Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

The compulsion power of one's past derives from free choice, not its content

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, define, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@sartre_being_1943, loc. 1194

4 min read

The compulsion power of one’s past derives from free choice, not its content

Evidence

But since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free, reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has given itself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power of a past. It is not only its content and the order of this content which my free choice decides; it is also the adherence of my past to my actuality. If within a fundamental perspective which we do not yet have to determine, one of my principal projects is to progress—i.e., to be always at any cost a little further advanced along a certain path than I was yesterday or an hour earlier, this progressive project involves in relation to my past a series of “uprootings.” The past—which now from the height of my progress I regard with a slightly scornful pity—is that which is strictly a passive object for moral evaluation and judgment. “How stupid I was then!” or “How wicked I was!” It exists only because I can dissociate myself from it. I no longer enter into it, nor do I any longer wish to enter into it. This is not, of course, because it ceases to exist, but it exists only as that self which I no longer am—i.e., that being which I have to be as the self which I am no longer. Its function is to be what I have chosen of myself in order to oppose myself to it, that which enables me to measure myself. Such a for-itself chooses itself therefore without solidarity with itself, which means not that it abolishes its past but that it posits its past so as not to be associated with it, exactly so as to affirm its total freedom (that which is past is a certain kind of engagement with respect to the past and a certain kind of tradition). On the other hand, there are other for-itselfs whose project implies the rejection of time and a narrow solidarity with the past. In their desire to find a solid ground these latter have, by contrast, chosen the past as that which they are, everything else being only an indefinite and unworthy flight from tradition. They have chosen at the start the refusal of flight; that is, the refusal to refuse. The past consequently has the function of requiring of them a fidelity. Thus we shall see that the former persons admit scornfully and easily to a mistake which they have made whereas the very admission will be impossible for the others without their deliberately changing their fundamental project; the latter will then employ all the bad faith in the world and all the subterfuges which they can invent in order to avoid breaking that faith in “what is” which constitutes an essential structure of their project. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1194

Categorization

  • XREF: Connects directly to Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and the freedom-facticity interplay this reading is explicitly building toward. — connects to: The inferiority complex is freely chosen rather than unconsciously suffered.; Freedom as choice retroactively constitutes the past as irremediable. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1178; Judgment-relevant psychology and past experience only constitute a situation from which free choice proceeds — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 36 (+6 more)
  • DEFINE: Clarifies how ‘solidarity with the past’ and ‘positing one’s past’ function as modes of for-itself freedom.

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks