Facticity and the past are identical in Sartre’s ontology

Evidence

But for all that the for-itself has not succeeded in freeing itself from the in-itself. The surpassed in-itself lives on and haunts the for-itself as its original contingency. The for-itself can never reach the in-itself nor apprehend itself as being this or that, but neither can it prevent itself from being what it is—at a distance from itself. This contingency of the for-itself, this weight surpassed and preserved in the very surpassing—this is Facticity. But it is also the past. “Facticity” and “Past” are two words to indicate one and the same thing. The Past, in fact, like Facticity, is the invulnerable contingency of the in-itself which I have to be without any possibility of not being it. It is the inevitability of the necessity of fact, not by virtue of necessity but by virtue of fact. … The past is what I am without being able to live it. The past is substance. In this sense the Cartesian cogito ought to be formulated rather: “I think; therefore I was.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 433

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the technical identity of Facticity and the Past — a core ontological equivalence.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s purpose of building a systematic backdrop for Beauvoir, who inverts ‘I think therefore I was’ into a gendered existential condition. — connects to: Sartrean freedom requires facticity, not its absence — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 508; Sartre holds freedom and facticity are ontologically distinct, so situation never limits freedom. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 636
• SEED: The reformulated cogito ‘I think; therefore I was’ is a punchy article hook contrasting Sartre’s retrospective self with Descartes’ present-tense one.

Broader Connections

• Sartrean freedom requires facticity, not its absence #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 508