Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, published in occupied Paris in 1943, sets out the philosophical case for a claim he had already been dramatizing in fiction: that human beings have no fixed nature given to them in advance, by God or by biology, that would tell them what to become. Existence precedes essence, in his formula, meaning a person first simply exists, thrown into a particular situation with no script, and only afterward, through the choices they actually make, becomes whatever they turn out to be. That leaves human beings, on his account, radically free in a way most people find unbearable rather than liberating, since it means no excuse, no claimed nature, upbringing, or circumstance, can ever fully account for what a person does, a condition he called being condemned to be free precisely because the freedom is not chosen and cannot be escaped. He gave the failure to face this squarely a name, bad faith, the various strategies by which people pretend to themselves that they are simply what their role or their past makes them, a waiter playing at being nothing but a waiter, rather than admitting they are choosing that role moment to moment. His play No Exit dramatized the same argument from another angle in its closing line, hell is other people, meaning not that other people are inherently hateful but that being seen and judged by another consciousness is an inescapable constraint on the freedom Sartre took to be the basic fact of human existence.