JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

310 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsincreasing division of labor, etc.—which first manifests the present contradictions ofsociety. The future is presented, then, as a schematic, always open possibility and asan immediate action on the present.Conversely, this future defines the individual in his present reality; the conditionswhich the medical students must fulfill in a bourgeois society at the same time revealthe society, the profession, and the social situation of the one who will meet theseconditions. If it is still necessary for parents to be well-off, if the practice of givingscholarships is not widespread, then the future doctor appears in his own eyes as amember of the moneyed classes. In turn, he becomes aware of his class by means ofthe future which it makes possible for him; that is, through his chosen profession. Incontrast, for the man who does not meet the required conditions, medicine becomeshis lack, his non-humanity (all the more so as many other careers are “closed” to himat the same time). It is from this point of view, perhaps, that we ought to approach theproblem of relative pauperism. Every man is defined negatively by the sum total ofpossibles which are impossible for him; that is, by a future more or less blocked off.For the under-privileged classes, each cultural, technical, or material enrichment ofsociety represents a diminution, an impoverishment; the future is almost entirelybarred. Thus, both positively and negatively, the social possibles are lived as schematicdeterminations of the individual future. And the most individual possible is only theinternalization and enrichment of a social possible.A member of the ground crew at an air base on the outskirts of London took a planeand, with no experience as a pilot, flew it across the Channel. He is colored; he isprevented from becoming a member of the flying personnal. This prohibition becomesfor him a subjective impoverishment, but he immediately goes beyond the subjectiveto the objective. This denied future reflects to him the fate of his “race” and the racismof the English. The general revolt on the part of colored men against colonialists isexpressed in him by his particular refusal of this prohibition. He affirms that a futurepossible for whites is possible for everyone. This political position, of which hedoubtless has no clear awareness, he lives as a personal obsession; aviation becomeshis possibility as a clandestine future. In fact he chooses a possibility already recognizedby the colonialists as existing in the colonized (simply because they cannot rule it outat the start)—the possibility of rebellion, of risk, of scandal, of repression. Thischoice allows us to understand at the same time his individual project and the presentstage of the struggle of the colonized against the colonialists (the colored have gonebeyond the moment of passive, dignified resistance, but the group of which this manis a part does not yet have the means of going beyond individual revolt and terrorism).This young rebel is all the more individual and unique in that the struggle in his