Sartre’s Being and nothingness:

The genius of Misunderstanding

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness isn’t so much a book as it is a labyrinth—a sprawling mediation on existence, freedom, and the unsettling responsibility of being alive. It’s heavy, both in it’s intellectual ambition and its physical weight. Most who pick it yup don’t finish it; many who claimed to have finished it have skimmed through the middle; and the few who try to fully grasp it often find themselves in its philosophical fog. Yet, somehow, this dense, difficult turned Sartre into an intellectual superstar.
Why? Because most people didn’t understand it—and that was its secret weapon.
In Being and nothingness, Sartre attempts to answer one of philosophy’s thorniest questions: if there is no god, no fixed essence adn no cosmic blueprint, what does it mean to exist? His answre is both exhilarating and terrifying: existence precedes essence. In other words, we are born into freedom, condemned to create ourselves without instructions, and haunted by the nothingness that surrounds our choices.
But here’s the thing—Sartre’s prose is famously impenetrable. His sentences double back on themselves, filled with jargon like :facility,” bad faith,” and “ontological.” Reading Being and Nothingness is an enduring test, a gauntlet for the intellectually ambitious. And it was precisely this complexity, this inaccessibility, that made Sartre famous.
Inm mid-20th-century Paris, existentialism wasn’t just a philosophy—it was a lifestyle. The cafes were filled with artists, students, and intellectuals smoking cigarettes, debating freedom and authenticity, and quoting Sartre. Many of them probably hadn’t made it past the introduction of Being and nothingness, But they didn’t need to. The book’s sheer difficulty gave it an aura of profundity*. To say you were reading Sartre—or even thing about reading Sartre—was enough to signal your intellectual credentials.
Sartre himself leaned into this mystique. He didn’t simplify his ideas for the masses or water down his language. He was unapologetically complex, knowing full well that the allure of his philosophy lay in its challenge. The less people understood, the more they admired him.
And yet, this isn’t top say Sartre was a fraud. His ideas, while intimidating are powerful. The notion of radical freedom—of being wholly responsible for defining your life in a meaningless universe —remains one of philosophy’s most provocative concepts.but what made Sartre famous wasn’t just his ideas; it was the difficult of accessing them. His fame was, in part, a product of the very misunderstandings and mystifications his philosophy sought to dismantle.
In a way, Sartre’s rise to fame mirrors the human condition he describes in Being and Nothingess. We project meaning into the meaningless, create myths to fill the void and find beauty oil complexity—even when we don’t fully grasp it. Sartre didn’t just write about existential absurdity; he lived it, thrived in int, and ultimately became s product of it.
So maybe we should thank being and Nothingness for being so famously opaque. Sartre’s fame reminds us that sometimes, not understanding something isn’t a failure. It’s an invitation to wrestle with ideas bigger than ourselves—or, at the very least, to look impressive doing it.

Yes, I understand the irony; Fuck off!