Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (L'Etre et le Neant, 1943) is Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical treatise, a phenomenological study of consciousness and freedom that gave French existentialism its systematic statement. It develops the distinction between being-in-itself, the fixed being of mere things, and being-for-itself, the being of a consciousness that is never simply what it is, and argues from that distinction to the claim that existence precedes essence: a human being has no essence given in advance, only the freedom to make one through choice. The book's long analysis of bad faith, the self-deception by which a person treats their own freedom as a fixed thing to escape responsibility, remains its most widely read section.