Being and Time describes his project in the following way: "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of "being" and to do so concretely." Heidegger claims that traditional ontology has prejudicially overlooked this question, dismissing it on the basis that being is the most universal and emptiest concept, that is indefinable or obvious. Instead Heidegger proposes to understand being itself, as distinguished from any specific entities (beings). "'Being' is not something like a being." Being, Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." Heidegger is seeking
Being and Nothingness sexual act". The critic Camille Paglia, writing in "Sexual Personae" (1990), equated Sartre's term for slime, "le visqueux", with "Dionysus' swamp, the fleshy muck of the generative matrix." The philosopher Thomas Baldwin, writing in "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy" (1995), described "Being and Nothingness" as a work of pessimism. He wrote that Sartre's argument that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed is based on a misunderstanding of Freud, and that Sartre's attempts to adapt Freud's ideas are of greater interest. The director Richard Eyre recalled that "Being and Nothingness" was popular among British students in the 1960s, but suggests