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Human reality is the pure effort to become God, desire being its expression

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tagsja-picks, define, xref, deepthinking, definitional_content, trade, singleton, category/definitional-content
aliases@sartre_being_1943, loc. 1348

3 min read

Human reality is the pure effort to become God, desire being its expression

Evidence

Desire is a lack of being. As such it is directly supported by the being of which it is a lack. This being, as we have said, is the in-itself-for-itself, consciousness become substance, substance become the cause of itself, the Man-God. Thus the being of human reality is originally not a substance but a lived relation. The limiting terms of this relation are first the original In-itself, fixed in its contingency and its facticity, its essential characteristic being that it is, that it exists; and second the In-itself-for-itself or value, which exists as the Ideal of the contingent In-itself and which is characterized as beyond all contingency and all existence. Man is neither the one nor the other of these beings, for strictly speaking, we should never say of him that he is at all. He is what he is not and he is not what he is; he is the nihilation of the contingent In-itself in so far as the self of this nihilation is its flight ahead toward the In-itself as selfcause. Human reality is the pure effort to become God without there being any given substratum for that effort, without there being anything which so endeavours. Desire expresses this endeavour. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1348

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Crisply defines the ontological triad In-itself, For-itself, and the impossible ideal In-itself-for-itself that human reality perpetually pursues.
  • XREF: This is the systematic backdrop Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity builds on; also echoes the ‘Man-God’ aspiration later critiqued in her work. — 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; The totality toward which human reality strives is itself, not a transcendent God.; God is the hypostasized ideal of the impossible self-synthesis — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 363 (+9 more)
  • DEEPTHINKING: The claim that human reality is ‘the pure effort to become God without any given substratum’ — desire with nothing that desires — is the dense core of Sartre’s ontology of lack. It resists summary and rewards returning to.

Broader Connections

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