8
Bad faith in human life:
Being and Nothingness
Temporality: the phenomenology
Sartre conceives of time as an original synthesis, a totality with secondary
structures and not a series of “instances” that Merleau-Ponty ascribes to
him as a kind of “pointillism” of temporality.^1 These secondary structures,
the past, present and future, must be considered in light of the synthetic
whole of which they are parts. So begins his reflections with a phenomen-
ology of these three temporal dimensions. These descriptive analyses are
pursued under the totalizing eye of the ontology of world and circle of
self just considered. So the past is initially “mine”; it presents itself as the
past of my present and my future. This “myness” “is not a subjective
nuance that would shatter the memory; it is an ontological relation which
unites the past to the present” (BN 110 ). That relation is not external, it is
internal and constitutive. I “am” my past, I don’t simply have it. But this
past has an identity and a permanence that is ever increasing as I continue
to live. Its ontology is factical; it assumes the features of being-in-itself.
So I am my past in the manner of not-being it. This is the temporal
dimension of the facticity of my being-in-situation. “Facticity” and
“Past,” Sartre assures us, are two words to indicate one and the same
thing (BN 118 ). But, unlike other aspects of my facticity, I am my past
under the aspect of “having been” it. As Sartre explains: “If already I am
no longer what I was, it is still necessary that I have to be so in the unity
of a nihilating synthesis which I myself sustain in being” (BN 117 ).
If the past is in-itself, the present is for-itself, but paradoxically so.
If one were to rid it of what it is not in either direction (that is, that past
(^1) SeeAD 105 and 117.
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