‘I found that no goal was worth the trouble of any effort,’ said Benjamin Constant’s hero. Such are often the thoughts of the adolescent when the voice of reflection awakens within him. As a child, he was like Pyrrhus: he ran, he played without asking himself questions, and the objects that he created seemed to him endowed with an absolute existence. They carried within themselves their reason for being. But he discovered one day that he had the power to surpass [depasser] his own ends. There are no longer ends; only pointless occupations still exist for him, he rejects them. ‘The dice are loaded,’ he says. He looks at his elders with scorn: how is it possible for them to believe in their undertakings? They are dupes…..
Simone De Beauvoir, & Timmermann, M. (2020). What is existentialism? Penguin Books. pp10
But in reality, and without prejudging what the analysis of time will disclose, we have already discovered, between time and subjectivity, a much more intimate relationship. We have just seen that the subject, who cannot be a series of psychic events, nevertheless cannot be eternal either. It remains for him to be temporal not by reason of some vagary of the human make-up, but by virtue of an inner necessity. We are called upon to conceive the subject and time as communicating from within. We can now say of temporality what we said earlier about sexuality and spatiality, for example existence cannot have any external or contingent attribute. It cannot be anything- spatial, sexual, temporal- with out being so in its entirety, without taking up and carrying its ‘attributes’ and making them in to so many dimensions of its being, with the result that an analysis of any one of them that is at all searching really touches upon subjectivity itself. There are no principal and subordinate problems: all problems are concentric. To analyse time is not to follow out the consequences of a pre-established conception of subjectivity, it is to gain access, through time, into its concrete structure. If we succeed in understanding the subject, it will not be in its pure form, but by seeking it at the intersection of dimensions . We need therefore, to consider time itself, and it is by following through its internal dialectic we shall be led to revise our idea of the subject.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Forgotten Books. 476
….In spite of everything , my heart beats, my hand reaches out, new projects are born and push me forward. Wise men have wanted to see the sign of man’s incurable folly in this stubbornness. But is a perversion so essential still to be called perversion? Where will we find the truth about man if it is not in him? Reflection cannot stop the elan of our spontaneity.
But reflections are also spontaneous. Man plants, builds, conquers; he wants, he loves; there is always an ‘after that?’ It could be that from moment to moment he throws himself into new undertakings with an ardour that is always new, like Don Juan deserting one woman only to seduce another. But even Don Juan gets tired one fine day.
Simone De Beauvoir, & Timmermann, M. (2020). What is existentialism? Penguin Books. pp11
It is in my ’field of presence’ in the widest sense—this moment that I spend working with it, behind it, the horizon of the day that has elapsed, and in front of it, the evening and the night—that I make contact with time and learn to know its course. The remote past has also its temporal order, and it has been present itself; it has been ’in its time’ traversed by my life and carried forward to this moment. When I call up a remote past, I reopen time and carry myself back to a moment in which it still had before it a future horizon now closed and a horizon of the immediate past, which is today. Everything, therefore, causes me to revert to the field of presence as the primary experience in which time and its dimensions make their appearance unalloyed, with no intervening distance and with absolute self-evidence. It is here that we see a future sliding into the present and on into the past. Nor are these three dimensions given to us through discrete acts: I do not form a mental picture of my day; it weighs upon me with all its weight; it is still there, and though I may not recall any detail of it, I have the impending power to do so; I still have it in hand. In the same way, I do not think of the evening to come and its consequences, and yet it ‘is there’ like the back of the house of which I can only see the facade or like the background beneath a figure. Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and daydreams. Ahead of what I see and perceive, there is, it is true, nothing more actually visible, but my world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come (although we are always on the watch, perhaps to the day of our death, for the appearance of something else). The present itself, in the narrow sense, is not posited. The paper and my fountain pen are indeed there for me, but I do not explicitly perceive them. I do not so much perceive objects as reckon with an environment. I seek support in my tool, and am at my task rather than confronting it.`
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Forgotten Books. pp483
These remarks do not prejudge the outcome of the critical investigation which we are about to undertake. They merely indicate its intention. It is possible that, on some plane, individual praxis is transparent to itself and that in this transparence, it provides the model and the rules of full intelligibility; but this still has to be proved. It is also conceivable, at least hypothetically, that human thought (in so far as it is itself praxis and a moment of praxis) is fundamentally the understanding of novelty (as a perpetual re-organisation of the given in accordance with acts explicable by their end).
Jean-Paul Sartre. (n.d.). Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol 1. Verso Books. pp61
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