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Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic.

The basis of Sartre's existentialism is found in The Transcendence of the Ego. To begin with, the thing-in-itself is infinite and overflowing. Any direct consciousness of the thing-in-itself, Sartre refers to as a "pre-reflective consciousness". Any attempt to describe, understand, historicize etc. the thing-in-itself, Sartre calls "reflective consciousness". There is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-reflective, and so reflection is fated to a form of anxiety, i.e. the human condition. The reflective consciousness in all its forms, (scientific, artistic or otherwise) can only limit the thing-in-itself by virtue of its attempt to understand or describe it.