1. The Reality and Unreality of Time - an Existential Phenomenological Analysis
David Proud, MPhil, BA, BA(Open), PGCE (ICT)
‘Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime’, wrote John Donne, ‘Nor hours, days, months,
which are the rags of time’;1 that is, they are the divisions of time imposed upon a reality in
itself timeless2 and known only to an omniscient spectator, God, that can see past, present and
future, all at once.3 But when Macbeth is deliberating on a murder he is about to commit, he
proclaims: ‘but this blow/Might be the be-all and the end-all! - here,/But here, upon this bank
and shoal of time,/We'd jump the life to come’.4 The image now is of time as a narrow
sandbar, the present, between two boundless oceans, the past and the future.5 Such poetic
conceits raise two concerns about the nature of time; how time appears, and what it is. For
Macbeth, the temporal order is real enough; we do fear future time, if only because our own
deaths await us there. And time as it appears is not illusory for Donne, because whatever it is
it can be measured, though the temporal order still belongs to the world of appearance. But is
there really such a thing as time? McTaggart thought not, while acknowledging that it
‘doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements
1
which involve its reality are erroneous’.6
In this essay, rather than denying the reality of time, thus reducing poetry to idle prattle, I
argue for a theory of time that is paradoxical, that time is both real and not real, because time
1 ‘The Sun Rising’, in John Donne, The Complete English Poems (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 80.
2 Timeless in that the passage of time is an illusion, although illusions are themselves temporal; but timeless can
mean without change; ideal (mathematical) objects are thus timeless.
3 Eternalism: all points in time are equally real.
4 William Shakespeare, Macbeth (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 69.
5 Presentism: only the present is real.
6 J. M. E. McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, in The Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), (pp. 23 – 34), p. 23.

2. unfolds itself7 within a singular element of reality, namely, consciousness; an element that is
itself contradictory.8 That is, I present a critical analysis of Sartre’s thesis that
‘[consciousness] which separates human reality from itself [a contradiction] is at the origin
of time’.9 My conclusion, however, is that this leads to a paradox that Sartre would not
recognize; that the past, existing only in respect of consciousness, is subject to change.
The essay has the following structure: 1. Methodology: The Phenomenology of Time.
Phenomenology systematically reflects on (temporal) structures of consciousness, and
(temporal) phenomena. Phenomenology (how time appears) and ontology (what time is) are
to be distinguished, though they do correlate. 2. Making Sense of Time, errors arise through
thinking about time non-relatively to a (temporal) consciousness, and so 3. Reflecting on
Time, I reflect instead on how time appears to me, and then, 4. Living Through Time, I can
reflect on what it means to exist in time, from which, 5. The Paradox of Time, it would
appear that a past that exists in respect to consciousness can be changed. This is a
contradiction at the heart of Sartre’s theory of time, but, 6. Conclusion, as it is a
contradiction that I have merely described phenomenologically, it is open to revision.
1. Methodology: The Phenomenology of Time
‘Philosophy’, Husserl wrote, is ‘absolutely self-responsible’,10 and must proceed in
accordance with evidence it alone produces. The goal dictates the choice of method, but I do
not assume at the outset that such a goal is possible. I can, however, begin with a general
7 Something existing in time is not static, that is, it has a temporal property; an initial assumption amenable to
subsequent modification. (See page 3).
8 See note 21.
9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 102. Whether consciousness is the
origin of time and time is grounded in consciousness make the same claim is doubtful; the first is implausible;
the second claims that temporality correlates with a structure of consciousness, whether or not consciousness
exists. .
10 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988),
p. 6.
2

3. idea about time that is ‘in a state of indeterminate fluid generality’.11 At the beginning any
assumptions I have about time are fluid, but my understanding of the meaning of such ideas
3
may change as the enquiry moves forward.
the intending the intended
Fig. 1
The Intentionality Thesis
There is a distinction to be made, however, between phenomenology, (how time appears),
and ontology, (what time is), a distinction dependent on the concepts of intentionality,
facticity, and transcendence. Intentionality is the thesis that every act of consciousness is
consciousness of something. I am thinking about Shakespeare, (Fig. 1); imagining I am him,
wishing I could write like him. These intentional acts, a tending towards an (intentional)
object, have differing modes of directedness, but both exemplify a positional12 consciousness;
an act of consciousness takes, or posits, an object.
Consciousness reaches out beyond itself to something else; the object of an act of
consciousness is transcendent to that act in that it is not wholly contained in and confined to
that one act of consciousness. ‘All consciousness is positional’, says Sartre, ‘in that it
transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing’.13
The intended object is transcendent to the act of intending; the way things appear is not
11 Ibid., p. 8.
12 Ibid. 9, p. xxvii.
13 Ibid.

