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The Reality and Unreality of Time - an Existential Phenomenological Analysis

‘Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime’, wrote John Donne, ‘Nor hours, days, months,

which are the rags of time’;1 that is, they are the divisions of time imposed upon a reality in

itself timeless2 and known only to an omniscient spectator, God, that can see past, present and

future, all at once.3 But when Macbeth is deliberating on a murder he is about to commit, he

proclaims: ‘but this blow/Might be the be-all and the end-all! - here,/But here, upon this bank

and shoal of time,/We'd jump the life to come’.4 The image now is of time as a narrow

sandbar, the present, between two boundless oceans, the past and the future.5 Such poetic

conceits raise two concerns about the nature of time; how time appears, and what it is. For

Macbeth, the temporal order is real enough; we do fear future time, if only because our own

deaths await us there. And time as it appears is not illusory for Donne, because whatever it is

it can be measured, though the temporal order still belongs to the world of appearance. But is

there really such a thing as time? McTaggart thought not, while acknowledging that it

‘doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements

which involve its reality are erroneous’.6

In this essay, rather than denying the reality of time, thus reducing poetry to idle prattle, I

argue for a theory of time that is paradoxical, that time is both real and not real, because time

unfolds itself7 within a singular element of reality, namely, consciousness; an element that is

itself contradictory.8 That is, I present a critical analysis of Sartre’s thesis that

1 ‘The Sun Rising’, in John Donne, The Complete English Poems (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 80. 2 Timeless in that the passage of time is an illusion, although illusions are themselves temporal; but timeless can

mean without change; ideal (mathematical) objects are thus timeless. 3 Eternalism: all points in time are equally real. 4 William Shakespeare, Macbeth (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 69. 5 Presentism: only the present is real. 6 J. M. E. McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, in The Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1993), (pp. 23 – 34), p. 23. 7 Something existing in time is not static, that is, it has a temporal property; an initial assumption amenable to

subsequent modification. (See page 3). 8 See note 21.

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‘[consciousness] which separates human reality from itself [a contradiction] is at the origin

of time’.9 My conclusion, however, is that this leads to a paradox that Sartre would not

recognize; that the past, existing only in respect of consciousness, is subject to change.

The essay has the following structure: 1. Methodology: The Phenomenology of Time .

Phenomenology systematically reflects on (temporal) structures of consciousness, and

(temporal) phenomena. Phenomenology (how time appears) and ontology (what time is) are

to be distinguished, though they do correlate. 2. Making Sense of Time, errors arise through

thinking about time non-relatively to a (temporal) consciousness, and so 3. Reflecting on

Time, I reflect instead on how time appears to me, and then, 4. Living Through Time, I can

reflect on what it means to exist in time, from which, 5. The Paradox of Time, it would

appear that a past that exists in respect to consciousness can be changed. This is a

contradiction at the heart of Sartre’s theory of time, but, 6. Conclusion, as it is a

contradiction that I have merely described phenomenologically, it is open to revision.

1. Methodology: The Phenomenology of Time

‘Philosophy’, Husserl wrote, is ‘absolutely self-responsible’,10 and must proceed in

accordance with evidence it alone produces. The goal dictates the choice of method, but I do

not assume at the outset that such a goal is possible. I can, however, begin with a general

idea about time that is ‘in a state of indeterminate fluid generality’.11 At the beginning any

assumptions I have about time are fluid, but my understanding of the meaning of such ideas

may change as the enquiry moves forward.

9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 102. Whether consciousness is the

origin of time and time is grounded in consciousness make the same claim is doubtful; the first is implausible;

the second claims that temporality correlates with a structure of consciousness, whether or not consciousness

exists. . 10 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988),

p. 6. 11 Ibid., p. 8.

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the intending the intended

Fig. 1

The Intentionality Thesis

There is a distinction to be made, however, between phenomenology, (how time appears),

and ontology, (what time is), a distinction dependent on the concepts of intentionality,

facticity, and transcendence. Intentionality is the thesis that every act of consciousness is

consciousness of something. I am thinking about Shakespeare, (Fig. 1); imagining I am him,

wishing I could write like him. These intentional acts, a tending towards an (intentional)

object, have differing modes of directedness, but both exemplify a positional12 consciousness;

an act of consciousness takes, or posits, an object.

Consciousness reaches out beyond itself to something else; the object of an act of

consciousness is transcendent to that act in that it is not wholly contained in and confined to

that one act of consciousness. ‘All consciousness is positional’, says Sartre, ‘in that it

transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing’.13

The intended object is transcendent to the act of intending; the way things appear is not

reducible to the way things are, or ‘the phenomenon of being [is not] identical with the being

of phenomena’.14

12 Ibid. 9, p. xxvii. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. xxiv.

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Positional consciousness knows its objects; but the way in which things appear to it is not

reducible to the way things are. The reality of what is exterior (the being of the

phenomenon) is not reducible to my thoughts concerning a thing as an existing thing (the

phenomenon of being). But as the way things are is an object of knowledge, being itself is

not knowledge, as the way things appear to consciousness is not completely reducible to the

way things are.15 Phenomenology and ontology are not the same; to think otherwise would

be to estimate being in terms of knowing.

Added to this there is the brute fact of my existence; however many generalities may be

accrued concerning my particularity, I am no mere consequence of them; there is indeed no

reason why I should be here at all, living this particular life; these definite and unnecessary

facts about myself constitute my facticity.16 And transcendence and facticity together

constitute temporality,17 for time consists of past, present, and future, understood in terms of

whatever it is that has them, myself for instance. I have my own past, which has the

peculiarity of being over with, but does not define me,18 because I have a future that is not

restricted by it. I may even infer the existence of time from the nature of consciousness, for

this latter is not a thing, but a constantly changing (flowing) process.

My objective is to account for the flow of time through the flow of consciousness. Time is

not static,19 nor to be conceptualized spatially, in such representations as time’s arrow, that

points from earlier to later, (Fig. 2). 1616 is earlier than 1631, Shakespeare died before

15 My consciousness is not reducible to my perceptions (of phenomena), and my awareness of any object (as

phenomena) reveals the being of existent things. When I perceive (in a broad sense) a temporal phenomena,

e.g., enduring, the being of my perceiving-consciousness is not reducible to my perception of enduring; (but my

systematic reflection does begin with phenomena, the perceived-enduring. See p. 21). 16 Sartre’s term for ‘a pure apprehension of the self as a factual existence’. (Ibid., p. 338). 17 It may be objected that even if transcendence and facticity are properties of mine, they may, along with my

other properties, be spatial, or causal, rather than temporal. But temporal relations are internal; unlike external

spatial (and causal) relations. Internal relations are definitive. An external relation exists between me and this

chair, unless this chair is present to me as I sit on it, (see note 49), or as I envisage sitting on it tomorrow,

(internal relations). 18 All the facts that constitute my past do not give a complete account of who or what I am, unlike non-

conscious entities that have neither memory nor foresight. (See note 28). 19 See note 7.

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Donne; but the future also becomes the present, the present becomes the past. Time, unlike

space, is a dimension of change;20 it shares this mode of existence with consciousness itself.21

A: 1616 B: 1631

Earlier Later

Shakespeare dies Donne dies

Fig. 2

The Arrow of Time

Time, therefore, has at least an appearance, (phenomena), albeit one we cannot evade. At

this present moment my act of consciousness transcends itself forward into my future; my

transcendence is my temporality.22 And as ‘every subjective process’, as Husserl said, ‘has

its internal temporality’,23 then consciousness is a process, not a thing; a continuous flow of

intentional experiences each with their own internal temporal structures. And as time has an

appearance, we can reflect systematically on the phenomena of time. To proceed otherwise

would incline us toward paradoxes on the nature of time; for instance, that time is illusory,

and unreal.

20 One may deny time flows without denying things change, but time’s elements, past, present and future, like

those of consciousness, are internally connected, (see note 17). Time thereby flows, though seemingly only

forwards. 21 Because of its peculiar (internal) relational structures. If consciousness is at a distance from its objects,

(intentionality), it is at a distance from itself, and breaks the law of identity, ∀x(x = x). Therefore, ‘I am not

what I am’, (Ibid. 9, p. 64), and ‘I am what I am not’, (Ibid., p. 67). But I am internally related to what I am not,

(my past and my future, see note 17). 22 My past I cannot change, but the sense I give to it is up to me. 23 Ibid. 10, p. 41. See note 17.

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2. Making Sense of Time

Time is grounded in consciousness.24 Suppose this to be false and think of time a) as a

receptacle,25 (fig. 3), in which worldly events are sequential,26 or b) as a an aggregate of

times, (Fig. 4), of instants, yesterday, today, tomorrow, etc.

Horace Chaucer Shakespeare Donne dies dies dies dies 8 B.C. 1400 A.D. 1616 A.D. 1631 A.D.

Fig. 3

Time the Container

But if time is a receptacle in which the events of the world take place sequentially, the

largest portion of the receptacle is non-existent. And if time is an aggregate of instants, the

implication is that only the present instant exists; and all other instants, being non-existent,

cannot be parts of a whole. The present becomes the past, but the past is never present, and

does not exist, not even in a passive condition. The future will become the present, but is

never present itself, and does not exist. But the present exists only as an imperceptible

24 A theory of time must account for the myness of my past and my future; but time also transcends

consciousness. Original time exists in a pure (or ideal) form, even if there are no conscious beings. See note

66. 25 Isaac Newton’s view. 26 The ‘time of the world’, (Ibid. 9, p. 204). See note 62.

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moment between the past and the future; so short it cannot be said to endure for any length of

time at all.

?

1616

Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ‘…the rest is silence’

19 April 20 April 21 April 22 April 23 April (Hamlet)

Fig. 4

Time the Aggregate of Times

But time is real enough; it has its own effects. ‘Time’s glory is…to feed oblivion with

decay of things’,27 etc. But with the above views most of time does not exist, and is not real.

What is required is a view of time that explains its evident reality; or explains it away, like

McTaggart who argued that the existence of time involves a contradiction. It is apparent that

time is relative to events, and events in time can be spoken of as past, present, or future, (A-

series properties; time has a separate existence); or as being before, after, or simultaneous

with one another, (B-series properties; time is relational). The first cannot be reduced to the

second, as the second cannot account for the passage of time. And the second depends on the

first, for the first explains change.

McTaggart argues that a) B-series relations are temporal relations, b) there cannot be

temporal relations unless there is change, c) there cannot be change unless there is an A-

series ordering, therefore, d) there cannot be a B-series unless there is an A-series. But the A-

series is contradictory, what was once present is now past, etc. And B-series expressions are

27 William Shakespeare, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, in The Narrative Poems (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 105 –

162, (p. 136).

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relative; if they express a truth they are always true, (it is forever true that Shakespeare died

before Donne).

However, it is an assumption that A-series properties are contradictory. McTaggart argues

that if any event has one of the A-series properties of past, present, and future, it has them all,

and this is impossible, as they are incompatible properties. And as nothing has an A-series

property (because they are contradictory), nothing exists in time.

But let us suppose the A-series to be grounded in consciousness,28 its events ordered as my

past, my present, or my future, such relations forever changing as my time flows by.29 If past,

present and future are relative to the being of which it is the past, present or future, like

myself, then such (internally) relational changes are always relative, to me. In relation to me,

what is done cannot be undone, and my future is open, etc. My past is prologue, my future an

undiscovered country, and my present consciousness escapes the confines of the present

instant, the Cartesian ‘I think’:

[consciousness]…[cannot be kept] within the substantial limits of the instantaneity of the Cartesian

cogito…If the cogito refuses instaneity…this can happen only within a temporal surpassing.30

If my past, present and future are grounded in consciousness, these temporal elements

interpenetrate each other in a contradictory A-series that flows, as each particular act of

28 I am arguing for this particular take on the A-series, but opponents of a dynamic view of time, (time as

becoming), ask how fast events travel against a background of past, present and future. For ‘in the passage of

time a measurable quantity changes at an unmeasurable rate’. (Eric T. Olson, ‘The Passage of Time’, in The

Routledge Companion to Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 440 – 448, (p. 446)). But as St.

Augustine said: ‘It is in you, O mind of mine, that I measure the periods of time’, (Saint Augustine, The

Confessions (New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), p. 236). More specifically, measuring time is

measuring that which remains fixed in memory, and as mental processes are physical processes, time passes at

the rate of those physical processes. 29 Grounding time in consciousness can account for the flow of time in a way that, for example, Prior’s tensed

logic cannot. ‘Putting a verb into the past or future tense is’, according to Prior, ‘the same…as adding an adverb

to the sentence’. (Arthur N. Prior, ‘Changes in Events and Changes in Things’, in The Philosophy of Time

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 35 – 46, (p. 40)). Tensed facts help us understand how tensed

statements reflect reality, namely, their truth depends on their correspondence to facts about time. But tensed

logic cannot explain how ‘it was the case that p, but is not now the case that p’ expresses the flow of time. 30 Ibid. 9, p. 104 - 105.

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consciousness contains an internal temporality; they are each past, present and future all at

once. This is contradictory, but then consciousness is contradictory, and time is both real and

unreal.

3. Reflecting on Time

Although that has yet to be properly established. But having given sense to the phenomena

of time I can now subject the primary manifestations of temporality to a phenomenological

description. To begin with, the past is a particular past of a particular present; it acquires its

particular meaning through its relation to this particular present, it does not explain the

present. But it can only appear in this way for a being that is its own past:31 ‘only those

beings have a past which are such that in their being, their past being is in question, those

beings who have to be their past’.32

It may be objected that if I agonize ‘I was once in love’, this is a past that is mine, so how

can it be in addition a present that is mine? Is this not contradictory; I was once in love, and

this is my past? But if I am my past there is no contradiction. And if I aspire to disown a

particularly shameful episode from my past, I merely certify the encumbrances my past

places on me as a consequence of my instinctive assumption of responsibility for the whole

of my past. ‘At my limit [of my life]’, as Sartre said, ‘at that infinitesimal instant of my

death, I shall be no more than my past. It alone will define me’.33

An example will clarify this point. Shakespeare’s Hotspur, after being mortally wounded

by Prince Hal, declaims:

31 See note 24. 32 Ibid. 9, p. 114. 33 Ibid, p. 115. This contradicts an earlier thought, but at this initial stage I am thinking fluidly.

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I better brook the loss of brittle life

Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;34

Fig. 5

‘Time Must Have a Stop’

For Hotspur, ‘proud titles’ he would have won had he lived are neither who he was or who he

is; forever headstrong and impulsive, that is what he has been, completely in the past, and that

is what he is; powerless to return to, or to counter, his hot-headedness. As Sartre explains:

Death reunites us with ourselves…At the moment of death we are, that is, we are defenceless before the

judgments of others. They can decide in truth what we are.35

The phenomena of the past here manifests itself as a mode of existence that simply is, neither

active nor passive. An ‘ever growing totality of…[w]hat we are. Nevertheless, so long as we

are not dead, we are not [the past] in the mode of identity. We have to be it’.36 And given

that my past and myself are not in synchronization, my past is something I have to

appropriate. I am not my past insofar as I was my past. And consciousness ‘can assume its

being only by a recovery of that being, which puts it at a distance from that being’.37 To

34 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part One (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1960), p. 158. 35 Ibid. 9, p. 115. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 118.

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appropriate a particular past is to apprehend a past in the mode of a thing I have already

desisted from being. ‘The past is the [facticity] which I am,’ as Sartre puts it, ‘but I am this

[facticity] as surpassed’.38

However, the past is factual in a way peculiar to consciousness alone. My consciousness

cannot enter into my past,39 because my past is facticity. Rather, ‘the past is what I am

without being able to live it. The past is substance’.40 Descartes was mistaken in thinking

consciousness could be substantialized by confining it to a present instant, rather than to a

past instant; thereby transmogrifying it into a substantial thing. It is more exact to say ‘I

think, therefore I was’,41 but then my ‘I think’ cannot effect my ‘I was’. This internal

rupturing, consciousness separating itself from itself,42 makes of consciousness an

inefficacious immaterial thing, a soul.

