Christophe Bouton - Time and Freedom

Time and Freedom
Northwestern University
Studies in Phenomenology
and
Existential Philosophy
Founding Editor †James M. Edie
General Editor Anthony J. Steinbock
Associate Editor John McCumber

TiME ANd
FrEEdoM
Christophe Bouton
Translated from the French by Christopher Macann
Northwestern University Press

Evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
English translation by Christopher Macann copyright © 2014 by Northwestern

University Press, with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France. Pub-
lished 2014. Originally published by Presses Universitaires de Toulouse in 2007
as Temps et liberté; copyright © 2008 Presses Universitaires du Mirail (Toulouse,
France). All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bouton, Christophe, author.

[Temps et liberte. English]
Time and freedom / Christophe Bouton ; translated from the French by
Christopher Macann.
pages cm.—(Northwestern University studies in phenomenology and
existential philosophy)
“Originally published by Presses Universitaires de Toulouse in 2007 as Temps
et liberte.”—Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8101-3016-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8101-3015-9 (pbk. :
alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8101-6813-8 (ebook)
1. Time—Philosophy. 2. Liberty. I. Macann, Christopher E., translator.
II. Title. III. Series: Northwestern University studies in phenomenology &
existential philosophy.
BD638.B69513 2014
115—dc21
2014027041
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Preface to the American Edition ix
Note on Citations, Translations, and Abbreviations xi
introduction 3
Part 1. The Tree of Possibilities
1 Whether the Future is Necessary (Leibniz) 19
2 Three Kantian Solutions to the Problem of Pre-determinism 41
3 The Wheel of Time (Schopenhauer) 73
Part 2. The Plasticity of Time
4 The Time of decision (Schelling) 89
5 The Moment (Kierkegaard) 121
6 decision for Temporality (Heidegger) 141
Part 3. The mystery of the Future
7 Time as the Source of Freedom (Bergson) 189
8 Freedom at the root of Time (Sartre) 209
9 The Fecundity of Time (Levinas) 231
Conclusion 251
Notes 259
Bibliography 271
index 281
Preface to the American Edition
This book is the translation of a slightly modified version of my work

Temps et liberté, published by Presses Universitaires de Toulouse in 2007.
It is both a work in the history of philosophy, one that seeks to study the
emergence of a question across a series of thinkers stemming from the
so-called continental tradition (German and French for the most part)
and which, at the same time, (or so the author hopes) represents a work
of philosophy, to the extent that it attempts, across its analyses, to bring
answers to the question of the relation of time and freedom, answers
summed up in the conclusion. I am grateful to Thomas Ruble for his
remarks on the translations of Schelling and to Christopher Macann,
who put his talents as a philosopher and a translator into the service of
this publishing venture, a task all the more delicate in that it refers to a
very wide range of schools and terminologies. I am also very grateful to
Anthony Steinbock for the honor of accepting this text in the SPEP series
of Northwestern University Press.
ix
Note on Citations, Translations,
and Abbreviations
The authors are quoted in the English translations mentioned in the bib-
liography, except for Heidegger, Kant and Schelling, cited, as is usual, in
reference to the complete works in German, also indicated in the bibli-
ography (volume number: page number). Thus (5: 42) refers to page 42
of volume 5 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, the same for Kant’s Gesammelte
Schriften, and the same again for Schelling’s Sämtliche Werke. Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason is quoted according to the pagination of 1781 (A) and/
or 1787 (B), which is indicated in the margin of the English translation
that is used: The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1963). Heidegger’s Being and Time is quoted according to
the pagination of the original edition: Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Nie-
meyer Verlag, 1986) (16th printing), which pagination is also to be found
in the margin of the translation that is used: Being and Time, trans. John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
For the other works by Heidegger, Kant, and Schelling, the English trans-
lations most often indicate the pagination of the complete works in Ger-
man, and in such a way that the reader can easily find the passage quoted.
When this is not so, the page of the English translation is added after a
“/,” so that the reader, if he or she wants, can find it easily enough. For
all the other unpublished texts, Christopher Macann is responsible for
the translation.
For works of authors which are frequently cited, the following ab-
breviations are used (presented in alphabetical order):
Bergson
CE Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Modern

Library, 1944.
CM An Introduction to Metaphysics: The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle
L. Andison. Totowa: Littlefield, Adams, 1975.
ME Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon Carr.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975.
xi
xii
NO TE ON CI TAT I O NS , T RANS LAT I O NS, AND ABBREVIATIONS
MM Matter and Memory, trans. W. Scott Palmer. London: George

Allen and Unwin, Humanities, 1970.
TFW Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,
trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin,
Macmillan, 1959.
Heidegger
BP The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
ER The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1969.
FC The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude,
trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995.
HF The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans.
Ted Sadler. London: Continuum, 2002.
MF The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Schelling Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan
Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.
SZ Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986 (16th
printing).
Kant
CPR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith. London:

Macmillan, 1963.
CPrR Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1949.
New Elucidation New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition,
trans. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. In Immanuel Kant,
Theoretical Philosophy, 1755– 1770, 5– 45. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992.
Religion Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di
Giovanni. In Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed.
and trans. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni, 39– 171.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
xiii
NO TE O N C I TAT I ONS , T RANS LAT I O NS , A ND ABBREVIATIONS
Kierkegaard
CA The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte in

collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1980.
EO Either/Or, ed. and trans. in 2 volumes by Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
EO 1 Volume 1
EO 2 Volume 2
PF Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, ed. and trans.
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.:
Postscript Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed.
and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, volume 1.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Repetition Repetition, in Fear and Trembling. Repetition, ed. and trans.
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.:
SD The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna
H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.
SL Stages on Life’s Way, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna
H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
UD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Leibniz
Confessio Confessio philosophi, Papers Concerning the Problem of Evil, 1671–

1678, ed. and trans. by Robert C. Sleigh Jr. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2005.
Theodicy Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the
Origin of Evil, ed. Austin Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard. La Salle,
Ill.: Open Court, 1985.
Levinas
EE Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1978.
xiv
NO TE ON CI TAT I O NS , T RANS LAT I O NS, AND ABBREVIATIONS
Entre nous Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith

and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998.
OB Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.
TI Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans Alphonso
Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2nd ed. 2007
(1st ed. 1969).
TO Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A.
Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987.
Sartre
BN Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London:

Routledge, 1969.
Schelling
AW Die Weltalter [The Ages of the World].

There are three versions of this work (1811, 1813, 1815).
For the first draft of 1811, the second draft of 1813, and the
fragments, the quotes refer to Die Weltalter: Fragmente: In der
Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich:
Biederstein und Leibniz Verlag, 1946). For the third version of
1815, the quotes refer to volume 8 of the Sämtliche Werke
(Stuttgart: Cotta, 1861).
AW 1811 Version of 1811.
AW 1813 Version of 1813, with the following translation: Ages of the World
(Second Draft, 1813), trans. Judith Norman. In Slavoj Žižek, The
Abyss of Freedom, 107– 82. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997.
AW Fr. Fragments.
AW 1815 Version of 1815, with the following translation: The Ages of the
World: Third Version, trans. Jason M. Wirth. New York: SUNY
Press, 2000.
PI Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom,
trans. Jeffrey Love and Johannes Schmidt. New York: SUNY
Press, 2006.
xv
NO TE O N C I TAT I ONS , T RANS LAT I O NS , A ND ABBREVIATIONS
Schopenhauer
FR On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F.

J. Payne. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1997.
FW Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, ed. Günter Zöller, trans. Eric
F. J. Payne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
WWR The World as Will and Representation, trans. in 2 volumes by E. F. J.
Payne. Indian Hills, Colo.: Falcon’s Wing, 1958 (WWR I: volume
1 with books 1, 2, 3, 4 and the appendix; WWR II: volume 2
with the supplements).
Time and Freedom
introduction
Time and Freedom. The title of this book will become clearer in the
course of the following chapters. Let us just say, for the moment, that
it designates an inquiry into a specific problem— that of the relation
between time and freedom— whose genealogical tree I will sketch out
with a view to making a number of contributions towards a solution.
Before becoming a philosophical question, time existed as a reality
that haunts our innermost being, expressed so wonderfully by Borges as
follows:
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along,
but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a
fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. (Borges 1964, 234)
Time is both what is closest to me and what is farthest from me. We bathe
continually in the flux of time and we are quite incapable of mastering
it conceptually. This well-known paradox, immortalized by Saint Augus-
tine in The Confessions— “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know;
if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know” (1998,
256)— implies a pre-comprehension of time that the philosopher tries
to make explicit. But it has to be admitted that, like an impregnable
fortress, time resists all attempts to plumb its depths. Among the latter,
at least five possible strategies can be distinguished, strategies that have
been employed in the history of philosophy to confront the problem of
time. By summarizing them here, I will at the same time be outlining the
strategy adopted in this book.
1. The most basic is the quantitative approach, which consists in determin-

ing time as the measure of motion. The very first philosopher to theorize
this approach was Aristotle, in the fourth book of his Physics, who defines
time as the “number of motion in respect to ‘before’ and ‘after’” (Physics
219b1– 2).1 As we shall see at the beginning of the first chapter, it is not
possible to restrict the Aristotelian conception of time to the question
3
4
I N T R O D UCT I O N
of its quantification. Nevertheless, a central place is certainly granted to

quantification. Time appears as a succession of nows. The now is the limit
between the before and the after. As such, it cannot offer a unit of mea-
surement for time,2 since a limit has no duration. It makes no sense to say
of any movement that it has lasted for ten nows. It is much more plausible
to say that it has lasted for ten seconds, but this kind of affirmation already
presupposes a number of preliminary operations. In order for time to be
the measure of movement, it must itself be measured by a movement, a
movement that provides a unit of objective measure. This is why, Aristotle
tells us, “not only do we measure the movement by the time, but also the
time by the movement, because they define each other” (Physics 220b15–
16). In order that the measurement of time should be as universal as
possible, not just any movement can be adopted to measure time; rather,
“uniform circular motion” has to be chosen (Physics 223b19– 20), since
this is both the most familiar and the most regular movement. With refer-
ence to the movement of the stars one obtains measurable unities of time,
which are ever more precise (the year, the month, the day, the hour), and
thanks to which we can measure all the other movements—calculate their
speed and compare them with each other.
In Aristotle’s day, nobody talked of seconds. The measurement of
time was obtained by instruments such as the gnomon, a vertical post
planted on a horizontal surface illuminated by the sun, or by solar clocks.
For more precise measurements clepsydras were used, as in courts of
law, where it was necessary to fix the time of speech in a fair way, or in
astronomical observations.3 Since Galileo, the quantitative approach to
time has been mathematized, in the sense that time has become a vari-
able “t” in the equations of physics.4 The quantification of time finds
its most rigorous expression in physics, which constantly improves the
precision with which time is measured by making use of atomic radia-
tion, for example, which produces waves of an extremely regular and
short wavelength. Despite these differences, the procedure is the same
as that brought to light by Aristotle. Time is to be measured first of all
by a regular motion, which then serves as a standard for measuring all
other movements. In this sense, it is not time that measures movement
but a certain regular movement that measures all other movements by
way of temporal mediation. Measuring movements by time comes down
to comparing them among themselves.5
2. We can understand why the quantitative approach must have seemed

unsatisfactory to many philosophers, even though it enjoys a certain au-
thority and never ceases to remind us of its usefulness, both in science
5
and in daily life, where it features as clock time. What is a watch, if not, at
the level of the body, a regular movement that reproduces a movement
like that of the stars? Instead of being thought as time, time is in each
instance simply used to calculate movements. The quantitative approach
to time gets around the problem of time without ever really getting into
it. As banal an experience as boredom suffices to bring out the extent
to which measurable time does not exhaust the reality of time: there are
minutes that last for hours and inversely. To get free of the quantitative
utilization of time, the philosopher can start out from his or her own
experience of time, resistant to measurement. Consciousness of time
thereby becomes the Trojan horse set up to get us into the fortress, and
to do so better than the analysis of movement itself. This is the subjectiv-
ist approach to time: time is refracted across the prism of the subject who
experiences it. The argument is the following. By examining the time of
our consciousness in particular, we will be able to elucidate the meaning
of time in general. To illustrate this position, it will be enough to cite a
few well-known examples. Saint Augustine is the first to have ventured
down this path: “‘There are three tenses or times: the present of past
things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.’
These are three realities in the mind, but nowhere else as far as I can see,
for the present of past things is memory, the present of present things is
attention, and the present of future things is expectation” (1998, 261).
In this way, time is reduced to the consciousness of time.6 The question
of the measure of time is also to be found in book 11 of the Confessions.
But it is quite rightly displaced from the domain of external and natural
movements to that of mental interiority: “In you, my mind, I measure
time” (1998, 269). In reality, I never measure time but only the conscious-
ness I have of it. So it is not time itself that drags on in boredom but my
expectation of future events.
This way of presenting the problem will be endlessly developed. By
making of time the form of internal sense, Kant appeals to the subjectiv-
ist approach in his transcendental aesthetics. Time is the a priori form—
universal and necessary— of sensibility, that which makes it possible for
the subject to intuit itself, to perceive its own internal states. To be sure,
time is also and mediately the condition of the perception of the exter-
nal world and, as such, along with space, it is one of the foundations of
the objectivity of nature. But both space and time belong to a pure in-
tuition which resides a priori in the subject. If we abstract entirely from
all subjectivity, time disappears, purely and simply: “Time is therefore a
purely subjective condition of our (human) intuition . . . ; and in itself,
apart from the subject, is nothing” (CPR, A 35/B 52). Despite his reserva-
tions vis-à-vis Kantianism,7 Bergson commits himself to the fundamental
6
philosophical decision, which consists in defining time on the basis of

consciousness. True time is duration, “the form which the succession of
our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains
from separating its present state from its former states” (TFW, 100). Here
again, it’s a matter of disclosing the essence of time by plunging into the
arcane depths of consciousness, which can be opened up like a book,
a book that then has to be closed again with a view to trying to think a
duration more appropriate to the universe itself.8 In making of time a
determination of human reality foreign to being in itself, Sartre, as we
shall see in chapter 8, does not call into question this way of thinking of
time on the basis of the subject.
There can be no doubt that Husserl managed to carry the subjectiv-
ist approach to time further than anyone else. Husserlian phenomenol-
ogy grasps time as an activity inseparable from consciousness. The time
of consciousness coincides with the consciousness of time, from which
the time of the world is derived. In his Ideas I, at section 81, Husserl notes:
The transcendentally “absolute” which we have brought about by the

reductions is, in truth, not what is ultimate; it is something which con-
stitutes itself in a certain profound and completely peculiar sense of its
own and which has its primal source [Urquelle] in what is ultimately and
truly absolute.
Fortunately, we can leave out of account the enigma of conscious-
ness of time in our preliminary analyses without endangering their
rigour. (1982, 193– 94)
If the phenomenological reduction is to be complete, radical, it has to

go back to the source of time; it has to explore the consciousness of time
and the time of consciousness. Husserl in a footnote refers us to his lec-
tures delivered in 1905 at the University of Göttingen, published years
later by Heidegger in 1928 under the title Lectures on the Phenomenology
of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Did Husserl manage in these lectures
to resolve the enigma of time consciousness? The lectures begin with a
phenomenological reduction of time that comprises two phases. First of
all, objective time has to be “suspended,” “bracketed.” Objective time
corresponds to “world time,” to “the real time,” to “the time of nature in
the sense of natural science” (Husserl 1991, §1, 4– 5). Objective time is
hereby placed in parentheses, in the sense that one refuses to make any
use of it, to affirm it, to entertain any preconceived beliefs with regard
to it. In a second step, the meaning of time has to be traced back to its
origin in consciousness. We need to understand how objective time, or
temporal objectivity, “can become constituted in subjective consciousness
7
of time” (Husserl 1991, 3). The first part of this course of lectures trans-
forms the entire problem of time into a problem of the purely subjective
consciousness of time, with explicit reference to Saint Augustine, rightly
quoted as an indispensable predecessor. Husserl’s aim is to think the
fundamental connection of time and consciousness: “What we accept,
however, is not the existence of a world time [Weltzeit], the existence of
a physical duration, and the like, but appearing time [erscheinende Zeit],
appearing duration as appearing” (Husserl 1991, §1, 5). The conscious-
ness of time refers back of itself to the time of consciousness, which is
the “immanent time of the flow of consciousness” (Husserl 1991, §1, 5),
time as it appears to consciousness, lived time, felt time. When one gets
outside the circuit of objective time and “slides into the ‘corridors’ of an
already constituted experience” (Granel 1968, 60), the only remaining
certainty is that of the existence of lived time, a time that now needs to
be examined in its own right.
For our purposes it will not be necessary to go over Husserl’s analy-
ses in detail, analyses which distinguish two levels of temporality. Tempo-
ral objects (Zeitobjekte)— for example an enduring sound, a melody, and
so on— are constituted through a double intentionality, a retention of the
past and a protention of the future. As for the temporal flux of conscious-
ness, it constitutes itself continually and so forms an “absolute subjectiv-
ity” (Husserl 1991, §36, 79), thereby incarnating that “ultimately and truly
absolute” evoked at section 81 of Ideas I. An approach of this kind consists
in reducing (in the phenomenological sense) time to the consciousness
of time. This reduction of time certainly does make it possible for us to
deepen our knowledge of the specific temporality of consciousness, but
it brings with it at least three difficulties.
The first arises out of the rigorous symmetry, proposed by Husserl,
between retention and protention,9 a symmetry that masks the essential
asymmetry of time. Contrary to retention, protention aims at a moment
of time which is absent, as yet indeterminate. To the extent that the past is
charged with the reality of what was present and gives rise to a retentional
intentionality that constitutes it, to that same extent the future partly es-
capes the hold of protention, which remains incapable of determining
the meaning of what is about to happen with the same certainty as the
retention of what is no longer. Between the anticipation of the future mo-
ment, in protention, and its “fulfillment” in the now, there is a change of
meaning, a hiatus that merits further analysis. Husserl grants primacy to
the past, implicitly at least, a past in which the in-determination of time
has disappeared to leave room for the activity of primary memory.
The second difficulty bears upon the constitution of objective time,
which forms, as an outcome of the flow of consciousness and the ongoing
8
flow of temporal objects, the third stratum of time. At the beginning of