4. reducible to the way things are, or ‘the phenomenon of being [is not] identical with the being
4
of phenomena’.14
Positional consciousness knows its objects; but the way in which things appear to it is not
reducible to the way things are. The reality of what is exterior (the being of the
phenomenon) is not reducible to my thoughts concerning a thing as an existing thing (the
phenomenon of being). But as the way things are is an object of knowledge, being itself is
not knowledge, as the way things appear to consciousness is not completely reducible to the
way things are.15 Phenomenology and ontology are not the same; to think otherwise would
be to estimate being in terms of knowing.
Added to this there is the brute fact of my existence; however many generalities may be
accrued concerning my particularity, I am no mere consequence of them; there is indeed no
reason why I should be here at all, living this particular life; these definite and unnecessary
facts about myself constitute my facticity.16 And transcendence and facticity together
constitute temporality,17 for time consists of past, present, and future, understood in terms of
whatever it is that has them, myself for instance. I have my own past, which has the
peculiarity of being over with, but does not define me,18 because I have a future that is not
restricted by it. I may even infer the existence of time from the nature of consciousness, for
this latter is not a thing, but a constantly changing (flowing) process.
14 Ibid., p. xxiv.
15 My consciousness is not reducible to my perceptions (of phenomena), and my awareness of any object (as
phenomena) reveals the being of existent things. When I perceive (in a broad sense) a temporal phenomena,
e.g., enduring, the being of my perceiving-consciousness is not reducible to my perception of enduring; (but my
systematic reflection does begin with phenomena, the perceived-enduring. See p. 21).
16 Sartre’s term for ‘a pure apprehension of the self as a factual existence’. (Ibid., p. 338).
17 It may be objected that even if transcendence and facticity are properties of mine, they may, along with my
other properties, be spatial, or causal, rather than temporal. But temporal relations are internal; unlike external
spatial (and causal) relations. Internal relations are definitive. An external relation exists between me and this
chair, unless this chair is present to me as I sit on it, (see note 49), or as I envisage sitting on it tomorrow,
(internal relations).
18 All the facts that constitute my past do not give a complete account of who or what I am, unlike non-conscious
entities that have neither memory nor foresight. (See note 28).

5. My objective is to account for the flow of time through the flow of consciousness. Time is
not static,19 nor to be conceptualized spatially, in such representations as time’s arrow, that
points from earlier to later, (Fig. 2). 1616 is earlier than 1631, Shakespeare died before
Donne; but the future also becomes the present, the present becomes the past. Time, unlike
space, is a dimension of change;20 it shares this mode of existence with consciousness itself.21
A: 1616 B: 1631
Earlier Later
Shakespeare dies Donne dies
Fig. 2
The Arrow of Time
Time, therefore, has at least an appearance, (phenomena), albeit one we cannot evade. At
this present moment my act of consciousness transcends itself forward into my future; my
transcendence is my temporality.22 And as ‘every subjective process’, as Husserl said, ‘has
its internal temporality’,23 then consciousness is a process, not a thing; a continuous flow of
intentional experiences each with their own internal temporal structures. And as time has an
appearance, we can reflect systematically on the phenomena of time. To proceed otherwise
19 See note 7.
20 One may deny time flows without denying things change, but time’s elements, past, present and future, like
those of consciousness, are internally connected, (see note 17). Time thereby flows, though seemingly only
forwards.
21 Because of its peculiar (internal) relational structures. If consciousness is at a distance from its objects,
(intentionality), it is at a distance from itself, and breaks the law of identity, ∀x(x = x). Therefore, ‘I am not
what I am’, (Ibid. 9, p. 64), and ‘I am what I am not’, (Ibid., p. 67). But I am internally related to what I am not,
(my past and my future, see note 17).
22 My past I cannot change, but the sense I give to it is up to me.
23 Ibid. 10, p. 41. See note 17.
5

