Individual passions are surface expressions of one total fundamental project

Evidence

The free project is fundamental, for it is my being. Neither ambition nor the passion to be loved nor the inferiority complex can be considered as fundamental projects. On the contrary, they of necessity must be understood in terms of a primary project which is recognized as the project which can no longer be interpreted in terms of any other and which is total. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1147

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the fundamental project as prior to and grounding all specific projects like ambition or the inferiority complex.
• XREF: Directly sets up Beauvoir’s framing of women’s situation as a fundamental project; also contrasts with Freud’s understanding of drives, which Sartre is implicitly critiquing. — connects to: All interpersonal conduct reduces to desire, love, and hate as fundamental projects; The same fatigue is lived as loving appropriation within a vaster project — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1104; Our fundamental project creates all the motives that could ever revise it — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1121 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• One’s fundamental project determines the meaning of one’s past #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1184
• The meaning of one’s place depends entirely on the project one chooses. #expands (0.82)
• The past’s force and meaning depend entirely on present projects #expands (0.80)
• The permanence of things is constituted by one’s own ongoing project. #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1284
• Self-consciousness extends the cogito beyond the instant into one’s global project #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1117