DE Weekly: Sartre, Being and Nothingness, & Pas Encore Vu
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 9, 2024.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, & Pas Encore Vu
Besides being the preeminent existentialist philosopher, synonymous with the movement and at the forefront of its most emergent thinking, Jean-Paul Sartre also happens to be the author by whom I’ve read the most stuff (save maybe Camus).
I’ve reread some of Sartre’s classics in the past year–including No Exit and Nausea, but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read one of his most challenging works, Being and Nothingness.
Being and Nothingness is technically an essay–all 700+ pages of it. It’s also incredibly dense, but that’s what makes it one of Sartre’s most important works of nonfiction and, in my opinion, a contender for his magnum opus.
I’d also argue it’s one of the best treatises explaining the machinations behind existentialist thought available.
One of the concepts from it which I think about quite a bit comes from the chapters wherein Sartre discusses his theory behind “déjà vu”, something you’ve likely heard of.
It’s when, in the middle of something happening to you, you feel like “I’ve lived this very moment sometime before now.”
Sartre’s proposition was that déjà vu is a result of our consciousness having already played out each iteration of the past, present, and future before it actually happens to us.
What happens, happens, and what doesn’t happen, is archived somewhere deep in our subconscious.
So, in instances of déjà vu, we’re just recalling something from our subconscious that our consciousness already predicted as a possibility of happening.
Easy, right?
Well, Sartre never coined a moniker for this concept, but I thought one up when I read Being and Nothingness a couple of years ago: Pas encore vu.
For those of you who don’t know, déjà vu roughly translates to already seen in French, while pas encore vu roughly translates to not yet seen.
Besides the fact I stuck to Sartre’s native French, I think this is a fitting term for this concept.
It takes into consideration Sartre’s theory that your consciousness has already played out all possible futures available to you.
The feeling you get when one of them happens is simply because you haven’t seen it yourself yet. But you know it’s in there, somewhere. “Pas encore vu”.
If you haven’t read Being and Nothingness yet, I’d highly recommend it. I don’t think I truly understood Sartre until I did. If you feel like you don’t totally get his philosophy either, go ahead and give it a try.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
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