A place’s meaning is fixed only by the future ends toward which freedom projects.

Evidence

It is only in the act by which freedom has revealed facticity and apprehended it as place that this place thus defined is manifested as an impediment to my desires, an obstacle, etc. Otherwise how could it possibly be an obstacle? An obstacle to what? A compulsion to do what? The story is told of an emigrant who was going to leave France for Argentina after the failure of his political party: When someone remarked to him that Argentina was “very far away,” he asked, “Far from what?” And it is very certain that if Argentina appears “far away” to those who live in France, it is so in relation to an implicit national project which valorizes their place as French. For the internationalist revolutionary, Argentina is a center of the world as is any other country. But if we have by a primary project first constituted French territory as our absolute place, and if some catastrophe forces us to go into exile, it is in relation to this initial project that Argentina will appear to us as “very far away,” as a “land of exile”; it is in relation to this project that we shall feel ourselves expatriated. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1175 (#expands, via linked claim)

The Past is, to be sure, the being which I am outside of myself, but it is the being which I am without the possibility of not being it. This is what we have defined as being its past behind itself. The being of the Future which I have to be, on the contrary, is such that I can only be it; for my freedom gnaws at its being from below. This means that the Future constitutes the meaning of my present For-itself, as the project of its possibility, but that it in no way predetermines my For-itself which is to-come, since the For-itself is always abandoned to the nihilating obligation of being the foundation of its nothingness. … The future is what I would be if I were not free and what I can have to be only because I am free. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 454 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Freedom unifies past, present, and future into a single project.; The facticity of place only becomes an obstacle through freedom’s original project — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1175; The past is fixed being while the future remains modifiable by freedom — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 454 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• The facticity of place only becomes an obstacle through freedom’s original project #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1175
• Freedom is meaningful only as engaged by free choice of ends #corroborates (0.85)
• The past is fixed being while the future remains modifiable by freedom #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 454
• The obstacles that limit freedom are constituted only by freedom’s own posited ends #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1152
• Situation-limits are given meaning only by the freedom they nevertheless bound #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1241
• Freedom’s own possibilities rest on the ground of further possibilities #expands (0.80)
• Freedom has concrete content only when engaged in the world #expands (0.80)
• Freedom is only real once it chooses its own finitude. #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1176
• Individual freedom is grounded in meanings others have already established. #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 75