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point of departure for my possible decisions. And as soon as I make another decision, it, in turn, belongs to the past and modifies what I am and offers another platform for successive projects. If it is meaningful to put the problem of freedom and of the responsibility of our decisions in philosophical terms, the basis of the discussion and the point of departure for a phenomenology of these acts is always the structure of temporality. 3
For Husserl, the 'I' is free inasmuch as it is in the past. In effect, the past determines me and therefore also determines my future, but the future, in turn, 'frees' the past. My temporality is my freedom, and on my freedom depends my 'Being-having-been' which determines me. But, in its continuous synthesis with the future, the content of my 'Being-having-been' depends on the future. Now, if the 'I' is free because it is already determined together with the 'I-that-should-be', there exists within this freedom (so encumbered by conditions, so burdened with what was and is hence irreversible) a 'sorrowfulness' (Schmerzhaftigkeit) which is none other than 'facticity'. (Compare with Sartre: "I am my future in the continuous prospective of the possibility of not being it. In this is the suffering which we described before and which gives sense to my present; I am a being whose sense is always problematic.")4 Each time I plan I notice the tragic nature of the condition in which I find myself, without being able to avoid it. Nevertheless, I plan to oppose the tragic elements with the possibility of something positive, which is a change from that which is and which I put into effect as I direct myself toward the future. Plan, freedom, and condition are articulated while I observe this connection of structures in my actions, according to a dimension of responsibility. This is what Husserl observes when he says that, in this 'directed' being of the 'I' toward possible scopes, an ideal 'teleology' is established and that the future as possible 'having' with respect to the original futurity in which I already always am is the universal prefiguration of the aim of life.
In other words, the subject situated in a temporal dimension is aware of the gravity and difficulty of his decisions, but at the same time he is aware that he must decide, that it is he who must decide, and that this process is linked to an indefinite series of necessary decision making that involves all other men.
4.4. A Plot Which Does Not 'Consume' Itself
If contemporary discussions which involve man in meditation upon his destiny and his condition are based on this concept of time, the narrative structure of Superman certainly evades it in order to save the situation which we have already discussed. In Superman it is the concept of time that breaks down. The very structure of time falls apart, not in the time about which, but, rather, in the time in which the story is told.

 
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