JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

164Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingstime, or time as it is directly given to consciousness, is treated as an absolute,indubitable, datum. The objective temporality of an event is then explainedas an achievement of consciousness. A melody, in Husserl’s example, isapprehended as an objective event through retention and protention. Thepast course of the melody is partly retained and the future course of themelody is partly anticipated in the present apprehension of the melody. Themelody is constituted as an objective temporal object for consciousness bythis retentive and anticipatory ‘reading into’ the present. Knowledge of theobjective time dealt with commonsensically, measured by clocks and studiedby science, presupposes phenomenological time.As we have seen, Heidegger’s aim in Being and Time is the clarificationof the meaning of the question of being (Seinsfrage). What is it to be? isdifficult to answer once we appreciate that being is not being something.Being is not being red, or being perceived, or being spatio-temporal. Thepossession of these properties is neither necessary nor sufficient for beingrather than not being.Heidegger assumes that a necessary preliminary to the inquiry into beingis an inquiry into the kind of being that can pose the Seinsfrage, our ownbeing or Dasein. Much of Being and Time is then taken up with descriptionof the existential structures of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. However, towardsthe end of the book Heidegger comes close to answering the Seinsfrage byclaiming a temporality that is primordial with regard to being, a kind of timepresupposed by being. This is a kind of becoming that is not so muchbetween the future and the past as the becoming past of the future. One’sown being or Dasein entails this process.Sartre is profoundly influenced by both Husserl’s and Heidegger’sphenomenology of time. His views are partly their synthesis, or areconciliation of tensions between them.Sartre seeks to avoid a paradox which vitiates the philosophy of time: Thepast does not exist because it is over. The future does not exist because ithas not happened yet. The present does not exist because there is no timeinterval between the past and the future. Nevertheless, the appearance ofall three temporal ekstases as real is existentially compelling.Sartre’s solution, in the chapter of Being and Nothingness reproducedbelow, is to argue that past present and future all exist, but as an originalsynthesis. He means that past, present and future can not exist in abstraction