Sartre's second century

24 Chapter Two
being what it is", from the matter of the past, for which a different
dialectical relationship holds: "I can escape the past only by not being
what / am [...] the former for-itself undergoes an essential modification
[...]. It is not annihilated, but it is recovered by the in-itself [...]. So the past
has over consciousness all the superiority of substantiality and solidity—of
opacity too—which the in-itself confers upon it." 15 In Sartre's view, none
of this compromises the freedom of the for-itself, for the for-itself is not
identical with its past. On the other hand, its special "nihilating"
relationship to its past shows that it is the self in the form of "what I was"
that is now synthetically bound to the free and present for-itself. To the
extent that we are time, Sartre argues, "we are something in another mode
than the for-itself'. 16 And to the extent that we are something in another
mode than the for-itself, we bear a relationship to our past that combines
that translucent consciousness of our freedom with a penumbral shadow of
the in-itself nature of our past that can play the role of a condition for the
possibility of a responsibility for our past. Our past belongs to our freedom
in a way that differentiates past actions from present transcendent givens.
"Time", Sartre claims, "is the opaque limit of consciousness." Moreover,
as an "indiscernible opacity", time eludes the transparency of
consciousness, for if the for-itself is transparent to itself by virtue of its
nothingness, "to the extent that we are time, we are something in another
mode than that of the for-itself." 17
Since we can now speak of a "structural", if not "substantial", bond
between my present and my past, an element of continuity between my
past actions and my present situation can serve as basis for the ontology of
responsibility. The recognition of a distinctive ontological complicity
between what I am and what I have been enables Sartre to state: "/ have
become a situation for myself. In this way, / am in my character and my
work. Beginning from a situation that is not-me in relation to me, I have
transformed itself into me." 18
It is outside the scope of the present discussion to go beyond the
suggestion that these notebook entries prefigure the enhanced dialectic of
the for-itself and in-itself that is distinctive of the opening pages of the
Critique of Dialectical Reason. It is also outside the scope of this
discussion to document how Sartre's reflections on temporality and the
for-itself might have served as an ontological prolegomena to the later
Notebook entries concerning the life of William II. At this point it will
15 Ibid., 213.
16 Ibid., 209.
17 Ibid.
18 Sartre, Notebooks, 121.