Sartre concludes this phenomenology of time with a well-known line:
“In short, the For-itself is free, and its Freedom is to itself its own limit.
To be free is to be condemned to be free” (BN 129 ).
Temporality: the ontology
Static temporalitySartre begins his examination of the “secondary ekstatic structures” of
temporality by distinguishing two points of view – each valid but
incomplete. The “static” attends to the “Ekstatic concept of time intro-
duced into the literature by Heidegger.”^2 As the word suggests, the three
dimensions of time, past, present and future, are ways of “standing out”
from simple identity of the in-itself. “The meaning of the ekstasis is
distance from self ” (BN 137 ). But that is precisely how the circle of
selfness and the for-itself were described. In other words, time is of the
“essence” of the for-itself (Das Wesen ist was gewesen ist), except that the
“essence of Dasein is it existence” (BN 35 ;EN 72 ).^3 Sartre follows
Heidegger in speaking of these temporal “ekstases” in nontemporal
terms – a perennial challenge for any theory of time. Thus the Heideg-
gerian triad of “thrownness” or “facticity” (the already), immersion or
fallenness (alongside entities in the world) and existence or projection
(the not yet) constitutes the model. As we have observed, Sartre adopts
“facticity” and “project” for the past and the future but replaces immer-
sion amongst things with “presence to” in the sense just described.
In Sartre’s ontology, these are three dimensions of the For-itself ’s
temporal “dispersion” (its othering).
The temporal has traditionally been viewed as dispersive – “you
cannot step into the same river twice” (Heraclitus). And Sartre speaks
(^2) That it bears an unacknowledged Kierkegaardian provenance has been argued, for example,
by John Caputo. See his “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a Hermeneutic Phenom-
enology,” inA Companion to Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” ed. Joseph Kockelmans
(Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of
3 America,^1986 ),^121.
Sartre is ambiguous on thus understanding the essence of human reality. As we shall see,
there is an ontological meaning of the Sartrean essence of human reality that identifies it with
its past (its previous choices). In this ontological sense, “existence precedes essence” is true
by definition, if one takes “existence” as synonymous with the future of human reality and
“essence” as denoting its past. or its facticity.
198 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness