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 complicit passivity of the present?