Useless passion

Useless passion is the name for the human project of escaping contingency by becoming self-grounding: people seek a fusion of consciousness and being, an In-itself-For-itself, that would be its own foundation. The project gives human existence its deepest direction, but its goal is contradictory and unattainable. People lose themselves in the attempt to found being, and lose themselves in vain; hence the stark conclusion that man is a useless passion.

The Project of Self-Grounding

Each human reality, the account argues, projects two aims that are aspects of one fundamental project. It seeks to transform its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself, and to appropriate the world as a totality of being-in-itself under the form of a fundamental quality. These aims are not merely practical interests or isolated desires: they express a drive to overcome the lack that marks human existence by becoming a being that is its own foundation.

The imagined endpoint is the Ens causa sui, the self-caused being that religions call God. Human passion thus takes the form of a projected loss of self: the person would cease to be merely human so that God might be born. The formulation turns ordinary striving into a metaphysical project, while making its failure inseparable from its ambition.

Why the Passion Fails

The desired synthesis cannot be realized. The idea of God is contradictory, so the attempt to escape contingency by becoming its own foundation cannot succeed. Uselessness does not mean that human beings have no projects or that their actions lack direction; it marks the impossibility of achieving the ultimate being toward which those projects are directed. The aspiration supplies a horizon, but no human action can complete it.

This failure also unsettles simple moral descriptions of conduct. Existential psychoanalysis treats human projects as oriented toward the missing synthesis of consciousness and being, rather than explaining them solely through self-interest, utility, altruism, or disinterestedness. What looks like egoism can be described just as readily as a person losing himself so that self-cause may exist. Self-interest is one freely chosen way of pursuing the larger passion, not an adequate account of its ultimate aim.

From Ontology to Ethical Description

Ontology can disclose the origin and nature of value, but it cannot derive ethical commands from descriptions of what is. Because value arises as the lack in relation to which the For-itself determines itself, human tasks can be examined as expressions of the search for a completed being. Existential psychoanalysis consequently offers a moral description: it brings out the ethical meaning of human projects without reducing them to calculations of advantage or conventional divisions between egoism and altruism.

Its critical target is the spirit of seriousness, which treats values as independent, transcendent givens and transfers desirability from things’ symbolic significance to their material constitution. Bread, for example, is taken as desirable simply because it is nourishing and necessary for life, as though its value were written into an objective order. In this attitude, a desired object’s empirical properties obscure the free project that makes it desirable. Human beings then experience objects as mute demands and themselves as passive obedience to those demands, concealing their own pursuit of being and evading anguish.

Recognition, Freedom, and Despair

Existential psychoanalysis aims to disclose the real goal of this pursuit: being as a synthetic fusion of the In-itself and the For-itself. Some people, the text observes, have reached this insight without waiting to learn the discipline’s principles. They may refrain from appropriating things merely for their own sake and instead attempt a symbolic appropriation of their being-in-itself. Yet awareness alone does not secure deliverance. If they still believe that the mission of producing the In-itself-for-itself is prescribed by things themselves, they remain caught in seriousness and are condemned to despair.

The reason is that human activities are equivalent in their ultimate orientation: each tends to sacrifice the human being so that self-cause may arise, and all are doomed to fail at that end. Accordingly, getting drunk alone and leading nations differ in scale and circumstance, not in the success of the ultimate project. The solitary drunkard’s quietism may even take precedence over a leader’s agitation when it embodies a greater consciousness of the ideal goal; the comparison measures awareness, not practical achievement.

When the moral agent recognizes that values exist through human reality, freedom can become conscious of itself. It then appears in anguish as the unique source of value and as the nothingness through which the world exists. Even the pursuit of being and appropriation of the In-itself can be grasped as possibilities only against the ground of other possible choices. The account thus leaves a decisive ethical problem open: what becomes of freedom if it turns away from the ideal of self-cause that has unified its choices? The passion remains useless as a route to God, but its recognition exposes freedom’s responsibility for the values and projects it chooses.