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ArgumentTo exist is to project oneself
Man is not a given thing: he is only what he makes of himself by projecting toward the future.
Supports
Sartre · Existentialism Is a Humanism
- A stone is what it is, wholly in the present. Man, by contrast, is never quite given: he relates ceaselessly to what he is not yet, what he wants to become, to do, to accomplish.
- This is what means: . No one is born with a ready-made nature; we are our acts and our commitments to come, and it is by projecting ourselves that we give ourselves a shape.
- From then on, to fall back on the instant alone, to refuse to project oneself, would be to treat oneself as a thing, to give up what makes us subjects. This retreat has a name, : hiding one's own freedom from oneself by passing for a being with no future.
Therefore So to live, for a human being, is to strain toward what is not yet: not to lose oneself in the future, but to recognize oneself there as the author of what one becomes.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
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Entirely
Deepenings
Why we are not things
- A thing coincides with itself; a consciousness, never. I am not my occupation the way the inkwell is an inkwell: I am it in the mode of having-to-be it, that is, by projecting myself into it.
- This distance from oneself is our very freedom: because nothing fixes me once and for all, I am responsible for what I make of myself, and that « what I make » is turned toward tomorrow.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
Not at all
Entirely
Put to the test
Objection