ABSTRACT

I am thrown into a nature, and that nature appears not only as outside me, in objects devoid of history, but it is also discernible at the centre of subjectivity. Theoretical and practical decisions of personal life may well lay hold, from a distance, upon my past and my future, and bestow upon my past, with all its fortuitous events, a definite significance, by following it up with a future which will be seen after the event as foreshadowed by it, thus introducing historicity into my life. Yet these sequences have always something artificial about them. It is at the present time that I realize that the first twenty-five years of my life were a prolonged childhood, destined to be followed by a painful break leading eventually to independence. If I take myself back to those years as I actually lived them and as I carry them within me, my happiness at that time cannot be explained in terms of the sheltered atmosphere of the parental home; the world itself was more beautiful, things were more fascinating, and I can never be sure of reaching a fuller understanding of my past than it had of itself at the time I lived through it, nor of silencing its protest. The interpretation which I now give of it is bound up with my confidence in psychoanalysis. Tomorrow, with

shall go on to interpret my present interpretations in their turn, revealing their latent content and, in order finally to assess their truth-value, I shall need to keep these discoveries in mind. My hold on the past and the future is precarious, and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment, bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn further developments in order to be understood. My voluntary and rational life, therefore, knows that it merges into another power which stands in the way of its completion, and gives it a permanently tentative look. Natural time is always there. The transcendence of the instants of time is both the ground of, and the impediment to, the rationality of my personal history: the ground because it opens a totally new future to me in which I shall be able to reflect upon the element of opacity in my present, a source of danger in so far as I shall never manage to seize the present through which I live with apodeictic certainty, and since the lived is thus never entirely comprehensible, what I understand never quite tallies with my living experience, in short, I am never quite at one with myself. Such is the lot of a being who is born, that is, who once and for all has been given to himself as something to be understood. Since natural time remains at the centre of my history, I see myself surrounded by it. The fact that my earliest years lie behind me like an unknown land is not attributable to any chance lapse of memory, or any failure to think back adequately: there is nothing to be known in these unexplored lands. For example, in pre-natal existence, nothing was perceived, and therefore there is nothing to recall. There was nothing but the raw material and adumbration of a natural self and a natural time. This anonymous life is merely the extreme form of that temporal dispersal which constantly threatens the historical present. In order to have some inkling of the nature of that amorphous existence which preceded my own history, and which will bring it to a close, I have only to look within me at that time which pursues its own independent course, and which my personal life utilizes but does not entirely overlay. Because I am borne into personal existence by a time which I do not constitute, all my perceptions stand out against a background

together somewhat absentminded and dispersed “consciousnesses”: sight, hearing and touch, with their fields, which are anterior, and remain alien, to my personal life. The natural object is the track left by this generalized existence. And every object will be, in the first place and in some respect, a natural object, made up of colours, tactile and auditory qualities, in so far as it is destined to enter my life.