Man is a useless passion

“Man is a useless passion” is the concluding formula for a fundamental contradiction in human existence: people seek to make themselves the self-grounding fullness of God, but the ideal they pursue cannot be realized. The phrase gathers together the attempt to become complete and foundational with the inevitable failure of that attempt, leaving human striving both passionate and futile.

The Project of Becoming

Every human reality, the passage argues, projects transforming its for-itself into an in-itself-for-itself. This is not an isolated ambition added to existence from outside; it is bound up with the project of appropriating the world as a totality of being-in-itself, taking that world up under a fundamental quality. Human reality thus seeks not merely to act in the world but to found being itself.

The passage describes this movement as a passion: humanity projects losing itself so that being may be founded. In the same movement, it imagines constituting an in-itself that escapes contingency by serving as its own foundation, the Ens causa sui that religions call God. The goal is absolute self-sufficiency, but it requires the for-itself to surrender the very mode of being that makes it a project.

The Reversal and Its Failure

The phrase turns on an inversion of Christ’s passion. In the religious pattern invoked by the text, God becomes human; in the human project described here, humanity loses itself as human so that God may be born. The reversal exposes the stakes of the aspiration: the for-itself would give up its own unsettled existence in exchange for the completed, self-grounding being it lacks.

But this completion cannot be achieved. The idea of God is contradictory, and the effort to lose oneself in order to found being therefore ends in vain. “Useless” does not mean that human beings lack projects or intensity: the passage calls humanity a passion precisely because it is driven toward this absolute end. The futility lies in the impossibility of realizing the ideal that organizes the striving.

Scope and Significance

The conclusion follows a discussion of tastes and inclinations as appropriative choices of being. Foods, the preceding passage suggests, can embody a way of taking in the world, and existential psychoanalysis is charged with comparing and classifying such choices. Yet the analysis reaches a limit: ontology can identify human reality’s ultimate ends, fundamental possibilities, and the value that haunts it, but it does not by itself complete the interpretation of particular inclinations.

“Man is a useless passion” supplies the broad existential frame for those particular choices. Beneath varied ways of appropriating the world lies a recurrent project: to escape contingency by becoming the foundation of being. Its final formulation is at once sweeping and tragic. Human striving reaches toward divine self-grounding, but the contradiction in that ideal prevents the desired reconciliation of existence and foundation.