Freedom from a fundamental project comes only through radical conversion, not will

Evidence

Since the upsurge of a voluntary decision finds its motive in the fundamental free choice of my ends, it can attack these ends in appearance only. It is therefore only within the compass of my fundamental project that the will can be efficacious; and I can be “freed” from my “inferiority complex” only by a radical modification of my project which could in no way find its causes and its motives in the prior project, not even in the suffering and shame which I experience, for the latter are designed expressly to realize my project of inferiority. Thus so long as I am “in” the inferiority complex, I can not even conceive of the possibility of getting out of it. Even if I dream of getting out of it, the precise function of this dream is to make me experience even further the abjection of my state; it can be interpreted therefore only in and through the intention which makes me inferior. … Yet at each moment I apprehend this initial choice as contingent and unjustifiable; at each moment therefore I am on the site suddenly to consider it objectively and consequently to surpass it and to make-it-past by causing the liberating instant to arise. Hence my anguish, the fear which I have of being suddenly exorcized (i.e., of becoming radically other); but hence also the frequent upsurge of “conversions” which cause me totally to metamorphose my original project. These conversions which have not been studied by philosophers, have often inspired novelists. One may recall the instant at which Gide’s Philoctetes casts off his hate, his fundamental project, his reason for being, and his being. One may recall the instant when Raskolnikoff decides to give himself up. These extraordinary and marvelous instants when the prior project collapses into the past in the light of a new project which rises on its ruins and which as yet exists only in outline, in which humiliation, anguish, joy, hope are delicately blended, in which we let go in order to grasp and grasp in order to let go—these have often appeared to furnish the clearest and most moving image of our freedom. But they are only one among others of its many manifestations. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1137

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the key mechanism distinguishing ordinary voluntary decision from radical conversion of the fundamental project.
• XREF: Connects directly to the backdrop Sartre sets for Beauvoir’s ethics of situated freedom and conversion. — connects to: A radical conversion reinterprets the old project as a past it must supersede. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1124
• SEED: Essay angle: Sartre’s account of ‘conversions’ as the philosophical skeleton behind common literary redemption arcs.