JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

174Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsapprehend on it. Determinism appears on the ground of the futurizing project ofmyself. Thus the future will be distinguished from the imaginary, where similarly I amwhat I am not, where similarly I find my meaning in a being which I have to be butwhere this For-itself which I have to be emerges on the ground of the nihilation of theworld, apart from the world of being.But the Future is not solely the presence of the For-itself to a being situatedbeyond being. It is something which waits for the For-itself which I am. This somethingis myself. When I say that I will be happy, we understand that it is the present “I,”dragging its Past after it, who will be happy. Thus the Future is “I” in as much as Iawait myself as presence to a being beyond being. I project myself toward the Futurein order to merge there with that which I lack; that is, with that which if syntheticallyadded to my Present would make me be what I am. Thus what the For-itself has to beas presence to being beyond being is its own possibility. The Future is the ideal pointwhere the sudden infinite compression of facticity (Past), of the For-itself (Present),and of its possible (a particular Future) will at last cause the Self to arise as theexistence in-itself of the For-itself. The project of the For-itself toward the futurewhich it is is a project toward the In-itself. In this sense the For-itself has to be itsfuture because it can be the foundation of what it is only before itself and beyondbeing. It is the very nature of the For-itself that it must be “an always future hollow.”For this reason it will never have become, in the Present, what it had to be, in theFuture. The entire future of the present For-itself falls into the Past as the future alongwith this For-itself itself. It will be the past future of a particular For-itself or a formerfuture. This future is not realized. What is realized is a For-itself which is designatedby the Future and which is constituted in connection with this future. For example,my final position on the tennis court has determined on the ground of the future all myintermediary positions, and finally it has been reunited with an ultimate positionidentical with what it was in the future as the meaning of my movements. But,precisely, this “reuniting” is purely ideal; it is not really operative. The future does notallow itself to be rejoined; it slides into the Past as a bygone future, and the PresentFor-itself in all its facticity is revealed as the foundation of its own nothingness andonce again as the lack of a new future. Hence comes that ontological disillusion whichawaits the For-itself at each emergence into the future. “Under the Empire howbeautiful was the Republic!” Even if my present is strictly identical in its content withthe future toward which I projected myself beyond being, it is not this present towardwhich I was projecting myself; for I was projecting myself toward the future quafuture—that is, as the point of the reuniting of my being, as the place of the upsurgeof the Self.