Even though Sartre repeatedly emphasized the divergences between Hegel and himself, this chapter discusses their convergences. It will be seen, moreover, that these often conflict with Sartre's own stress on the differences between them.

Sartre does not refer to Hegel in his early works; he seems to have become familiar with him only from Being and Nothingness onward, where Hegel, along with Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, is one of his chosen interlocutors and adversaries. This essay deals with certain specifically philosophical aspects of the debate: the conception of being-for-itself and being-for-others in Sartre and Hegel. Being and Nothingness also discusses the dialectical conception of nothingness. Juliette Simont has analyzed this question in an important footnote to her article "Sartre et Hegel: le probleme de la qualite et de la quantite." I shall not therefore return to it directly.

In Sartre's analysis of being-for-itself and for-others, the most significant references are to the two Logics (the Science of Logic and the first part of the Encyclopedia) and to the Propédeutique. Sartre's perceptiveness with respect to these dry texts leads one to conjecture that he had more than a merely academic knowledge of Hegel - did he perhaps discuss him with some of Kojève's pupils, with Jean Wahl, Lefèbre, and Hartmann, authors of a collection of selected texts from Hegel, Hyppolite, and Maurice de Gandillac? It is possible, but as yet unproven.