Project

In Sartre's phenomenological ontology, the "project" names the fundamental structure through which the For-itself (consciousness) constitutes its temporal existence by throwing itself forward toward future possibilities. The project is not a deliberate plan or a consciously entertained intention but rather the ontological act of freedom itself—the very mode by which the For-itself transcends its given facticity and organizes the past, present, and future into a meaningful whole. As the first occurrence makes clear, the project installs "a complex system of references" that determines how any fragment of the past enters into a "hierarchical, plurivalent organization": the past is not a fixed repository of facts but a field of meaning perpetually reconstituted by the direction in which the For-itself projects itself. Freedom, on this account, is not one property among others but the original constituent of temporal structure—the past is literally "chosen" in being interpreted from within the light of the current project.

The second occurrence specifies an essential structural feature: every project is "open," not "closed." Although fully individualized and thoroughly singular, the project contains within itself the possibility of its own further modification. This openness is not a deficiency but a constitutive condition: freedom requires a resistant, independent in-itself as the very medium of its exercise, and the adversity or unpredictability of the world is pre-outlined as a "margin of indetermination" internal to the project's structure. The project thus stands as the mediating term between facticity (the unchosen, brute givenness of existence) and freedom (the nihilating movement of transcendence): it is neither pure constraint nor pure spontaneity, but the correlate structure that makes a situation—rather than mere circumstance—possible at all.

This concept lives exclusively within the source jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological and functions as the organizing hinge between several of the corpus's cross-referenced canonical concepts. Most directly, "project" is the operative term that articulates the relation between facticity and freedom: as the canonical definition of facticity insists, "there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom," and it is precisely the project that produces this co-constitution. The project takes up facticity (the past, the body, the place) and retroactively assigns it meaning—making the For-itself the author of its own history without ever escaping its thrownness. This connects equally to temporality and historicization: the project is the mechanism by which the For-itself's temporal dispersion (past–present–future) is unified into a meaningful arc, and by which the past is "historicized"—not as a fixed chronicle but as a living interpretive frame perpetually revised from the standpoint of future projection.

In relation to phenomenology as a cross-referenced canonical, the project is a distinctly Sartrean contribution that pushes phenomenological ontology toward its existentialist conclusion: rather than remaining within Husserlian intentionality or Heideggerian thrownness, Sartre makes freedom—enacted as project—the primary ontological structure from which temporal and situational meaning flow. Relative to subjectivity and identification, the project implies a subject that is never self-identical or complete but perpetually ahead of itself, which resonates with the Lacanian principle that the subject is constitutively split and non-self-transparent. The concept is best read as an extension and radicalization of Heideggerian "thrownness-as-projection" (Geworfenheit/Entwurf), translated into the register of absolute freedom rather than Dasein's care-structure, while anticipating the Lacanian insistence that meaning is always retroactively constituted (après-coup) rather than given in advance.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.507)

every project of freedom is an open project and not a closed project. Although entirely individualized, it contains within it the possibility of its further modifications.

The opposition between "open" and "closed" project is theoretically loaded because it insists that radical individuation and structural revisability are not in tension but mutually constitutive: the project is "entirely individualized" (it is the singular act of this For-itself) yet intrinsically incomplete, containing "the possibility of its further modifications" as an internal feature rather than an external contingency—this is precisely what distinguishes Sartrean freedom from any deterministic or teleological account of action.