
How hard is Being and Nothingness to read?
Being and Nothingness scores 78 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
- Sartre employs phenomenological vocabulary (being-for-itself, being-in-itself, being-for-others, bad faith, nothingness) but defines terms more accessibly than Heidegger. French philosophical prose translates more transparently than German. The vocabulary is specialized but not as opaque as Heidegger or Lacan.
- Sentence structure: 78 out of 100
- Long, argumentatively dense sentences that build elaborate phenomenological descriptions. Sartre's prose is more conventional than Heidegger's but sustains extended analytical passages. The 800+ page length compounds the syntactic demands.
- Abstraction: 92 out of 100
- Pure philosophical investigation of consciousness, nothingness, and freedom. Even the concrete phenomenological examples (the waiter, the peeping tom, the gambler) serve entirely abstract arguments about the structure of consciousness. The ontological framework operates at the highest level of abstraction.
- Information density: 85 out of 100
- Sartre's arguments build systematically through hundreds of pages, each section extending the ontological framework. The density is somewhat relieved by extended phenomenological illustrations, but the philosophical argumentation remains tightly packed throughout.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Sartre argues directly.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- Philosophical rather than symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Sartre argues earnestly.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Philosophical conclusions but existential openness.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Systematic philosophical treatise.
How Being and Nothingness is regarded
Being and Nothingness holds a literary regard score of 92 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.