6. would incline us toward paradoxes on the nature of time; for instance, that time is illusory,
6
and unreal.
2. Making Sense of Time
Time is grounded in consciousness.24 Suppose this to be false and think of time a) as a
receptacle,25 (fig. 3), in which worldly events are sequential,26 or b) as a an aggregate of
times, (Fig. 4), of instants, yesterday, today, tomorrow, etc.
Horace Chaucer Shakespeare Donne
dies dies dies dies
8 B.C. 1400 A.D. 1616 A.D. 1631 A.D.
Fig. 3
Time the Container
But if time is a receptacle in which the events of the world take place sequentially, the
largest portion of the receptacle is non-existent. And if time is an aggregate of instants, the
implication is that only the present instant exists; and all other instants, being non-existent,
24 A theory of time must account for the myness of my past and my future; but time also transcends
consciousness. Original time exists in a pure (or ideal) form, even if there are no conscious beings. See note
66.
25 Isaac Newton’s view.
26 The ‘time of the world’, (Ibid. 9, p. 204). See note 62.

7. cannot be parts of a whole. The present becomes the past, but the past is never present, and
does not exist, not even in a passive condition. The future will become the present, but is
never present itself, and does not exist. But the present exists only as an imperceptible
moment between the past and the future; so short it cannot be said to endure for any length of
7
time at all.
?
1616
Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ‘…the rest is silence’
19 April 20 April 21 April 22 April 23 April (Hamlet)
Fig. 4
Time the Aggregate of Times
But time is real enough; it has its own effects. ‘Time’s glory is…to feed oblivion with
decay of things’,27 etc. But with the above views most of time does not exist, and is not real.
What is required is a view of time that explains its evident reality; or explains it away, like
McTaggart who argued that the existence of time involves a contradiction. It is apparent that
time is relative to events, and events in time can be spoken of as past, present, or future, (A-series
properties; time has a separate existence); or as being before, after, or simultaneous
with one another, (B-series properties; time is relational). The first cannot be reduced to the
second, as the second cannot account for the passage of time. And the second depends on the
first, for the first explains change.
McTaggart argues that a) B-series relations are temporal relations, b) there cannot be
temporal relations unless there is change, c) there cannot be change unless there is an A-
27 William Shakespeare, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, in The Narrative Poems (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 105 –
162, (p. 136).

8. series ordering, therefore, d) there cannot be a B-series unless there is an A-series. But the A-series
is contradictory, what was once present is now past, etc. And B-series expressions are
relative; if they express a truth they are always true, (it is forever true that Shakespeare died
8
before Donne).
However, it is an assumption that A-series properties are contradictory. McTaggart argues
that if any event has one of the A-series properties of past, present, and future, it has them all,
and this is impossible, as they are incompatible properties. And as nothing has an A-series
property (because they are contradictory), nothing exists in time.
But let us suppose the A-series to be grounded in consciousness,28 its events ordered as my
past, my present, or my future, such relations forever changing as my time flows by.29 If past,
present and future are relative to the being of which it is the past, present or future, like
myself, then such (internally) relational changes are always relative, to me. In relation to me,
what is done cannot be undone, and my future is open, etc. My past is prologue, my future an
undiscovered country, and my present consciousness escapes the confines of the present
instant, the Cartesian ‘I think’:
[consciousness]…[cannot be kept] within the substantial limits of the instantaneity of the Cartesian
cogito…If the cogito refuses instaneity…this can happen only within a temporal surpassing.30
28 I am arguing for this particular take on the A-series, but opponents of a dynamic view of time, (time as
becoming), ask how fast events travel against a background of past, present and future. For ‘in the passage of
time a measurable quantity changes at an unmeasurable rate’. (Eric T. Olson, ‘The Passage of Time’, in The
Routledge Companion to Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 440 – 448, (p. 446)). But as St.
Augustine said: ‘It is in you, O mind of mine, that I measure the periods of time’, (Saint Augustine, The
Confessions (New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), p. 236). More specifically, measuring time is
measuring that which remains fixed in memory, and as mental processes are physical processes, time passes at
the rate of those physical processes.
29 Grounding time in consciousness can account for the flow of time in a way that, for example, Prior’s tensed
logic cannot. ‘Putting a verb into the past or future tense is’, according to Prior, ‘the same…as adding an adverb
to the sentence’. (Arthur N. Prior, ‘Changes in Events and Changes in Things’, in The Philosophy of Time
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 35 – 46, (p. 40)). Tensed facts help us understand how tensed
statements reflect reality, namely, their truth depends on their correspondence to facts about time. But tensed
logic cannot explain how ‘it was the case that p, but is not now the case that p’ expresses the flow of time.
30 Ibid. 9, p. 104 - 105.

