The relationship between self and its existence and future possibilities

The For-itself’s relation to its future possibility is a relation of projection, lack, and freedom, not anticipation of a pre-existing later state. The future gives present action its direction and meaning, but it cannot be possessed in advance or finally achieved: each projected future becomes a past future, while the For-itself is already oriented toward another possibility. This tension explains why the future is essential to the self and why it remains a source of anguish.

The future gives the present its meaning

A movement on a tennis court makes the relation concrete. A player’s position has meaning through the stroke that is to follow: the future return hovers behind the positions, clarifying, linking, and modifying them. The player need not picture the stroke clearly or form a firm will to execute it. Those representations and volitions, the account argues, are explanations imposed by psychologists rather than the basis of the action. The future movement can organize the present without being thematically represented.

The same structure extends beyond sport. Writing, smoking, drinking, and resting each have a meaning that lies at a distance, outside the immediate present. Conscious activity is not a succession sealed within now; it is oriented toward what the For-itself has to be. The future is not simply a later moment that the present predicts. It is the possibility by which the present becomes intelligible as a movement toward something not yet attained.

Projection, lack, and presence

The future cannot be understood as a not-yet-existing now waiting in a static container of time. The For-itself does not first exist as a complete present and then look ahead. It makes itself present to being through a flight from what it is and was, toward what it lacks. In this account, a possibility is what the For-itself lacks in order to be itself: it appears as the self at a distance, the being toward which the present projects itself without becoming identical to it.

That lack does not arrive from outside and attach itself to an otherwise complete self. The For-itself constitutes itself as a not-yet through its own projection beyond the present. Only a being whose existence is in question for itself can have a future; conversely, it can apprehend itself as such a being only in the perspective of what it is not yet. Future and self are thus disclosed together. The future is the For-itself’s possibility of presence to being beyond being, and the present For-itself is the one that awaits itself in that possibility.

The future also carries a world with it. To say that the present self will be happy, for example, is to project this actual self—with its past—toward a future presence to being. The future possibility gives meaning not only to the For-itself but also to the being toward which it will be present. In this way, the For-itself’s projection lets a particular future arrive in the world; it apprehends the world’s possibilities from the standpoint of what it projects itself to become.

The self awaits itself

The future is not merely a possibility located beyond the present self; it is the self as awaited. In projecting toward the future, the For-itself seeks to coincide with what it lacks, as if the addition of that possibility to the present would make it fully what it is. The projected point of completion would compress past facticity, present existence, and a particular future possibility into the emergence of a Self with the solidity of an in-itself.

But this completion remains an ideal. The future is an “always future hollow”: the For-itself can project toward the being it would have to be, but it never becomes that being in the present in the way it had anticipated. On the tennis court, the final position organizes the intermediary positions and can appear to reunite them with the endpoint toward which they were directed. Yet that reunion is purely ideal, not an accomplished joining of self and possibility. The projected future slips into the past as a bygone future, and the present For-itself finds itself once more as the lack of a new future.

This repeated non-coincidence produces ontological disillusion. Even if the present resembles the content of the future once projected, it is not the future as future—the imagined point at which the self would finally be gathered together. The old contrast, “Under the Empire how beautiful was the Republic!”, gives this reversal a historical figure: what was longed for from one position can be seen differently once it has become past. A realized present cannot restore the future’s promise of completion, because that promise depended on being ahead of the self.

Freedom and the problematic future

The future differs from the past because the For-itself does not have to be its future in the way it cannot cease to be its past. A possibility can give the present its meaning, but it does not predetermine the For-itself that will come. Freedom works against any such fixed determination: the future outlines limits within which the For-itself may make itself, but the self to come must still determine itself. Once a projected future becomes past, it can influence the present only as something the For-itself takes up and makes of it.

For that reason, the For-itself is its future only problematically. It is separated from the possibility that gives its present meaning by the nothingness that it is, and it remains able not to be that possibility. The future is what the self would be if it were not free, yet it is something the self can have to be only because it is free. Freedom is therefore not an escape from the future’s demands; it is what prevents those demands from becoming a predetermined identity. The For-itself is condemned to be free, and its projected future is never simply guaranteed.

The future is consequently neither an already existing state nor a settled sequence of moments to come. It is the continual possibilization of possibilities: a meaning that shapes the present while radically escaping it. A possibility farther away in ordinary chronological time may define the present more decisively than a nearer one. What matters is not sheer proximity on a calendar but the role a possibility plays in the For-itself’s project. The relation remains open, and that openness is both the condition of action and the source of its unease.