A person’s varied past selves all exist in the mode of having been

Evidence

It is not the adolescent who was at the Polytechnic. Concerning the latter, for so long as he was, we have to say: he is. It is the forty-year old who was the student. Actually the thirty-year old was the student also. But again what would this man of thirty years be without the man of forty who was he? It is at the extreme limit of his present that this man of forty “was” a student at the Polytechnic. Finally it is the very being of the Erlebnis which has the task of being a man of forty, a man of thirty, and an adolescent—all in the mode of having been. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 418

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how the past tense attaches to a single Erlebnis: it is the present being that ‘was’ the earlier selves—all held together in the mode of having been.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s project of Beauvoir’s ethics, where temporality and the weight of past choices shape present freedom. — connects to: Memory poetically completes the past self with a plenitude of being; The past is a for-itself that has hardened into an in-itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 434; One’s past is grounded in the world by becoming In-itself, losing transcendence. (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• The past is a for-itself that has hardened into an in-itself #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 434
• Being one’s past is the foundation of being able not to be it #corroborates (0.85)
• One’s past is grounded in the world by becoming In-itself, losing transcendence. #expands (0.82)
• Present experience re-encounters a past that was once a projected future. #expands (0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1068
• The past constrains identity but is always narrativized, not literally recovered. #qualifies (0.78) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 256
• Past moments of spirit form a habitus that dialectic reactualizes. #expands (0.75)
• Encountering the Other reveals the for-itself having an outside and being embedded in being #expands (0.72)