Memory poetically completes the past self with a plenitude of being

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

In the primary mode I was my Past without knowing it (but by no means not without being conscious of it); in the secondary mode I know my past but I no longer was it. Someone may ask how I can be conscious of my Past if it is not in the thetic mode. Yet the Past is there constantly. It is the very meaning of the object which I look at and which I have already seen, of the familiar faces which surround me. It is the origin of this movement which presently follows and which I would not be able to call circular if I were not myself—in the Past—the witness of its beginning. It is the origin and springboard of all my actions; it is that constantly given density of the world which allows me to orient myself and to get my bearings. It is myself in so far as I aim at myself as a person (there is also a structure to-come of the Ego). In short, the Past is my contingent and gratuitous bond with the world and with myself inasmuch as I constantly live it as a total renunciation. The psychologists call it empirical knowledge (savoir). But in addition to the fact that by this term they “psychologize” it, they thus remove any method of accounting for it. For empirical knowledge is everywhere and conditions everything, even memory; in a word, intellectual memory presupposes knowledge. And what is their empirical knowledge—if we are to understand by it a present fact—if it is not an intellectual memory? This supple, insinuating, changing knowledge which makes the woof of all our thoughts and which is composed of a thousand empty indications, a thousand designations which point behind us, without image, without words, without thesis—this is my concrete Past inasmuch as I was it as the unalterable background-depth of all my thoughts and all my feelings. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 481 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Between past and present there is an absolute heterogeneity; and if I can not enter the past, it is because the past is. The only way by which I could be it is for me myself to become in-itself in order to lose myself in it in the form of identification; this by definition is denied me. In fact that shame which I experienced yesterday and which was shame for itself is always shame in the present, and its essence can still be described as for-itself. But its being is no longer for itself since it no longer exists as reflection-reflecting. Though capable of description as for-itself, it simply is. The past is given as a for-itself become in-itself. That shame, so long as I live it, is not what it is. Now that I was it, I can say: it was shame. It has become what it was—behind me. It has the permanence and the constancy of the in-itself; it is at its date for eternity; it has the total adherence of the in-itself to itself. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 434 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A person’s varied past selves all exist in the mode of having been — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 418; The past is a for-itself that has hardened into an in-itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 434; The Past is a non-thetic, lived bond with the world and self — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 481 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• A person’s varied past selves all exist in the mode of having been #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 418
• The Past is a non-thetic, lived bond with the world and self #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 481
• The past is a for-itself that has hardened into an in-itself #complicates (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 434