Jean-Paul Satre

Early Sartrean philosophy is one of a pursuit of being. It is an attempt to grasp being through an investigation of the way being presents to consciousness - phenomenological ontology. Phenomenological ontology refers to the study of being through its appearances. This simplistic definition needs further clarification. First, by phenomenon Sartre refers to the totality of appearances of a thing and not simply a particular appearance. As Wilfrid Desan writes, phenomenology is "a method which …

…establishment of an authentic community is explicated at the end of his play, No Exit, when Garcin said that hell is other people. Hakim writes: Being-for-another belongs to the very being of man. Yet the moment this relationship is analyzed, it is seen that the Other pushes against my freedom and circumscribes it. At one and the same time, the Other, who helps establish my freedom, also destroys it; being-for-itself and being-for-another shatter each other.