Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 The childhood of a genius
- 2 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher
- 3 Teaching in the lycée, 1931–1939
- 4 First triumph: The Imagination
- 5 Consciousness as imagination
- 6 The necessity of contingency: Nausea
- 7 The war years, 1939–1944
- 8 Bad faith in human life: Being and Nothingness
- 9 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation
- 10 Ends and means: existential ethics
- 11 Means and ends: political existentialism
- 12 A theory of history: Search for a Method
- 13 Individuals and groups: Critique of Dialectical Reason
- 14 A second ethics?
- 15 Existential biography: Flaubert and others
- Conclusion: the Sartrean imaginary, chastened but indomitable
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
8 - Bad faith in human life: Being and Nothingness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 The childhood of a genius
- 2 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher
- 3 Teaching in the lycée, 1931–1939
- 4 First triumph: The Imagination
- 5 Consciousness as imagination
- 6 The necessity of contingency: Nausea
- 7 The war years, 1939–1944
- 8 Bad faith in human life: Being and Nothingness
- 9 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation
- 10 Ends and means: existential ethics
- 11 Means and ends: political existentialism
- 12 A theory of history: Search for a Method
- 13 Individuals and groups: Critique of Dialectical Reason
- 14 A second ethics?
- 15 Existential biography: Flaubert and others
- Conclusion: the Sartrean imaginary, chastened but indomitable
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Temporality: the phenomenology
Sartre conceives of time as an original synthesis, a totality with secondary structures and not a series of “instances” that Merleau-Ponty ascribes to him as a kind of “pointillism” of temporality. These secondary structures, the past, present and future, must be considered in light of the synthetic whole of which they are parts. So begins his reflections with a phenomenology of these three temporal dimensions. These descriptive analyses are pursued under the totalizing eye of the ontology of world and circle of self just considered. So the past is initially “mine”; it presents itself as the past of my present and my future. This “myness” “is not a subjective nuance that would shatter the memory; it is an ontological relation which unites the past to the present” (BN 110). That relation is not external, it is internal and constitutive. I “am” my past, I don’t simply have it. But this past has an identity and a permanence that is ever increasing as I continue to live. Its ontology is factical; it assumes the features of being-in-itself. So I am my past in the manner of not-being it. This is the temporal dimension of the facticity of my being-in-situation. “Facticity” and “Past,” Sartre assures us, are two words to indicate one and the same thing (BN 118). But, unlike other aspects of my facticity, I am my past under the aspect of “having been” it. As Sartre explains: “If already I am no longer what I was, it is still necessary that I have to be so in the unity of a nihilating synthesis which I myself sustain in being” (BN 117).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- SartreA Philosophical Biography, pp. 196 - 229Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014