Skiing transforms snow through the skier’s activity into meaningful lived terrain

Evidence

To ski means not only to enable me to make rapid movements and to acquire a technical skill, nor is it merely to play by increasing according to my whim the speed or difficulties of the course; it is also to enable me to possess this field of snow. At present I am doing something to it. That means that by my very activity as a skier, I am changing the matter and meaning of the snow. From the fact that now in my course it appears to me as a slope to go down, it finds again a continuity and a unity which it had lost. It is at the moment connective tissue. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1359

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates how the for-itself confers meaning and organization on brute matter through purposive activity — the snow is unified only as traversed toward a goal.
• XREF: Continues the chapter’s project of grounding the for-itself’s synthetic, meaning-conferring activity; will connect directly to Beauvoir’s account of situation and embodied project. — connects to: A person’s mode of engaging a surface changes how that surface phenomenologically appears. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 390

Broader Connections

• A person’s mode of engaging a surface changes how that surface phenomenologically appears. #exemplifies (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 390