JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

5 BeingThe question What is being? is not the question What exists? or What isthere?. It cannot be answered by producing a list of things that exist. Thequestion is: What exactly have we said about anything when we have saidthat it is rather than is not?.In Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) Heidegger calls What is being?‘the question of being’ (Seinsfrage) and the attempt to answer it ‘fundamentalontology’. Traditional ontology is the attempt to establish what exists andwhat does not exist. Fundamental ontology seeks to establish what it is forwhat is to be. Heidegger thinks that because Western philosophy, since atleast Plato and Aristotle, has forgotten and surpressed the question of beingin favour of epistemology and traditional ontology, What is it to be? hasslipped all too readily into What exists?. The meaning of the Seinsfrage hasto be recovered and rethought with pre-socratic purity because ourtechnocratic and means-to-end modes of thinking make us largely obliviousto the puzzlement of just being.We know that Sartre read and re-read Heidegger, partly in the originaland partly in the translation l’Etre et le Temps. In Being and NothingnessSartre does not answer the Seinsfrage but produces phenomenologicaldescriptions of being. The subtitle of Being and Nothingness is An Essay inPhenomenological Ontology, a concatenation of words which would havemade no sense to Husserl because he insists it is necessary to suspendor bracket ontology to engage in phenomenology. For Husserl it is necessaryto ignore what is in order to reveal what appears to be – the phenomenon.Sartre eschews Husserl’s methodological solipsism and uses Heidegger’sfundamental existential category being-in-the-world to characterise our