The dynamic of duration raises two distinct problems about the Past and Present

Evidence

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Leibniz and Bergson treated temporality as mere immanent continuity; The Past is a non-thetic, lived bond with the world and self — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 481; Everyday psychic duration stands opposed to authentic historicity (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The Past is a non-thetic, lived bond with the world and self #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 481