Existential waiting

Existential waiting names the unsettled structure through which a person’s present actions and past acquire meaning only in relation to a future that has not yet arrived. It is not merely impatience for an outcome: each achieved end may itself need later interpretation, while death can prevent that interpretation and leave a life’s value unresolved.

Meaning Deferred to the Future

Human reality, in this account, makes itself known through what it is not yet; it comes toward itself by projecting possibilities. Present conduct therefore carries an anticipated meaning, but that meaning awaits a future present capable of confirming or revising it. The future cannot be known in advance: it can only be projected and awaited, since it will freely take up the past in a new light.

The example of a reprimand makes this instability concrete. Someone may intend to rebuke a person who has seriously offended them, yet the planned rebuke could become irritated, timid stammering. The future manner of acting can alter what the present conduct will have meant. Present consciousness is, in one sense, fully lucid about its undertaking; at the same time, its significance is concealed by a later free determination that remains to come.

The same uncertainty appears in an adolescent’s conduct. The adolescent may be fully conscious of its mystic sense, yet only later life can disclose whether it was a passing crisis of puberty or a serious commitment to devotion. The present is not simply obscure to its agent; its eventual place in a life remains undecided.

A Life Made of Nested Waitings

Waiting is not an incidental weakness or nervous habit that practice could correct. It follows from the way the for-itself temporalizes itself: to be oneself is to come to oneself. A person waits for undertakings to succeed, but also waits to determine the place and value those successes will hold in their life. Even becoming loved, winning a distinction, or obtaining a favor does not settle what the achievement means.

These are therefore waitings that wait for further waitings. Each points toward an imagined final rest in which being would no longer be awaited: a plenitude in which the past could be recovered once and for all and the curve of a life fixed. The account describes this ultimate term as a value of being, an ideal fusion of in-itself and for-itself. It remains a horizon rather than an achieved conclusion; no present moment can supply the final verdict on a life still unfolding.

Death and the Unclosed Account

Death cannot reliably provide the final confirmation that waiting seems to promise. A person may die before completing a task or survive it; even a death that resembles a harmonious ending is determined by chance, not by the life’s own project. Its resemblance to a resolved musical chord does not make it a resolution that the life itself has composed. Death instead stands outside a person’s possibilities as a possible nullification of them.

The hope that death will close the account of a life is also challenged by the question of who chooses its hour. A final judgment might seem to fix what a person has been, but if another power determines when the account closes, the person has not chosen the moment that gives the whole its meaning. The example of two brothers before the divine tribunal sharpens the problem: one asks why he died young and is told that longer life would have led him to crime; the other asks why he lived so long. A minute added or taken away could change the account, yet the hour of death is not freely set by the person whose life is being judged.

The Future Interrupted

The fate of a prospective writer shows what interruption does to meaning. After thirty years of expecting to become a great writer, the young man publishes a first book. Even if it is good, the book’s significance depends on what follows: it might stand alone as both beginning and testament, prove an isolated accident in a mediocre series, or become the opening of a body of work that establishes its author among the first rank. The book cannot decide which future it belongs to by itself.

Death arrives while the writer is still testing whether he has the capacity to write another work. Because only one book appeared, it cannot be said either that this was the sole book he was meant to write or that he would have written several. His sacrifices and hard life do not settle the issue; mediocre figures, too, may make comparable sacrifices. The value of his conduct remains suspended, and the ensemble of actions, expectations, and values falls into the absurd. Existential waiting thus exposes both the openness of a life’s meaning and its vulnerability: the future that might have confirmed it can be taken away before confirmation ever comes.