Consciousness’s temporality refuses the instant because the for-itself never is.

Evidence

Thus the time of consciousness is human reality which temporalizes itself as the totality which is to itself its own incompletion; it is nothingness slipping into a totality as a detotalizing ferment. This totality which runs after itself and refuses itself at the same time, which can find in itself no limit to its surpassing because it is its own surpassing and because it surpasses itself toward itself, can under no circumstance exist within the limits of an instant. There is never an instant at which we can assert that the for-itself is, precisely because the for-itself never is. Temporality, on the contrary, temporalizes itself entirely as the refusal of the instant. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 501

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines time of consciousness as a ‘detotalizing ferment’ and establishes the for-itself as never-being, the refusal of the instant.
• XREF: States the for-itself’s mode of being as ‘never is’ — the neither-yet-nor-any-longer temporal structure that grounds Sartre’s later ethics of authentic temporality, which Beauvoir’s ‘Ethics of Ambiguity’ picks up. — connects to: Consciousness has no inertia; it must perpetually recreate its own states — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 301; Consciousness never coincides with itself because it exists for a witness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 329; Temporality exists only as the intra-structure of the For-itself, which temporalizes itself. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 471 (+7 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: ‘Nothingness slipping into a totality as a detotalizing ferment’ is a dense, paradigm-shifting image of the for-itself’s mode of being that resists paraphrase and rewards sitting with.
• ADDENDUM: The for-itself as never-being, always surpassing itself, resonates with the ‘grafting as narrative metaphor’ framing — a structure that never is, only becomes in its self-surpassing.

Broader Connections

• Conceiving consciousness as in-itself makes past and present unreconnectable #corroborates (0.85)
• Time is constituted by the For-itself’s nothingness rather than inhering in objects #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1524
• Neither ancient nor modern notions of time adequately capture time’s twofold negation #expands (0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 118