Relation to oneself· Existence
Project
Axis: Temporal orientation — Toward which dimension of time should we orient our life: the present, the future, or the past?
To exist is to project oneself: human beings are defined by what they undertake and by the future they set for themselves. Life draws its meaning from this movement toward what is not yet, and confining oneself to the present would mean giving up on oneself.
Movements 1
Existentialismexplicit
A being without essence cannot be defined by what it already is, only by what it reaches toward: existence is project, a thrust toward a future it has to be. names this structure being-ahead-of-itself, and takes it up: it is the aimed-at future that retrospectively illuminates the past and gives it its meaning, not the reverse. The primacy of the future thus sets the movement apart from the wisdoms of the present such as or , for whom living well is gathering the instant: here, to live is to project oneself and never to coincide with oneself.
Being and Nothingness · Heidegger, Being and Time
Philosophers 3
Show inferred positions (3)
Beauvoirinferable
Existence is structured by the project: freedom is defined by the future it aims at and toward which it surpasses itself. Beauvoir conceives oppression precisely as the deprivation of a future, confinement in a repetitive present with no opening onto freely posited ends, which confirms the primacy of the temporality of the project.
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), freedom as a project toward the future
Marxinferable
Marx's thought is wholly turned toward a future to be built: the capitalist present has meaning only as a moment of transition toward communist society, and the past is analysed only to illuminate that movement: a resolutely project-oriented stance, one that cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (the poetry of the future)
Sartreinferable
The for-itself is stretched toward the future: it defines itself by the project, that toward which it throws itself forward, and is never fixed in its past, which it must always take up and re-signify. To live is to pro-ject oneself; the present itself has meaning only in relation to what one makes oneself be. The orientation is therefore resolutely that of the project, not of memory nor of the bare instant.
Being and Nothingness, Part 2, ch. 2 (temporality, the ecstasis of the future)
Characters 1
Odysseusexplicit
Odysseus's existence is structured by a single project that gives it sense and direction, the return, to which he subordinates years, pleasures and detours. Yet this project is wholly turned toward the restoration of a past: to regain his rank, his wife, his son, to set his fathers' house back in order. The great traveler is no man of the present or of novelty: he strains forward in order to re-establish what once was, binding the drive of the project to the memory of his origin.
Odyssey (the return as the end of ten years of trials) · Odyssey, XVI-XXIII (the recognitions of Telemachus, Eumaeus, Eurycleia, Penelope)
Argument
- 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.
See the pageObjection
- Suppose that to exist is to project oneself. The danger is only the greater: for the project always pushes life off to the moment when it will be accomplished, and that moment endlessly recedes.
- , in , observed it among the busy men of Rome: wholly given to their undertakings, they lived as though they would live forever, putting off the best until later. They arrange their lives for the far off, and death surprises them in the midst of their preparations, before they have begun to live.
- This deferral is no accident of the project, it is its slope: the busyness that thinks itself useful is often one more , filling the hours so as not to have to ask whether one is living them. We save time everywhere, except at living.
Therefore So to project oneself without end can be the subtlest way of missing one's life: not out of laziness, but by dint of preparing it instead of living it.
See the pageObjection
- To define oneself by one's projects is to place the meaning of one's life in what is not yet: a goal to reach, a work to finish, a future to build.
- Yet of all this, almost nothing . An illness, an accident, a setback, and the patiently raised edifice collapses. Whoever is happy only once the goal is reached entrusts his happiness to fortune, which owes him nothing.
- Worse: the goal once reached, another rises at once. Always straining toward the next stage, the man of projects never enjoys arriving; he lives on borrowed time, awaiting a rest he himself keeps pushing back.
Therefore So to rest one's life on the future is to build on ground that is not one's own: it remains to be seen whether it is wise to lodge there the whole worth of one's days.
See the pageReclaiming your timeExerciseAttested · Seneca
Seneca reproached the busy for living as though they would live forever, putting off the best until later. He advised reclaiming possession of one's time, taking stock of it, and setting aside a share for what truly matters. Today it is a safeguard against the calendar that fills itself and the endlessly deferred life.
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- PrescriptiveExistential Thought experimentWould you live it again?
A demon offers you to relive your life, identical, endlessly: would you want it? The test reveals whether you truly inhabit your time, rather than hanging it on tomorrow or mourning it as yesterday.
the time of a life - PrescriptiveExistentialLiving, or preparing to live
We keep deferring living to a future that, often, never comes: life flows away while we prepare it. Yet if we project nothing, if we give up every goal, do we not lose what gives existence a direction and an impetus?
the time of a life - PrescriptiveExistentialFor whom to build after oneself?
To plant a tree whose shade you will never sit under: do we owe anything to those who will come, who have done nothing for us? Transmission turns the present toward a future that outlasts us.
those who will come