Past

The Past is the For-itself’s inescapable yet surpassed being: not a possession it can set aside, but the fixed facticity it must continually assume while projecting itself beyond what it has been. Through this temporal structure, the past both grounds a person’s concrete place in the world and exposes the difference between living responsibility and the final, irrevocable identity imposed by death.

Being One’s Past

To say that a person “has” a past can misleadingly suggest passive possession. The more exact claim is that a person has to be the past: the present is bound to what it has been, and the past exists as past for a being whose own being is at issue. In the example of Paul’s fatigue, saying that Paul was fatigued makes the present Paul responsible for sustaining that former state as his past. Without this relation, the fatigue would simply be lost, with no connection to the present. The word “was” names the ontological passage between present and past, not a neutral link between two separate things.

The relation is neither simple identity nor complete separation. A person is the past, but is not the past in the way a thing is identical with itself. A judgment such as “I am quick-tempered” or “I am a civil servant” points toward what that person is in the past, as a fixed, compact being; the living For-itself, however, exists at a distance from this fixedness and surpasses it. Its past is its own being, not another person’s, yet the person can never coincide with it as an In-itself. The For-itself must recover and assume its being precisely by keeping a distance from it.

This distance does not cancel responsibility. A living person remains answerable for the past because the person continually reassumes it and sustains it in being. A grudge against someone addresses the living person who is freely what that person was; when the person dies, the grudge ordinarily ceases, because the dead are reunited with their past without any further responsibility for taking it up. The past does not exist merely as a private representation: it enters the world through the person who is that past, and can then be represented through psychological processes.

Facticity, Possibility, and Essence

The past differs fundamentally from a possibility. A possibility remains open as something the For-itself may realize, while the past has consumed its possibilities: nothing can be added to its content or removed from it. The person must be what has already happened, with no possibility of not having been it. The past is therefore In-itself, a fixed being identified with itself, even though the living person’s relation to it is not one of static identity.

This fixedness is facticity: the original contingency that the For-itself can neither abolish nor merge with, and that it carries along in every attempt to change or flee it. Past and facticity name the same weight of being. Facticity cannot determine the content of a person’s motives, but it constrains them: motives cannot suppress the fact from which they depart, and any effort to transform a situation preserves the given it seeks to transform. A person may be a professor, for example, but can only take up that identity as a role, never become fully identical with it.

In this sense the past is the person’s essence, but not a pre-established human nature. As the glossary formulation puts it, essence is what has been; each person makes an essence through living. The past is the For-itself reapprehended and inundated by the In-itself, the being that stands behind the person as a surpassed fact. It is the contingent, unalterable fact each For-itself must be, not an instruction or imperative from which a prescribed life can be deduced. In this respect it resembles value, since both involve a relation between For-itself and In-itself, but the past is value reversed: instead of the For-itself recovering and founding its being, the In-itself fixes and thickens what the person has been.

Memory and the World’s Past

The Past does not ordinarily stand before consciousness as an object under inspection. It haunts the For-itself from behind, outside the thematic field toward which consciousness is directed. A person can make a past episode the object of explicit investigation, but then the person takes it up as something posited and is no longer living that past in the original mode. In its primary mode, the past is lived without being thematically observed. It is present in the meaning of a familiar face or a thing already seen, and in the recognition that a movement now unfolding is circular because its beginning is already known.

As the springboard of action, the past supplies the changing density through which a person finds bearings in the world. It conditions empirical knowledge and even memory, rather than being an item that memory alone creates. Its relation to present existence is one of being, not merely representation. The past also carries the person’s former presence to a former state of the world: the For-itself that has become In-itself belongs to the world of what has been. There is, in this account, only one Past—the past of being, or objective Past—in which the person was. The person belongs to universal time through the past, while present and future are ways of escaping it.

The passage of an experience into the past changes its mode of being. A past sadness, for instance, is no longer sustained as an experience by the For-itself; it has become a quality of the In-itself, fixed in the world as what the person was. The former present is not simply erased and replaced by an image. Rather, the expresent passes into In-itself as a new present arises through the nihilation of that being. What has become past remains the being of the present, and the For-itself must be what it has been even as it surpasses it.

The account extends from personal temporality to things. The inkwell, glass, or table is apprehended as already having been there and as extending across temporal dimensions, but the thing does not itself live a past as a person does. Its apparent duration is presented through a succession of externally related, momentary aspects; time flows over the thing, which is disclosed as an enduring form. In the world’s past, instants are joined by external relations. The For-itself’s past is part of that objective past, with the distinction that the For-itself has to be its own.

Body, Birth, and Finitude

The body is the immediate past that still touches the fleeing present: at once a point of view and a point of departure. In perception it is the center of reference beyond which the person reaches toward a glass, table, or distant tree; in action it is the factical starting point surpassed toward a new arrangement of instruments. The body is not simply an object the For-itself possesses. It is what the For-itself immediately is, and what it continually surpasses in order to act in the world.

This bodily facticity is both contingent and necessary. It is contingent that a person has a particular physical constitution, character, social position, or nationality; it is necessary that action begin from some concrete given rather than from nowhere. Birth is the body’s original reference to the primary In-itself from which the For-itself arises. The body is therefore not an accidental addition to consciousness but a permanent condition of consciousness as awareness of a world and as a project toward a future. The perspective it provides also makes action possible: without resistant circumstances and the practical break between conceiving an end and realizing it, desire could not be distinguished from action, or a possible from an accomplished result.

The body’s structure can also be seen in the perception of another person’s movement. A moving arm is apprehended against the past-being of an arm at rest, although that immobility cannot be separately seen; it is glimpsed through the movement that surpasses it, like a pebble seen through moving water. This ungraspable, surpassed bodily being is facticity and flesh. If the surpassing ceases, the body collapses into the status of a corpse, a life’s pure past. A corpse may still be understood through the situations toward which the living person once moved, but it no longer surpasses itself toward renewed situations and is no longer in situation.

Death and the Completed Life

While a person lives, the past is fixed in content but not a finished verdict on the whole person. The living For-itself remains responsible for reassuming what it was, and can alter the meaning of the past by changing how that past is taken up in relation to a future. Death ends that movement. At death, the For-itself slips entirely into the past and is changed forever into an In-itself; the past becomes the ever-growing totality of the being the person was.

That transformation is why a life cannot be finally judged before its end. Sophocles gives the principle to Deianeira in the Trachiniae: one cannot judge whether a mortal’s life was happy or unhappy until death. The formulation “Death changes life into Destiny” names the same closure. A last-hour repentance may try to break open the being that has congealed around a life, but death itself becomes one more determination in the totality; it cannot undo what preceded it. The dead are consequently exposed to the judgments of others, no longer able to escape or revise the completed life.

The Past thus holds together two opposed truths. For the living, it is an unavoidable being to assume and surpass, a contingent bond with the body and world that makes concrete action possible. For the dead, it is the fixed totality that the person has become, no longer open to further action or self-revision. Human existence lives in the tension between being what it has been and exceeding that being; only death arrests the tension and leaves the past as destiny.