JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Temporality165from one another but only as a temporal whole. Any atomistic account oftime that fails to recognise this will fail.Although past, present and future all are, they exist in three radicallydifferent fashions. The past belongs to that fixed, inert and passive mode ofbeing that Sartre calls being-in-itself. The present is part of the spontaneous,free, subjective, conscious, manner of being called being-for-itself. Thebeing of the future is neither being-in-itself nor being-for-itself. The futureexists as pure possibility. Nevertheless, being-for-itself has an ontologicallyprivileged role in the constitution of temporality. The past is someone’spast. The present is someone’s present and the future is someone’s future.If there were no subjective conscious beings, there would be no past, presentor future.To see this, we need to draw a sharp distinction between past, presentand future on the one hand and before, simultaneous with and after, on theother. If there is past, present and future then there is before, simultaneouswith and after but from the fact that there is before, simultaneous with andafter it does not follow that there is past, present and future. ‘Past’ means‘before now’ and ‘future’ means ‘after now’ but ‘now’ means roughly ‘whenI am’, or ‘simultaneous with this thought/utterance of “now”’. A historicalfigure, say Louis XIV, uses ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ indexed to his time.We use them indexed to ours. ‘Before’, ‘simultaneous with’, and ‘after’ maybe used to denote an ordering that arguably obtains independently of tense.Sartre says that I am my past and I am my future, and the for-itself can bedefined in terms of presence to being. My being is therefore intimately boundup with my being temporal. I am my past because I am, so far, the totality ofmy exercised choices in situations. I am my future because that is what mypresent possibilities consist in. The being of the for-itself is present in bothsenses of ‘present’. I am present in the sense that now is when I am but Iam present in the sense of in the presence of being. In the first sense, I ampresent in a sense that contrasts with past and future. In the second sense,I am present in a sense that contrasts with absent.Sartre’s insistence that the ekstases of time are inseparable incorporatesHusserl’s distinction between ‘retention’ and ‘protention’ but Sartre rejectsHusserl’s view that subjective time may be even methodologically separatedfrom objective time.In this he endorses the Heideggerian doctrine that our being isfundamentally being-in-the world.