Fundamental project

The fundamental project is the individual’s original, total relation to being: the freely chosen orientation through which a person exists in a world and particular actions become intelligible. It is not an unconscious blueprint behind experience or a fixed trait that explains conduct from outside. The project exists in the concrete choices through which a person makes a world meaningful, and each such choice can express the person’s whole being from a particular angle.

Definition and Scope

A fundamental project concerns neither a person’s relation to one isolated object nor a single preference considered by itself. It is a total way of being-in-the-world, a chosen relation to being that illuminates the world in terms of an end. Particular aims and tendencies can be understood only within this total orientation, but the totality is not an additional entity concealed behind them: it is the person’s being as freely unified in the world.

The project is fundamental because it cannot be interpreted in terms of another, more basic project. Ambition, a passion to be loved, or an inferiority complex may be important, but none is automatically ultimate. Each calls for interpretation in relation to the person’s total being-in-the-world. The inquiry seeks the point at which explanation no longer reduces the person to a further cause, but discloses the unique project that makes the person’s actions hang together.

How the Project Gives Meaning

The relation between project and world is reciprocal. Things are apprehended against the world as a totality, not assembled one by one until a person finally infers a world from them. At the same time, the world’s unity depends on the human upsurge that discloses it: the in-itself by itself does not organize itself into a world. A person chooses himself or herself as a whole within a world that is likewise apprehended as a whole.

Particular possibilities emerge within this paired totality. A hammer can be perceived as a hammer in the context of a world, but the act of hammering becomes a live possibility only within the person’s total project. The project is therefore not a private intention added after neutral perception; it belongs to the way the person encounters things and discovers what can be done with them. The fundamental act of freedom gives meaning to a particular action because it is at once a choice of self in the world and a disclosure of that world.

This choice is conscious without being a deliberate decision reached by weighing causes and motives as objects. Deliberation already depends on an interpretation of the situation and on ends that make its motives matter. Once a cause or motive is apprehended as significant, a choice is already underway. The project is thus not a secret mental event that precedes observable conduct: it is lived in the intentional activity through which a person takes up a situation.

Freedom, Facticity, and Renewal

A fundamental project is not instantaneous, but neither does it exist outside time and subsequently create time for itself. In its upsurge it temporalizes: a future end illuminates the present and gives pastness to the in-itself data that have been taken up. The project is a choice in the world, not a choice from nowhere. It acts upon a given situation, and its particular expressions arise on the occasion of concrete elements of that situation.

Yet freedom has no support or springboard that could make one choice final. The project must be continually renewed: a person cannot simply remain what he or she has once chosen without lapsing into the fixed existence of the in-itself. Each choice also implies the possibility of other choices, even when those alternatives are not explicitly formulated. This lived awareness of alternatives appears as the unjustifiability and absurdity of one’s choice. Freedom does not abolish contingency; it takes contingency up, nihilates it, and gives it a chosen meaning.

The project is therefore fundamental without mechanically determining every action. Particular projects are specifications of the global project in particular circumstances, but they remain choices in their own right. Each retains a margin of contingency, unpredictability, and absurdity. The total orientation makes an action interpretable in relation to the person’s whole being; it does not turn the action into a necessary effect that could have been predicted in advance.

Existential Psychoanalysis and Personal Unity

Existential psychoanalysis is the method proposed for making an initial project explicit. It does not stop at a supposed irreducible desire simply because a psychologist cannot explain it further, and it does not treat a person as either passive material shaped by drives or a bundle of drives linked only by external association. Both pictures lose the person: one leaves an indeterminate substance to receive properties, while the other scatters the individual among disconnected tendencies.

The alternative is to find a unity that is personal and responsible, neither a substance beneath experience nor a sum produced after the fact. A person is freely unified in the world. Biography matters because the investigator must consult the individual’s history to understand the particular for-itself, but biography is not a catalogue of traits. Its task is to disclose the original project through which a life has been unified.

The example of a friend who likes rowing shows why an isolated preference cannot serve as a final explanation. To say only that he likes rowing stops inquiry at a contingent fact; to classify the preference under outdoor sports, exercise, or some still broader category merely sorts it. Neither procedure reveals why this activity matters in the individual life. Conversely, interpreting the preference as part of the person’s total project need not reduce it to a generic appetite. The concrete activity remains the individual’s own choice in a particular situation.

Every Tendency as an Expression of the Whole

A desire reaches beyond its immediate object. Hunting, tennis, and other activities can signify a search for diversion rather than an end contained within the activity alone. Love and jealousy, in the examples drawn from Stendhal and Marcel Proust, cannot be reduced to possessing a particular woman: through her, they may express an effort to lay hold of the world as a whole. The woman is described as a conducting body in a larger relation of the person to the world and to himself or herself. Such readings may be incomplete, but they demonstrate why analytical description alone cannot disclose the meaning of a project.

The interpretive aim is not to replace the concrete with an abstract tendency. A person’s relation to a particular woman and a possible orientation toward God are both concrete; the task is to rediscover, through partial and incomplete actions, the individual’s total impulse toward being and original relation to self, world, and the Other. This avoids explaining a person by a list of general maxims or by translating a distinctive act into a broad category. The result is irreducible not because it is meager, but because it gathers the person’s concrete life into an individual fullness.

Accordingly, each inclination or attitude can express the person completely, though from a different angle. A jealousy situated on a particular date and in relation to a particular woman may disclose the subject’s total relation to the world. The empirical attitude is not a surface effect produced by a separate, hidden intelligible character; it is itself the concrete choice through which that character’s meaning exists. To row in a particular circumstance is not merely to illustrate a project located elsewhere: that act is the person’s concrete being in that circumstance, and its significance becomes visible through comparison with other empirical choices.

The method therefore compares a person’s diverse tendencies rather than adding them together or reconstructing the person from a hierarchy of increasingly general traits. Each tendency is the whole person expressed in a particular form; comparison helps disclose the project common to those forms without turning it into an independent cause. The fundamental project names the unity of a life as an ongoing, situated freedom: total in what it expresses, yet renewed and specified anew in each concrete choice.