JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Temporality167death.” This is also the meaning of that sentence of Malraux’ which we quoted earlier.“Death changes life into Destiny.” Finally this is what strikes the Believer when herealizes with terror that at the moment of death the chips are down, there remains nota card to play. Death reunites us with ourselves. Eternity has changed us into ourselves.At the moment of death we are; that is, we are defenceless before the judgments ofothers. They can decide in truth what we are; ultimately we have no longer any chanceof escape from what an all knowing intelligence could do. A last hour repentance is adesperate effort to crack all this being which has slowly congealed and solidifiedaround us, a final leap to dissociate ourselves from what we are. In vain. Death fixesthis leap along with the rest; it does no more than to enter into combination with whathas preceded it, as one factor among others, as one particu]ar determination which isunderstood only in terms of the totality. By death the for-itself is changed forever intoan in-itself in that it has slipped entirely into the past. Thus the past is the evergrowing totality of the in-itself which we are.Nevertheless so long as we are not dead, we are not this in-itself in the mode ofidentity. We have to be it. Ordinarily a grudge against a man ceases with his death; thisis because he has been reunited with his past; he is it without, however, being responsiblefor it. So long as he lives, he is the object of my grudge; that is, I reproach him for hispast not only in so far as he is it but in so far as he reassumes it at each instant andsustains it in being, in so far as he is responsible for it. It is not true that the grudge fixesthe man in what he was; otherwise it would survive death. It is addressed to the livingman who in his being is freely what he was. I am my past and if I were not, my pastwould not exist any longer either for me or for anybody. It would no longer have anyrelation with the present. That certainly does not mean that it would not be but onlythat its being would be undiscoverable. I am the one by whom my past arrives in thisworld. But it must be understood that I do not give being to it. In other words it doesnot exist as “my” representation. It is not because I “represent” my past that it exists.But it is because I am my past that it enters into the world, and it is in terms of itsbeing-in-the-world that I can by applying a particular psychological process representit to myself.The past is what I have to be, and yet its nature is different from that of mypossibles. The possible, which also I have to be, remains as my concrete possible, thatwhose opposite is equally possible—although to a less degree. The past, on thecontrary, is that which is without possibility of any sort; it is that which has consumedits possibilities. I have to be that which no longer depends on my being-able-to-be,that which is already in itself all which it can be. The past which I am, I have to be with