' Jean-Paul Sartre................ French philosopher and author

Sartre took over the phenomenological method, which proposes careful, unprejudiced description of the phenomena of conscious experience, from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and used it with great skill in three successive publications: L’Imagination (1936; Imagination: A Psychological Critique), Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (1939; Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions), and L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (1940; The Psychology of Imagination).................. But it was above all in L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness) that Sartre revealed himself as a philosopher of remarkable originality and depth............ Sartre places human consciousness, or no-thingness (néant), in opposition to being, or thingness (être)......... Consciousness is not-matter and by the same token escapes all determinism................... The message, with all the implications it contains, is a hopeful one; yet the incessant reminder that human endeavour is and remains useless makes the book tragic as well........................ from Britanica