his lectures, Husserl points out several a priori temporal laws of objective
time, which he presents as evident: “Naturally, I mean by this laws of the
following obvious sort: that the fixed temporal order is a two-dimensional
infinite series, that two different times can never be simultaneous, that
their relation is a nonreciprocal one, that transitivity obtains, that to every
time an earlier and a later time belong, and so on” (Husserl 1991, §2, 10).
The present “now” cannot coexist with other “nows,” past and future, the
past “now” can never be present again. But is objective time, with its prop-
erties of succession and irreversibility, actually constituted by conscious-
ness? To find out, the reduction has first to be completed by exposing the
process by which objective time, the time of the world, gets constituted,
and this out of a meaning giving consciousness. The phenomenology of
time is a search for a time that has been overlooked, a natural time placed
in brackets by the reduction and to which Husserl refers as follows: “Time
is fixed, and yet time flows. In the flow of time, in the continuous sinking
down into the past, a nonflowing, absolutely fixed, identical, objective
time becomes constituted. This is the problem” (Husserl 1991, §31, 67).
The solution proposed in the Lectures of 1905 is to appeal to sec-
ondary memory in the constitution of objective time, as is explained in
section 32 entitled “The Role of Reproduction in the Constitution of the
One Objective Time.” Contrary to retention, which is an immediate or
primary memory, included automatically in perception, secondary mem-
ory is the active recall of a past representation, which only comes about
after the retentions have stopped. Secondary memory, or recollection, is
characterized by its ability to make the past present again (Vergegenwärti-
gen). According to Husserl, it is this reproduction of the past by the sec-
ondary memory which inserts each phase of the lived flux into the fixed
order of objective time, by assigning to it its determinate place. When
we remember a past event, we situate it in the calendar of the world. But
doesn’t this solution consist in making of objective time something ideal,
subjective, a simple creation of remembering? Unless one simply presup-
poses it as given in advance, as Husserl does, when he simply enumerates
the properties of objective time over again as “a priori laws,” laws like suc-
cession, irreversibility, homogeneity, continuity, and the ceaseless welling-
up of a now (Husserl 1991, §33, 73– 75). These temporal characteristics
are all referred to the time of the world, to a natural time that is simply
not clarified. On this point it is difficult not to agree with Paul Ricoeur,
who thinks that “the price of the Husserlian discovery of retention and
secondary remembrance is that nature is forgotten, yet succession is pre-
supposed by the very description of the internal consciousness of time”
(Ricoeur 1988, 59).
9
The limit of the Husserlian phenomenology of time is not that of

dissolving objective time in consciousness but of having enclosed it in a
circle, by presupposing as established what it is supposed to be constituting.
3. The subjectivist approach no doubt throws some light on the time of

consciousness, but at the price of an irreducible incompleteness, leaving
the time of the world in a vast zone of inaccessible darkness. There are
several ways of going about the business of thinking time in its worldly,
cosmological dimension. First of all, nature can be taken as the means of
access to worldly time. The approach by way of nature marks, to a consider-
able extent, the approach adopted by Aristotle. For the latter, time is not
just in the soul, it is in all things, “in earth and in sea and in heaven” (Phys-
ics 223a16– 17). Time is linked to movement, because all movement takes
place in time, but it cannot be identified with movement itself, whose
number and whose measure it supplies. Being in time means being mea-
sured or measurable through time. But can time subsist without the soul
that measures it? After having taken account of objections, Aristotle con-
cludes in the affirmative, at least in the sense in which movement, from
which time is inseparable, can obviously exist without the soul (Physics,
223a21– 28). That time cannot be perceived, noted, enumerated except
by the soul does not mean that it is constituted in its very being by soul.
To admit that would be to confuse the perception of time, which depends
effectively upon the soul, with its very existence, which is independent of
it. Being in time is to be enveloped by natural time as by a horizon which
comprehends all beings whether in movement or at rest.
We see that several different approaches to the problem of time can
be found in one and the same philosopher. Thus Aristotle combines the
quantitative approach with the via naturalis. Even a thinker like Hegel will
try to combine the subjectivist conception of time with that which sees in
the latter a natural being. In the system of the Encyclopaedia, time is situ-
ated at the beginning of the Philosophy of Nature, where it figures as the
abstract negativity of nature, which engulfs all events in the nothingness
of the past. The destructive power of time, evoked by Borges across the
image of the tiger and of fire, is symbolized with Hegel by the God Kro-
nos/Chronos devouring his own children. From this point of view, there
is nothing subjective to time and “time does not involve the difference
between objectivity and a distinct subjective consciousness” (Philosophy
of Nature, 1970, §258, 230). Like Aristotle, Hegel conceives the time of
nature independently of consciousness and so, in contrast to Kant, effects
a kind of de-subjectivization of time. But he also confirms that time is
“abstract subjectivity, the same principle as the: ‘ego = ego’ of pure self-
10
consciousness” (Philosophy of Nature, 1970, §258, 230). So does time arise

out of nature or out of consciousness? Out of both in fact. For Hegel, time
is a Janus whose two faces are nature and spirit, sharing in common the
principle of negativity. Considered as the universal negativity of nature,
time is opposed to spirit. But through memory, language, and thought,
spirit can surpass the destructive negativity of natural time and convert it
into a creative negativity appropriate to historical time: “Future and past
are separate only in our thought, in nature there is only the now. History
exists only in spirit; what has happened is past, time being the tomb of
what was, but spirit conserves the past” (Hegel 2002, 37). Under the form
of history, time is reintegrated within the domain of spirit.10
4. The approach by way of nature does justice to the fact that time can-
not be restricted to a structure of finite human subjectivity. If this were
the case, the history of the universe and of the earth before the appear-
ance of man would simply be inconceivable. Time did not wait for man to
exist! All the same, the recognition of the autonomy of natural time can-
not fail to raise the problem of its relation with human time, the time of
consciousness. With Hegel, the dialectical reversal of a natural time into
a historical time of spirit is possible because nature is already concealed
spirit, spirit existing in itself. But if one refuses this thesis, if one holds that
spirit is not capable of raising the veil of Isis, of penetrating the secrets of
nature, the via naturalis can only lead on to cosmological time, and so runs
the risk of never rejoining psychological time, which then takes on the
enigmatic figure of a will-o’-the-wisp in the endless night of the universe.
To grasp time in all its facets as both human time and a world time,
a mode of access has to be adopted which is even more general than that
of nature— being itself. The ontological approach adopted by Heidegger
consists in saying that time is the horizon of any comprehension of being,
of the being of Dasein, human existence, or that of any other beings, enti-
ties readily available to us, “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden), or merely present
for us, “present-at-hand” (vorhanden). The first two published sections of
Being and Time show how time, under the form of ecstatical temporality,
is the “ontological meaning of care” (§65), that is, the condition of the
possibility of the existence of Dasein. All the existential characters of Da-
sein, the “existentialia”— like projection, resoluteness, facticity, thrown-
ness, care, and so on— are only possible within the horizon of the three
ecstatical dimensions of time, the future, the “having-being” (the past),
and the present. At first sight, one might suspect Heidegger of having
latched onto the subjectivist approach, which deduces time from the sub-
ject, even though the latter might now have been re-baptized “Dasein.”
11
This is not in fact so. Temporality remains the horizon of all beings, of
Dasein just as much as those other beings which it is not itself. This thesis
is announced from the very outset of Being and Time: “Whenever Dasein
tacitly understands and interprets something like Being, it does so with
time as its standpoint. Time must be brought to light— and genuinely
conceived— as the horizon for all understanding of Being and of any
way of interpreting it” (SZ, 17). Temporality has two aspects which are
two sides of the same phenomenon. As Zeitlichkeit, it is the horizon of
the being of Dasein. As Temporalität, it is the horizon of being in general.
Thus it is only through “the exposition of the problematic of Temporality
[Temporalität]”11 that “the question of the meaning of Being will first be
concretely answered” (SZ, 19). All the same, this program is not carried
through in Being and Time, which ends with the following questions: “Is
there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of Being?
Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of Being?” (SZ, 437). The
reply should have been given in the third section of the first part of Being
and Time. But Heidegger destroyed the latter at the end of the year 1926,
shortly after he had finished composing it, for the reason that he found
it inadequate.
For want of this deliberately destroyed first version, the lectures
of summer 1927 entitled The Basic Problems of Phenomenology can be con-
sidered as a “new elaboration of this third section” (BP, 24: 1). At the
end of these lectures (BP, §21), Heidegger makes another attempt at ad-
dressing the problem of the Temporality of being. Temporality is ecstatic-
horizonal. Each of the three ecstasies bears a horizontal schema, render-
ing possible the understanding of the being of beings: “we understand
being from the original horizontal schema of the ecstasies of temporality” (BP, 24:
436). The ecstasis of the present projects itself towards the horizon of
the praesens, which is the condition of the possibility of the “readiness-to-
hand” (Zuhandenheit). In other words, “readiness-to-hand formally implies
praesens [Praesenz], presence [Anwesenheit]” (BP, 24: 439, trans. modified).
What does that mean? Any interaction with some ready-to-hand thing—
object, thing, instrument, and so on— is possible only on the basis of an
understanding of its specific being, of its availability, which is itself only
possible because the entity is perceived within the horizon of the praesens,
because it is there present, close at hand. Let’s admit that the praesens—
the ecstatical horizon of the present— designates the Temporality of the
thing ready-to-hand. It remains to be seen what might be the two other ec-
statical horizons governing the future and the past, which, by definition,
cannot be reduced to the praesens. Surely, the future and the past project
being in its non-presence, enveloping being with a halo of absence? But
Heidegger dodges the problem: “In order not to confuse unduly our
12
vision of the phenomena of temporality, which moreover are themselves

so hard to grasp, we shall restrict ourselves to the explication of the pres-
ent and its ecstatical horizon praesens” (BP, 24: 435– 36). The ontological
approach remains incomplete, even if it does not lead to an impasse.12
5. Despite the different approaches adopted to decipher the enigma,

the problem of time confronts an apparently insurmountable resistance.
The two paths that go by way of subjective or nature seem incompatible,
the adoption of the one bringing with it the abandonment of the other.
After completing a recapitulative survey of the main lines of thinking on
the subject, Ricoeur concludes that philosophy is not able to find its way
out of the maze of temporality, split between two conceptions, the cos-
mological, inaugurated by Plato and especially Aristotle, which makes of
time a being of nature, and that of psychology, which sees in time a form
of consciousness, this along a line of thought that runs from Saint Augus-
tine to Husserl. Time of the world or Time of the soul? This alternative,
described in detail by Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, constitutes one of
the most obscure aporias of temporality, perhaps even the most obscure.
The aporetic approach consists in recognizing the powerlessness of philos-
ophy to resolve the problem of time, whose solution has therefore to be
sought outside its own domain. In Ricoeur’s eyes, the thread permitting
Ariane to get out of the maze of the “aporetics of temporality” is narrative
(historical or fictional). In its historical and literary forms, narrative is the
“guardian of time,” it unifies our temporal experience and makes it pos-
sible for us to develop “a third-time,” one that bridges the gap between
lived time and cosmic time. Relating an event is reinscribing a fragment
of lived time in the universal calendar of the time of the world. This
process applies equally to the third and more familiar form of narrative,
that by which an individual relates its life and develops its own “narrative
identity,” interwoven with narrated stories which get made up and then
unmade (Ricoeur 1988, 241– 49).
One might even ask whether Ricoeur does not refute his own theory,
in the sense in which his work Time and Narrative certainly constitutes a
carefully worked out, philosophical response to the dilemma of temporal-
ity. But the real problem is located elsewhere. Is the first and most familiar
experience we have of time really that of narrative? We might be permitted
to question this. In one way or another, narrative refers to the past. Narra-
tive identity is retrospective, fabricated out of accomplished actions which
it inevitably follows upon. Ricoeur was certainly aware of this, since he un-
derlines, from the first, and at the very start of his work, that the operation
of mimesis and of plot, through which he defines narrative, always refers
13
to actions. Mimesis is the representation of an action, just as plot is the

synthesis of goals, causes, and of chance, that “are brought together within
the temporal unity of a whole and complete action” (1984, ix). “Mimesis
II”— creative imitation, the act of relating properly so called— has to be
distinguished from “mimesis I,” which designates the pre-narrative expe-
rience of action. Before relating one’s life one has to live it. But this first
stage of mimesis I implies, among other things, a “pre-understanding”
of the temporality proper to action. This is the way Ricoeur invokes the
“temporality of human action” (1984, 82), a “properly practical temporal-
ity” (1984, 83), which precedes and makes possible the time related in the
narrative. What does this all mean?
The answer is laconic. One finds this remark, for example: “it is
easy to see that the project has to do with the future, in a very specific
way that distinguishes the future from prevision or prediction” (Ricoeur
1984, 60). It is indeed easy to take note of this, but difficult to explain it.
In what does the future of the time of action differ from that of prevision?
Are there two modalities of the future, one for natural events that can be
predicted by appeal to scientific laws, and another unpredictable modal-
ity reserved for human actions? As if to have done with these difficulties,
Ricoeur appeals to Heidegger’s concept of within-timeness: “This struc-
ture of within-timeness [Innerzeitigkeit] seems the best characterization of
the temporality of action for my present analysis” (1984, 61). When we
act, we certainly situate ourselves in time and count on it. But this mode
of temporality cannot exhaust the temporality of action, if it turns out,
as we shall see in chapter 6 devoted to Heidegger, that it only designates
one modality of existence: its improper, inauthentic form, centered on
the present, that which is furthest removed from any true action emanat-
ing from the free choice of the individual. By approaching time from the
standpoint of narrative, the temporality of action remains a blind spot,
constantly presupposed but never made fully explicit.
6. In this book I propose to follow up this unexplored path, one that

addresses the problem of time not from its quantification, not from sub-
jectivity, from nature, from being, or from narrative but in the light of
action, and from that by which it is conditioned: freedom. I am not going
to pretend that this practical approach to the problem of time offers the
final key. What I hope for is something more in the way of throwing new
light on the scene. My starting point is the idea that action is a specific
experience of the world whose cause is freedom. It is based on a specific
experience of time oriented towards the future. I assume that human
freedom exists as a choice between several possibilities, and I try to inves-
14
tigate the conception of time which is involved in that notion of freedom.

In other words, I do not deal with the classical issue of the existence of
freedom, but only with the relation of human freedom to time. From
a practical point of view, the future is not an object of narrative but of
the will. In his actions, the individual spontaneously complies with this
dimension of time, most often turning his back on the past and living in
the future. Pascal has described this phenomenon in these terms:
Everyone should study their thoughts. They will find them all centred
on the past or on the future. We almost never think of the present, and
if we do it is simply to shed some light on the future. The present is
never our end. Past and present are our means, only the future is our
end. And so we never actually live, though we hope so, and in constantly
striving for happiness it is inevitable that we will never achieve it.13
Why does the future enjoy such a primacy? Pascal suggests that it is dis-
traction or diversion (divertissement) which commits us to continual anxi-
ety. The future is the refuge of the one who never stops running away
from himself. A refuge that has all the attraction of a prison, for, by dint
of fleeing the present, man becomes a prisoner of the future. Without
denying the pertinence of Pascal’s analysis, I think, nevertheless, that it
might be possible to develop a different interpretation, and even one that
moves in the opposite direction. For us, the primacy of the future can
be explained as a function of the privileged place occupied by human
freedom. Which implies the following: if one is going to find a solution
to the dilemma of temporality, one is going to have to look in the direc-
tion of the practical. Narrative identity presupposes a practical identity,
constituted by the interconnection of freedom and time. The process
of action consists in writing the subjective temporality of the individual,
made up of memories, impressions, and projects, into the time of the
world, which, by that very token, becomes a human time. However, the
practical approach to time in turn raises a new problem, which crystallizes
around the articulation of time and freedom. In what way does freedom
manifest itself through time? How can time accommodate the process of
acting? Through the future, one might want to say. But does the future
really provide a stage upon which freedom can be enacted or is it not
really already determined in advance?
Questions such as these have sometimes been raised in the history
of philosophy, notably across controversies relating to fatalism. But curi-
ously, the analyses implied by such questions relative to the concept of
freedom have rarely been accompanied by the no less necessary reflec-
tion bearing on the nature of the time thereby taken into consideration
15
and, in particular, on the status of the future, no matter how important

this kind of reflection might turn out to be. Hence their unfinished,
unthought character, leaving the way open for aporetic dilemmas. The
few remarks Leibniz devoted to the notion of the future in his Essay on
Theodicy pale into insignificance by comparison with the ample and de-
tailed efforts he devoted to the definition of freedom. One could say
the same of Kant, who talks very little of the future in a thematic way.
So what I am proposing to do is to examine the birth and development
of the problem of the relation of freedom and time insofar as it can be
read out of the history of philosophy. A difficult birth and a slow develop-
ment, since it seems that this problem has still not been fully worked out,
even today. It takes root in Leibniz’s interpretation of the Aristotelian
debate on future contingents. Kant’s “Third Antinomy” allows for a first
formulation, which constitutes a kind of common trunk from which the
problem branches out in different directions: Schopenhauer on the one
side, Schelling, on the other, then, through the intermediary of Kierke-
gaard, finding further ramifications with Heidegger in Germany, and
Bergson, Sartre, and Levinas in France. Over and beyond their differ-
ences, all these philosophers have this in common, that they were one
and all confronted with the problem of the temporality of human freedom
and, in order to resolve this problem, felt obliged to think the plasticity of
time,14 that is, its capacity to be modified and configured by freedom. The
guiding thread of this book will then be the concept of the “possible.” Is
it legitimate to employ this concept in connection with the future? And
if so, what meaning do we need to confer upon it?
1
Whether the Future is Necessary

(Leibniz)
Is the future necessary? To this question, humans tend to answer in the

negative, for few are those who are ready to succumb to “lazy reason.”
The contingency of the future seems to be the precondition for all action,
even the most ordinary. But perhaps this is only an illusion. It is difficult to
reach anything like a rigorously demonstrative decision on this matter. One
can even ask to what an extent future events can be analyzed according to
the categories of modality. Perhaps fatalism belongs along with dogmatic
idealism to those objections which are as impossible to refute theoretically
as to admit practically. Numerous are the controversies on this subject,
running from antiquity to modern philosophy, and passing by way of the
Middle Ages. The first period assumes the form of a logical treatment of
the subject, addressed by way of the Master Argument or the problem of
future contingents.1 The second introduces a theological problematic, to
the extent that medieval philosophers envisage the question of human free-
dom and its relation to the future out of the framework of a reflection upon
divine prescience.2 The third period adds to the logical and the theological
approaches an epistemological perspective, privileging the category of cau-
sality, the dominant category in modern science stemming from Galileo.
The problem is not just that of determining in what way prescience can be
reconciled with human freedom but above all: how human freedom can
coexist with the causal laws of nature? I shall concentrate my inquiry on
the last of these three periods, taking as my point of departure the philos-
ophy of Leibniz, who examined the thesis of fatalism from all three points
of view, the logical, the theological, and the epistemological.
Three Possible Arguments in Favor

of the Necessity of the Future
The question of the agreement of divine prescience with human free-

dom, as also the controversy concerning future contingents, along with
fatalism, is the general frame within which Leibniz addresses the problem
19
20
T H E T R E E OF P OS S I BI LI T I E S
of the future. Does the author of the Theodicy succeed in avoiding the
labyrinth of liberty and necessity?
We know that Leibniz was not happy with Descartes’s solution, ac-
cording to which the agreement between human freedom and divine
preordination, whose omnipotence makes it possible for him to leave
our actions “entirely free and undetermined,” goes beyond anything our
finite intelligence can comprehend.3 In his “Preface” he lays out the three
possible arguments brought in favor of fatalism:
For, they said, if the future is necessary, that which must happen will
happen, whatever I may do. Now the future (so they said) is neces-
sary, whether because the Divinity foresees everything, and even pre-
establishes it by the control of all things in the universe; or because
everything happens of necessity, through the concatenation of causes;
or finally, through the very nature of truth, which is determinate in the
assertions that can be made on future events, as it is in all assertions,
since the assertion must always be true or false in itself, even though
we know not always which it is. And all these reasons for determination
which appear different converge finally like lines upon one and the
same centre; for there is a truth in the future event which is prede-
termined by the causes, and God pre-establishes it in establishing the
causes. (Theodicy, “Preface,” 54)
Divine foreknowledge, the necessity of causes, the truth of future contin-

gents. These are the three reasons in favor of declaring the future neces-
sary and, in consequence, they represent the three principal objections
to human freedom. To refute these objections, Leibniz develops a series
of arguments, each of which relies on the others.
1. In what way is divine foreknowledge compatible with human freedom?

The reply to this question passes by way of an analysis of freedom and,
in the first place, a critique of the freedom of indifference. In certain
texts, Leibniz admits the existence of a relative or limited indifference,
inasmuch as man can suspend judgment and so abstain for a time from
following the best option his intelligence offers.4 But a balanced indiffer-
ence, the total incapacity to choose one thing rather than another, is, in
his eyes, an absurd illusion, as illustrated by the example of Buridan’s ass.5
Such a conception of freedom, inspired by Descartes or more remotely by
Molina, is for Leibniz false, for it contradicts the principle of reason itself,
which precisely excludes the very notion of indetermination, and accord-
ing to which nothing happens without a cause, or at least some determin-
21
W H E THE R T HE FUT URE I S NE CE S S ARY (LEIBNIZ)
ing reason, that is, something that makes it possible to render intelligible
why this exists rather than not existing and why it exists in this way rather
than in another.6 As a result of this principle, the freedom of indifference
makes no sense: “Therefore, nothing is more unsuitable than to want to
transform the notion of free choice into I do not know what kind of un-
heard of and absurd power of acting or not acting without reason— such
a power no sane person would select for himself” (Confessio, 69).
In fact, the supposed indifference is never perfectly balanced; ac-
cording to Leibniz, there are always motives, even imperceptible motives
made up out of his so-called petites perceptions, which incline us in one
direction rather than another.
What is at stake implicitly in such a critique is the preservation of
divine foreknowledge. So, “when one asserts that a free event cannot be
foreseen, one is confusing freedom with indetermination, or with indif-
ference that is complete and in equipoise” (Theodicy, art. 369, 346). If
human freedom was devoid of reason, God would be unable to foresee
it, as appears more clearly in this passage from On the Omnipotence . . . :
For example, when Abiathar prophesied by divine inspiration to David

that the citizens of Ziclag would deliver him to the besieger Saul if Saul
came to Ziclag, the philosophers did not know what to do. In other
words, they did not know how to explain that God would always be able
to know what the citizens of Ziclag would have done at some point,
since the Ziclagian free will was a completely indifferent thing, bound
to no cause, in which God could not see anything (even if he had con-
sidered all the conditions ever so precisely to which people are used to
resorting, and this is often infallible enough) by which he could know
with certainty which way the balance of their free will would move.7
God can foresee the free actions of humans because their freedom is
spontaneous, in opposition to the constraint which makes us act in ac-
cordance with a principle external to ourselves, and is also a choice of
the best, in opposition to the absolute necessity that excludes other pos-
sibilities.8 For man as for God, being free means choosing what appears
to be the best possible alternative. The difference is that God’s freedom
is infallible whereas man’s freedom can be mistaken in taking the worse
for the better. By virtue of his spontaneity, man is then free from all eter-
nal influence on the part of other substances, except for divine concor-
dance to which he remains subjected. But then surely human freedom is
reduced to a state of illusion with regard to divine foreknowledge?
On this point, Leibniz advances a theological argument. God made
man in his own image and therefore made him free.9 In his theory of
22
preestablished harmony, God chose the best of all possible worlds, which
included individuals acting freely. He chose Adam sinning freely in the
sense in which he admitted into existence a world including Adam the
sinner.10 The human soul “was determined from all eternity in its state
of mere possibility to act freely, as it does, when it attains to existence”
(Theodicy, art. 323, 321), and this in virtue of the creative decree of God.
In a word, God has foreseen and indeed wanted that man act freely, di-
vine foreknowledge entirely covering human freedom.
2. Foreknowledge is all the same the sign of the necessity of actions. Leib-
niz himself says that divine foreknowledge is only possible thanks to the
fact that freedom is determined by reasons. So it seems that human free-
dom is subject to a necessity that subverts it. This is where he appeals to
the logic of two necessities. In the wake of Aristotle, Leibniz distinguishes
absolute necessity, whether logical or metaphysical, whose contrary is im-
possible, and hypothetical or moral necessity, whose opposite remains
possible.11 Physical necessity, which belongs to the causal order of nature,
is itself founded in moral necessity, which corresponds to God’s decision
to choose the best of all possible worlds.12
The possible is that which is conceived clearly by an attentive mind,
the thinkable in the sense of the non-contradictory. In order to avoid the
vicious circle (the possible is that which can be conceived, i.e., all that it is
possible to conceive), it is worth pointing out that the possible is that which
is conceived by the divine understanding, the region of all possibilities.
This logical definition of the possible through the law of non-contradiction
regulates the definitions of the necessary— that whose opposite implies
contradiction and is therefore impossible— and the contingent, that whose
opposite does not imply contradiction and is consequently possible. Since
God chose the actual world from an infinity of possible worlds, the events
of the world are contingent, their nonexistence remaining precisely pos-
sible in other possible worlds. At the same time, they obey the principle
of reason and are subject to the choice of the best by God, which is why
they attest to a moral or hypothetical necessity. All that exists in the world
exists necessarily because it has been chosen by God. Contingent events are
therefore necessary ex hypothesi, according to the hypothesis whereby the world
in which they figure exists by virtue of divine decree.13
Thanks to this distinction, Spinoza’s fatalistic argument had been
rejected. Spinoza wrongly reduced hypothetic necessity to metaphysical
necessity. For there exist possibilities that are never realized, destined to
remain in the limbo of the divine understanding along with other pos-
sible worlds, and the necessity of the existing world is therefore not abso-
23
lute. The decisions of God “in no way alter the possibility of things. And,
as I have already said, although God certainly always chooses the best, that
does not stop something less perfect from being and remaining possible
in itself, even though it will not happen— for it is not its impossibility but
its imperfection which makes him reject it” (Discourse on Metaphysics, art.
13, 1998a, 65). It is because the field of the possible exceeds that of the
real that the choice can be called contingent. And he who says choice
says in effect plurality of possibilities: “there would be neither choice nor
freedom if there were but one course possible” (Theodicy, art. 235, 273).
For man, as for God, freedom is only subject to a hypothetical necessity,
which includes both the possible and the contingent. Freedom is saved
at the cost of the thesis that there exist absolute possibilities, destined to
remain merely possible.
3. We are now in a position to examine the third objection bearing on

future contingents, the most relevant for our purposes. How could Leib-
niz uphold the truth of future contingents without abolishing human
freedom? What conception of the future is implied by such an analysis?
Let us go back for a moment to the Aristotelian theory of future
contingents, discussed by Leibniz in his Theodicy. In chapter 9 of On In-
terpretation, Aristotle defends the daring thesis that consists in limiting
the validity of the principle of bivalence, derived from that of non-
contradiction.14 Two contradictory propositions cannot both be true
(principle of non-contradiction). If one is true, the other is false and
vice versa (principle of excluded middle). This implies that every logical
proposition possesses a determinate truth value: either it is true or false
(bivalence). The Megaric philosophers had made use of this principle to
demonstrate the thesis of fatalism according to which all future events are
either necessary or impossible. Given a future event A, the proposition
“A will happen tomorrow” is either true or false. If it is true, event A will
inevitably happen; it is necessary. If it is false, event A will never happen;
it is impossible. At least three consequences follow from this form of rea-
soning. (1) The first is that “all, then, that is about to be must of necessity
take place” (On Interpretation, 18b15– 16).15 Between the necessary and the
impossible, there is no longer any room for the possible. As was pointed
out in the Metaphysics (1046b28– 30), the Megarics ruined the very no-
tion of possibility by reducing potentiality to actuality. (2) If the future is
necessary, it is in principle entirely predictable: “For a man may predict
an event ten thousand years beforehand, and another may predict the
reverse; that which was truly predicted at the moment in the past will of
necessity take place in the fullness of time” (On Interpretation, 18b34– 36).
24
(3) To be sure, it is only after the event that we will know which of these
two predictions was the right one. But one is still entitled to apply the
principle of retrogradation of truth: it was already true 10,000 years ago
that what is happening today would happen.
Aristotle wants to refute determinism, starting out from the anal-
ysis of propositions. Which are those that lie beyond the bounds of the
principle of bivalence? Universal propositions are evidently subject to this
principle independently of time. “Man is a political animal” is a propo-
sition which is just as true as that affirming that “man will be a political
animal.” Singular propositions bearing on the past and the present also
obey the rule of bivalence. “Socrates was at the Agora yesterday,” “Soc-
rates is at the Agora right now,” are propositions whose truth value is
determinate. The problem only arises with singular propositions bearing
on the future. But even here it is worth making the following distinction:
Singular propositions of the type “Socrates will be a man,” “the sky will
change,” are also necessarily true for they attribute predicates which are
essential. The limitation to the principle of bivalence concerns singular
propositions bearing on the future with respect to a contingent matter,
what the tradition calls “future contingents.” The contingent is what can
not be or can be other than it is. The domain of future contingents in-
cludes therefore all events whose accomplishment is not necessary, every
type of event that might not have happened. To go back to Aristotle’s
examples, propositions like “the coat will be cut” or “there will be a sea
fight tomorrow” are neither true nor false. The validity of the excluded
middle does not imply that of bivalence, a state of affairs Aristotle for-
mulates as follows: “A sea fight must either take place tomorrow or not.”
For one of the two propositions will be true, the other false, by virtue of
the principle of excluded middle adapted to these propositions de futuro.
But Aristotle goes on to insist: “but it is not necessary that it should take
place tomorrow, neither is it necessary that it should not take place, yet it
is necessary that it either should or should not take place tomorrow” (On
Interpretation, 19a30– 33). It is necessary that tomorrow there either will
or there will not be a sea fight. But neither one of these two branches is
already fixed in terms of its truth value. In other words, the truth of the
disjunction p or not-p is not a sufficient condition for the truth of p or
the truth of not-p. Propositions bearing on future contingents have an
indeterminate truth value, one that cannot be assigned; they are neither
true nor false at the time they are uttered, from which it follows that they
cannot escape the temporal context in which they are situated. This logi-
cal indeterminateness follows from a lack of temporal determinateness,
a term designating the ability of present or future events to happen indif-
ferently in this or that way: “for the meaning of the word ‘fortuitous’ [τὸ
25
γὰρ ὁπότερ’ἔτυχεν] with regard to present or future events is that reality is

so constituted that it may issue in either of two opposite directions” (On
Interpretation, 18b6– 8). Understood in this way, the indeterminateness of
the future does not solely concern its knowledge, which for us is most
often retrospective, but belongs to its very nature.
Leibniz deals with the problem of future contingents in a detailed
way in articles 36 to 45 of the first part of the Theodicy. He begins by laying
out his position. The truth of future contingents is certain, determinate,
and nevertheless contingent. Certain, because it complies with the rule
of bivalence, founded in the principle of contradiction which, with that
of reason, is intangible and accommodates no exception. Contingent, be-
cause it relies on hypothetical necessity. It is therefore legitimate to apply
to propositions on future contingents the principle of the retrogradation
of truth: “It was true already a hundred years ago that I should write today,
as it will be true after a hundred years that I have written” (Theodicy, art.
36, 143). Leibniz does not agree either with Aristotle, who thought that
propositions on future contingents were indeterminate, or with Diodore,
who claimed that there could not be possibilities that would not be actual-
ized.16 The determination of the proposition is the equivalent of objective
certainty. For who? Not for human beings of course, who are ignorant
of how the future will turn out, but for God, who knows in advance all
truths: “God’s knowledge causes the future to be for him as the present”
(Theodicy, art. 28, 140).
The determination of propositions on future contingents is a pre-
determination, the object of divine foreknowledge. But does the latter
not contradict human freedom yet again? Leibniz responds to this objec-
tion with two arguments. What is foreseen by God cannot fail to materi-
alize. But this necessity is hypothetical and not absolute. If God foresees
it, such an action is necessary. Its contrary is nevertheless possible, in the
sense that for Leibniz this action takes place in a world chosen by God
among other possible worlds in which it does not exist. Leibniz also speci-
fies that “foreknowledge in itself adds nothing to the determination of
the truth of contingent futurities, save that this determination is known”
(Theodicy, art. 37, 144). Knowing does not necessitate. God can say: “I
know the future, but I do not bring it about” (Theodicy, art. 409, 367).
Leibniz and Molina: The Conditional Future
What is the nature of divine foreknowledge? On this question, Leibniz takes

up the doctrine of Molina, who set about reconciling divine foreknowledge
26
with human freedom on the basis of a radical conception of free will as a

“power of contraries”: “That agent is called free which, with all the prereq-
uisites for acting posited, is able to act and able not to act, or is able to do
one thing in such a way that is also able to do some contrary thing” (Mo-
lina, Concordia, pt. 1, Dispute 2).17 Molina distinguishes two meanings of
contingency. In a first and classical sense, the contingent is that whose op-
posite is possible, that is non-contradictory. For example, the fact that Soc-
rates is seated is contingent since the opposite predicate is just as possible.
But this contingency can perfectly well coexist with a fatalistic necessity, just
as soon as one takes into consideration the series of causes in which the
event in question is situated. According to the hypothesis that everything
happens from natural necessity, “anyone who knew all the causes in such a
universe would thereby know infallibly and with certainty all the things that
were going to be” (Concordia, 1988, pt. 4, ch. 47, 86). However, Molina in-
troduces a second form of contingency which contradicts this hypothesis:
“By contrast, a given future state of affairs is called contingent in a second
sense, because it rules out not only the necessity that has its source in the
nature of terms, but also the fatalistic and extrinsic necessity that results
from the arrangement of causes” (Concordia, 1988, pt. 4, ch. 47, 86). Cer-
tain contingent events exist that exclude the fatal and extrinsic necessity
of causes. These events are those that stem from free will. The specific con-
tingency of human freedom is that whose opposite is possible and which,
with regard to the same causes, may or may not happen. The will of God is
“the primary, though remote source” of this contingency, in the sense in which
God created the free choice of human beings, which latter is its “proximate
and immediate source” (Concordia, 1988, 94).
To reconcile this radical concept of free will with foreknowledge,
Molina develops the idea of a middle knowledge of God:
Finally, the third type is middle knowledge [media scientia], by which, in

virtue of the most profound and inscrutable comprehension of each
faculty of free choice, He saw in His own essence what each such faculty
would do with its innate freedom were it to be placed in this or in that
or, indeed, in infinitely many orders of things— even though it would
really be able, if it so willed, to do the opposite. (Concordia, 1988, pt. 4,
ch. 52, 168)
Leibniz comments on Molina’s doctrine in these terms.18 Between the

