THE PROBLEM OF BEING AND NOTHINGNESS IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE'S EPISTEMOLOGY

Résumé

The paper is an epistemic examination of Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. The study selects some aspects of his epistemic arguments with the view of analysis. For instance, Sartre had in the preliminary pages contends that there is an element of despair in human existence which comes, from the realization that we are limited to what is within the scope of our knowledge. And that we cannot expect more from human existence than the finite probabilities it possesses. By this he rejects elements of a priori knowledge, claiming that it has no place in human nature. The study discovers that Sartre's conception of being appeals to certain kinds of experience such as nausea and joy, and not denote a realm behind the phenomena that the descriptive method, neither is it the object of an “eidetic” reduction of Husserl. Rather, being accompanies all phenomena as their existential dimension. And that this dimension is revealed by certain experiences such as that of utter contingency. Which for him is not rationalistic in nature but possesses element of experience or empiricism. The paper concludes that Jean-Paul Sartre's epistemology is heavily steeped in empiricism, although necessary for all our actual knowledge, yet it is not sufficient to give us the whole knowledge about being and nothingness, since the senses never give anything but instances, that is to say particular or individual truths.