What that means may be clarified if we consider how this mistake manifests itself in

psychology.43 ‘Psychologists’, Sartre laments, ‘because they contemplated the psychic state

in the past have claimed that consciousness was a quality which could affect the psychic state

without modifying it in its being’.44 A value of mine I regard as a fact, yet I can only ever be

directed toward a value, wishing to be such and such and be conscious. Whereas

consciousness directed toward the past is ‘reapprehended and inundated by [its facticity]’.45

Whereas the past has being, the perpetual lack of being of my value makes me anxious, I

wish to escape from it. And yet my past and my value have this much in common, they both

38 Ibid. 39 I can think about my past, but not enter it. 40 Ibid. 9, p. 119. 41 Ibid. 42 See note 21. 43 In psychoanalysis mistakes are always motivated by past experiences: ‘The first time one forgets an

appointment; the next time, after having made a special resolution not to forget it, one discovers that one has

made a mistake in the day or hour’. (Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York:

Boni & Liveright, 1920), p. 15). Subconsciously, it is an appointment one doesn’t want to keep. 44 Ibid. 9, p. 119. 45 Ibid., p. 120.

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combine my facticity and my consciousness, and to free myself from my anxiety I turn to my

past in order to realize my value there and make it fact.

Brutus, that ‘noblest Roman of them all’, furnishes us with an example of this:

… fare you well at once, for Brutus’ tongue

Hath almost ended his life’s history.

Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest,

That have but laboured to attain this hour.46

As night hangs over his eyes (he sees no future), he justifies the role he chose, that of one

who sacrifices himself for the sake of a higher cause, an agent of political necessity. He has

laboured so, in order that he might find honour (value) in his noble (value again) death. This

is a directedness toward his past in order to realize value there, but any attempt he makes to

justify his present serves only to justify his past.47 By ending his life he transforms his past,

his ‘life’s history’, into a given eternally created by himself.

But whereas the past is complete, the present is present to consciousness, or the present is

the presence of consciousness to something, to factual existents. But ‘it is impossible to

grasp the Present in the form of an instant’, Sartre says, ‘for the instant would be the moment

when the present is’.48 And if the present has to be present to something, and this something

is the sum total of simultaneously existing things, the being of the present is therefore

grounded in consciousness, for only this latter can present the totality of existing things in

this way. Which is to say, for two existents to co-exist, to be present to each other, they need

46 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 229. 47 His claim that suicide is ‘cowardly and vile’, (ibid., p. 217), and his use of suicide to realize value,

exemplifies his inability to justify his present. 48 Ibid. 9, p. 123.

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a witness,49 and for this to be so consciousness must be able to witness itself as present to

things.

Fig. 6

‘Brutus is an Honourable Man’

This is possible because of intentionality; consciousness is present to things in the form of

transcendence, as consciousness directs itself outside itself toward the being of things. This

is an external relation, because for consciousness to reach toward being it is denying it is

itself that being. The attitude consciousness has toward itself is a denial that its objects are

itself, a denial therefore of itself. Consciousness and the world are not two different realities

set side by side, the world appears as denied by a consciousness that refuses to be that world.

Consciousness is thus a ‘witness of itself in the presence of being as not being that being’,50

the being of the world. The present is an escape from being insofar as there is being to

escape from. As Sartre says:

49 Because to be present is to be in the presence of something, and without a witness two simultaneous events or

objects would be related externally. But the being of time is not constituted by the subjectivity of the witness;

the witness is a witness of itself as present to being. 50 Ibid. 9, p. 122.

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[Consciousness] is present to being in the form of flight; the Present is a perpetual flight in the face of

being… the present is not; it makes itself present in the form of flight.51

Jeanson describes the present as ‘the presentification’52 of consciousness. An example will

clarify what this means; Hamlet expounding existentially upon the nature of the human

subject, the latter considered as having ‘such large discourse,/Looking before and after’.53 If

the present ‘has its being outside [consciousness], before and behind’, and ‘behind, it was its

past; and before, it will be its future…. At present it is not what it is (past) and it is what it is

not (future)’,54 then the phenomena of the present is that of absence from the being of

consciousness. But given our power of ‘discourse’, the ability to proceed from premises to

conclusion, Hamlet can lament: ‘How all occasions do inform against me’, (occasions, the

mark of the present), ‘And spur my dull revenge!’55 Dull through ‘thinking too precisely on

the event’;56 an escape from being.