9. If my past, present and future are grounded in consciousness, these temporal elements
interpenetrate each other in a contradictory A-series that flows, as each particular act of
consciousness contains an internal temporality; they are each past, present and future all at
once. This is contradictory, but then consciousness is contradictory, and time is both real and
9
unreal.
3. Reflecting on Time
Although that has yet to be properly established. But having given sense to the phenomena
of time I can now subject the primary manifestations of temporality to a phenomenological
description. To begin with, the past is a particular past of a particular present; it acquires its
particular meaning through its relation to this particular present, it does not explain the
present. But it can only appear in this way for a being that is its own past:31 ‘only those
beings have a past which are such that in their being, their past being is in question, those
beings who have to be their past’.32
It may be objected that if I agonize ‘I was once in love’, this is a past that is mine, so how
can it be in addition a present that is mine? Is this not contradictory; I was once in love, and
this is my past? But if I am my past there is no contradiction. And if I aspire to disown a
particularly shameful episode from my past, I merely certify the encumbrances my past
places on me as a consequence of my instinctive assumption of responsibility for the whole
of my past. ‘At my limit [of my life]’, as Sartre said, ‘at that infinitesimal instant of my
death, I shall be no more than my past. It alone will define me’.33
An example will clarify this point. Shakespeare’s Hotspur, after being mortally wounded
by Prince Hal, declaims:
31 See note 24.
32 Ibid. 9, p. 114.
33 Ibid, p. 115. This contradicts an earlier thought, but at this initial stage I am thinking fluidly.

10. 10
I better brook the loss of brittle life
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;34
Fig. 5
‘Time Must Have a Stop’
For Hotspur, ‘proud titles’ he would have won had he lived are neither who he was or who he
is; forever headstrong and impulsive, that is what he has been, completely in the past, and that
is what he is; powerless to return to, or to counter, his hot-headedness. As Sartre explains:
Death reunites us with ourselves…At the moment of death we are, that is, we are defenceless before the
judgments of others. They can decide in truth what we are.35
The phenomena of the past here manifests itself as a mode of existence that simply is, neither
active nor passive. An ‘ever growing totality of…[w]hat we are. Nevertheless, so long as we
are not dead, we are not [the past] in the mode of identity. We have to be it’.36 And given
that my past and myself are not in synchronization, my past is something I have to
appropriate. I am not my past insofar as I was my past. And consciousness ‘can assume its
being only by a recovery of that being, which puts it at a distance from that being’.37 To
34 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part One (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1960), p. 158.
35 Ibid. 9, p. 115.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., p. 118.

11. appropriate a particular past is to apprehend a past in the mode of a thing I have already
desisted from being. ‘The past is the [facticity] which I am,’ as Sartre puts it, ‘but I am this
11
[facticity] as surpassed’.38
However, the past is factual in a way peculiar to consciousness alone. My consciousness
cannot enter into my past,39 because my past is facticity. Rather, ‘the past is what I am
without being able to live it. The past is substance’.40 Descartes was mistaken in thinking
consciousness could be substantialized by confining it to a present instant, rather than to a
past instant; thereby transmogrifying it into a substantial thing. It is more exact to say ‘I
think, therefore I was’,41 but then my ‘I think’ cannot effect my ‘I was’. This internal
rupturing, consciousness separating itself from itself,42 makes of consciousness an
inefficacious immaterial thing, a soul.
What that means may be clarified if we consider how this mistake manifests itself in
psychology.43 ‘Psychologists’, Sartre laments, ‘because they contemplated the psychic state
in the past have claimed that consciousness was a quality which could affect the psychic state
without modifying it in its being’.44 A value of mine I regard as a fact, yet I can only ever be
directed toward a value, wishing to be such and such and be conscious. Whereas
consciousness directed toward the past is ‘reapprehended and inundated by [its facticity]’.45
Whereas the past has being, the perpetual lack of being of my value makes me anxious, I
wish to escape from it. And yet my past and my value have this much in common, they both
38 Ibid.
39 I can think about my past, but not enter it.
40 Ibid. 9, p. 119.
41 Ibid.
42 See note 21.
43 In psychoanalysis mistakes are always motivated by past experiences: ‘The first time one forgets an
appointment; the next time, after having made a special resolution not to forget it, one discovers that one has
made a mistake in the day or hour’. (Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York:
Boni & Liveright, 1920), p. 15). Subconsciously, it is an appointment one doesn’t want to keep.
44 Ibid. 9, p. 119.
45 Ibid., p. 120.

