Objective questions about a project’s worth remain transcendent and cannot trigger genuine anguish

Evidence

When one fights for the emancipation of oppressed natives, or the socialist revolution, he is obviously aiming at a long range goal; and he is still aiming at it concretely, beyond his own death, through the movement, the league, the institutions, or the party that he has helped set up. What we maintain is that one must not expect that this goal be justified as a point of departure of a new future; insofar as we no longer have a hold on the time which will flow beyond its coming, we must not expect anything of that time for which we have worked; other men will have to live its joys and sorrows. As for us, the goal must be considered as an end; we have to justify it on the basis of our freedom which has projected it, by the ensemble of the movement which ends in its fulfillment. The tasks we have set up for ourselves and which, though exceeding the limits of our lives, are ours, must find their meaning in themselves and not in a mythical Historical end. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 121 (#expands, via linked claim)

For Heidegger, this ‘why’ is not the sort of question that seeks an answer from physics or cosmology. No account of the Big Bang or divine Creation could satisfy it. The point of asking the question is mainly to boggle the mind. If you had to sum up Heidegger’s opening sally in Being and Time in one word, that word might be ‘wow!’ It was this that led the critic George Steiner to call Heidegger ‘the great master of astonishment’ — the person who ‘put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 173 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Long-range projects must justify themselves without appeal to a mythical future — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 121; Heidegger framed being as a question meant to astonish rather than to be answered — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 173

Broader Connections

• Long-range projects must justify themselves without appeal to a mythical future #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 121
• Heidegger framed being as a question meant to astonish rather than to be answered #qualifies (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 173