An individual justifies himself only through a future-oriented project, never through present facticity
Evidence
It seems as if we have hardly advanced, for we come back, in the end, to the statement that what appears as useful is to sacrifice the less useful men to the more useful. But even this shift from useful to useful will enlighten us: the complement of the word useful is the word man; but it is also the word future. It is man insofar as he is, according to the formula of Ponge, “the future of man.” Indeed, cut off from his transcendence, reduced to the facticity of his presence, an individual is nothing; it is by his project that he fulfills himself, by the end at which he aims that he justifies himself; thus, this justification is always to come. Only the future can take the present for its own and keep it alive by surpassing it. A choicewill become possible in the light of the future, which is the meaning of tomorrow because the present appears as the facticity which must be transcended toward freedom. No action is conceivable without this sovereign affirmation of the future. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 114
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Clarifies why ‘useful’ always implicates the future: transcendence is the only source of human worth, and transcendence is inherently future-directed.