“knowledge of mere intelligence” (Molina calls it “natural knowledge”),
which bears on possibles independent of creation, and the “knowledge of
intuition” (“free knowledge”), through which God knows events as they
effectively turn out in the course of the universe, there exists a “middle
27
knowledge” which has for its objects conditional events, events that would
happen if certain circumstances were given. The classical example on this
subject, as we have already seen above, is the question David addresses to
God with a view to knowing if the inhabitants of the town of Keilah would
deliver him over to Saul under the assumption that he remained in this
town and that Saul besieged it (1 Samuel 23). God replied in the affirma-
tive and David left Keilah. Thanks to this middle knowledge, God knew
what individuals would do freely when placed in certain situations. This
middle knowledge is the foreknowledge of conditional propositions bear-
ing on those future contingents that constitute free acts— the knowledge
of “conditionals of freedom.”19 For example, “If Saul besieged Keilah,
David would be handed over by its inhabitants.” Foreknowledge extends
to conditionals of freedom, without however compromising the latter,
and for several reasons. (1) The conditional acts of individuals do not
depend upon God’s will, since the middle knowledge is pre-volitional, it
precedes creation, and in such a way that God is like a spectator of the
free will of man. (2) This free will is effective, to the extent that, at the
moment of choice, the individual could, if he wanted, have really made
the opposite choice. If Molina’s theory is formulated in the semantics of
possible worlds, one might say that the individual is free in the sense that,
given a specific situation, he can choose another possibility, situated in
another possible world where this conditional of freedom, the act that
he accomplishes in this situation, would be false. (3) Finally, in his crea-
tive activity, God does not choose free acts but certain situations on the
basis of which free acts can be produced. In this sense, it is not because
God knows the future events (conditional and absolute) that will hap-
pen, but because they will happen according to natural or free causes,
that he knows them. In consequence, everything happens exactly as if
God had no foreknowledge of future events: “For it is a foreknowledge
that imposes no necessity or certitude of the consequent on future things, but
rather leaves them as uncertain in themselves and in relation to their
causes as they would be if there were no such foreknowledge” (Concordia,
1988, pt. 4, ch. 52, 193).
Molina agrees with Aristotle in thinking that propositions bearing
on future contingents are indeterminate as regards to their truth value.
But he nevertheless thinks that God can know them, God who, through his
middle knowledge, knows conditional future contingents and, through
his free knowledge, also knows absolute future contingents, those which
will effectively happen. How then are we to conceive correctly this relation
between possibles and the future understood in this way? In knowledge
of mere intelligence, the possibles are envisaged in a purely logical way,
without reference to time. On the other hand, middle knowledge bears on
28
Figure 1. Ramification of possibilities (Molina)
conditional future contingents, that is, it bears on possibles which are writ-
ten into temporal series of events, which proceed from different situations.
Let’s go back to the preceding example. God’s reply to David contains in
fact two conditional propositions: (1) if David stayed in Keilah, Saul would
besiege the town; (2) if Saul besieged Keilah, the inhabitants would deliver
David over to him. The crucial point is that the consequence in the first
proposition becomes a hypothetical situation in the second proposition,
which prolongs the first in this way. In the middle knowledge, the pos-
sibles are not then simply juxtaposed pell-mell alongside each other, they
are linked up with each other according to a logic of ramification; one
branching off where the other leaves off. The ramification could even be
continued along in the following way: (3) if David had been handed over
to Saul, . . . Each stage leads to a bifurcation, a branching that, in Molina’s
view, corresponds to a real choice facing the individual, in such way that
the foundation of this ramification of possibles is human freedom from
a God’s-eye point of view. Inasmuch as David finally decides not to stay
in Keilah, that entire branch of possibilities, as God was well aware, was
simply set aside. The middle knowledge implies a series of possible worlds
which emerge somewhat in the manner of an ever tuftier tree. At the mo-
ment when each choice has to be made, each individual finds himself
face to face with different possible actions, representing as many different
possible courses of the world, different ramifications of the tree of pos-
sibilities, the complete outcome of which is known only to God. Molina
even sketches out an understanding of the future as the ramification of
possibilities rooted in human freedom (see figure 1).
For Molina, each ramification represents a real choice between two
contrary possibilities. At A, David has the choice of staying at Keilah (B)
or leaving the town (B’). At B, Saul, knowing that David is at Keilah, can
29
besiege the town (C) or give up pursuing David (C’). At C, the inhabi-
tants of Keilah have the choice of handing David over to Saul (D) or pro-
tecting him (D’). In revealing to David at A the meaning of the effective
ramification of future choices (if B then C then D), God is only helping
him to make up his mind.
From this doctrine, Leibniz holds onto the idea that God is capable
of knowing the infinity of possible worlds in their slightest detail. Through
his omniscience, “God sees all the innumerable possible arrangements
and consequences at one time, while the math master must have time for
each” (On the Omnipotence . . . , 2005, 27). God foresees not just all the abso-
lute future events, those future contingents which will certainly take place,
but also all the conditional future events which might have happened in
other possible worlds, conditional future contingents:
For this result I resort to my principle of an infinitude of possible

worlds, represented in the region of eternal verities, that is, in the
object of the divine intelligence, where all conditional futurities must
be comprised. For the case of the siege of Keilah forms part of a pos-
sible world, which differs from ours only in all that is connected with this hy-
pothesis, and the idea of this possible world represents that which would
happen in this case. Thus we have a principle for the certain knowledge
of contingent futurities, whether they happen actually or must happen
in a certain case. (Theodicy, art. 42, 146)
Each possible world is a coordinated set of conditional events compre-

hending a series of possibilities which would happen if such and such
circumstances were given (for example, the siege of Keilah, leading to
the capture of David by Saul). If one takes up the point of view of the
actual world chosen by God, and which does not include the siege of
Keilah, that is, which comes to be after the creation, one has to say that
each possible world is a ramification of conditional future events which
would have happened if certain circumstances had been actualized. But
from the very fact of divine decree, these conditional future events will
remain in the state of pure possibilities.
Like Molina, Leibniz thinks that foreknowledge in all its forms does
not contradict human freedom, even if for different reasons. The prin-
ciple difficulty facing Molina’s doctrine, its Achilles’ heel, is the question
of the foundation of the middle knowledge. How could God know what
individuals would do freely under such and such circumstances? Molina
replies by appealing to the profound and eminent understanding that
God has regarding each free will. But for Leibniz, he only displaces the
problem, since the foreknowledge of conditional free acts remains just as
30
mysterious as that of free actions that will be actualized, just as soon as they
fail to conform to the principle of reason. As we saw in the passage from On
the Omnipotence . . . cited above, freedom of indifference undermines the
foundations of divine foreknowledge. Hence the following alternative.20
Either one makes of free will a power of contraries, as does Molina, an abil-
ity to act in one way or another without any determining causes, and any
middle knowledge becomes impossible, since this violates the principle of
reason. Or else this knowledge is founded in the principle of reason (ef-
ficient causes, final causes, principle of the best choice), and there is noth-
ing exceptional about the middle knowledge; it differs from the divine
knowledge of the possible— the knowledge of mere intelligence— solely
by virtue of its object (conditional possibilities) and not by its method (the
analysis of reasons). For this reason, it is for Leibniz useless distinguishing
a middle knowledge from a knowledge of mere intelligence. The latter
encompasses the former. In fact, “all these connexions of the actions of
the creature and of all creatures were represented in the divine under-
standing, and known to God through the knowledge of mere intelligence,
before he had decreed to give them existence. Thus we see that, in order
to account for the foreknowledge of God, one may dispense with both the
mediate knowledge of the Molinists and with predetermination” (Theodicy,
art. 47, 149). By virtue of the knowledge of mere intelligence, the knowl-
edge of all the possibles, God knows in advance the totality of future pos-
sibilities, the future contingents that will certainly happen and those that
will certainly never happen.
In article 17 of Causa Dei (1978, 441), Leibniz nevertheless manages
to leave some room for the middle knowledge, and this by restricting the
field of the knowledge of mere intelligence. The divine knowledge gets
divided into three branches, as a function of the object under consider-
ation. The knowledge of mere intelligence is not the knowledge of the
possible, but the knowledge of possible and necessary truths, which are
to be found in every possible world and which would then be necessar-
ily actualized. The middle knowledge is the knowledge of possible and
contingent truths, like all future contingents. The knowledge of intuition
bears on actual and contingent truths, those future contingents which
have been actualized on the basis of the creative decree of God.
Leibniz’s Pre-determinism
Leibniz’s critique of Molina shows that the certainty of propositions bear-

ing on future contingents does not rest on divine foreknowledge, which
31
is rather a consequence of the former, but on the principle of reason. In

the eternity of his present, God sees all the predicates contained in any
particular subject, for he grasps the reasons of their action. So where does
that leave human freedom? The abundance of arguments deployed by
Leibniz to defend divine foreknowledge and the truth of future contin-
gents leads to a pre-determinism,21 which seems to toll the knell of free
will. As early as the Discourse on Metaphysics, this pre-determinism is ex-
pressed (art. 13) by the idea that each individual is in possession of a com-
plete notion that contains everything that will ever happen to him: “since
the individual notion of each person involves once and for all everything
that will ever happen to him, we can see in that notion the a priori proofs
or reasons for the truth of every event, or why one thing happens rather
than another” (1998a, 63). So is his future necessary? Yes, certainly, but
the necessity is only hypothetical, since the individual has been freely
chosen by God, along with the best of all possible worlds. It belongs to the
individual notion of Caesar that he crossed the Rubicon. Just like all his
other predicates, this attribute is in the subject, by virtue of the principle
praedicatum inest subjecto. The complete notion of an individual is a reserve
of predetermined events, that existence will only unfold over time. But
the proposition “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” is contingent, its contrary
implying no contradiction. In the Theodicy, Leibniz formulates the same
thesis in different words:
All is therefore certain and determined beforehand in man, as every-

where else, and the human soul is a kind of spiritual automaton, al-
though contingent actions in general and free action in particular are
not on that account necessary with an absolute necessity, which would
be truly incompatible with contingency. Thus neither futurition in itself,
certain as it is, nor the infallible prevision of God, nor the predetermi-
nation either of causes or of God’s decrees destroys this contingency
and this freedom. (Theodicy, art. 52, 151)
The idea of a “spiritual automaton” encompasses that of a complete no-

tion, implying as it does that of a total pre-determination of the future
for each individual, this in the mode of hypothetical necessity designed
to preserve human freedom from every objection: “futurition” (truth of
future contingents), foreknowledge, causality.
This pre-determinism is not what one would call today a physical
determinism. Free will is independent not only of metaphysical necessity,
which concerns truths of reason, but also of physical necessity, which fol-
lows from the fixed laws of nature. As was noted by Moreau (1984, 226),
who appealed to a text edited by Couturat,22 freedom is not predictable
32
for Leibniz in the same way as the events of nature. The causal laws of
nature are only “subordinate laws,” which can be set aside by God for mir-
acles. Human freedom is comparable to “a sort of private miracle” (quasi
privato quodam miraculo), in the sense in which the will is withdrawn from
the necessity of efficient causes, which only concern bodies:
But free or intelligent substances possess something greater and more

marvellous [than bodies], in a kind of imitation of God. For they are
not bound by any certain subordinate laws of the universe, but act as
it were by a private miracle, on the sole initiative of their own power,
and by looking towards a final cause they interrupt the connexion and
the course of the efficient causes that act on their will. So it is true that
there is no creature “which knows the heart” which could predict with
certainty how some mind will choose in accordance with the laws of
nature; as it could be predicted (at any rate by an angel) how some
body will act, provided that the course of nature is not interrupted [by
a miracle]. (Necessary and Contingent Truths, 1973, 100)
And yet, Leibniz continues, God knows perfectly well all the future ac-
tions of each free substance! How is that possible if will is independent of
the causal laws of nature? From the fact that the relevant predicate, even
future predicates, are contained in the notion of the subject. Predication
is prediction. Mind does not escape the principle of “futurition,” which
wants the truth of future contingents to be determinate. This is why Leib-
niz can declare in the Discourse on Metaphysics, written at the same period,
that “all our future thoughts and perceptions are only the consequences
(albeit contingent) of our preceding thoughts and perceptions. So if I
were capable of considering distinctly everything which is happening or
appearing to me now, I would be able to see in it everything which will
ever happen or appear to me for all time” (art. 14, 1998a, 67). To be sure,
only God can plumb the depths of our hearts to the point of accomplish-
ing such a prediction. But if one looks more closely into the matter, one
sees that the mind no more escapes the principle of the inherence of
the predicate in the subject than it does the principle of causality. Free
and intelligent substances act by a sort of private miracle which frees
them from efficient causes certainly, but not from all causes, since the
course of efficient causes is only suspended in view of a final cause. Free
substances are subject to a different system of causality from that of bod-
ies, as the Monadology makes clear. If bodies act “according to the laws of
efficient causes, or of motions,” “souls act according to the laws of final
causes, through appetition, ends and means” (Monadology, art. 79, 1998a,
279).23 Who says law says possible foresight, at least for God. Leibnizian
33
pre-determinism implies a physical determinism for bodies, based on ef-

ficient causes and accessible in part to human knowledge (in the image
of the predictable phenomena of eclipses), and a more complex psycho-
logical determinism for the mind, which rests on the series of final causes
and can only be foreseen by God, the guarantor, through preestablished
harmony, of the concordance between the two regions of mind and body.
Pre-determinism goes further than the religious doctrine of predes-
tination, which is limited to questions of salvation. For it encompasses all
the actions of every individual. The distinction of two types of necessity no
longer suffices to remove finally and completely the suspicion of fatalism.
Indeed so very little, that Leibniz constantly had to refute the objection of
lazy reason, which, hydra-like, keeps on growing new heads. If everything
in man is certain and determined in advance, why bother to act? Leibniz
replies to this in two ways. First, by appealing to hypothetical necessity
to define destiny. The Fatum mahometum is an absolute necessity imposed
on individuals. The same holds of the Fatum stoicum, with this difference
that it is attenuated by being voluntarily endured. The Fatum christianum
that Leibniz defends is derived from the word fari, which means “to pro-
nounce,” “to decree.” It designates the certain destiny of all things regu-
lated by the decrees of God according to the moral necessity of the best.
The Christian does not endure his destiny, he loves it for it is for him the
work of providence.24
On these already established grounds, a new argument is grafted,
a purely practical argument. The future is predetermined, but the indi-
vidual cannot know his future. Man can foresee what an action in general
will be, the quest of what the agent believes to be the best, but man is
quite incapable of foreseeing this or that action in particular. The move-
ments of the heart cannot be foreseen in the same way as the movements
of bodies and of stars. Thus,
the whole future is doubtless determined: but since we know not what it
is, nor what is foreseen or resolved, we must do our duty, according to
the reason that God has given us and according to the rules that he has
prescribed for us; and thereafter we must have a quiet mind, and leave
to God himself the care for the outcome. (Theodicy, art. 58, 154)
Ignorance of the future is the indispensable counterpart to its predeter-

mination. If the future were known, either it could be contradicted by
acts which would refute foreknowledge, or it could not, transforming
providence into fatality. But man ignores what God has decided for him:
“therefore since it is not evident to you whether something has been de-
creed in your favor or against you, act as if it had been decreed in your
34
favor or act as if nothing had been decreed, since you cannot conform
your action to what is unknown to you” (Confessio, 61). In doubt, every-
thing should be done to obtain grace. According to Leibniz, it pertains
to the one who loves God to be satisfied with the past and to endeavor to
render the future as good as possible.25 Even if our entire future is prede-
termined, we have to act as though it were not, as if we could modify, even
improve, the future. Here freedom has become a kind of wager (Kant will
call it a “postulate”), a bet whose outcome we shall never know. Falling
back in this way upon the position assumed by Descartes, Leibniz’s ratio-
nalism has to allow an aura of mystery to surround our freedom, since
we cannot know in advance how, nor for what precise reasons, God has
disposed our free will.26
With regard to its premise— the ignorance of the future— this prac-
tical argument relies upon a logical argument. To the two types of necessity
(absolute and hypothetical) there correspond two types of propositions.
Necessary propositions are those whose opposite implies a contradiction.
They can be reduced to the principle of identity by the human mind by
way of a finite number of operations, as in the demonstrations of the
propositions of arithmetic (“any number divisible by 12 is a number divis-
ible by 4”). In this case, the predicate is implied in the subject (Leibniz
uses the verb implicare). Contingent propositions are those whose op-
posite is possible (“Caesar crossed the Rubicon”). But Leibniz offers a
more precise definition of this proposition, which makes no appeal to
the category of the possible:
In the case of a contingent truth, even though the predicate is really in

the subject, yet one never arrives at a demonstration or an identity, even
though the resolution of each term is continued indefinitely. In such
cases it is only God, who comprehends the infinite at once, who can see
how the one is in the other, and can understand a priori the perfect rea-
son for contingency; in creatures this is supplied a posteriori, by experi-
ence. (Necessary and Contingent Truths, 1973, 97)
The impossibility for man to know future contingents in advance comes

not from the supposedly indeterminate character of the future, but from
the fact that the contingent propositions in general can be known only
a posteriori by a finite understanding, the analysis of the reason running
to infinity. Between the subject “Caesar” and the predicate “crossing the
Rubicon” there exist an infinity of intermediary terms that God alone can
take in at a glance. The predicate is certainly involved in the subject, but
in such a way that this connection cannot be demonstrated and known
a priori (Leibniz uses the verb involvere).27 The complete notion is only
35
known to God, and the individual can only discover it bit by bit in the
course of his existence.
It is not at all clear whether Leibniz managed to get free of the apo-
rias raised by his confrontation with divine foreknowledge and human
freedom. Three difficulties can be noted. First of all, the determinate
knowledge of an object presupposes that this object is actually deter-
mined. However, only past and present existence are completely deter-
mined and are to be distinguished from the future precisely on account
of the indeterminate character of the latter. Leibniz’s thesis regarding
the determination of future contingents is therefore debatable, for it ob-
scures the distinction between the three temporal dimensions. The reply
might be given that God does not know Titus as existing, but only the
complete notion of Titus, his individual essence which does not exist as
yet. But it is obvious that the concept of a “complete notion” excludes all
human freedom in the sense of a power to choose between alternatives,
even though one might specify that contingent truths remain unknow-
able for man. For Peter, not to have denied Christ would come down to
his not being Peter. But no one has the power to not be who he is.28
This last objection raises a third difficulty, this time one intrinsic
to Leibniz’s theory. Let us admit for a moment that pre-determinism is
compatible with freedom, for it retains contingency. Among all possible
worlds, God chose the one in which Peter sinned freely. Peter’s decision
to deny Christ is free in the eyes of Leibniz, since the contrary is possible,
implies no contradiction. At the same time, “denying Christ” is one of
Peter’s accidental predicates, located in the subject and which as such
makes up a part of the complete notion of Peter from all eternity. So in
this sense, it would be contradictory to withhold this predicate from Peter.
All the same, Peter not denying Christ is possible, just as long as one speci-
fies that it holds of another Peter, located in another possible world. But
can one operate with the logic of contradiction if the subject has changed
at the same time as the predicate? In the case of contingent propositions
arising out of hypothetical necessity, either the contradiction is impos-
sible as a result of the principle praedicatum inest subjecto, or the contra-
diction makes no sense, since the subject disappears at the same time
as the predicate. The opposed predicate— not to deny Christ— is never
possible of Peter, only of some other Peter existing in another world, one
that was not chosen by God. The contingency at the moment of choice
is then illusory; the contrary would have been possible, belonging as it
does to an inaccessible future that has already been set aside. It follows
from this that the conditional propositions of the middle knowledge do
not, strictly speaking, make sense. Asking what Peter might have done,
if he had not betrayed Christ, comes down to asking what Peter would
36
have done had he not been Peter.29 Possible worlds can never be brought
together in any way whatever.
Where does this leave us? In the light of the preceding analyses, it
turns out that human freedom is triply predetermined: (1) by the ratio-
nal principle of the best, which requires that the choice bear infallibly
upon real or apparent goodness; (2) by the complete notion, which, by
virtue of the principle praedicatum inest subjecto, requires that all the acts
of the individual flow forth necessarily from its individual essence; and
finally (3) by God’s creative decree, requiring that the best of all pos-
sible worlds be actualized along with all the complete notions that such a
world contains. Divine decree is for the individual a choice of its choice,
whose determinate reasons, over and beyond the very general principle
of the best, are impenetrable to the latter. If the possible is never my pos-
sible, and if my choice is already fixed, where is my freedom? This triple
predetermination is rooted in the principle of sufficient reason, whose
compatibility with human freedom is anything but demonstrated.
The Two Figures of the Future in Leibniz
Are we going to have to conclude that Leibniz’s philosophy clearly brings

