rocities in strict accordance to their belief. For others life has too much meaning and they spend their lives trying to reassure themselves that they have grasped this meaning. I would like to take a moment to inspect this further.There are those in our history who have established a religion. Why? As I have posited, this could well have been done in an attempt to reassure oneself that that he had come to terms with the meaning of life. I think Sartre would believe as I that this act of reassurance is nothing more than what he calls a fundamental project. Sartre believes that when we become anguished by the affairs of life we pursue a fundamental project in an attempt to flee this anguish. Sartre says that we try to make ourselves Gods in hopes that others would see us as divine, and hold us in high or higher regard. To pursue a fundamental project according to Sartre is to act in bad faith. And to act in bad faith Sartre says is to manifest our freedom inauthentically. I will address these premises a little later in the text; before I do I first I would like to present some requisite background Sartreian philosophy in an attempt to convey a full understanding of why one sometimes feels compelled to pursue a fundamental project.Sartre believes that, man experiences two primary phases of consciousness in his life, the spontaneous phase and the reflective phase. In the spontaneous phase of his life, man does nothing more that pursue a particular task, and does not acknowledge his status in life or that there are those who would give him a degree of status. In this phase of life man is in a shallow mode of being. He is not concerned with society and acts accordingly (i.e. all statements are rhetoric, all questions are rhetorical). In the reflective phase of consciousness, a significant event occurs. Man one day realizes that he is not alone in this world. This realization is not without consequences. When man acknowledges that there are o...
