Present projects retroactively decide whether a past period counts as continuous or repudiated

Evidence

Similarly about 1938 we saw how a new generation, concerned with the international events which were in preparation, now suddenly illuminated the period of 1918—1938 with a new light by calling it “the period between the wars” even before war actually had burst forth in 1939. Suddenly the period under consideration (1918—1938) was constituted in a form which was limited, surpassed, and repudiated whereas those who had lived through it by projecting themselves toward a future in continuity with their present and their immediate past had experienced it as the start of a continuous and unlimited progress. The actual project therefore decides whether a defined period of the past is in continuity with the present or whether it is a discontinuous fragment from which one is emerging and which is put at a distance. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1188

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Beauvoir’s account of how situated projects color the past; also connects to T.S. Eliot’s sense of tradition as re-ordering the past in view of the present. — connects to: The past’s force and meaning depend entirely on present projects; One’s fundamental project determines the meaning of one’s past — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1184; Choosing a starting point can bias history without any falsehood — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 1838 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: The ‘period between the wars’ as retroactive reconstitution shows how a collective project creates historical meaning, paralleling how trees as infrastructure or ritual sacrifice gain meaning only through the projects that interpret them.

Broader Connections

• The past’s force and meaning depend entirely on present projects #expands (0.92)
• One’s fundamental project determines the meaning of one’s past #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1184
• Choosing a starting point can bias history without any falsehood #qualifies (0.72) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1838