no solution to the problem of laying out the relation of time and free-
dom? Not at all. Leibniz’s pre-determinism allows, paradoxically, for both
a restriction and an extension of the future. On the one hand, the pres-
ent is big with the future and the future can be read in the past.30 The
future is present to God, who foresees all things. One sole and unique
future is traced out in advance for each individual. On the other hand,
Leibniz extends the horizon of the future as much as possible, in affirm-
ing the existence of an infinite number of possible worlds and, at the
heart of these worlds, the existence of hypothetical future events which
will never be actualized.
So two figures of the future have to be distinguished. (1) The “pres-
ent future” is said to be present in the double sense in which it is pres-
ent in God’s view (it is a present future), and in the sense in which it will
necessarily be present (it is also a future present), for the reason that
this future, with all its contents, is integrated into the best of all possible
worlds.31 (2) As for the “hypothetical future,” it will never be present since
it is not compossible with the world chosen by God. It is a future which
could have been present if God had chosen it. In the system of preestab-
lished harmony, the two figures of the future are predetermined. Present
future is predetermined in the frame of the actual world, hypothetical
37
future in the play of possible worlds, the object of Molina’s middle knowl-
edge, re-baptized by Leibniz as the knowledge of possible and contingent
truths. This strict distribution of these two modalities of the future is itself
predetermined by the decree of divine creation.
Are pure possibilities, possibilities which will never be real, truly
temporal? Can they even be called “futural,” even if qualified by “hypo-
thetical”? The question is difficult, all the more so because Leibniz never
made himself clear on this subject. On the one hand, he seems to think
that only those possibilities which will be realized effectively are tempo-
ral, in the sense of taking place in the future. This is what is suggested,
for example, by this passage: “For God understands perfectly the notion
of this free individual substance, considered as possible, and from this
very notion he foresees what its choice will be, and therefore he decides
to accommodate to it his predetermination in time, it being granted that
he decides to admit it among existing things” (Necessary and Contingent
Truths, 1973, 103). Temporalization only intervenes with the actualiza-
tion in existence, so that, from the standpoint of pure possibilities, it
would be better to talk of eternity. One might think that all possibles are
atemporal before the creation, at least from the standpoint of the knowl-
edge of mere intelligence. Once the creative decree has been realized, all
possibles are temporalized, in the mode of the absolute future, for those
belonging to the created world, in the mode of the conditional future
for the other that will never be realized. But on the other hand, Leibniz
employs the future to explain that God, before any actualization, already
foresees what the choice of its creatures will be. When he states that cer-
tain possibilities will never be realized, he refers these possibilities to the
future, even if only negatively. What sense would such a claim make if all
possibles were eternal?
In certain texts, Leibniz describes the possible in temporal terms.
Every possibility, whether envisaged before or after creation, includes a
tendency to existence (conatum ad existentiam), of such a kind that “every
possibility is a future existent [omne possible existiturire]” (24 Metaphysical
Theses, 1988, 534). The temporality of the possible comes from the fact
that it is not limited to pure logical non-contradiction, but aspires to
existence. Leibniz is quite ready to invent other neologisms on the basis
of the future tense of existere (existiturus), like the “exisentiturientia” of es-
sences, or the “existuriens,” terms which designate the tendency towards
the existence of possibilities.32 All possibles tend toward existence but
only those will be actualized which are compossible with the best possible
world decreed by God, that which contains the maximum of physical
and moral perfection: “There is a struggle between all the possibles, all
of them laying claim to existence, and that those which, being united,
38
produce most reality, most perfection, most significance carry the day”
(Theodicy, art. 201, 253). For this reason Leibniz, distinguishes the existi-
turientia, the possibles inasmuch as they all tend toward existence, from
the existitura, which are those possibles which will exist. As opposed to
the necessary which is strictly eternal, the possible is linked analytically
with the future, which certainly does not mean that it can be identified
purely and simply with the “will be” in all its forms,33 for this formulation
fails to take account of the fact that certain possibilities, in particular,
will never happen. The possible is divided up between the hypothetical
future, which will not be, and the present future, which will be.
Leibniz keeps Molina’s ideas of a tree of possibilities, with the dif-
ference that the bifurcations which form the ramifications are not due
to free choice but to the fact that all possible are not compossible. David
can not stay at Keilah and leave Keilah. God actualized the world in which
David leaves Keilah, and from this precise point the world in question
branches out into an actual (where David leaves Keilah) and another pos-
sible world (where David does not leave Keilah). This possible world itself
branches out into other possible worlds as a function of the conditional
possibilities which multiply ad infinitum (David captured by Saul can be
killed or not, can escape or remain a prisoner, etc.). The actual world
is then the actualization of a determinate series of possibilities, which
coexist with possible worlds, each of which constitutes the branch of the
tree of possibilities in accordance with an infinitely complex process of
ramification. This branching of the possible is the hypothetical future.
Pure possibilities are in fact caught up in temporal series which sketch
out, each time differently, the course of diverse possible worlds. Even
though it does not actually exist in time, a possible world is ordered in
the form of a succession of events, in the absence of which it would be a
pure chaos. This succession is not purely logical, since for the most part
it principally connects truths of fact, referring to events unfolding in time
(for example, David staying at Keilah). Hence the idea that although they
will never attain existence, the pure possibles composing this series form
a hypothetical future destined never to be present. They are future, to
the extent that they are all after the divine decree of creation, which is an
absolute present (a present without past). The difference between condi-
tional future and absolute future is that the latter gets transformed into
present, then into past (David left Keilah), whereas the former becomes
in a certain sense “past future.” At the time David leaves Keilah, the possi-
bility that he might be captured by Saul becomes an obsolete possibility,
one that can no longer be realized. Conditional future is peculiar in this,
that it becomes past without passing through the stage of the present.
39
Figure 2. Parallel possible worlds (Leibniz)
For Leibniz, the future is then in part possible (conditional future)

and in part necessary (present future). It is thanks to this infinite reserve
of hypothetical future events that the future is not necessary in the sense
of absolute necessity. But the problem of freedom still remains. For each
individual can only actualize one route across the tree of possibilities,
since this tree is itself rooted in the principle of sufficient reason and
in the inherence of the predicate in the subject, which is one of its con-
sequences.34 What is for God a present future is for man like a future
perfect according to which all the future events will have taken place,
a future that is always already predetermined. Everything happens as if
possible worlds were not ramified each in relation to the others, but ran
parallel to one another, as can be represented in the following schema
(figure 2).
The branch of the possible world God revealed to David is that situ-
ated in the world W1 (A1-B1-C1), the alphabetical order symbolizing the
40
temporal succession. Among all these possible worlds, God chose to actu-
alize W2, where we find the branch A2-B2-C2. Strictly speaking, the David of
W1, the David of W2, and the David of W3 and so on, are not different pos-
sibilities of one and the same individual, but different individuals, who
are namesakes. Each individual, placed in the world that is his, is caught
in tracks of stone he will never be able to escape. There do exist other
paths, other possible worlds, but it is impossible for him to have access to
them. The possibility that God dangles before man is only a mirage of the
future in the present. Far from being resolved or even posited explicitly,
the problem of the compossibility of freedom and time, a problem that
just begins to emerge, remains unsolvable.
2
Three Kantian Solutions to the

Problem of Pre-determinism
Leibniz never managed to find his way out of the labyrinth of freedom and
necessity, perhaps because he failed to identify and take control of what
plays there the role of Minotaur: time. Can Kant offer us an Ariadne’s thread
allowing freedom to escape from the maze of temporality? By considering
his thinking in the light of this question, we shall perhaps be able to find
not one but several solutions— at least three. This solution does not make
things simpler, since each, as we will see, engenders its own difficulties. As
if that were not already enough, Kant radically modified his conception of
Leibniz’s philosophy, in particular with what pertains to human freedom.
After having taken over Leibniz’s pre-determinism in his New Elucidation,1 he
turns his back on it in the Critique of Practical Reason, likening the freedom
of the “spiritual automaton” to a “turnspit which when once wound up also
carries out its motions of itself” (CPrR, 5: 97). But instead of deriving from
this critique a more open conception of the future, Kant adds, a little later,
the astonishing phrase claiming that if we could know the entire character
of a man in the least detail together with all the circumstances of his life,
“his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occur-
rence of a solar or lunar eclipse, and we could nevertheless still assert that
the man is free” (CPrR, 5: 99, trans. modified). From reading this text, we do
not know if the future of this man is necessary or not, nor even whether the
eclipse in question might not indeed be that of his freedom. What are his
reasons for reversing his position vis-à-vis Leibniz? Is it really a reversal? Is a
pre-determinism of this kind really compatible with the thesis of freedom?
And if such is the case, what conception of the future is presupposed by this
Kantian attempt to render the two compatible?
Kant and the Principle of

determining Ground
Kant thought about Leibniz’s position, which he knew from a direct read-
ing of works like the Theodicy and through the prism of the philosophy of
41
42
Wolff, who takes up again the fundamental concepts of the system of prees-
tablished harmony.2 Like Leibniz, Wolff admits the existence of a plurality
of possible worlds. He defines the contingent as that whose opposite is pos-
sible and so involves no contradiction. The necessary, on the other hand, is
that whose opposite is self-contradictory. Wolff insists upon the distinction
of two necessities, absolute and hypothetical, in order to escape the charge
of Spinozism. These two notions are clarified with the help of the principle
of reason. A being is absolutely necessary if it has the reason for its existence
built into its essence. With the exception of God, all beings are therefore
only hypothetically necessary, for their sufficient reason is situated outside
their essence. The pre-determinism that results from the principle of suf-
ficient reason leads Wolff too to affirm the truth of future contingents in
his Cosmologia Naturalis (§§106– 8). Future events are predetermined and
propositions bearing on the latter enjoy a completely determinate truth
value. But they are no less contingent for all that, for they do not contain
in themselves the sufficient reason of their existence. Does Kant accept this
way of reconciling pre-determinism and contingency?
The Kantian position vis-à-vis the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff
underwent an appreciable evolution, as is manifest from the example
of the Theodicy, approved in his essay on Optimism of 1759,3 condemned
out of hand in 1791 in the little work entitled “On the Miscarriage of All
Philosophical Trials in Theodicy.”4 I limit my investigation to the problem of
pre-determinism and through it, I will raise again our initial question: is
the future necessary? All the more embarrassing, since Kant rarely tack-
les the question of the future thematically. So I will approach the matter
from the standpoint of pre-determinism, discussed from the time of the
New Elucidation of 1755.
In this text, with Leibniz and against Wolff, Kant claims that the
principle of reason is not reducible to that of contradiction. Following
Crusius, he calls the principle of sufficient reason the “principle of de-
termining ground,” to the examination of which section 2 is devoted. We
should bear in mind Leibniz’s definition of the “principle of determin-
ing reason,” which is the ontological version of the principle of reason:
“Nothing ever comes to pass without there being a cause or at least a
reason determining it, that is, something to give an a priori reason why it
is existent rather than non-existent, and in this wise rather than in any
other” (Theodicy, art. 44, 147). The logical form of the principle of rea-
son examines the reasons or grounds (ratio, Grund)5 of a statement and
so appeals to the analysis of propositions; its ontological form investi-
gates causes (causa, Ursache) and corresponds to the principle of causality,
which then becomes an obstacle to any theory of human freedom. Kant
sets about examining the meaning of this principle.
43
THREE KANTIAN SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM OF PRE-DETERMINISM
To determine means attributing a predicate to a subject by exclud-

ing its opposite. A ground is not what makes it possible to understand
why a thing is rather than not being. This Wolffian definition Kant simply
finds tautological. Rather, a ground is what determines the subject, by es-
tablishing a link between the subject and its predicate. A ground either
determines antecedently (ratio essendi), responding to the question: why?
Or it determines consequentially (ratio cognoscendi), responding to the
question: what? According to its logical form, the principle of determin-
ing ground signifies that “nothing is true without a determining ground”
(New Elucidation, 1: 393). In this case, the ground that determines ante-
cedently is the demonstration of the proposition, establishing its truth,
and the ground that determines consequentially is simply its explanation.
According to its ontological form, the principle is expressed as follows:
“Nothing which exists contingently can be without a ground which de-
termines its existence antecedently” (New Elucidation, 1: 396). Everything
that is contingent presupposes some other thing containing the ante-
cedent ground that determines its existence. Contingency is seen as that
whose determining ground exists outside itself. From this point of view,
only God escapes the principle of determining ground posed above, for
God’s existence is absolutely necessary. Kant, by contrast with Wolff, does
not make this absolute necessity reside in the idea that God possesses,
in his very essence, the ground for his existence, but in the fact that the
opposite of his existence is unthinkable.
All contingent beings, including humans, are subject to the prin-
ciple of determining ground, for they are determined by an antecedently
determining ground. It is not difficult to see that this pre-determinism
threatens to lead straight to the negation of free will. An act of will is con-
tingent, and is therefore necessarily preceded by a ground that fixes its
content. Crusius had already produced the following objections against
the principle of Leibniz and Wolff.6 Applied in a universal way, the prin-
ciple of determining ground leads to Stoic fatalism, and so to the sup-
pression of freedom and morality. Since everything is coordinated by the
chain of grounds, it is pointless hoping for the contrary of an event, which
would amount to wishing for the impossible. The distinction between
absolute and hypothetical necessity is illusory, since the opposite of an
event can never take place, the grounds for its existence not having been
given. If God has supervised the connection of all that happens to us, he
is the unique cause of our acts, and so of sin. Caius lied. He cannot not
lie at the very moment he lies, for otherwise he would disturb the order
of grounds implied from the very beginning of the world.
For Crusius, free action is undetermined. Caius lied freely because
that is what he wanted to do. One cannot go further back than that.
44
Freedom is the natural power of the will to determine itself to act without
being determined, neither from without, nor from within. It’s an uncon-
ditioned cause capable of beginning a causal series. In his New Elucidation,
Kant rejects this concept of freedom, which he takes up again however in
1781 in the name of transcendental freedom.7 For, in the form it assumes
with Crusius, it stands opposed to the principle of reason in its univer-
sal form, which the latter wants to restrict: “that whose non-existence is
thinkable [the contingent] stems from a sufficient cause and, if an initial
free action did not take place, this is the result of causes of such a kind
that, given the circumstances, what happens cannot proceed or unfold
otherwise.”8 That is, if an initial free action did not take place. This supple-
ment to the principle of reason makes of freedom a pure and simple
exception to the law of causality.
In his refutation of Crusius, Kant begins by conceding that the dis-
tinction between the two necessities is hardly pertinent.9 Necessity does
not admit of degrees. The distinction between absolute and hypothetical
(or moral) necessity concerns the origin and not the nature of neces-
sity, which is not at odds with freedom. If this origin is external to the
subject, the act is indeed constrained. But if it is in the subject, the act is
free. True freedom is not therefore the freedom of indifference, whose
specter haunts Crusius’s entire theory. Rather it consists in a spontaneity
determined by the representation of the best. An act is free not because
there is no ground for it, but because it is determined by grounds that
stem from intelligence and influence the will. No exception to the prin-
ciple of determining ground is possible. Even when the will takes itself
to be free, it is still determined by more or less obscure motives.10 Kant
criticizes the position of Crusius not only because it contradicts the prin-
ciple of reason (as determining ground) but divine foreknowledge as
well. Crusius adopts Aristotle’s solution to the problem of future contin-
gents, which remain undetermined in the case of human actions. Loyal to
Leibniz, Kant thinks on the contrary that it would be impossible for God
to foresee things whose existence could not have been determined by
antecedent grounds. The principle of determining ground is the secret
to divine foreknowledge:
The events which occur in the world have been determined with such
certainty, that divine foreknowledge, which is incapable of being mis-
taken, apprehends both their futurition [futuritio] and the impossibility
of their opposite. And He does so in conformity with the connection of
their grounds, and as certainly as if the opposite were excluded by their
absolute concept. (New Elucidation, 1: 400)
45
If future events are predetermined, propositions bearing on future con-

tingents are themselves certain and determinate, their truth value re-
maining fixed for all eternity, and so from now on. Even though the truth
of these propositions is only accessible to divine omniscience, it predeter-
mines the future as necessary. What necessity are we talking about? Kant’s
proximity to Leibniz reaches its limit at this precise point. For Leibniz,
the hypothetical necessity of the events of the world is compatible with
their contingency, for their opposite is possible. Kant affirms on the con-
trary that God knows the impossibility of the opposite of future events,
that is, their absolute necessity, which then takes the place of that said to
be hypothetical. So in what does the contingency of worldly events then
consist? A definition of contingency that might be called causal, inspired
by Wolff, has to replace the modal definition. The contingent is no lon-
ger that whose opposite is possible, but that which does not have in itself
the ground for its existence. From this point of view, the events of the
world are all contingent since they are all determined by an antecedent
ground. Like every contingent event, an act of the will does not possess
in itself the ground for its existence; it has an antecedently determining
ground. If this ground is internal to the subject— the representation of
the best by the understanding— the will is free. If the ground is external
to the subject— the blind force of nature, bodily drives— it is not free. In
both cases, the will remains caught in a chain of grounds whose necessity
is absolute.
At the stage of the New Elucidation, Kant takes up again for his own
account Leibniz’s pre-determinism, reinforcing all the same the necessity
of the future. There are not two futures— present future and hypotheti-
cal future— but one single figure of the future, supported by one single
meaning of necessity (the impossibility of the opposite). The future is
absolutely necessary.
The Antinomy of Freedom and Time
The inconsistencies encountered earlier in connection with Leibniz have

become more flagrant than ever. If the future is absolutely necessary,
predetermined, what is the meaning of human freedom? How can one
escape fatalism, if the logical argument of two necessities is abandoned?
These difficulties led Kant to rework the totality of his theory of
freedom, which takes on a new form in the critical system. This form is
well known. Kant defends a strong compatibilism of human freedom and
46
the causal necessity of nature.11 So, in the economy of the critical philos-
ophy, what becomes of Leibniz’s pre-determinism? How does Kant now
understand the relation of freedom to the future?
From Leibniz to Kant, the problem of human freedom has been
displaced. Molina claims that free will, as the power of contraries, is not
subject to the fatal and extrinsic necessity of causes, without asking him-
self how such a phenomenon is possible. Even while rejecting the liberty
of indifference, Leibniz makes of the human will a sort of miracle ex-
empt from the natural laws which regulate the order of efficient causes.
With both philosophers, the problem of the compatibility of divine fore-
knowledge and human freedom eclipses that of articulating the relation
between freedom and causality. With Kant, the critique of rational the-
ology and its ontological proof pushes God back from the status of first
truth to that of an Idea of pure reason, with regard to which it is impos-
sible to know whether any reality corresponds to it. The argument of lazy
reason can henceforward be eliminated with one sentence. For in fact
it relies on a constitutive instead of on a merely regulative Idea of a Su-
preme Being.12 The enigma that has to be resolved now bears not upon
the agreement of human freedom with divine foreknowledge, but with
the causal pre-determinism of nature raised to the status of knowledge a
priori. This is what is at stake in the “Third Antinomy,” which sets up the
thesis that there exists in addition to the causality of natural laws a free
and unconditioned causality, against the anti-thesis according to which
all that happens, happens solely in accordance with the laws of nature.13
Kant sums up the difficulty in a note to Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason. What needs to be examined is
how can pre-determinism coexist with freedom, when according to prede-

