Sartre's second century

48 Chapter Four
Sartre makes the argument, in Being and Nothingness, that both of
these conceptions of the past are inadequate for the task of explaining the
temporality of consciousness, because they strand consciousness in an
instantaneous present. Sartre writes:
[...] if we begin by isolating man on the instantaneous island of his
present, and if all his modes of being as soon as they appear are destined
by nature to a perpetual present, we have radically removed all methods of
understanding his original relation to the past. We shall not succeed in
constituting the dimension "past" out of elements borrowed exclusively
from the present [.. .]. 7
Sartre is arguing that understanding our existence only in terms of the
present cannot explain the original relationship that we have to our past.
Sartre is not arguing that the past does, in fact, exist in and of itself.
Rather, he is arguing that we cannot understand man's original ontological
connectedness to his past if we understand his modes of being, or his
modes of consciousness, non-temporally in the instantaneous present.
Similarly, Sartre challenges the notion, as expressed by Roquentin, that
"each event puts itself politely into a box and becomes an honorary event".
In this case the past would exist but impotently disconnected from the
present. For Sartre, this conception is no better than a non-existent past:
Popular consciousness has so much trouble in refusing a real existence to
the past that alongside the thesis just discussed [that the past does not exist]
it admits another conception equally imprecise, according to which the past
would have a kind of honorary existence. Being past for an event would
mean simply being retired, losing its efficacy without losing its being. 8
Note that Sartre uses here the same metaphor that he had Roquentin make
use of. In Nausea, the past is "pensioned off to become an "honorary
evenf, while in Being and Nothingness the past is "retired" to become a
kind of "honorary existence". In both books, the same conceptions of time
are described, in the same order, and using the same formulations. It
would seem that, in Nausea and in Being and Nothingness, Sartre's
understanding and usage of these conceptions of time remained constant.
It would be surprising if Sartre had Roquentin express these erroneous
notions without repudiating them in some manner. And, in fact, what I am
suggesting here is that the strange scene of the news of Lucienne's death is
the repudiation of Roquentin's musings on the nature of time. In Being
7 Being and Nothingness, 161.
8 Ibid., 161.