12. combine my facticity and my consciousness, and to free myself from my anxiety I turn to my
past in order to realize my value there and make it fact.
Brutus, that ‘noblest Roman of them all’, furnishes us with an example of this:
12
… fare you well at once, for Brutus’ tongue
Hath almost ended his life’s history.
Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest,
That have but laboured to attain this hour.46
As night hangs over his eyes (he sees no future), he justifies the role he chose, that of one
who sacrifices himself for the sake of a higher cause, an agent of political necessity. He has
laboured so, in order that he might find honour (value) in his noble (value again) death. This
is a directedness toward his past in order to realize value there, but any attempt he makes to
justify his present serves only to justify his past.47 By ending his life he transforms his past,
his ‘life’s history’, into a given eternally created by himself.
But whereas the past is complete, the present is present to consciousness, or the present is
the presence of consciousness to something, to factual existents. But ‘it is impossible to
grasp the Present in the form of an instant’, Sartre says, ‘for the instant would be the moment
when the present is’.48 And if the present has to be present to something, and this something
is the sum total of simultaneously existing things, the being of the present is therefore
grounded in consciousness, for only this latter can present the totality of existing things in
this way. Which is to say, for two existents to co-exist, to be present to each other, they need
46 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 229.
47 His claim that suicide is ‘cowardly and vile’, (ibid., p. 217), and his use of suicide to realize value,
exemplifies his inability to justify his present.
48 Ibid. 9, p. 123.

13. a witness,49 and for this to be so consciousness must be able to witness itself as present to
13
things.
Fig. 6
‘Brutus is an Honourable Man’
This is possible because of intentionality; consciousness is present to things in the form of
transcendence, as consciousness directs itself outside itself toward the being of things. This
is an external relation, because for consciousness to reach toward being it is denying it is
itself that being. The attitude consciousness has toward itself is a denial that its objects are
itself, a denial therefore of itself. Consciousness and the world are not two different realities
set side by side, the world appears as denied by a consciousness that refuses to be that world.
Consciousness is thus a ‘witness of itself in the presence of being as not being that being’,50
the being of the world. The present is an escape from being insofar as there is being to
escape from. As Sartre says:
49 Because to be present is to be in the presence of something, and without a witness two simultaneous events or
objects would be related externally. But the being of time is not constituted by the subjectivity of the witness;
the witness is a witness of itself as present to being.
50 Ibid. 9, p. 122.

14. [Consciousness] is present to being in the form of flight; the Present is a perpetual flight in the face of
being… the present is not; it makes itself present in the form of flight.51
Jeanson describes the present as ‘the presentification’52 of consciousness. An example will
clarify what this means; Hamlet expounding existentially upon the nature of the human
subject, the latter considered as having ‘such large discourse,/Looking before and after’.53 If
the present ‘has its being outside [consciousness], before and behind’, and ‘behind, it was its
past; and before, it will be its future…. At present it is not what it is (past) and it is what it is
not (future)’,54 then the phenomena of the present is that of absence from the being of
consciousness. But given our power of ‘discourse’, the ability to proceed from premises to
conclusion, Hamlet can lament: ‘How all occasions do inform against me’, (occasions, the
mark of the present), ‘And spur my dull revenge!’55 Dull through ‘thinking too precisely on
14
the event’;56 an escape from being.
And that which Hamlet is fleeing towards is whatever he is lacking in order to be himself,
but as he can never achieve a complete coincidence with his possibilities, his flight is
permanent. His future, unlike his past, lacks being; the cause of a rift between his present (as
witness to the world) and the instant (simultaneously existing present existents):
There is in my consciousness no moment which is not similarly defined by an internal relation to a future;
when I write,…when I rest, the meaning of my conscious states is always at a distance, down there ,
outside.57
51 Ibid , p, 122 – 123.
52 Francis Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 146.
53 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1982), p. 345.
54 Ibid. 9, p. 123.
55 Ibid., p. 49.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., p. 125.

