Each person’s situation is uniquely theirs, a gate built for one

Evidence

Since the situation is illumined by ends which are themselves projected only in terms of the being-there, which they illuminate, it is presented as eminently concrete. Of course it contains and sustains abstract and universal structures, but it must be understood as the single countenance which the world turns toward us as our unique and personal chance. We may recall here a fable of Kafka’s: A merchant comes to plead his case at the castle where a forbidding guard bars the entrance. The merchant does not dare to go further; he waits and dies still waiting. At the hour of death he asks the guardian, “How does it happen that I was the only one waiting?” And the guardian replies, “This gate was made only for you.” Such is precisely the case with the for-itself if we may add in addition that each man makes for himself his own gate. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1281

Categorization

• XREF: The Kafka gate fable as a figure for radical particularized freedom connects to the reader’s foundational goal of mapping to Beauvoir’s ethics of situated freedom. — connects to: Each person is a fragment even of their own singular type — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 91; Digital self-tracking makes each person a self-surveilling guard and inmate in one. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 139
• FICTION: The gate-made-only-for-you fable is a compact narrative image worth keeping — it recurs in existentialist literature and could seed a story.

Broader Connections

• Each person is a fragment even of their own singular type #expands (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 91