or nonaccessory reflection inBeing and Nothingness– which is a require-
ment for authenticity – is impossible?” Sartre responds:
You know that I never described this kind of reflection; I said that it could exist,
but I only showed examples of accessory reflection. And later I discovered that
nonaccessory reflection was no different from the accessory and immediate way of
looking at things but was the critical work one can do on oneself during one’s entire
life, throughpraxis.^8
Referring to concepts introduced in theCritique of Dialectical Reason,
Sartre adds: “Finally, here is an additional reason having to do with
the totalizing method itself: it is impossible to totalize a living man”
(L/S 122 ).
Even inBNitself, Sartre admits that what matters to him is the
description of impure reflection inasmuch as it constitutes and reveals
psychic temporality. Such temporality belongs to empirical psychology –
the study of the Ego as “I” and “Me” of consciousness. Like every
conscious act, accessory or impure reflection is intentional and is
thetic consciousness of its object while being nonthetic or implicit
awareness of itself. The phenomenological and the contrasting
“empirical” dimensions of Emotionsand The Imaginaryexemplified
psychic temporality. “By Psyche we understand the Ego, its states, its
qualities, and its acts” (BN 162 ). It is a “transcendent” object for
reflective consciousness; as such, the Psychic possesses a kind of
“inertia” that allows it to be apprehended as related to things “in
the world,” even though it is not on the same plane as these existents
(BN 166 ). As Sartre remarks: “Its essential difference from original
temporality is that it is while original temporality [as non-being]
temporalizes itself ” (an expression reminiscent of Heidegger’s “noth-
ing nothings” meant to underscore the sui generischaracter of the
dynamic phenomenon in question). Accordingly, psychic time can be
constituted only by the past, with the future understood only as a past
that will come after the present past; this is common sense time as a
series of “nows.” But the evidence which empirical psychology
(^8) “On the Family Idiot,” interview with Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka in 1971 (L/S
121 – 122 )
202 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness