Being and Nothingness was "a pretentious metaphysical thesis" and "principally an exercise in misusing the verb 'to be'." The philosopher William Barrett, writing in "Irrational Man" (1958), described "Being and Nothingness" as "a great, uneven, brilliant and verbose tome". He noted Sartre's debts to Heidegger, but nevertheless credited him with originality. He criticized Sartre for neglecting Heidegger's "notion of the truth of Being", his understanding of what it means for a subject or object to be. In his view, Sartre failed to "deal with the problem of truth in a radical and existential way", instead viewing truth in "the ordinary intellectualistic sense that
German collective guilt German collective guilt German collective guilt refers to the notion of a collective guilt attributed to Germany and its people for perpetrating the Holocaust and starting World War II. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote an influential essay in 1945 about this concept as a psychological phenomenon, in which he asserted that the German people felt a collective guilt ("Kollektivschuld") for the atrocities committed by their fellow countrymen, and so introduced the term into German intellectual discourse. Jung said collective guilt was "for psychologists a fact, and it will be one of the most important tasks of therapy to bring the