Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (), sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author asserts the individual's existence as prior to the individual's essence ("existence precedes essence") and seeks to demonstrate that free will exists. While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927). Heidegger's work, an ontological investigation through the lens and method of Husserlian phenomenology (Edmund Husserl was Heidegger's teacher), initiated Sartre's own philosophical enquiry. Though influenced by Heidegger,
Being in itself 'Being in itself' to be at the same time the most vague and general concept possible to contemplate, but also the topic of greatest interest to him as a philosopher. In Sartrean existentialism, being-in-itself ("être-en-soi") is also contrasted with the being of persons, which he describes as a combination of, or vacillation or tension between, being-for-itself ("être-pour-soi") and being-for-others ("I'être-pour-autrui"). Being-in-itself refers to objects in the external world — a mode of existence that simply is. It is not conscious so it is neither active nor passive and harbors no potentiality for transcendence. This mode of being is relevant to