To understand Sartre you need to understand how it is he wrote that book. He has a way of constantly contradicting himself, then explaining the contradiction with another contradiction and that with another, essentially making a full circle and explaining one of the contradiction with the original contradiction. That explains itself why it is that I think I can explain Sartre in only a few pages, but always fail, because to explain even a small piece of his philosophy in a few pages is to appear as if I’m making a direct non-contradictory claim, which is self-defeating. That is why his book is so long while seemingly only containing a small amount of “philosophical material”. For every point he makes (whether it be about his specific use of the term ‘nothingness’, bad faith, authenticity, being-in-the-world, being-for-others and freedom itself) he has to use that style of contradiction.
It is necessary because his philosophy is about more than all those semi-concrete points is about, what I can for lack of better words, call a new perspective. My understanding of that perspective is always fleeting, because it isn’t what I’m used to. But, perhaps to give an insight into it let me give a response to the discussion going on in this thread about determinism. In the book itself (which is all that matters) Sartre never says what his view on determinism is, what he does do is show why it doesn’t matter. We are equally free whether or not determinism exists and we are equally free whether or not we believe determinism exists. To even discuss determinism one must use a perspective antithetical to the one I have so much difficulty explaining. The term ‘determinism’ is loaded with cultural ideas; such as the idea that there was a world with differentiated objects for billions of years before human life emerged and that all events including the emergence of human life are due to causal principals. Then from their one only needs to ask if those causal principals allow some randomness. The only reason he even needed to mention determinism is to make it clear that he wasn’t even speaking in that sphere of thought and for one other reason:
Some people confuse the idea that everything may be determined with the idea that certain determined things or events can always be known. If one believes that, then they are more susceptible to making choices in bad faith - based on the idea that what others are telling him to believe must be so, because they are already determined and known. But, everything one knows, one chooses to know - if one hears someone tell them something as if it were fact they can always choose to see it as fiction.
Think of it this way, if a powerful being knew the future of Earth for the next one hundred years and was outside of Earth and any influence on Earth then we would never know of him and it would be irrelevant if he wrote or let’s say “carved” a prediction of the next hundred years on a material for which the act of carving can be dated. Then one hundred years later he came to Earth and let scientists date his prediction and verify it. The knowledge of that would take nothing from our freedom. In fact if he had been exerting control in various ways without our knowledge that would have taken nothing away from our freedom, in fact isn’t that example the equivalent of saying that we are governed by forces we don’t understand?
Perhaps one may laugh at that idea today, because we understand the laws of physics, but before the laws of physics were formulated people were in fact governed by forces they didn’t understand. But, I’m speaking in a historical context; a modern person who simply is so under-educated to have never heard of the laws of physics is also governed by forces he doesn’t understand, but that only matters to him if he should do something stupid and later realize that it could have been avoided.
The issue that I still am unfamiliar with is how much this difficult to explain perspective that Sartre is using was influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger in general. I was reading out of order, I read Sartre without knowing the historical contexts he was speaking from - anything about his influences. So just like Gamer discovered he knew about existentialism before he knew that the term applied to his knowledge, I have to wonder how many concepts from Sartre that I attempt to explain using my terminology already have readymade terms. Perhaps this difficult to explain perspective that he speaks from is actually called the phenomenological approach. Which refers to what Moreno was saying: