JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Temporality175Now we are better able to raise the question of the being of the Future since thisFuture which I have to be is simply my possibility of presence to being beyond being.In this sense the Future is strictly opposed to the Past. The Past is, to be sure, thebeing which I am outside of myself, but it is the being which I am without thepossibility of not being it. This is what we have defined as being its past behind itself.The being of the Future which I have to be, on the contrary, is such that I can only beit; for my freedom gnaws at its being from below. This means that Future constitutesthe meaning of my present For-itself, as the project of its possibility, but that it in noway predetermines my For-itself which is to-come, since the For-itself is alwaysabandoned to the nihilating obligation of being the foundation of its nothingness. TheFuture can only effect a pre-outline of the limits within which the For-itself will makeitself be as a flight making itself present to being in the direction of another future. Thefuture is what I would be if I were not free and what I can have to be only because I amfree. It appears on the horizon to announce to me what I am from the standpoint ofwhat I shall be. (“What are you doing? I am in the process of tacking up this tapestry,of hanging this picture on the wall”). Yet at the same time by its nature as a futurepresent-for-itself, it is disarmed; for the For-itself which will be, will be in the mode ofdetermining itself to be, and the Future, then become a past future as a pre-outline ofthis for-itself, will be able only as the past to influence it to be what it makes itself be.In a word, I am my Future in the constant perspective of the possibility of not beingit. Hence that anguish which we have described above which springs from the fact thatI am not sufficiently that Future which I have to be and which gives its meaning to mypresent: it is because I am a being whose meaning is always problematic. In vain wouldthe For-itself long to be enchained to its Possibility, as to the being which it is outsideitself but which it is surely outside itself. The For-itself can never be its Future exceptproblematically, for it is separated from it by a Nothingness which it is. In short theFor-itself is free, and its Freedom is to itself its own limit. To be free is to be condernnedto be free. Thus the Future qua Future does not have to be. It is not in itself, and neitheris it in the mode of being of the For-itself since it is the meaning of the For-itself. TheFuture is not, it is possibilized.The Future is the continual possibilization of possibles—as the meaning of thepresent For-itself in so far as this meaning is problematic and as such radically escapesthe present For-itself.The Future thus defined does not correspond to a homogeneous and chronologicallyordered succession of moments to come. To be sure, there is a hierarchy of mypossibles. But this hierarchy does not correspond to the order of universal Temporality