Published in 1943, Sartre’s opus magnum, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, had a significant influence on philosophical thought and intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. His principal goal in this book is to “repudiate the spirit of seriousness” of traditional philosophy as well as of bourgeois culture (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 796). The spirit of seriousness assumes (1) that there are transcendent values that exist antecedently to humans, and (2) that the value of a thing is part of the actual being of the valued thing. Sartre’s view, in contrast, is that all values are generated by human interactions in situations, so that value is a human construct with no extra-human existence in things.