And that which Hamlet is fleeing towards is whatever he is lacking in order to be himself,

but as he can never achieve a complete coincidence with his possibilities, his flight is

permanent. His future, unlike his past, lacks being; the cause of a rift between his present (as

witness to the world) and the instant (simultaneously existing present existents):

There is in my consciousness no moment which is not similarly defined by an internal relation to a future;

when I write,…when I rest, the meaning of my conscious states is always at a distance, down there ,

outside.57

51 Ibid , p, 122 – 123. 52 Francis Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 146. 53 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1982), p. 345. 54 Ibid. 9, p. 123. 55 Ibid., p. 49. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 125.

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Fig. 7

‘Looking Before and After’

Hamlet ‘is defined much more by his end and the terms of his plans than by what we can

know of him if we limit him to the passing moment’.58 That is, Hamlet’s future is to be

understood in terms of future-directed possibilities:

…I am my Future in the constant perspective of the possibility of not being it. Hence that anguish… which

springs from the fact that I am not sufficiently that Future which I have to be and which gives its meaning to

my present: it is because I am a being whose meaning is always problematic.59

The future lacks being, because it can never be realized; if it were realized my future could

foreordain my future consciousness, which is impossible. But with or without being, I sense

the future as a possibilizing presence; that is what the future means.

4. Living Through Time

58 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1950), p. 38. 59 Ibid. 9, pp. 128 – 129.

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Past and future have thus far been accounted for in terms of facticity and transcendence;

whereas the present is present as opposed to past or future (the ‘A’-series), and present is also

present as opposed to absent. A being that has a present is a being that is present to

something; consciousness has a present, because of intentionality; it is forever present to the

world as a witness.

(of)

of

consciousness of

self-consciousness (of)

Fig. 8

Non-Positional Intending

But before proceeding from phenomenology to ontology, an adjustment is needed to this

representation of intentionality. Consciousness, awareness, is also aware of itself, but it

cannot posit itself as an object, because consciousness is conscious of something present to it.

Self-consciousness must also be non-positional,60 (i.e., not positing itself as an object, Fig. 8,

though a more exact representation would put the dotted arrow within the solid one). Every

conscious act of mine has a point of view peculiar to me, and it is this that I am non-

positionally aware of, my point of view with respect to an object. And as consciousness is

not a thing, it is not a thing with a point of view but is the assumption of a point of view.

This is necessary for the object to be at a distance from consciousness and not absorbed by it;

60 Ibid., p. xxix.

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otherwise, were I to perceive Shakespeare, I would not be conscious of Shakespeare, I would

be Shakespeare.

My consciousness

My present

My non-positional intending My positional intending

(My being) (My knowing)

My past My facticity My transcendence My future

Fig. 9

The Ontology of Time

Positional consciousness, however, knows its object; but non-positional consciousness

(which cannot know anything in the absence of an object to know), is my unique point of

view, it is what I am;61 it is my being. I can therefore position my present in my positional

consciousness; whatever I am present to. And I can position my past and my future in my

non-positional consciousness, my being; for such non-positionality consists of both facticity

and transcendence, (Fig. 9).62

It may be objected that, even accepting that my point of view is who I am, this leaves

unexplained how I recognize a particular point of view as mine. And here there is certainly a

problem, which Sartre addresses through a notion of pure reflection, as opposed to impure 61 ‘Every conscious existence exists as consciousness of existing’. (Ibid., Intro, p. xxx). 62 The world has a past and a future in a sense derivative of the sense in which I have them. And I experience

the future as a possibilizing presence because I have possibilities.

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reflection. The latter posits an object from a point of view; the object does not give all it has,

and is misrepresented.63 But pure reflection posits its object from no point of view; and the

object is properly represented.

