Robert G.Olson

follows from this that in so far as a man is conscious of his freedom, his natural and social environment will take on the character of a brute fact, something contingent, absurd, alien; for consciousness of freedom is also consciousness of the fact that meaning comes to being through us.

Although Sartre denies that man has an essence or nature if by this one means that God or Nature has predetermined him to pursue certain goals to the exclusion of others, he does not deny that man has an essence or nature if by this one means that it is possible to discern certain universal and necessary structures within the human condition.

Thus one may best describe the fundamental project of the human reality in saying that man is the being who projects to be God. . . . And if man possesses a preontological comprehension of the being of God, it is neither the great spectacle of nature nor the power of society which have given it to him. Rather God . . . represents the permanent limits in terms of which man understands his being. To be man is to strive to be God, or, if one prefers, man fundamentally desires to be God.