The instant dissolves the world into disconnected atoms whose passage becomes philosophically inexplicable
Evidence
It results from these premises that a temporal vision of the world and of man will dissolve into a crumbling of befores and afters. The unity of this crumbling, the temporal atom, will be the instant, which has its place before certain determined instants and after other instants without admitting either before or after inside its own form. The instant is indivisible and non-temporal since temporality is succession, but the world dissolves into an infinite dust of instants. And it is a problem for Descartes, for example, to learn how there can be a passage from one instant to another instant; for the instants are juxtaposed—i.e., separated by nothing and yet without communication. Similarly Proust asks how his Self can pass from one instant to another; how, for example, he discovers after a night’s sleep precisely the Self of the day before rather than some other one. More radically, the empiricists after having denied the permanence of the Self try in vain to establish a semblance of transversal unity across the instants of psychic life. Thus when we consider in isolation the dissolving power of temporality, we are forced to admit that the fact of having existed at a given instant does not constitute a right to exist at the following instant, not even a mortgage or option on the future. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 461
Categorization
- XREF: Proust’s a-temporal Self problem echoes the reader’s own engagement with time, memory, and identity themes; the Descartes instant-to-instant passage problem is a classic early-modern quandary worth tracking into Sartre’s own solution. — connects to: The present as pure being is an infinitesimal instant that reduces to nothingness; Approaching an object dissolves its unified being into nothingness.
- SEED: The idea that ‘having existed at a given instant does not constitute a right to exist at the following instant’ could seed an essay on the philosophical stakes of persistence and continuity in identity.
Broader Connections
- The present as pure being is an infinitesimal instant that reduces to nothingness
#expands(0.92) - Approaching an object dissolves its unified being into nothingness.
#exemplifies(0.85)