space, like potentiality and instrumentality, like universal time itself in
the form of totalities in perpetual disintegration.
We know that the past functions as the in-itself (as Facticity for any
situation) as identical with itself in contrast to the for-itself. There is
only one past, which is the past of being or theobjectivepastinwhich
I was and which I flee.
This means that there is a coincidence for only one of the temporal dimensions
between the ekstatic temporality which I have to be and the time of the world as a
pure given nothingness. It is through the past that I belong to universal temporality;
it is through the present and the future that I escape from it.
(BN 208 )
The presentSartre points to motion as distinct from becoming as a necessary condi-
tion for the For-itself to apprehend the present dimension of universal
time. He believes that his ontology/metaphysics of nothingness can
resolve a problem that has challenged philosophers since Zeno set forth
his famous paradoxes of motion.^9 As “the being of a being which is
exterior to itself,” it is motion’s trajectory that reveals its evanescent
unity-in-otherness to the witnessing For-itself. It offers the For-itself “an
image– projected on the level of the in-itself – of a being which has to be
what it is not and to not-be what it is” (BN 213 , emphasis added). But
this image of exteriority to itself, while “realizing universal time,” does
so from the dimension of the in-itself, nihilated by ekstatic temporality of
the For-itself. In other words, the “present” in this moving image is
subject to the infinite divisibility of its absolute exteriority. The failure to
distinguish this “Present” of universal time from its ontological founda-
tion in the internal negations of ekstatic temporality of the For-itself is
behind the criticism by Merleau-Ponty and others of Sartre’s temporal
“pointillism.”
(^9) Demonstrating the unintelligibility of motion, this follower of Parmenides proposed several
paradoxes, the most famous of which were those of the arrow that at one moment between
bow and target had to be stationary and the race between Achilles and the tortoise, given the
slightest head start to the tortoise, since the intervening space between the two competitors
was infinitely divisible and so Achilles would require an infinite time to traverse it. Aristotle
describes and refutes these and two other arguments in hisPhysicsBkvi, ch. 2 , 233 a, 21 ff.
204 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness