ABSTRACT
A good deal of our sense of moral repugnance comes from the asshole's refusal to recognize us or anyone as an other. The asshole is thus the opposite of the fully cooperative person. The Romantic Satan appears in two ways. Neither one was the traditional Devil. The traditional Devil was a rebel against his liege lord. Sartre describes the desire to be God as the basic form of the human condition in a famous passage from Being and Nothingness. In it he asserts that human reality is an effort to create the Being in-itself-for-itself, to become God, a contradiction that asserts that consciousness is the foundation of its own positive being. In Schelling's Of Human Freedom he writes, "This is the secret of love, that it unites such beings as could each exist in itself, and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other". Satan's failing is to have chosen only himself and not love of another.
