A few notes on Being and Nothingness. In light of our discussions and study of Heidegger, it will be useful to draw attention to some of the places where Sartre's views differ significantly from Heidegger's own views.

• Sartre offers a variation of Heidegger's description of Dasein: "consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself" (24). [Notice that (1) Sartre defines Dasein as consciousness, and (2) the essential feature of this consciousness is that it is about something other than itself -- its directedness towards something transcendent.]
• Sartre later refines this: "Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being" (86).
• Death, however, for Sartre offers no guidance to his analog for Heidegger's authenticity, which Sartre calls good faith: "[W]e must conclude in opposition to Heidegger that death, far from being my peculiar possibility, is a contingent fact which as such on principle escapes me and originally belongs to my facticity. I can neither discover my death nor wait for it nor adopt an attitude towards it, for it is that which is revealed as undiscoverable, that which disarms all waiting, that which slips into all attitudes (and particularly into those which are assumed with respoect to death) so as to transform them into externalized and fixed conducts whose meaning is forever entrusted to others and not to ourselves. Death is a pure fact as is birth; it comes to us from outside and it transform us into the outside. At bottom it is in no way distinguished from birth, and it is the identity of birth and death that we call facticity" (697).
• Human beings long to be be something (which is in fact then to be an In-itself) and also to retain their freedom (which is to remain For-itself); this is an impossibility. "Each human reality is... a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself and a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by beings its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which the religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion" (784).

All quotes are from Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956.