considers is only probable, not certain, much less apodictic (as for
some phenomenological accounts). Only the latter shares in the trans-
parency of consciousness itself. We have already witnessed his discus-
sion of the “image” in Imaginaire. The psychic object, being the
shadow cast by the For-itself reflected-on, possesses the characteristics
of consciousness in a degraded form.
“The Time of the World”
Universal time comes into the world through the For-itself which is
temporality. But the For-itself is not consciousnessoftemporality except
when it produces itself in the relation “reflective-reflected-on.” In the
unreflective mode, Sartre insists, “the for-itself discovers temporalityon
being – that is, outside. Universal temporality is objective” (BN 204 ).
Still that full objectivity will not be realized until the third basic form
of Being, namely being-for others (pour autrui) enters the scene.
The pastOur discussion of temporality thus far has focused on original temporality,
the ontological temporality which “temporalizes” itself. Sartre now directs
our attention to the time of our everyday experience. First the
Past, specifically, the “abolitions and apparitions” of things. Sartre distin-
guishes the ontological from the metaphysical approach to this issue.
He admits that they “ought to be the object of a purely metaphysical
elucidation, not an ontological one, for we can conceive of their necessity
neither from the standpoint of the structures of being of the For-itself
nor of those of the In-itself. Their existence,” he concludes, “is that of a
contingent and metaphysical fact” (BN 206 ). Sartre is implicitly treading
metaphysical waters anyway when he points out that any “before” or
“after” in the inevitable question “What came first?” (think “Big Bang”)
is misplaced. The very notion of “before” and “after” can arise “only
retrospectively to a world by a For-itself which is its own nothingness
and its own priority” (BN 207 ). The most we can expect with such a world
is the quasi-after of a “quasi-succession.” To complete this “metaphysical”
finesse of metaphysics, Sartre offers the same response to the origin of
the principle of causality. He concludes that “the ambiguity of apparition
and abolition comes from the fact that they are given, like the world, like
“The Time of the World” 203