All Those Useless Passions: On Sartre, love and the sacred
Abstract
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes the human being as a 'useless passion', a passion that has no justification for existence. Starting from this premise, I will draw connections between 'uselessness' and the sacred. Could one of the uses of these useless passions be Sartrean choice – the courage of freedom, responsibility and self-determination? Could choice be the antidote to the implicit passivity of the present?
Fields of Study & Subjects
Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Philosophy
Ethics
and Existentialism
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Existential Analysis Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 12–25
- Publication date
- 1 January 2026