The humanistic Us-object is an unattainable ideal demanding the correlative concept of God
Evidence
But if God is characterized as radical absence, the effort to realize humanity as ours is forever renewed and forever results in failure. Thus the humanistic “Us”—the Us-object—is proposed to each individual consciousness as an ideal impossible to attain although everyone keeps the illusion of being able to succeed in it by progressively enlarging the circle of communities to which he does belong. This humanistic “Us” remains an empty concept, a pure indication of a possible extension of the ordinary usage of the “Us.” Each time that we use the “Us” in this sense (to designate suffering humanity, sinful humanity, to determine an objective historical meaning by considering man as an object which is developing its potentialities) we limit ourselves to indicating a certain concrete experience to be undergone in the presence of the absolute Third; that is, of God. Thus the limiting-concept of humanity (as the totality of the Us-object) and the limiting-concept of God imply one another and are correlative. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1032
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘Us’ as a limiting concept: humanity-as-totality and God-as-radical-absence imply one another.
- XREF: Directly relevant to the stated goal of building the backdrop to Beauvoir — the unattainable ideal and the absent God are systematic commitments she inherits. — connects to: The idea of God derives from our need for an absolute unobserved observer; The human ideal of God is a self-contradictory synthesis of the in-itself and for-itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 67; God is the hypostasized ideal of the impossible self-synthesis — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 363 (+2 more)
- SEED: Could support an essay on how totalitarian or humanitarian appeals to ‘humanity’ secretly presuppose a divine standpoint — the theological residue in secular universalism.
Broader Connections
- The idea of extra-human objectivity is a leftover of the concept of God
#corroborates(0.90) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1582