Psychic temporality hypostasizes original ekstatic temporality and thus conceals an unresolvable contradiction.
Evidence
The characteristics of psychic duration for Bergson are a pure contingent fact of experience; they are so because we find them so—that is all. Thus psychic temporality is an inert datum, closely akin to Bergson’s duration, which undergoes its intimate cohesion without effecting it, which is perpetually temporalized without temporalizing itself, in which the irrational and magic interpenetration of elements that are not united by an ekstatic relation of being can be compared only to sympathetic magic acting from a distance—an interpenetration which hides a multiplicity of already formed “nows.” These characteristics do not result from any error on the part of psychologists or from a lack of knowledge; they are constitutive of psychic temporality, which is the hypostasis of original temporality. The absolute unity of the psychic is indeed the projection of the ontological, ekstatic unity of the, for-itself. But since this projection is made in the in-itself which is what it is in the distanceless proximity of self-identity, the ekstatic unity parcels itself out in an infinity of “nows” which are what they are and which, precisely for this reason, tend to isolate themselves in their self-identity. Thus participating simultaneously in the in-itself and in the for-itself, psychic temporality conceals a contradiction which is never overcome. This should not surprise us. Since psychic temporality is the product of impure reflection, it is natural that it is made-to-be what it is not and that it is not what it is made-to-be. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 542
Categorization
- DEFINE: Distinguishes psychic temporality (the hypostasis of original temporality, an inert datum) from the For-itself’s genuine ekstatic temporality, keying Sartre’s refutation of Bergson.
- XREF: Directly parallel to Beauvoir’s later treatment of ambiguity and the impossibility of reconciling the for-itself with the in-itself.