Quasi- Object

( = )

Fig. 10

Pure Intending

Pure reflection is a difficult notion to comprehend, hence my difficulty in trying to

represent it, (Fig. 10). And when Sartre claims ‘[in pure reflection] the reflected-on is not

wholly an object but a quasi-object for reflection’,64 his positing of something called a ‘quasi-

object’ is certainly suspicious. But we have established that consciousness does not exist in

the world in the same way as other things in the world, though it may try to reflect on itself as

though it did. And if it reflected on itself purely, from no point of view, it would thereby

avoid misrepresenting itself:

…the consciousness reflected-on [in pure reflection] is not presented yet as something outside reflection -

that is, as a being on which one can ‘take a point of view’, in relation to which one can realize a withdrawal,

increase or diminish the distance which separates one from it.65

63 Sartre believes this to be true even of ideal objects, such as those of mathematics , which ‘are revealed to us

with an orientation in relation to other truths, to certain consequences; they are never disclosed with all their

characteristics at once’. (Ibid. 9, p. 155). 64 Ibid., p. 155. 65 Ibid.

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But although I began with intentionality as a fluid assumption, I see no reason to discard it

completely, in a pure reflective act reflecting on the reflected-on from no point of view, for

then the quasi-object of consciousness would be identical with the act that is conscious of it.

However, if all reflection I ever engage in is impure and misrepresents its objects, the ideal of

a pure reflection can assist in the realization that it is an original (pure) temporality66 that

always falls under the purview of an impure consciousness that misrepresents its objects.

5. The Paradox of Time

In this manner temporality suffers an objectification67 from the point of view of such an

impure consciousness. There is a ‘first spontaneous (but not the original) reflective

movement’,68 that is thus far incognizant of the inevitability according to which

consciousness has to be conscious. Which is to say, impure consciousness apprehends its

unreflective self, (its self that is not reflecting on itself), as a self-contained and fully realized

being, but consciousness is not really like that, and as a consequence of this

(mis)apprehension there is a consciousness of an enduring that constitutes a succession of

psychic facts.

The three elements of temporality, past, present, and future, (the A-series), are then

ensnared within these successive states:

66 Pure temporality is not temporality independent of consciousness, but temporality as it would be for pure

reflection, (temporality as being), as opposed to temporality that is derived (i.e. impure) knowledge of myself as

an enduring psyche (a misrepresentation of myself). I have rejected Sartre’s pure reflection as fact, but not as

ideal. 67 Which accounts for the subjective experience of time, whereby time appears to me to move more slowly or

quickly depending on what I am doing. 68 Ibid. 9, p. 160.

20

Psychic time is only the connected bringing together of temporal objects. But its essential difference from

original temporality is that it is while original temporality temporalizes itself. As such psychic time can be

constituted with the past, and the future can be only as a past which will come after the present past.69

Therefore, if I were to attempt to grasp at this instant that ‘I think’70, I could only apprehend

it reflectively, as a past objectivized exteriorized psyche.

But although it has proven fruitful to follow Sartre in accounting for the puzzling features

of time through the puzzling features of consciousness, he himself did not follow through the

priority such a procedure gives to the past. For the past exists only with respect to

consciousness, and the past is facticity. If, after some kind of worldly catastrophe,

Shakespeare is totally forgotten and his complete works, including all copies, are destroyed

and consigned to oblivion, then Shakespeare never existed. So while my consciousness

transcends itself toward my future, dragging my facticity behind it, this latter becoming more

and more of a burden as it gets bigger and bigger, as facticity it is the only thing that is real in

this process. It is real as facticity, and it is real in the sense of being there to be transcended.

Only the past is real, and only past events and entities exist, and time is real even if it requires

change, because the past is an element of change.71

6. Conclusion.

69 Ibid., p. 170. 70 An intuition grasped in an instant. 71 I call this theory pastism. As Wittgenstein said: ‘The world is the totality of facts ’. (Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London:Routledge, 1961), p. 5). The past is facticity, only facts are real,

therefore, only the past is real. It may be objected that facts are unchangeable, but pastism is not the view that

history (the time of the world) can be rewritten. It should more properly be called mypastism, because the

elements of internal time are internally related; a change in the internal present infects the internal past.

21

But time is also unreal; it is grounded in the being of consciousness. This discussion began

with a fluid assumption concerning acts of consciousness that can be apprehended in the

instant. As it proceeded, these detached acts required linking together to give consciousness

a unity over time. This was achieved by describing them in terms of an all-embracing

flowing temporal process. I did say at the beginning, however, that in application the

phenomenological method is an ideal goal; I am not quite satisfied I have attained it, but

while the theory can be revised, phenomenology has at least extended my understanding of

consciousness and of time.

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