One’s fundamental project determines the meaning of one’s past
Evidence
Now the meaning of the past is strictly dependent on my present project. This certainly does not mean that I can make the meaning of my previous acts vary in any way I please; quite the contrary, it means that the fundamental project which I am decides absolutely the meaning which the past which I have to be can have for me and for others. I alone in fact can decide at each moment the bearing of the past. I do not decide it by debating it, by deliberating over it, and in each instance evaluating the importance of this or that prior event; but by projecting myself toward my ends, I preserve the past with me, and by action I decide its meaning. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1184
Categorization
- XREF: The freedom-facticity dialectic here prefigures Beauvoir’s account of how situated choice reconstitutes narrative meaning — a direct bridge to the stated reading purpose. — connects to: Past motives become objective things, collapsing the distinction between cause and motive — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1092; Individual acts express and are unchangeable apart from one’s original project — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1119; Individual passions are surface expressions of one total fundamental project — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1147 (+13 more)
- SEED: Article angle: the ethics of retrospective meaning — how conversion retroactively revalues adolescent crises, relevant to memoir and testimony ethics.
Broader Connections
- The past’s force and meaning depend entirely on present projects
#corroborates(0.95) - The past is a free choice made from the present project
#corroborates(0.92) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1192 - Having a past requires actively choosing it through the future-project.
#corroborates(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1182 - Present experience re-encounters a past that was once a projected future.
#corroborates(0.78) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1068 - The past informs the individual but can be re-captured through successive choices.
#complicates(0.75)