Pursued in pursuit

The pursued-pursuit describes the for-itself as at once pursuing its projected ends and being pursued by itself. It is not a succession of isolated choices but a continuous, temporal movement: freedom, choice, nihilation, and temporalization are bound together, while every project remains open to renewal or rupture.

A project that unfolds through time

The pursued-pursuit is inseparable from the original choice through which consciousness gives meaning to its world. That choice arranges causes and motives for particular actions, and discloses the world through its meanings, instrumental complexes, and adversity. It does not first arise at a single instant and then produce a sequence of consequences. Consciousness temporalizes itself; the original choice unfolds time as a unity of past, present, and future.

To choose oneself is to nihilate oneself: to project a future that gives meaning to the past. Choice therefore engages a finite, continuous duration between the person and the realization of their original possibilities. There are no disconnected instants in which a present choice simply stands apart from earlier or later choices. Freedom, choice, nihilation, and temporalization are different aspects of this same movement.

The pursuit and its threatened rupture

While engaged in a task, the for-itself does not ordinarily experience itself as a sequence of subjective instants. It is instead carried toward the ends that define it, in a movement the text calls the pursued-pursuit. Yet the instant remains a standing possibility: freedom can make it appear as a rupture in the unity of temporal existence. The continuous project is thus not guaranteed to continue unchanged; it can be broken by the emergence of another project.

The fundamental project is not a particular ambition, a desire to be loved, or an inferiority complex. These more specific aims must be interpreted through a primary project that concerns the person’s total being-in-the-world and the kind of relation to being they seek. Because freedom has no support or springboard, however, this fundamental project must be continually renewed. A person cannot simply be what they once chose; that would reduce the for-itself to the fixed existence of the in-itself.

Renewal, possibility, and the past

Each choice also indicates that other choices remain possible, even when they are not explicitly formulated. The lived sense that a choice cannot justify itself expresses both its absurdity and the freedom that makes alternatives possible. In projecting a total possibility, the for-itself simultaneously affirms its freedom to negate that project and make it past. Freedom therefore eats away at its own project: commitment does not erase the possibility of change.

When a project collapses, the for-itself does not simply acquire a new existence free of what came before. It must still be that former project in the mode of what it was; the lapsed project becomes part of its situation. A new project arises through the nihilation of the old, but no fixed law determines in advance how many projects a life will contain. The pursued-pursuit consequently names a self that persists through movement without ever becoming identical to a completed, unchanging choice.