15. Fig. 7
‘Looking Before and After’
Hamlet ‘is defined much more by his end and the terms of his plans than by what we can
know of him if we limit him to the passing moment’.58 That is, Hamlet’s future is to be
understood in terms of future-directed possibilities:
…I am my Future in the constant perspective of the possibility of not being it. Hence that anguish… which
springs from the fact that I am not sufficiently that Future which I have to be and which gives its meaning to
my present: it is because I am a being whose meaning is always problematic.59
The future lacks being, because it can never be realized; if it were realized my future could
foreordain my future consciousness, which is impossible. But with or without being, I sense
the future as a possibilizing presence; that is what the future means.
15
4. Living Through Time
58 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1950), p. 38.
59 Ibid. 9, pp. 128 – 129.

16. Past and future have thus far been accounted for in terms of facticity and transcendence;
whereas the present is present as opposed to past or future (the ‘A’-series), and present is also
present as opposed to absent. A being that has a present is a being that is present to
something; consciousness has a present, because of intentionality; it is forever present to the
16
world as a witness.
(of)
of
consciousness of
self-consciousness (of)
Fig. 8
Non-Positional Intending
But before proceeding from phenomenology to ontology, an adjustment is needed to this
representation of intentionality. Consciousness, awareness, is also aware of itself, but it
cannot posit itself as an object, because consciousness is conscious of something present to it.
Self-consciousness must also be non-positional,60 (i.e., not positing itself as an object, Fig. 8,
though a more exact representation would put the dotted arrow within the solid one). Every
conscious act of mine has a point of view peculiar to me, and it is this that I am non-positionally
aware of, my point of view with respect to an object. And as consciousness is
not a thing, it is not a thing with a point of view but is the assumption of a point of view.
This is necessary for the object to be at a distance from consciousness and not absorbed by it;
60 Ibid., p. xxix.

17. otherwise, were I to perceive Shakespeare, I would not be conscious of Shakespeare, I would
17
be Shakespeare.
My consciousness
My present
My non-positional intending My positional intending
(My being) (My knowing)
My past My facticity My transcendence My future
Fig. 9
The Ontology of Time
Positional consciousness, however, knows its object; but non-positional consciousness
(which cannot know anything in the absence of an object to know), is my unique point of
view, it is what I am;61 it is my being. I can therefore position my present in my positional
consciousness; whatever I am present to. And I can position my past and my future in my
non-positional consciousness, my being; for such non-positionality consists of both facticity
and transcendence, (Fig. 9).62
It may be objected that, even accepting that my point of view is who I am, this leaves
unexplained how I recognize a particular point of view as mine. And here there is certainly a
problem, which Sartre addresses through a notion of pure reflection, as opposed to impure
61 ‘Every conscious existence exists as cons ciousness of existing’. (Ibid., Intro, p. xxx).
62 The world has a past and a future in a sense derivative of the sense in which I have them. And I experience
the future as a possibilizing presence because I have possibilities.

18. reflection. The latter posits an object from a point of view; the object does not give all it has,
and is misrepresented.63 But pure reflection posits its object from no point of view; and the
18
object is properly represented.
Quasi-
Object
( = )
Fig. 10
Pure Intending
Pure reflection is a difficult notion to comprehend, hence my difficulty in trying to
represent it, (Fig. 10). And when Sartre claims ‘[in pure reflection] the reflected-on is not
wholly an object but a quasi-object for reflection’,64 his positing of something called a ‘quasi-object’
is certainly suspicious. But we have established that consciousness does not exist in
the world in the same way as other things in the world, though it may try to reflect on itself as
though it did. And if it reflected on itself purely, from no point of view, it would thereby
avoid misrepresenting itself:
…the consciousness reflected-on [in pure reflection] is not presented yet as something outside reflection -
that is, as a being on which one can ‘take a point of view’, in relation to which one can realize a withdrawal,
increase or diminish the distance which separates one from it.65
63 Sartre believes this to be true even of ideal objects, such as those of mathematics , which ‘are revealed to us
with an orientation in relation to other truths, to certain consequences; they are never disclosed with all their
characteristics at once’. (Ibid. 9, p. 155).
64 Ibid., p. 155.
65 Ibid.

