Meaning and Language in Being and nothingness

Abstract

Sartre’s philosophy of language barely occupies a few pages in Being and Nothingness. However, its interest is fundamental since it concentrates the problem of freedom in the phenomenological moment of Sartre’s philosophy. Indeed, the subject is not thrown into a world free of all significance, but always already inhabited by others who signify it through collective meanings, being-for-others and the phenomenon of otherness. In order to maintain the absolute freedom of the subject, Sartre, in dialogue with the thoughts of Brice Parain and Jean Paulhan, defends an original theory of language that does not subjugate the subject to the meaning of words, nor to the syntactic rules of their articulations. By speaking, the subject creates the grammar and re-signifies each of the words. Thus, Sartre’s philosophy of language reveals the phenomenological core of Sartre’s first philosophy, through the subject’s absolute freedom that lies in his position as creator of meaning.