Sartre's second century

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 21
marked by temporality in a way that is only glossed over by this new form
of immanence:
All immanence is a dream state. Even the Heideggerian immanence, since
being rediscovers itself as possibilities beyond the world. And I am well
aware that there is time between the projecting being and the projected
possibilities. But as this time is read backwards, it loses its separating
virtue and ceases to be anything but the substance of Dasein's unity with
itself. 8
It may be noted in defence of Heidegger that Being and Time is
concerned primarily with Dasein's transcendental structures. As a result,
Sartre may be confusing structure with process. To say that Dasein's
possibilities are structurally contained in Dasein may not be to deny the
reality of the "there is time" but only serves to maintain the unity of lived
temporality at the level of ontological analysis. However, Sartre's own
analysis of "situation" in Being and Nothingness is subject to a criticism
parallel to that which he directs against Heidegger. To say that the
nihilation that results in the fact that "I am my past in the mode of not
being it" is singly conjoined with my negation of the present situation as it
is given to me, is to suggest incorrectly that my relation to my past is a
relationship of the same kind to something that is transcendent to me in the
sense in which the present given is transcendent to me. Yet my very
temporality ("there is time") would imply that my past is related to me in a
manner that is distinct from my relationship to my present. The
"immanence" of the nihilating nature of the for-itself abstracts from this
important difference.
Sartre's comments on Heidegger are followed later in the War Diaries
by an important discussion of the relationship between temporality and the
for-itself in which alternatives to the ontology of Being and Time are
proposed. Time, Sartre notes, is of a different nature than the in-itself. It is
also of a different nature than the for-itself. The passage in which these
claims occur deserves extended citation:
In La Nausee, I assert that the past is not; and earlier I tried to reduce
memory to a true fiction. In my lectures I used to exaggerate the share of
reconstruction in remembrance, because reconstruction operates in the
present. This incomprehension perfectly matched my lack of solidarity
with myself, which led me to judge my dead past insolently from the
vantage-point of my present. The difficulties of a theory of memory,
combined with the influence of Husserl, decided me to endow the past with
Ibid.