All human projects aim at becoming God through self-causation

Evidence

Thus existential psychoanalysis is moral description, for it releases to us the ethical meaning of various human projects. It indicates to us the necessity of abandoning the psychology of interest along with any utilitarian interpretation of human conduct—by revealing to us the ideal meaning of all human attitudes. These meanings are beyond egoism and altruism, beyond also any behavior which is called disinteiested. Man makes himself man in order to be God, and selfness considered from this point of view can appear to be an egoism; but precisely because there is no common measure between human reality and the self-cause which it wants to be, one could just as well say that man loses himself in order that the self-cause may exist. We will consider then that all human existence is a passion, the famous self-interest being only one way freely chosen among others to realize this passion. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1445

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines existential psychoanalysis as moral description and ‘man makes himself man in order to be God’ as the master drive.
• XREF: This ‘useless passion’ thesis directly frames what Beauvoir’s ethics must respond to — the desire to be God that freedom must learn to renounce. — connects to: Every human being fundamentally desires to be God, a desire that is inherently self-contradictory. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 57; Every human project is grasped by referencing other possibles back to an ultimate possibility. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1112; Human desire fundamentally aims at being one’s own foundation, a state called God. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1330 (+13 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The compression here — desire as passion to become the self-cause, self-interest demoted to one freely chosen style of that passion — is a paradigm-rearranger for how one reads human motives.
• SEED: The reframe of self-interest as one style among many within a deeper passion is a striking angle for an essay on what motivates ‘rational’ economic actors.

Broader Connections

• Human reality is an abortive project toward being its own self-cause #corroborates (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1440
• God is the hypostasized ideal of the impossible self-synthesis #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363
• The human ideal of God is a self-contradictory synthesis of the in-itself and for-itself #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 67
• Humanity’s defining project is self-surpassing, not mere survival #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 153
• Building the panopticon produces God as an emergent architectural byproduct #exemplifies (0.75) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 65
• The panopticon produces God the way an assembly line produces a body #exemplifies (0.75) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 63
• Creation is God’s self-dislocation into alterity and rupture #contradicts (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 667
• Science was framed as replacing religion by giving humanity its definitive self-explanation #exemplifies (0.72)
• Human beings create their own essence through action rather than inheriting a fixed nature #expands (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 27