JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

8 TemporalityThe phenomenology of time entails the description of kinds of time that arescientifically inexplicable: paradigmatically, subjective or human time.Although the Newtonian understanding of the objective ordering before,simultaneous with, and after has been shown to be incomplete by Einstein’sSpecial and General theories of relativity, physics is still powerless to sayanything about past, present and future or subjective time.Understanding Sartre’s phenomenology of time in Part Two, ChapterTwo, of Being and Nothingness, extracts of which are reprinted below, requiresa grasp of Husserl’s Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness (Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des innernZeitbewusstseins, delivered from 1905) and ‘temporality’ (Temporalität) inHeidegger’s Being and Time.Husserl’s lectures, which facilitate a transition from the earlyphenomenology of Logical Investigations (1900–1) to the ‘transcendental’phenomenology of Ideas (1913), are a putative explanation of how objectivetime may be apprehended. The temporal ordering of events in the externalworld is not the temporal ordering of one’s own experiences: I think thisthought, am distracted by that sensation, etc., but outside of my mind thisphysical event occurs then that physical event. Arguably anyone is only everdirectly acquainted with the temporal ordering of their own experiences, yetbelieves in an objective ordering of event chains. The problem is: How is theapprehension of such an objective time order possible ?In a partial anticipation of his 1913 use of epoché, Husserl adopts amethodological suspension of belief in objective time to explain its possibilityas an object for consciousness. World time, real time, the time of nature,scientific and psychological time are all suspended but phenomenological