Every human project aims to become God, a goal that proves impossible

Evidence

Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself and a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1415

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up Beauvoir’s reading of bad faith and ambiguity as the flip side of the for-itself’s impossible God-project — this is presumably the backdrop being built toward. — 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; All human projects aim at becoming God through self-causation — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1445; Human reality is the pure effort to become God, desire being its expression — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1348 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the ens causa sui and the In-itself-For-itself as the telos of human reality, and defines the human being as ‘useless passion.’
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘useless passion’ and inverted-Christ formulation is a dense crystallization of the whole project: the desire for God is self-defeating because the idea of God is contradictory.
• BMF: The drive to ‘lose oneself so as to found being’ — a being that escapes contingency by being its own foundation — resonates obliquely with the For-itself’s self-grounding desire over against the mere contingent being-in-itself of the world in which, say, Octavia Butler’s Parable characters must define their own god out of flux rather than find a ready one.

Broader Connections

• All human projects aim at becoming God through self-causation #corroborates (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1445
• Human reality is the pure effort to become God, desire being its expression #corroborates (0.93) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1348
• God is the hypostasized ideal of the impossible self-synthesis #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363
• The human ideal of God is a self-contradictory synthesis of the in-itself and for-itself #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 67
• The humanistic Us-object is an unattainable ideal demanding the correlative concept of God #responds-to (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1032
• All human activities are equivalent and equally doomed to failure in pursuit of being #expands (0.85)
• Narcissism attempts the impossible in-itself for-itself synthesis that defines divinity #exemplifies (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1793