terminism freely chosen actions, as occurrences, have their determin-
ing grounds in antecedent time (which, together with what is contained
therein, no longer lies in our control), whereas, according to freedom,
the action, as well as its contrary, must be in the control of the subject at
the moment of its happening. (Religion, 6: 49– 50n)
From the very beginning of this inquiry, all the dilemmas gravitate around
the question of time, more exactly the future, which is the blind spot in
the controversy, to the extent that it is never analyzed thematically. The
contribution of the Critique of Pure Reason is to partly fill this gap; and this
from the very beginning of the work in the celebrated “Transcendental
Aesthetic,” and then in the chapter on “Schematism.” Unfortunately for
us, the three dimensions of time studied by Kant are not the past, the
present, and the future, but permanence, simultaneity, and succession.
47
All the same, this analysis of time has the merit of bringing to light the
temporal dimension of the principle of reason in its transcendental form,
causality.14 Everything that happens, Kant said in his New Elucidation, has
an antecedent ground by which it is determined in advance, hencefor-
ward clearly designated by the notion of cause.15 This anteriority is noth-
ing other than time. This is why causal determinism is always, for Kant,
a pre-determinism (Prädeterminism), claiming as it does that any present
phenomenon is determined by a cause that precedes it in time. In other
words, “the principle of sufficient reason is thus the ground of possible
experience, that is, of objective knowledge of appearances in respect of
their relation in the order of time” (CPR, A 201/B 246). As presented
in the “Second Analogy of Experience,” succession is the schema of the
category of causality, that which makes it possible for the latter to be ap-
plied to experience. Every effect necessarily follows upon its cause accord-
ing to a law of causality. By implication this means that every temporal
event in the world is situated in a causal order. The result of the tempo-
ralization of the principle of reason is the submission, without excep-
tion, of time to causality—proton pseudos, as Kant’s successors never cease
to confirm.
From a phenomenal point of view, there is no reason for Kant not to
include human actions under the jurisdiction of the principle of causality.
To do otherwise would be to hand over human action to blind chance,
and so to contradict the very idea of a principle, which implies univer-
sality. Freedom is not a “private miracle” exempt from the subordinate
laws of nature, as Leibniz thought. Kant goes into this in his “Critical
Examination [kritische Beleuchtung] of the Analytic of Practical Reason”:
“Therefore, if one attributes freedom to a being whose existence is de-
termined in time, it cannot be excepted from the law of natural necessity
of all events in its existence, including also its actions. Making such an
exception would be equivalent to delivering this being to blind chance”
(CPrR, 5: 95). There is no chance in nature (non datur casus). Everything
that happens has an anterior cause in time which determines it, this cause
in turn has its cause, and so on to infinity. The temporal formulation of
the principle of reason therefore makes it possible to disentangle the
dilemma of freedom and time. (1) Every action is an event that takes
place at some moment in time. (2) This event is determined by some
cause situated in a previous time. (3) Past time is however no longer in
my power. (4) Therefore we are no longer free at the moment we act,
for our present is determined by a past which escapes us by definition. In
short, freedom always arrives too late to be free. It is the prisoner of “an
already predetermined order [vorherbestimmte Ordnung]” in which nothing
like a beginning is possible (CPrR, 5: 94– 95).
48
The Problem of Psychological

Pre-determinism
Does Leibniz’s Kantian critique imply a rejection of psychological deter-

minism, symbolized by the image of the turnspit? In the Critique of Pure
Reason, the distinction of the two characters, empirical and intelligible,
designating two modes of causality, conditioned and unconditioned, al-
lows one to think that an action is free, as the effect of an intelligible
cause and, at the same time, determined, as the consequence of other
phenomena according to the necessity of nature. Far from being aban-
doned, Leibniz’s pre-determinism is then paradoxically reintroduced
into the field of appearances in an even more rigorous sense,16 since it
excludes other possible worlds. Kant hardly explains the way in which
the principle of causality can be applied to inner sense and, contrary to
Leibniz, he does not limit it to final causes alone. He finds it enough to
take note of the result:
All the actions of men in [the field] of appearances are determined in

conformity with the order of nature, by their empirical character and by
the other causes which cooperate with that character; and if we could
exhaustively investigate all the appearances of men’s wills, there would
not be found a single human action which we could not predict with
certainty, and recognize as proceeding from its antecedent condition.
So far then as regards this empirical character there is no freedom.
(CPR, A 549– 50/B 577– 78)
Kant is all the more inclined to exclude any liberty from the causal order
of nature inasmuch as he reintroduces it fully and completely in the
noumenal point of view. Thanks to the distinction between these two
points of view, he does not need, as did Leibniz, to reconcile freedom
and pre-determinism by introducing a purely formal contingency. He can
even allow himself to accentuate psychological pre-determinism: “Before
ever they [the actions of the will] have happened, they are one and all
predetermined in the empirical character” (CPR, A 553/B 581). The ex-
ample of a malicious lie sowing disorder in society shows that the em-
pirical character brings into play three types of causes: internal causes of
a psychological nature (thoughtlessness, levity, etc.); long-term external
causes (defective education, bad company, etc.), and short-term causes
(occasional circumstances).17
In Kant’s eyes, that actions can be predetermined and fully ex-
plained exists by right and so not as a matter of fact, for such a knowledge
is not accessible to man. This is why he always employs the conditional
49
when he evokes psychological determinism. In the Metaphysical Founda-

tions of Natural Science, he explains that the empirical theory of the soul,
psychology, cannot become a science of nature, for “mathematics is not
applicable to the phenomena of inner sense and their laws” (4: 471).
Kant does not say that there are no causal laws regulating our empirical
character, only that these laws are not of the same character as physical
or chemical laws, which, thanks to mathematics, make it possible for men
to calculate and predict future phenomena. At best, psychological pre-
determinism authorizes an a posteriori causal explanation, one that does
not apply to future actions. At any rate, this is what is suggested in the
Reflection 5616 from the years 1776– 79:
A posteriori we will be able to find in sensibility the ground for action,

that is the explanatory ground [Erklärungsgrund] but not the determining
ground [Bestimmungsgrund] for the latter; a priori however, and when the
action is represented as future [antecedenter], we feel undetermined with
regard to the latter and still capable of accomplishing a first beginning
in the series of phenomena. (18: 256)
Affects only provide the explanatory ground for action and not
its determining ground, a ground that would make it possible for the
action to be foreseen. But the impossibility for man of finding the deter-
mining causes of actions does not mean that they do not exist. At most
it means that psychology does not get further than the simple empirical
observation of behavior, that is, the study of explanatory grounds, which
can only be undertaken after the event. This text cannot be used to call
in question Kant’s psychological pre-determinism.18 Kant writes that we
feel undetermined and capable of acting freely. As is confirmed in later
texts, the principle of causality also applies according to him to internal
sense, by way of the empirical character, though in a way that is certainly
too complicated for us to be able to understand. From a phenomenal
point of view, this feeling of freedom only rests on a subjective igno-
rance. We are not far from Leibniz’s argument, which throws a veil of
ignorance over the future. Even if our future is predetermined, we do
not know how, and so must continue to act as thought we were free. A
conditional freedom responding to a conditional pre-determinism, ex-
pressed in conditional form: “If some person were capable of complet-
ing the whole demonstration by means of which he could prove this
connection of the subject (which is Caesar), with the predicate (which
is his successful enterprise), he would then show that the future dicta-
torship of Caesar had its foundation in his notion or nature” (Leibniz
1998a, 65).
50
Kant takes up again this idea of a conditional pre-determinism, with

this essential difference that he refuses to consider, as does Leibniz, that
divine foreknowledge constitutes an effective knowledge of the latter. On
this question the Critique of Practical Reason remains in the lineage of the
Critique of Pure Reason. For in it Kant confirms yet again his psychological
pre-determinism in a passage that touches on the mystery of freedom:
It may be admitted that if it were possible for us to have so deep an

insight into a man’s character as shown both in inner and outer actions,
that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external oc-
casions which affect them were known to us, his future conduct could
be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or
lunar eclipse, and we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free.
(CPrR, 5: 99, trans. modified)
In principle, for an infinite understanding, for example, the future con-

duct of a man is calculable in the last detail by virtue of laws of causality of
a quite special kind. Kant takes us right back to Leibniz’s pre-determinism,
in both its physical and psychological form, but not before ridding it of
the embarrassing residue still concealed in it. The hypothesis of free-
dom as a “private miracle” is set aside, and the theory of the plurality
of possible worlds is relegated to the status of an unprovable metaphysi-
cal doctrine.
There is No Fate (Non Datur Fatum)
How does Kant sketch out the objection of fatalism? In what sense can he
continue to declare that man is free? The first reply is that the reinforce-
ment of phenomenal pre-determinism is counterbalanced by the claim
that the true origin of acts is noumenal freedom. At the heart of this dis-
tinction, to which I shall recur later, we find the idea that the radicality
of pre-determinism knows no equal save the radicality of freedom. But
it’s worth adding that the necessity that reigns in the phenomenal world
is by no means absolute, contrary to what was stated in the New Elucida-
tion. To understand this, it is worth remembering how Kant redefined the
categories of modality bit by bit with the help of the principle of causal-
ity. In the philosophy of Leibniz, necessity and contingency are charac-
terized by the notion of the possible, itself understood out of the prin-
ciple of contradiction. The contingent is that whose opposite is possible
(non-contradictory). The absolutely necessary is that whose opposite is
51
impossible (contradictory). Moral or hypothetical necessity is a necessity

founded in reason but whose opposite remains possible.
In the New Elucidation, contingency is no longer understood on the
basis of the possible, but in the manner of Wolff, as that which does not
contain in itself the determining ground for its existence. On the other
hand, Leibniz’s conception of absolute necessity— that whose opposite
is impossible, inconceivable— is retained. In The Only Possible Argument in
Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763),19 Kant goes into the
modal conception of absolute necessity in greater depth, without calling
into question its definition in terms of the possible. The absolute neces-
sity that intervenes in the proof of God’s existence is either, in the formal
sense of the possible, that whose opposite is self-contradictory, or else, in
the material sense of the possible, that whose nonexistence abolishes all
the data making up the domain of the thinkable.20 In both cases, necessity
is established on the basis of the notion of possibility.
We have to wait for the Critique of Pure Reason to see Kant break
with this Leibnizian conception of necessity. The refutation of the on-
tological proof relativizes the notion of absolute necessity. In the proof,
God is understood to be an absolutely necessary being, the being whose
nonexistence is impossible. But, replies Kant, “the absolute necessity of
the judgment is only a conditioned necessity of the thing, or of the predi-
cate in the judgment” (CPR, A 593– 94/B 621– 22). Once the triangle has
been posited as given, it necessarily contains three angles. The predicate
“three angles” is absolutely necessary even while being conditioned by the
existence of the subject. In the same way, it should be said: if God exists,
he is the absolutely necessary being. Contrary to what it pretends to be,
absolute necessity has a purely logical sense; it is dependent upon the
existence of the subject of the proposition, which latter has to be proved
on the basis of pure or empirical experience, which is impossible in the
case of God.
In the chapter devoted to the categories of modality, Kant explains
the material meaning that necessity has in experience, as opposed to
that logical meaning, which connects concepts without being able to
found existence in any way whatever. The principle of causality, in ac-
cordance with which “everything which happens is determined a priori
through its cause in the [field of] appearances,” means that “everything
which happens is hypothetically necessary.” According to Baumgarten’s
axioms (Metaphysica, §382 and §383),21 there is in nature neither blind
chance (non datur casus) nor blind necessity (non datur fatum), “always a
conditioned and therefore intelligible necessity” (CPR, A 227– 28/B 280).
Kant takes up again the terminology of Leibniz but in a quite different
sense. In his view, the category of necessity, in its material form, receives
52
from now on a causal meaning. This hypothetical necessity is not a ne-

cessity whose opposite is possible, but rather a necessity derived from a
given cause, in accordance with a law of causality. “Hypothetical” means
conditioned by a cause. Causal necessity is limited for different reasons:
(1) necessity never bears on the existence of substances but only on
the relation between phenomena whose existence is attested by experi-
ence; (2) it therefore has as a condition at least one already given entity;
(3) it always bears on the effect, the cause being given. One can never
know the necessity of the cause; for that would mean getting into an
infinite regression transcending the limits of experience, and therefore
of any possible knowledge. The human understanding is no more able
to go back up the series of past causes than it is able to scrutinize the
infinite series of future effects. Conditioned necessity therefore simply
means that for such and such a given cause, such and such an effect is
necessary. As opposed to blind and inexplicable destiny ( fatum),22 hypo-
thetical necessity is intelligible, it includes laws of nature, reasons, deter-
mined causes that render the world if not transparent at least accessible
to knowledge and understanding, within the strict limits of experience.
Understood in this way, conditioned necessity coincides with what
Kant calls “empirical contingency.” Here again, it is important to distin-
guish modal from causal conceptions of contingency. According to the
first view, inspired by Leibniz, the contingent is something whose nonex-
istence is thinkable, or again that whose opposite is not contradictory.23
This “intelligible contingency” has to be reformulated in the light of the
principle of causality: the contingent is something that can only exist as
the consequence of something, that is, as the effect of a cause. In the
absence of this cause, it could never have taken place. In a remark to the
thesis of the fourth “Antinomy,” Kant recalls that empirical contingency
designates the dependency of phenomena with regard to empirically de-
termining causes.24 He adds this crucial clarification, that it is quite im-
possible to conclude from this empirical contingency to any modal or in-
telligible contingency. His argument is that at the very moment an event
takes place one can never know whether its contrary is possible. Take the
example of a body in motion (= A) which passes over into the state of
rest (= non-A). One can say that non-A is possible because it has actually
taken place (what is real is possible). But at the moment A occurs, one
can never know if non-A is possible, therefore if A is contingent according
to this definition, because the state of rest does not yet exist. Intelligible
contingency presupposes an event whose contrary is simultaneously pos-
sible. However, since the principle of causality implies succession between
the cause and the effect, the opposite state occurs always after the first
state. All that we know is that “motion at one time and rest at another are
53
not related as contradictory opposites” (CPR, A 460/B 488, my emphasis).

The causal conception of contingency replaces the purely modal, which
thereby become problematic.
The pre-determinism that reigns in nature is therefore not a fatal-
ism. Just as destiny and chance are thrown out into the common category
of what is contrary to reason,25 (hypothetical) necessity and (empirical)
contingency are brought together under the idea of ground, the ground
of a previously determining cause. In this way Kant succeeds in reconcil-
ing causality and contingency, without appealing to the Leibnizian prin-
ciple of different possible worlds. The question whether at a certain mo-
ment an event is contingent, in the sense in which its contrary is possible,
cannot be answered, once the realm of possibilities, that of the divine un-
derstanding, has been set aside: “That yet another series of appearances
in thoroughgoing connection with that which is given in perception, and
consequently that more than one all-embracing experience is possible,
cannot be inferred from what is given; and still less can any such infer-
ence be drawn independently of anything being given” (CPR, A 231– 32/
B 284). There exists no other possible world running parallel to the real
world. By replacing intelligible contingency, defined in relation to the
possible, with empirical contingency, founded on causality, the Critique of
Pure Reason subjects the Leibnizian tree of possibilities to a severe prun-
ing, to the point that there remains only the trunk (experience) and the
roots (the principle of causality). One single phenomenal series effec-
tively determines one single future as the totality of real possibilities—
bound by the formal conditions of experience— which figure as so many
future presents, that is to say, events which will not fail to transpire by
virtue of causally necessary laws. What distinguishes this pre-determinism
from fatalism is not freedom, but the intelligibility of the causal series.
However, even if conditioned necessity is rational and contingent, it is no
less strictly determined and determining. So it can be of no help to us in
trying to decide the problem of freedom, whose solution has to be sought
elsewhere, in the existence of man viewed from a noumenal standpoint.
Solution 1: The ideality of Time
To resolve the contradiction between the causality of nature and human

freedom, Kant disposes of the Leibnizian solution consisting in situating
freedom within the rational spontaneity of creatures, that is to say, in the
internal mechanism of the representations of the “spiritual automat.”
This was moreover the solution of the New Elucidation. But in the Critique
54
of Practical Reason, Kant now recognizes that it makes the mistake of clos-
ing freedom within a strict pre-determinism, ironically comparable to
the movement of the turnspit cited in the introduction to this chapter.
The “Critical Examination” refers explicitly to the solution of the “Third
Antinomy” from the first Critique, which holds, as one knows, to the dis-
tinction between phenomenon and thing in itself, what Michel Puech has
called the “dual worldliness” of man (1990, 460).26 As phenomenon, man
is endowed with an empirical character that subjects him, as it does all
other entities, to the necessity of the laws of nature. But nothing stands in
the way of also attributing to man, considered this time from a noumenal
standpoint, an unconditioned causality, situated in his intelligible char-
acter, entirely cut off from the conditions of experience. As a member
of the sensible world, man is situated in the causal series of nature, but
as belonging to the intelligible world, he remains fully free. The Critique
of Practical Reason reinforces the distinction between temporal phenom-
enon and atemporal thing in itself. Kant emphasizes that it is thanks to
the “principal supposition of the ideality of time” (CPrR, 5: 101) that the
solution to the dilemma of freedom could be found. In what sense? The
reasoning is based on the link between time and causality. If time existed
in itself, independent of the subject, if it affected things in themselves
instead of being limited to phenomena alone, there would be no way
out for human liberty; for being in all its forms would be subject to the
rigorous connection of the principle of causality, which latter accompa-
nies all succession. As a result of the causal conception of time, temporal
realism became synonymous with generalized fatalism. But because it is
ideal, an a priori form of the sensibility of the subject, time only concerns
phenomena and so leaves open the possibility (in the case of man con-
sidered as thing in itself) of a strictly atemporal noumenal freedom, one
which as such is independent of natural causality.
If Kant drastically prunes Leibniz’s tree of possibilities by suppress-
ing the hypothetical future, he frees freedom, understood in a tran-
scendental sense, from the limits imposed upon it by the system of pre-
established harmony, with its foreknowledge and its pre-determinism.
From now on it ceases to be necessary to make of freedom a mysterious
exception to the principle of sufficient reason, in the manner of Cru-
sius, because freedom no longer falls within the realm where empirical
causality exercises its sway. Kant now has room to take up again the
concept developed by Crusius, but this time by situating it upon the
purely noumenal plane. Transcendental freedom, which founds practi-
cal freedom, is an absolute spontaneity, in the sense of an unconditioned
causality;27 causality, since it is after all a power of beginning by itself a
series of phenomena, so conforming to the truth that there is no cause
55
without an effect; unconditioned, for freedom is a cause which is not

itself the effect of another anterior cause. Freedom, thus understood, is
independent of physical necessity (the causal laws of nature) and of all
divine preordination.
Solution 1 (continuation): The

