Action and the Project

Cinéas's question to Pyrrhus — why conquer the next kingdom, and the next, if at the end you will simply rest? — is not a counsel of paralysis but a genuine philosophical question about the structure of human desire. If every end can be pushed further, then no end is self-legitimating, and the pursuit of any particular goal seems arbitrary. The classical answer — that there is a final end, a highest good, at which action aims and in which it rests — is unavailable to existentialism, which denies any pre-given telos for human life. Beauvoir must provide a different account of why action matters.

Beauvoir's answer is that the meaning of action is not found in any distant destination but in the structure of the project itself. To project oneself toward a future is to constitute oneself as a particular kind of being — to give oneself a concrete identity in the world. The writer who commits to writing is not waiting for a final published masterwork to give her action meaning; the writing itself, undertaken freely and seriously, is the expression of what she is. The end is necessary not as a destination but as the horizon that gives direction to the activity, and activity is its own meaning because it is the concrete exercise of the freedom that constitutes human existence.

This analysis leads Beauvoir to her central political insight: because action requires a world — tools, materials, collaborators, an audience, a context in which one's work can be taken up and extended — genuine commitment to one's own freedom requires commitment to the world that makes freedom possible. The writer needs readers; the revolutionary needs comrades; the parent needs a future generation. Every serious project entails caring about the conditions that allow projects to succeed, which means caring about the freedom of others who will inhabit and extend the world one is trying to build.

Pyrrhus and Cinéas was Beauvoir's first published philosophical work, appearing in 1944 before the end of the German occupation of France. Its argument for the political implications of individual freedom was developed in conversation with Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) and represents Beauvoir's most direct early engagement with the problem of deriving ethics from existentialist ontology.