BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

In one sense the, the past, which is at the same time for-itself and in-itself, resembles value or self, which we described in the preceding chapter; for it represents a certain synthesis of the being which is what it is not and is not what it is -- with the being which is what it is. It is in this sense that we can speak of the evanescent value of the past. Hence arises the fact that memory presents to us the being which we were, accompanied by a plenitude of being which confers on it a sort of poetry. That grief which we had -- although fixed in the past -- does not case to present the meaning of a for-itself, and yet it exists in itself with the silent fixity of the grief of another, or the grief of a statue. It no longer needs to appear before itself in order to make itself exist. On the contrary it is its character of for-itself; far from being the mode of being of its being, it becomes simply one way of being, a quality. Psychologists because they contemplated the psychic state in the past have claimed that consciousness was a quality which could affect the psychic state or not without modifying it in its being. The past psychic first is; and then it is for itself -- just as Pierre is blond, as that tree is an Oak. ~ Page 174