Atemporality of Freedom
The price of the solution to the “Third Antinomy” is high. The causal
structure of time leaves no room for freedom, and freedom allows for
no temporal determination. The counterpart to the thesis of the ideality
of time is the atemporality of human freedom. In spite of temporal pre-
determinism, freedom is free because it is not subject to time. Freedom
is a causality of pure atemporal reason, which is omnipresent in all our
acts even while remaining withdrawn from the causal order of nature:
“Reason is present in all the actions of men at all times and under all
circumstances, but it is not itself in time” (CPR, A 556/B 584). Under the
figure of freedom, reason is determining and produces its effects in the
phenomenal world, but it is not determinable, since its causality is uncon-
ditioned. The agent is immediately under the power of reason, not in the
sense in which he will always act morally, but in the sense that despite his
past history the liar could precisely not have lied. As an absolute spon-
taneity, freedom has the power to suspend the course of time, it offers
the agent a task as if “the agent in and by himself began in this action
an entirely new series of consequences,” and in such a way that when we
judge his action, “we can regard the past series of conditions as not having
occurred” (CPR, A 555/B 583). It matters little that at the time when we
act, the past should no longer be in our power, since this past no longer
has any power over us. When the subject is conscious of his existence as
noumenon, he places himself under the atemporal jurisdiction of reason:
In this existence nothing is antecedent to the determination of his will;

every action and, in general, every changing determination of his exis-
tence according to the inner sense, even the entire history of his exis-
tence as a sensuous being, is seen in the consciousness of his intelligible
existence as only a consequence, not as a determining ground of his
causality as noumenon. (CPrR, 5: 97– 98)
Without developing it further, Kant here sketches out a fundamental idea

making it possible to disclose a relation, be it only negative, between free-
56
dom and time. Freedom does not simply have the power to suspend the
causal succession, it can also, and more profoundly, invert the course of
time. From a phenomenal point of view, time goes from the past towards
the future, for the past is the determining cause of the present and so
on for the future. However, freedom can make it be that the entire past
series of existence should be the effect and not the cause, the conse-
quence of the determination of the will. This reversal does not mean
that reason can change the past. It simply describes the temporal pro-
cess of free action: for the absolute spontaneity of freedom, it is not the
past which determines the future of the agent, but his future, under the
auspices of the goal of his action which determines his present and there-
fore, as a result, the whole of the past series of his acts. From a noumenal
point of view, causal predeterminism no longer makes any sense.
Human Freedom and divine Freedom
What remains of the problem, so fundamental for Leibniz, of the compat-

ibility of human and divine freedom? The “Third Antinomy” only makes
sense for a being who is at once free and temporal; it makes no sense
for God, who, as an atemporal being, cannot be subject to any kind of
pre-determinism, “since in God no temporal sequence is thinkable, this
difficulty has no place” (Religion, 6: 50n). If divine freedom is not threat-
ened by determinism, and if, on its side, human freedom can be thought
without contradicting the principle of causality in nature, it only remains
to ask how the two freedoms can be brought into agreement with one
another. However secondary it might be, this problem is not ignored
by Kant, who addresses it in the “Critical Examination.” As intelligible,
noumenal beings, humans are independent of natural causality, but they
still could be dependent upon the causality of God, which would destroy
the idea of freedom. Kant gets back to Leibniz’s question from another
angle: it is no longer a matter of reconciling two established truths but
two ideas of reason. The transcendental ideality of time, the Kantian Ari-
adne’s thread in the labyrinth of freedom, provides a new way out.28 God
is a purely intelligible being, independent of the form of time, the cre-
ator of man as noumenon, not of man as phenomenon: “Just as it would
therefore be contradictory to say God is the creator of appearances, it is
also a contradiction to say that He, as the Creator, is the cause of actions
in the world of sense, as these are appearances; yet at the same time He
is the cause of the existence of the acting beings (as noumena)” (CPrR,
5: 102).29 Because he does not step outside the limits of the noumenal
57
world, God cannot be the cause of actions produced in the phenomenal

world, left to human free will. The critical distinction of the two points
of view cuts both ways. Natural necessity is a causality that only concerns
man as phenomenon and not as noumenon. Divine causality is a causal-
ity that only concerns man as noumenon, not as phenomenon. In this
sense, there is compatibility between divine atemporal freedom, human
freedom, at once atemporal in its cause and temporal in its effects, and
purely temporal natural necessity. The entire reasoning rests on the dis-
tinction between phenomena and things in themselves, through which
human freedom can be saved. If man were only phenomenal, he would
be entirely subject to the pre-determinism of nature (whether mechani-
cal or psychological), and he would be no freer than a turnspit. But in-
versely, if man were a thing in itself, a noumenon, his actions would be
regulated by divine causality, which would make of him a “marionette
or an automaton like Vaucanson’s, fabricated and wound up by the Su-
preme Artist” (CPrR, 5: 101). Vaucanson’s automaton is more elaborate
than a vulgar turnspit, but it remains an automaton deprived of freedom.
The image of the automaton employed by Leibniz serves to support the
Kantian theory of freedom. Leibniz overlooked human freedom in fa-
vor of God’s freedom. With Kant, divine freedom provides the model of
human action as a creative power, a power to begin something, with this
sole difference, that divine creation is eternal and infinite, whereas that
of man is finite and temporal.
One might bring against Kant the objection that the intelligible
freedom of man in its noumenal form remains, or so it seems, deter-
mined by God. Surely, what has to be demonstrated is the compossibility
of foreknowledge, inherent in the idea of God, with human freedom? No
doubt all this raises metaphysical questions that transcend the limits of
human knowledge. But for Kant, the idea of God is logically possible and
morally necessary. For, so far from being an obstacle to human freedom,
it remains a guarantee of the harmony between the two realms of nature
and of grace, interpreted as “this harmony of nature and freedom” (CPR,
A 815/B 843).30
Solution 2: Noumenal duration
This reference of Kant’s thinking to that of Leibniz and his doctrine of

the two realms of nature and grace, undertaken with a view to throw-
ing light on the two worlds, phenomenal and noumenal, should not be
allowed to conceal the opposition between the two thinkers. Kant rein-
58
forced the physical pre-determinism that obtains in the realm of nature

and eliminated divine foreknowledge from the realm of grace. The future
now only exhibits one form instead of the two implied in the system of
preestablished harmony, namely, the temporal series of events that will
be present according to the conditioned necessity of causal laws— the
present future. In principle, this future is entirely predetermined, and
any speculation on possibilities which might never be present themselves
is a metaphysical illusion. And straightaway we are faced with a dilemma.
Freedom is an unconditioned causality, an atemporal cause, which is sup-
posed to produce temporal effects. How can freedom produce effects in
time if time is a predetermined causal order? Either freedom acts, but
loses itself at the very moment it temporalizes itself. Or else, it withholds
itself from the order of time, but then it has to give up acting. Two ways of
getting out of this alternative present themselves, the first of which moves
in the direction of a noumenal temporality that is essentially practical.
According to Kant, “pure reason, as a purely intelligible faculty, is
not subject to the form of time, nor consequently to the conditions of
succession in time” (CPR, A 551/B 579). As a purely theoretical and so
intelligible power, reason is eternal. But as a practical power, surely it has
to enter into a certain relation with time? In the “Critical Examination,”
Kant relies upon the practical reality of freedom— the ratio essendi of the
moral law— to bring out the idea of spontaneity. The intelligible char-
acter of the individual is not an original and unchangeable given, it is a
reality that is self-given: “For this action and everything in the past which
determined it belong to a single phenomenon of his character, which he
himself creates, and according to which he imputes to himself as a cause
independent of all sensibility the causality of that appearance” (CPrR,
5: 98). This creation of the character implies the idea of a process, an
intelligible noumenal duration, and opens up a new conception of the
future, laid out in the postulate of the immortality of the soul.
What is the genuinely temporal meaning of this postulate? The
object of the good will is the good, which is the highest good when it
is total and fulfilled. The moral law demands of the human will that it
seeks above all else to realize the first component of the highest good,
holiness, defined as the “complete fitness of the will to the moral law”
(CPrR, 5: 122). On the one hand, everyone is subject to this requirement,
which is a moral imperative. On the other hand, no finite rational being
could ever attain such a perfection of its will at any moment of its exis-
tence. Therefore, holiness “can be found only in an endless progress to that
complete fitness,” and “this infinite progress is possible, however, only
under the presupposition of an infinitely enduring existence and personal-
ity of the same rational being; this is called the immortality of the soul”
59
(CPrR, 5: 122). The complete realization of the highest good by the will
is only possible with this practical postulate, through which man awaits
“a further uninterrupted continuation of this progress, however long his
existence may last, even beyond this life” (CPrR, 5: 123). In other words,
the moral law requires of man, as person, that he postulate an infinite
duration. The “beyond this life” in no way designates the passage into an
eternal world, into a future life where the effort toward the good could
be brought to a definitive close; rather the contrary, the expression in
question indicates a hoped-for extension of mortal and finite duration
at the very heart of the phenomenal world into an infinite duration at
the service of the moral law. For man “cannot hope here or at any fore-
seeable point in his future existence” that the perfect adequation of his
will to the law be realized, and that is precisely why the will cannot hope
to attain this ideal save “in the infinity of its duration [in der Unendlichkeit
seiner Fortdauer]” (CPrR, 5: 123– 24).
The postulate of the immortality of the soul is in this sense the pos-
tulate of the infinity of time. It is the sign of a new form of temporality
which, following the expression of Philonenko, might be called “practi-
cal time” (1988, 170). What are the determinations of this temporality
required by human freedom? First of all, its infinity, which has to be
distinguished from that analyzed in the “Transcendental Aesthetic.” In
this case “the infinitude of time signifies nothing more than that every
determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of
one single time that underlies it” (CPR, A 32/B 47– 48). This infinity of
time follows from its very nature as an intuition that is unlimited a priori.
It can be represented with the help of a spatial analogy figuring time as a
“line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series of
one dimension only” (CPR, A 33/B 50). The infinity of practical time con-
cerns not time as a form of intuition but the duration of existence. Dura-
tion is defined by Kant in a wholly general manner in the first “Analogy
of Experience”: “Only through the permanent does existence in different
parts of the time-series acquire a magnitude which can be entitled dura-
tion” (CPR, A 183/B 227). So duration is the permanence of existence in
a temporal series, capable of being more or less prolonged. To the ex-
tent that one cannot prove the permanence of the existence of man save
within the limits of his life, one has to conclude that human duration is
finite, in the sense of mortal. Whereas the succession of nows is infinite,
the form that this succession takes for human existence, that is, its dura-
tion, is limited. The postulate of the immortality of the soul, a postulate
that presupposes the infinity of duration itself, expresses the practical
requirement of a surpassing of the finitude of human duration, attested
in the experience of death.
60
Could it not be held that this very surpassing itself is caught in a

process of bad infinity, since the effort of the will towards the total reali-
zation of the highest good is an infinite progress whose end, even if it is
actually proposed as possible, can never be attained? In fact, this infinite
moral progress itself presupposes the anticipation of its own fulfillment.
It is at one and the same time indefinite and total, still being worked out
and fully accomplished. Its very indefiniteness presupposes its perfect and
unconditioned infinity. Kant suggests that the apprehension of this infin-
ity in act makes itself known in the second postulate, that of the existence
of God, the only one who alone is able to comprehend the infinity of my
duration.31 In this sense, one can say that “the immortality of the soul is
then, according to Kant, an immortality under the eye of God” (Marty 1996,
249). But this total apprehension of the infinite duration has also to be
accessible to the will of the acting individual, to the extent that progress
towards holiness presupposes an immediate and effective apprehension
of this finality, admittedly not by intuition or even by understanding but
at least by reason. A passage from the Opus postumum describes the self-
evidence of just such a practical and unconditioned finality:
The conditions of time, which make for the representation of hu-

manity and of its goal phenomena of sensible intuition, disappear if
the destination of man as a species admits, as founded in reason, his
ultimate finality as a principle. Man is already that being he realizes he
ought to be.32
The infinite duration of moral progress is then above all a tension whose
final destination, the perfection of the will, is always already presupposed.
On the one hand, the will is separated from its ideal of perfection by the
infinity of the future it has to traverse to achieve its realization. On the
other hand, however, it gets beyond this infinity by an immediate insight
that anticipates and grasps this ideal, with which it is identified from the
first. It has therefore already reached this end that it knows it has to wait
for. But the clear grasp of this end, far from suppressing the assignment
of the will to its temporally infinite perfectionment, far from extracting
it definitively from the course of time, only reaffirms, on the contrary,
the infinity of the duration needed for man to complete the realization
of his ideal.
In Kant’s view, death is not a boundary, an absolute closure as with
Heidegger, but, above all, a limit whose overcoming is made possible by
the practical use of our reason. The practical subject certainly knows
that his death will arrive, he knows that his duration is limited. But he
constantly projects himself beyond this limit, inscribing his action not in
61
the restricted duration of his life, threatened as it is at every moment by

death, but in an infinite future which has to last as long as his existence
can last and “even beyond this life.” To act on behalf of a future situated
beyond one’s own mortality, to work for a future which will probably
be not one’s own but that of others is the choice of a freedom that ad-
vances in the horizon of practical time, a freedom “in spite of death,” to
use Ricoeur’s expression (2007, 409).33 Practical time is therefore what
founds the realization of practical action; it is the condition that freedom
gives itself to respond to its own duty, and so to accomplish its destiny.
According to Kant, by the practical is meant what is possible through
freedom. Practical time is the time of freedom. So the question of the
relation of freedom to time in the Kantian philosophy can find a second
solution here, a solution other than the first one based on the atempo-
rality of noumenal freedom. As we have seen, this first solution certainly
makes it possible for freedom to avoid the mechanical causality in which
the time of experience is caught up. But by the same token, freedom is
caught in a rigid opposition between the atemporal supersensible and
the temporal domain of phenomena. So how can the free act be inserted
into the order of time? How can free will change and progress over time?
To the extent that, in the domain of the supersensible, reason constructs
the idea of an infinite duration, from a practical point of view one might
want to accept that the eternity of reason does not so much retain the
meaning of an absolute atemporality as that of an infinite practical tem-
porality. Reason is not subject to time in the sense that it is certainly sub-
ject neither to the succession of nows, nor to the finitude of duration.
But in its openness to the moral law, the will has to be thought in relation
to an infinite duration with which, moreover, it has to be aligned. Two
orders of the real have to be distinguished here, the mechanical order
of the time of experience and the order of practical time.34 Inasmuch as
the a priori causality of phenomenal time leaves no room for freedom,
practical time opens up a horizon for freedom, that of an infinite future.
The complex problem of the inscription of freedom in time is also
to be found at the heart of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
though in a different perspective, that of the conversion to the good.
Man will only become good through “an endless progress,” in “inces-
sant laboring and becoming” (Religion, 6: 47– 48). But this progress itself
presupposes the radical conversion of the will, “a kind of rebirth” (Reli-
gion, 6: 48). The conversion of the will to the good has two determina-
tions. It is an “atemporal act of an intelligible character,” one which “has
to be manifest over time through a continual progress” (Bruch 1968,
82). In the noumenal order of freedom, this conversion implies both a
succession, a before and an after, and an infinite temporal progression.
62
How is that possible? Even if it is not affected by simple empirical suc-

cession, the act of conversion implies a form of temporality that renders
possible the idea of change and progression. Does the Kantian philos-
ophy include an explicit reference to this mode of practical temporality,
even if only in the form of a sketch? This is what is suggested by a text
from 1794, entitled The End of All Things.35 In this text, Kant tells us that
eternity has to be understood as the association of the idea of “an end of
all time [Ende aller Zeit] along with the person’s uninterrupted duration”
(8: 327). Eternity is not then an indefinite succession in time, even less
an absolute atemporality regarding which death allows for a transition.
It is a “duratio Noumenon” (8: 327). What is meant by such an expression,
an expression that sounds like an oxymoron? With this paradoxical idea,
Kant does not just have in mind the sense of eternity as the condition
of man after death, for “nothing stands in the way of its being applied
to homo noumenon in this life” (Bruch 1968, 90). The duratio noumenon
designates a duration that is noumenal, that is, infinite, unconditioned,
wholly transgressing the limits of experience, but it is, at the same time,
also a duration, a specific temporality, that precisely of practical time,
of freedom in its conversion and its infinite progression toward moral
perfection. With Kant, we are now in a position to offer a temporal for-
mulation of the categorical imperative: “We must take our maxims as
if, in all alterations from good to better going into infinity, our moral
condition, regarding its disposition (the homo Noumenon, ‘whose change
takes place in heaven’) were not subject to any temporal change at all”
(The End of All Things, 8: 335). In other words, we have to act as if our
good will commanded the whole of an infinite duration of existence, a
duratio noumenon.
To be sure, no one could deny the finitude of that temporality which
flows from human mortality.36 But the force of Kant’s thinking is to under-
stand the essence of this finitude as a limit. Just as any limit necessarily
presupposes the surpassing of the limit, the finitude of time is at the same
time the transgression of this finitude, the positing of the integral infinity
of our duration, on the basis of which alone we can apprehend our own
finitude. So the infinity of time can be called originary, to the extent that
is given from the first with finitude, a finitude with which it is immediately
co-originary. This means that in practical action, the lucid apprehension
of our mortality in its both certain and indefinite immanence is, at the
same time, the opening upon a beyond of our death, on an infinite future
in which the end envisaged by our freedom is situated. This is what one
might call the “practical immortality,” or rather the “transmortality” of
man, in the sense in which his possibility of dying is linked to a power to
63
transcend his death at the very heart of his life, by the inscription of his
acting into the horizon of practical time.
Practical time is primarily oriented toward the future. Such a future
is noumenal, in that it corresponds to an ideal, holiness, which will never
be present, therefore to a goal that exceeds the time of the world even
while conferring a practical orientation upon it. In this sense, with Kant,
we find not one but two figures of the future: the first, phenomenal, is
predetermined; the second, noumenal, would be the true abode of free-
dom. Is this solution entirely satisfactory? It might be if only it did not
leave the question of the relation between these two heterogeneous forms
of the future in the dark, thereby accentuating the opposition between
noumenal freedom and phenomenal pre-determinism. Faced with this
seemingly unanswerable difficulty, we shall explore another path, which
consists in seeking at the very heart of the phenomenal world a form of the
future that is not predetermined causally.
Solution 3: The Moral Possibility
My hypothesis is that, in his practical philosophy, and still more in his

