“Original Temporality and Psychic Temporality: Reflection”
Sartre now distinguished two forms of reflection, each with its
own temporality. Pure reflection is that awareness of the circle of
selfness, the “simple presence of the reflective For-itself to the For-
itself reflected-on.” The unity between reflective and reflected-on is
one of being, not of knowledge, which would objectify it as in-itself.
The reflectiveis the reflected-on “in the complete immanence of
the for-itself.” Of course, this “unity” is a unity-in-duality since the
“inner life” of the for-itself, so to speak, is an internal negation, an
action of “othering” without objectifying. Resurrecting an expression
he had employed for imaging consciousness inThe Imaginary,Sartre
speaks of the reflected-on as a “quasi-object” for such reflection.
Pure reflection is the original form of reflection and its ideal form.
Though it serves as the foundation on which “impure reflection”
appears, “it is also that which is never first given; and it is that which
must be won by a sort of katharsis” (BN 155 ). Some have likened it
to Husserl’s “transcendental reduction” though Sartre later insisted
that he had never pursued the discussion of pure reflection in any detail.
The reference to “katharsis,” however, is supported by his occasional
mention of “purifying” reflection, as if the effort must rid conscious-
ness of any remnant of the ontological mirage of the Self and, in effect
as a requirement for authenticity.^7 Purifying reflection articulates
the “original temporality” that we have been discussing thus far. It is
the temporality which weare(BN 159 ). Such reflection discovers
temporality “only in its own original nonsubstantiality, in its refusal
to be in-itself.” But it is consciousnessofthe three ekstatic dimensions:
a nonthetic consciousness (of) flow and a thetic consciousnesofdur-
ation (BN 157 ).
This is admittedly dense and convoluted. Even Sartre had misgivings
about it, as he explained in an interview with Michel Contat and Michel
Rybalka almost thirty years later. After he admits the impossibility of a
successfulself-analysisbecause numerous assumptions and biases enter
the picture so long as the subject is still conscious, his interviewers
object: “When you say this, aren’t you saying that what you called pure
(^7) For references to “purifying reflection” elsewhere inBN, consider, for example: “Lack is
accessible only to the purifying reflection, with which we are not here concerned” ( 199 ).
“Original Temporality and Psychic Temporality: Reflection” 201