Written as his Doctorat d'état in the 1950s and first published in 1961, TI encompasses all the dimensions of human existence, at the level of individual experience and to some extent at that of social interaction. The work is a child of its time. It opens its inquiry into consciousness with a double phenomenology of desire, and desire itself unfolds in enjoyment and as transformative labor. TI's interpretation of labor critically engages the then contemporary Marxian discussions thereof. It addresses philosophies of existence and ascribes to the enjoyment we experience in our surroundings a priority over the instrumentalist descriptions of such relations in the First Section of Heidegger' s Being and Time. Above all, TI is a defense of ethics as first philosophy, understood as the relation between two human beings. It is underived and almost irreducible to a gnoseology.