Time of the World

The Time of the World is the objective time in which one consciousness encounters another’s intentions and actions as worldly objects. It is crucial to Sartre’s argument that this apparent common ground cannot unite consciousnesses: observable acts may point toward a self, but they do not disclose the inward subjectivity from which they issue.

Public Time and Observable Acts

The Other’s intentions and actions are established and contemplated in the Time of the World. Their meanings can themselves become objects of apprehension: a person may recognize that the Other’s conduct refers to them, and may interpret that conduct as a sign directed toward them. Yet this interpretation takes place at the level of worldly objects, not as access to the Other’s consciousness in its own temporalization.

That distinction limits what public time can reveal. The Other appears as an object to the observer, while the observer cannot thereby know what the Other is for himself. Nor can a person apprehend, from their own side, the self they are for the Other. The observable sequence of acts supplies evidence of reference and meaning, but not a shared interior standpoint.

The Other as Mirror

Sartre frames the problem through Hegel’s account of recognition: the Other is an object, and the self apprehends itself as an object in the Other. But for the self to appear to itself as an object for another, it would have to apprehend that other as a subject and gain access to the other’s interiority. Once the Other is instead apprehended as an object, that subjectivity is unavailable, and the self’s objectivity for the Other cannot itself appear to the self.

The Other-as-object therefore becomes a clouded mirror. The observer can apprehend the Other’s acts as worldly things and recognize that they refer to the observer, but cannot see through those acts to the Other’s lived subjectivity. The result is not knowledge of the self through another mind; it is a consciousness of oneself as the one to whom the acts refer, without knowledge of the Other’s experience.

Limits of Hegelian Reconciliation

For Sartre, this failure exposes a limit in Hegel’s optimism about a universal self-consciousness. The relation between the Other-as-object and the self-as-subject has no common measure, just as self-consciousness and consciousness of the Other cannot be subsumed into universal knowledge. The Time of the World gives the relation an objective appearance, but does not bridge its ontological separation.

Sartre also identifies a more fundamental, ontological optimism in Hegel’s appeal to truth as the truth of the Whole. From the standpoint of that Whole, individual consciousnesses can be treated as moments mediated by a totality already taken as truth. But this vantage point is not the situated standpoint of either consciousness. The worldly time in which their acts become objects cannot, by itself, justify the leap from observable relation to a unified knowledge of their subjectivities.