Sartre's second century

22 Chapter Two
a certain kind of existence [...]. I tried in La Psyche to derive time
dialectically from freedom. For me, it was a bold gesture. But all that
wasn't yet ripe. And, behold, I now glimpse a theory of time! I feel
intimidated before expounding it, I feel like a kid.
Let me first observe that time is not originally of the same nature as the
in-itself [...]. If I consider it from one point of view, it is; and if I consider
it from another point of view, it is not: the future is not yet, and the past is
no longer, the present vanishes into an infinitesimal point, time is now but
a dream.
I see clearly, too, that time is not—as contemporary theories would
have us believe—of the same nature as the for-itself. I'm not in time, that's
for sure. But I'm not my own time either, in the way that Heidegger means.
Otherwise there would be a temporal translucidity coinciding with the
translucidity of consciousness; consciousness would be time, inasmuch as
it would be consciousness of time. 9
One important consequence of this analysis is that, while the
temporality of the for-itself is defined in Being and Nothingness as not
being its past and not being its future, Sartre here understands that the foritself
is a being which, if not in time, is perhaps of time. 10 It is possible that
Sartre understands being "in time" in the same manner in which Being and
Nothingness understands "being in a situation". For Sartre, to be in a
situation is to confront possibilities. 11 Since my situation is defined by my
projects and since my projects are transparent to me by virtue of my freely
projecting them, my situation is defined by the translucidity possessed by
the spontaneous upsurge and transparency of my freedom. Consequently,
being in time would carry the connotation of the self-transparency of
freedom. In contrast, to say that I am of time is to say that there is a
"thickness" or "substantiality" to time that cannot be foreshortened or
alleviated by the consciousness I have of it. Sartre's following gloss
suggests the reasonableness of such an interpretation:
I escape in time from my own motives; in time from my essence, since it is
what has been [...]. Yet it obviously is not the same thing, since I am my
own nothingness while I am not my own time. If you prefer, there is no
difference between nihilation and temporalisation, except that the for-itself
9 Ibid., 209.
10 The expression "of time" is not Sartre's, but is employed here in order to
reference aspects of the theory of time Sartre may have "glimpsed."
11 Sartre's expression for this concept in the War Diaries is "exigencies" {War
Diaries, 39).