Desire to be God

Desire to be God is Sartre’s name for the fundamental project of human reality: the for-itself seeks to become an in-itself-for-itself, combining conscious freedom with the completeness and self-grounding it lacks. This project is not a hidden desire that exists separately from ordinary life. It appears through a person’s particular choices and desires, while remaining an unattainable ideal that gives those choices their existential direction.

The fundamental project

Sartre treats the desire to be as an irreducible feature of the for-itself, not as a conclusion drawn from physiology, temperament, or empirical observation. The for-itself is defined by a lack of being: its possibilities and values express what it is not yet, and freedom is the concrete way this lack exists. To say that a person desires being is therefore to describe the structure of human existence, not to posit an additional drive behind it.

This fundamental project does not exist first as a separate, abstract wish and then produce particular feelings. It is manifest only through concrete desires and tendencies. Jealousy, greed, love of art, cowardice, and courage are among the contingent forms in which the project becomes legible. The project is not detached from the particular person who lives it: it appears through specific empirical expressions, each of which gives human reality a particular shape.

The ideal of in-itself-for-itself

The being the for-itself lacks is the in-itself, the dense, self-identical mode of being that consciousness does not possess. The for-itself arises by nihilation of the in-itself, yet it cannot simply return to that condition. It seeks instead a totality that would preserve consciousness while giving it the in-itself’s solidity: a being that would be its own foundation rather than remain contingent and unable to ground itself.

Sartre calls this projected ideal the in-itself-for-itself and identifies it with God. The aspiration is not merely to acquire permanence or to become an inert object. The for-itself would be conscious and free, yet also possess the complete, self-grounding being of the in-itself. Sartre’s stark formulation, “man is the being whose project is to be God,” names the structure of this impossible synthesis. The ideal serves as a limit by which people make known to themselves what they are, rather than as an attainable destination.

Freedom and concrete choices

The desire’s fundamental meaning does not prescribe the ends a person must pursue. It is never encountered as a fully formed universal intention that predetermines conduct. Each person discovers ends through a particular empirical situation, and pursuing those ends helps constitute that situation as meaningful. The desire to be is always realized as a desire for a particular mode of being.

Sartre describes the person’s desires as a layered symbolic structure. Particular empirical desires express a fundamental, concrete desire that is the person’s own way of making being a question in their existence. That personal project, in turn, expresses the more abstract desire for being in general. The general structure makes it possible to speak of a truth about human reality shared with others, but it does not replace the unique, freely realized desire of an individual. The abstract desire is encountered through concrete desires, as space is encountered through the bodies that shape it; no single empirical desire, taken in isolation, captures the whole project.

Every act, from the least significant to the most consequential, expresses a free choice of being. That choice may seek being directly or through appropriation of the world, and in practice it involves both. Sartre therefore presents freedom not as an escape from the desire to be, but as the way each person gives that fundamental project a particular form among innumerable ways of being and having. Existential psychoanalysis aims to retrace that individual choice through the person’s concrete projects.

Having, the world, and value

The desire to have is not an independent, irreducible alternative to the desire to be. It pursues the same value by a different route: instead of seeking to confer being on the for-itself without mediation, it seeks to do so through appropriation of the world. The two orientations can be distinguished in analysis, but Sartre says they are inseparable in lived desire. Seeking being directly and seeking it through the world are two ways of facing one fundamental situation, the lack of being that the for-itself is and makes itself be.

Objects matter in this pursuit not simply as isolated things, but through their mode of being and the qualities by which being is revealed. Sartre names the fluidity of water, the density of stone, the colors yellow and red, the taste of a tomato, and the wrinkled softness of split peas as qualities that can acquire symbolic significance. A person’s attraction or disgust toward such qualities can disclose a way of encountering being; existential psychoanalysis accordingly seeks their ontological meaning rather than explaining them only by sexuality. The project of being God thus reaches into the person’s tastes and perceptions, not as a code with one universal answer, but as a concrete choice of how being appears and may be appropriated.

Value belongs to this same structure. In the glossary, Sartre defines value generally as arising when the for-itself constitutes objects as desirable, and more specifically as what the for-itself lacks in order to be itself. Value is neither an independent object waiting outside human projects nor a guarantee that the desired ideal can be achieved. It marks the beyond toward which the for-itself surpasses its present condition. The desire to be God is therefore both an organizing ideal for human projects and a measure of their constitutive incompletion.

Absurdity and significance

The project cannot succeed. Sartre’s glossary defines human existence as absurd because its contingency has no external justification, and human projects as absurd because they aim at an unattainable end: the desire to become God, or to be at once a free for-itself and an absolute in-itself. The failure is not a temporary obstacle that a sufficiently determined person might overcome. It follows from the conflict between the freedom of consciousness and the self-contained completeness it seeks.

That impossibility does not make concrete desires meaningless or erase their differences. It means that no particular achievement can deliver the absolute self-foundation projected by the fundamental ideal. Each person’s projects remain distinct, situated expressions of a universal ontological structure, and each act continues to disclose a free choice of being. Desire to be God thus joins freedom to lack: it explains why human beings project values and organize a world around them, while also clarifying why the completion those projects seek remains unrealizable.