Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre. Its main purpose was to define consciousness as an act of negation (a transcendence of the given world). Being and Nothingness is clearly influenced by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time,[citation needed] though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter with Being.

In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion", what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, and which religions identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being (with a lower case "b"). Consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body, but has no objective reality; it is nothing ("no thing").

Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to make them appear, or to annihilate them. When we go about the world, we have expectations which are often not fulfilled. For example, Pierre is not at the café where we thought we would meet him, so there is a negation, a void, a nothingness, in the place of Pierre.

When looking for Pierre his lack of being there becomes a negation; everything he sees as he searches the people and objects about him are "not Pierre." So Sartre claims "It is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation."

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