19. But although I began with intentionality as a fluid assumption, I see no reason to discard it
completely, in a pure reflective act reflecting on the reflected-on from no point of view, for
then the quasi-object of consciousness would be identical with the act that is conscious of it.
However, if all reflection I ever engage in is impure and misrepresents its objects, the ideal of
a pure reflection can assist in the realization that it is an original (pure) temporality66 that
always falls under the purview of an impure consciousness that misrepresents its objects.
19
5. The Paradox of Time
In this manner temporality suffers an objectification67 from the point of view of such an
impure consciousness. There is a ‘first spontaneous (but not the original) reflective
movement’,68 that is thus far incognizant of the inevitability according to which
consciousness has to be conscious. Which is to say, impure consciousness apprehends its
unreflective self, (its self that is not reflecting on itself), as a self-contained and fully realized
being, but consciousness is not really like that, and as a consequence of this
(mis)apprehension there is a consciousness of an enduring that constitutes a succession of
psychic facts.
The three elements of temporality, past, present, and future, (the A-series), are then
ensnared within these successive states:
66 Pure temporality is not temporality independent of consciousness, but temporality as it would be for pure
reflection, (temporality as being), as opposed to temporality that is derived (i.e. impure) knowledge of myself as
an enduring psyche (a misrepresentation of myself). I have rejected Sartre’s pure reflection as fact, but not as
ideal.
67 Which accounts for the subjective experience of time, whereby time appears to me to move more slowly or
quickly depending on what I am doing.
68 Ibid. 9, p. 160.

20. Psychic time is only the connected bringing together of temporal objects. But its essential difference from
original temporality is that it is while original temporality temporalizes itself. As such psychic time can be
constituted with the past, and the future can be only as a past which will come after the present past.69
Therefore, if I were to attempt to grasp at this instant that ‘I think’70, I could only apprehend
it reflectively, as a past objectivized exteriorized psyche.
But although it has proven fruitful to follow Sartre in accounting for the puzzling features
of time through the puzzling features of consciousness, he himself did not follow through the
priority such a procedure gives to the past. For the past exists only with respect to
consciousness, and the past is facticity. If, after some kind of worldly catastrophe,
Shakespeare is totally forgotten and his complete works, including all copies, are destroyed
and consigned to oblivion, then Shakespeare never existed. So while my consciousness
transcends itself toward my future, dragging my facticity behind it, this latter becoming more
and more of a burden as it gets bigger and bigger, as facticity it is the only thing that is real in
this process. It is real as facticity, and it is real in the sense of being there to be transcended.
Only the past is real, and only past events and entities exist, and time is real even if it requires
change, because the past is an element of change.71
20
6. Conclusion.
But time is also unreal; it is grounded in the being of consciousness. This discussion began
with a fluid assumption concerning acts of consciousness that can be apprehended in the
69 Ibid., p. 170.
70 An intuition grasped in an instant.
71 I call this theory pastism. As Wittgenstein said: ‘The world is the totality of facts ’. (Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London:Routledge, 1961), p. 5). The past is facticity, only facts are real,
therefore, only the past is real. It may be objected that facts are unchangeable, but pastism is not the view that
history (the time of the world) can be rewritten. It should more properly be called mypastism, because the
elements of internal time are internally related; a change in the internal present infects the internal past.

21. instant. As it proceeded, these detached acts required linking together to give consciousness
a unity over time. This was achieved by describing them in terms of an all-embracing
flowing temporal process. I did say at the beginning, however, that in application the
phenomenological method is an ideal goal; I am not quite satisfied I have attained it, but
while the theory can be revised, phenomenology has at least extended my understanding of
21
consciousness and of time.
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