JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

166Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsBEING AND NOTHINGNESSTemporalityI. The PastWhat then is the meaning of “was”? We see first of all that it is transitive. If I say,“Paul is fatigued,” one might perhaps argue that the copula has an ontological value,one might perhaps want to see there only an indication of inherence. But when we say,“Paul was fatigued,” the essential meaning of the “was” leaps to our eyes: the presentPaul is actually responsible for having had this fatigue in the past. If he were notsustaining this fatigue with his being, he would not even have forgotten that state;there would be rather a “no-longer-being” strictly identical with a “not-being.” Thefatigue would be lost. The present being therefore is the foundation of its own past;and it is the present’s character as a foundation which the “was” manifests. But we arenot to understand that the present founds the past in the mode of indifference andwithout being profoundly modified by it. “Was” means that the present being has tobe in its being the foundation of its past while being itself this past What does thismean? How can the present be the past?The crux of the question lies evidently in the term “was,” which, serving asintermediary between the present and the past, is itself neither wholly present norwholly past. In fact it can be neither the one nor the other since in either case it wouldbe contained inside the tense which would denote its being. The term “was” indicatesthe ontological leap from the present into the past and represents an original synthesisof these two temporal modes. What must we understand by this synthesis?I see first that the term “was” is a mode of being. In this sense I am my past. I donot have it; I am it. A remark made by someone concerning an act which I performedyesterday or a mood which I had does not leave me indifferent; I am hurt or flattered,I protest or I let it pass; I am touched to the quick. I do not dissociate myself from mypast. Of course, in time I can attempt this dissociation; I can declare that “I am nolonger what I was,” argue that there has been a change, progress. But this is a matter ofa secondary reaction which is given as such. To deny my solidarity of being with mypast at this or that particular point is to affirm it for the whole of my life. At my limit,at that infinitesimal instant of my death, I shall be no more than my past. It alone willdefine me. This is what Sophocles wants to express in the Trachiniae when he hasDeianeira say, “It is a proverb current for a long time among men that one cannot passjudgment on the life of mortals and say if it has been happy or unhappy, until their