ough commentaries on the nature of perception run throughout his entire oeuvre. The nature of perception was something with which Sartre was necessarily very much concerned, for the idea of perception is in significant ways (if not always readily apparent ones) very much at the core of many of his arguments about the nature and desired state of human cognition.
Any philosophy that takes as its central tenet the requirement that people take responsibility for their own actions and own thoughts must be founded upon the idea that people can accurately perceive the world, for if they cannot do so, their ability to act in appropriately responsible ways is limited by the ways in which they are deceived by the nature of the world around them. And upon the heels of such accurate perception must come the ability to divorce perception from reality.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre is very concerned that people pay proper attention to one particular aspect of the act of perception, which is to distinguish between an object that we are thinking about and the object it
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