Jean-Paul Sartre wrote *L'Être et le Néant* in occupied Paris and published it in the summer of 1943. Censorship kept the book from making openly political claims, but the publication of a 700-page book on 'freedom' and 'responsibility' under Nazi occupation was itself a statement.

The book draws directly on Heidegger's *Being and Time* but goes somewhere different. Sartre distinguishes two kinds of being: 'being-in-itself' (en-soi) — the inert existence in which objects, stones, and bodies simply are — and 'being-for-itself' (pour-soi), the existence of consciousness, which is constituted by not being one of those objects, full of an ongoing 'not'. Consciousness is always 'not what I now am'. This 'not' is not a lack but is freedom itself.

The human being chooses at every moment. To refuse a decision is itself a decision; even not deciding is a position taken. The way out of this radical responsibility is what Sartre calls 'bad faith' (mauvaise foi): 'my job requires it', 'that's my nature', 'circumstances don't allow it'. With these phrases the person tries to present themselves as if they were a thing (en-soi); but for Sartre this is the person's lie to themselves.

The book's most famous passages are pieces of everyday phenomenology: the waiter who 'plays at being a waiter', the gaze (regard) that turns the other into an object, the man caught looking through a keyhole, the constitution of shame under another's gaze. These analyses are still in use in literature and film.

After 1945, with the post-war turn, Sartre moved sharply to the radical left and tried to reconcile existentialism with collective history and Marxism (*Critique of Dialectical Reason*, 1960). He refused the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. *Being and Nothingness* is still read wherever personal responsibility is being thought about.