theory of history, Kant is induced to sketch out an open conception of
the future, one that calls for a rehabilitation of the possible defined in a
new way. The modal conceptions of the categories of necessity and con-
tingency, rejected by the philosophy of knowledge, are reappropriated by
moral philosophy, which gives them a practical extension.
The Lectures on Ethics define “practical necessitation” in the frame
of the principle of reason, as determination by reasons or grounds. The
necessitatio pathologica operates per stimulus and so only applies to the an-
imal will (arbitrium brutum), which is incapable of withstanding it. The
necessita practica, proper to man, is per motiva; it only necessitates the free
will (arbitrium liberum) through motives which are either moral or patho-
logical: “An action is necessary if one cannot resist it; grounds are neces-
sitating if human powers are not adequate to resist them. But man can be
practically compelled per motiva, and then is not compelled but moved”
(27: 267). By virtue of his free will, man can also resist a pathological
motivation (like hunger, like torture), as also stand opposed to a rational
moral motivation, if his will is bad. In short, practical necessitation is not
absolute, ineluctable. But what do we mean by a necessity that “moves”
without necessitating? To become clear about this notion, the idea of
determination by some preceding reason is insufficient. So the notion of
64
possibility has to be brought in again, since practical necessity is a neces-

sity man can depart from.
In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant explains that the imperative
implied by the moral law is categorical and not hypothetical: “So act that
the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of
a universal legislation” (CPrR, 5: 30). This means, in the first instance, that
duty is absolutely necessary. At the same time, obedience to the moral law
is contingent, in the sense that its contrary is possible. Even if Kant identi-
fies free will with the autonomous will, he admits that the will can choose
what is wrong, commit itself to a malicious lie, for example.37 As opposed
to God, man does not carry out what is right according to a process that
is guaranteed in advance. For man, “the moral necessity is a constraint, an
obligation” (CPrP, 5: 81). What is the meaning of this “moral necessity”?
Moral obligation is not an absolute necessity, rather a free constraint, one
that inclines one to do the good rather than forcing one to do so. The
obligation is at one and the same time both morally necessary, it imposes
an unconditioned duty, a categorical imperative founded on the moral
law, while also presupposing the contingency of choice, in the sense in
which the opposite action, which is morally impossible, remains possible
in reality by virtue of the fact that this obligation appeals to the human
freedom of the finite subject. With Leibniz, the possibility of the oppo-
site action, included in moral necessity, remains purely formal, since it is
out of the reach of the individual, outreaches his complete notion. For
Kant, it is really in the hands of the subject, who can refuse to obey the
moral law, can choose heteronomy. Inversely, whatever the constraints of
the pathological inclinations might be, the autonomy of the will is always
possible.
In the “Critical Examination,” Kant employs a modal conception of
necessity, founded on the possible, to qualify the pre-determinism of nature:
Suppose I say of a man who has committed a theft that this act, by the
natural law of causality, is a necessary result of the determining grounds
existing in the preceding time and that it was therefore impossible that
it could have not been done. How then can judgment according to the
moral law make any change in it? And how can it be supposed that it
still could have been left undone because the law says that it should
have been left undone? (CPrR, 5: 95)
The reference to absolute necessity— that whose opposite is impossible— is

aimed at underlining, by way of contrast, the contingency of choice, de-
fined in a modal manner as that which might not have happened, that
whose nonexistence remains possible. The subject can try to hide behind
65
the idea of necessity, but the moral law reintroduces the possible in the
very process of action. For every action contrary to the law, the individual
has to say that “he could have left it undone” (CPrR, 5: 98). Repentance
bears witness to this past possibility. In the present moment of action, the
imperative of the moral law is the appeal to a future possibility.
The imperative of the law is a moral necessity that opens up two
possibilities for freedom: that of obeying the law, and its contrary, that of
not doing so. Necessity of the obligation (the prescribed action), versus
the contingency of the act (the action carried out). To say that is not to
attribute to Kant any defense of the freedom of indifference, since the
alternative in question is not symmetric. Since the choice is always made
if not according to, at least before the moral law, the agent is morally
bound to do the good. Take the example of the prince who asks of one
of his subjects that he make a false deposition against an honorable man,
threatening him with death if he refuses to do so. Duty commands abso-
lutely that one should not lie. The subject is conscious that he can refuse
the prince’s order and sacrifice his life to accomplish his duty; he knows
that he can die for someone else: “Whether he would or not he perhaps
will not venture to say; but that it would be possible for him he would
certainly admit without hesitation” (CPrR, 5: 30).
What is the meaning of this possibility? It is not simply logical but
real, since the action of resisting a sovereign is an event which can be
perfectly well integrated into experience, or, in other terms, is compat-
ible with the formal laws of experience. We have to resist the tempta-
tion to think that the object of the moral law is for Kant an inaccessible
ideal. Rather, it invariably assumes the form of an action that is on every
occasion concretely realizable, even if one can never be certain of its
purely moral character. This is true even of the supreme object of duty.
Thus, “the subjective effect of this law, i.e., the intention which is suit-
able to this law and which is necessary because of it, the intention to
promote the practically possible highest good, at least presupposes that
the latter is possible. Otherwise it would be practically impossible to strive
for the object of a concept, which, at bottom, would be empty and with-
out an object” (CPrR, 5: 143). To logical possibility— the conformity with
the law of thought, with non-contradiction— and to real possibility—
the agreement with the formal conditions of experience, notably the
law of causality38 — there has to be added a moral39 or practical possi-
bility, which has to be defined as conformity with the moral law. On the
other hand, moral impossibility is what contravenes the moral law (in
the sense in which, for example, it is morally impossible to lie). Moral
possibility is not formal, it is a real possibility posited by the moral law
and capable of being or not being realized. On the basis of this new defi-
66
nition of the couple possible/impossible, a modal conception of moral

necessity can be constructed. Duty is morally necessary for its contrary
is morally impossible, since it contradicts the moral law. So it pertains to
moral possibility to transform itself immediately into moral necessity; it
exhibits a tendency to exist, which is what we call duty: what is morally
possible, in conformity with the moral law, is morally necessary and so
has to be realized. Moral necessity implies the real possibility of the act.
You ought, therefore you can. The possibility in question here is not a
purely moral possibility— in which case the statement would be a tru-
ism (what is demanded by duty is a fortiori allowed by the moral law, in
conformity with the latter). Quite the contrary, it is a real possibility— in
the absence of which the categorical imperative would take on this para-
doxical form: you ought to do something but you can do nothing. For
all that, the categorical imperative does not abolish the contingency of
the act; for it is conditioned by the choice made by the will, and in such
a way that its contrary— what is wrong— is always possible (in the real
sense). Thus, moral necessity is a strange synthesis of the two necessi-
ties (absolute and hypothetical) Leibniz had already distinguished; it is
that whose contrary is morally impossible and which still is, nevertheless,
really possible.
By introducing surreptitiously a new figure of possibility, the moral
doctrine overthrows the conception of the future, whether from a phe-
nomenal or from a noumenal point of view. The very idea of duty in-
cludes within it analytically a reference to the future. Thou shalt not kill.
The duty to do or not to do something implies that the duty to carry out
or to refuse a possibility refers to what is still in the future at the time
the obligation is formulated. From this point of view, the phenomenal
future is not just a series of predetermined events predictable along the
lines of an eclipse, it is also a totality of undetermined practical possibili-
ties, which may or may not be actualized. To appreciate this, it is enough
to be reminded of the example of the individual engaged by his prince
to bear false witness under pain of death. Is the action of this individual
predictable? If one replies that the subject is necessarily going to obey
the prince and not the moral law, by accepting to lie under pain of death,
then one denies a priori his freedom, one attributes to him a will deprived
of choice (arbitrium brutum), which makes of the imperative of the moral
law an absurdity. If inversely one affirms that the individual is necessarily
going to resist the sovereign, sacrifice his life, one predicts an action that
relies on holiness, not on virtue. The only thing that can be said is that
the action is morally and really possible. So for human actions at least an
indetermination of the future has to be admitted, an indetermination
that does not rely on our ignorance. The action is unpredictable because
67
both this outcome and its contrary are within the power of the subject at
the moment of its accomplishment.
The Unforeseeability of the Future
Moral philosophy silently undermines the pre-determinism of nature.

Whenever it is operative, the moral law opens up an undetermined
future, and this even within the phenomenal field. At the moment he
decides to lie, the individual really can not lie and inversely. The predic-
tion of human behavior is in this sense impossible and this in principle
as well as in fact. The movements of the will always prove to be infinitely
more complex than those of the stars. But, it might be objected, practi-
cal possibility is not a demonstrable knowledge, since it derives from the
moral law as a fact of reason and so conforms to the regime of rational
belief. So it does not conflict directly with the pre-determinism of nature.
Kant did not always respect this critical limitation. In the theory of
history, where he struggles against fatalism, he adopts little by little the
thesis regarding the impossibility of objectively determining the future.
To be sure, not in the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim
of 1784, which begins with the reminder that all human actions, in their
phenomenal manifestations, are determined by universal laws of nature
(8: 17). In order to confer a sense on history, the philosopher has there-
fore to operate with the hypothesis of a hidden plan of nature, regulating
the historical life of man. In his essay Toward Perpetual Peace (1795),40 Kant
takes up again the idea that progress in history is guaranteed by nature.
In this way nature guarantees perpetual peace through the mechanism

of human inclinations itself, with an assurance that is admittedly not
adequate for predicting its future (theoretically) but that is still enough
for practical purposes and makes it a duty to work toward this (not
merely chimerical) end. (8: 368)
The guarantee offered by nature takes on the form of a practical pos-

tulate designed to support action in favor of perpetual peace, which it
shows not to be impossible. But why is this hypothesis incapable of pre-
dicting theoretically the future of humanity? Why, in a general way, does
this future transgress the bounds of human knowledge? Is it on account
of our ignorance of specific causal laws regulating human actions in their
phenomenal manifestations, or by virtue of a freedom which cannot be
subject a priori to any natural law?
68
The essay Toward Perpetual Peace does not respond to this question.
The lectures in Anthropology41 do however provide a significant indication,
under the head devoted to the gift of divination:
All prophesies that foretell an inevitable fate to a people, for which they
are themselves still responsible and which therefore is to be brought
about by their own free choice, contain an absurdity— in addition to the
fact that the foreknowledge is useless to them, since they cannot escape
from it. For in this unconditional fate (decretum absolutum) there is thought
to be a mechanism of freedom, by which the concept contradicts itself. (7:
188– 89)
This passage seeks once again to underline the falsity of fatalism. But
instead of relying upon the classical argument of the confusion between
absolute necessity and conditioned necessity, Kant suggest that peoples
are the authors of their own destiny, as if, in the domain of history, free-
dom authorized an open-ended conception of the future.
We have to wait for Kant’s last reflections on history, the second sec-
tion of The Conflict of the Faculties of 1798,42 to see him resolve the equivocal
status of the future. Kant raises the question of the possibility of a predic-
tive history, a history directed towards the future and not towards the past,
one that might make it possible for us to know whether the human species
is progressing constantly and will continue to do so. A history of the future!
What a surprise. In order to think such a concept, it helps to refuse both
those representations of history that deny progress (“terroristic” and “ab-
deritic”) and those, inspired by Leibnizian optimism, which advocate an
indefinite progress guaranteed in advance (“eudaemonistic”) (7: 81– 82).
No experience can be adduced that will make it possible to resolve the
problem of the future progress of humanity. For what reason? For “we are
dealing with beings that act freely, to whom, it is true, what they ought to
do may be dictated in advance, but of whom it may not be predicted what
they will do” (7: 83). The indetermination of the future is objective, not
the result of some subjective ignorance with respect to causes, but the
consequence of human freedom. As the Reflection 8077 stipulates, “with
regard to freedom nothing can be predicted with certitude” (19: 605). To
pretend to be able to foresee the future, to anticipate what actions men
will do, comes down to adopting unconsciously an infinite point of view:
For that would be the standpoint of the Providence which is situated

beyond all human wisdom, and which likewise extends to the free ac-
tions of the human being; these actions, of course, the human being
can see, but not foresee with certitude (for the divine eye there is no
69
distinction in this matter); because, in the final analysis, the human

being requires coherency according to natural laws, but with respect to
his future free actions he must dispense with this guidance or direction.
(The Conflict of the Faculties, 7: 84)
Far from being an argument against human freedom, divine foreknowl-

edge is here a possible point of view serving to throw into relief the finitude
of humankind. One would have to be endowed with an infinite under-
standing to be able to foresee actions that conform to no natural law of
causality, which is impossible for man. So we have to recognize that free
acts are predictable neither along the model of divine foreknowledge,
which remains an unprovable simple idea, nor along that of the eclipse,
which is quite inadequate for the task. Freedom is certainly subject to a law,
the moral law, but this cannot be equated with a law of causality giving rise
to a possible prediction. Prescription is not prediction. For what reason ex-
actly? Because the indeterminateness of the future is rooted in the finitude
of human freedom, as a power of doing either right or wrong. After the
previous quote, Kant adds that “if we were able to attribute to the human
being an inherent and unalterably good, albeit limited, will, we would be
able to predict with certainty the progress of his species toward the better,
because it would concern an occurrence that he himself could produce”
(7: 84). But this is not the case. We do not know a priori what will be the
choice of our freedom, what possibility it will actualize. The categorical
imperative is a moral necessity; it obliges without necessitating.
The Principle of insufficient reason
We have seen that Kant contests the application of the principle of cau-
sality to human freedom, for the reason that the latter is situated beyond
the sphere of jurisdiction of this principle (that is beyond the experi-
ence). This does not mean all the same that freedom is lawless and acts
without any ground. Such a freedom of indifference is, for Kant, an illu-
sion, a pure nothing.43 The will is always determined according to max-
ims that assume the form of motives— respect for the law or inversely,
egoism— but these motives are themselves accepted by virtue of a free
act of will, whose ground cannot be determined. The research into max-
ims that motivate the act gets lost in an infinite regression of such a
kind that “the first subjective ground of adoption of moral maxims is
inscrutable [unerforschlich]” (Religion, 6: 22). In this sense, free will blocks
the principle of sufficient reason, whether the latter bears on a search
70
for causes or for maxims. Kant refutes both what he calls “determinism”
(Determinismus)— he invents the word— defined as the determination of
the will “through inner sufficient grounds” (Leibniz), and “indetermin-
ism” (Indeterminism), which concerns the freedom of indifference (Reli-
gion, 6: 49– 50n). Free will has this paradoxical structure of being reason-
able even while remaining inscrutable, and so presupposes what I will
call “the principle of insufficient reason.”44 This principle signifies that,
in the case of free acts, there always do exist reasons, grounds (maxims,
motives, circumstances, etc.), but that these grounds never completely ex-
plain why the act took place, that is to say, never succeed in establishing a
necessary relation of cause to effect between the grounds and the act. For
that it is necessary to appeal to free will, which is not, in the strict sense, a
sufficient explanation, for it implies precisely that the act might not have
taken place. This is particularly evident in the case mentioned earlier of
the malicious liar. The liar did not lie without any ground; indeed he did
it for reasons both internal (wickedness, levity) and external (defective
education, bad company, circumstances, etc.). But these grounds do not
sufficiently explain the act, whose origin is to be traced back to the abso-
lute spontaneity of freedom. In the eyes of Kant, the act does not appear
to us as absurd, for we grasp its grounds, but we think that all the same
the individual might not have lied, so that he is morally responsible for
his act. He is entirely culpable just as soon as he lied. Even in the case of
a moral action, one cannot say that the motive of practical reason, respect
for the law, is sufficient to explain the act. If it were the case, there would
never be bad actions. The moral possibility is not even in itself a sufficient
ground to produce the act, which requires the adhesion of the free will.
Three Figures of the Future
Kant thought he had found the solution to the problem of pre-determinism

with his thesis concerning the atemporality of human freedom, by at-
tributing to it, mutatis mutandis, one of the properties of divine freedom,
creation, in the sense of the capacity to begin by oneself a series of phe-
nomena. This brought with it a refashioning of the conception of the
possible and of the future, whose stages I will recapitulate to conclude
this chapter.
1. Practical philosophy breathes life back into the tree of possibilities,

drastically pruned by theoretical philosophy. In fact it rehabilitates a
71
modal conception (defined out of the possible) of the categories of ne-

cessity and contingency, which had been set aside by transcendental phi-
losophy in favor of a causal interpretation of the former. Logical possi-
bility, defined by the principle of contradiction, is replaced by a moral
possibility founded in conformity to the moral law.
2. The unpredictability of the future not only has a theoretical cause

(the finitude of the human understanding, ignorant of so many of the
laws governing universal pre-determinism in nature), it also stems from
the radical finitude of freedom as a power of good and evil, which Kant
integrated little by little into his system.
3. Now there exists not just one but three figures of the future in Kantian
thinking, which can be distinguished with the help of the categories of
modality. The future is for man the branching of possibilities, which can
be divided into three. (1) The noumenal future is a pure possibility, a
future which can never be made present but which is the object of a moral
postulate. (2) The phenomenal future is a totality of real possibilities,
that which can be present. It presents two facets: (2.1) the predetermined
future covers events subject to the causal laws of nature on the model
of the eclipse. It is that which will be present, according to a conditioned
necessity that includes empirical contingency (dependence upon an an-
terior cause); (2.2) the practically undetermined future corresponds to
those events which bring human freedom into play; it is that which ought
to be present, according to a moral necessity that preserves in each instance
the contingency of the choice (as that whose contrary is really possible),
therefore remains unpredictable in principle. The future is thereby
understood to be a possibility which ought to be and which can still not
be. In this last figure, absent from the Leibnizian system, the future is
thought not as a differed present or as an all already accomplished past,
but as future. As such, the future includes an indetermination that follows
from the principle of insufficient reason and, in the final analysis, from
freedom as the power of contraries, the power of positing alternatives.
This indetermination lies outside the principle of bivalence and of divine
foreknowledge. Propositions bearing on future contingents, whenever
they bear on human actions, can in consequence be said to be indeter-
minate as to their truth value. To take up again the earlier example, the
statement that says that “the subject threatened by his prince will agree to
bear false witness to save his life” is neither true nor false. Kant has liber-
ated the branching of possibilities: there no longer exists as with Leibniz
72
one and one path only, laid out in advance for each individual, but a plu-
rality of pathways realized as a function of the choices made by the free
will of individuals. Several questions remain in suspense. The boundary
between the predetermined future of natural phenomena (2.1) and the
practically undetermined future of human actions (2.2) remains surely,
in itself, and in certain cases, undetermined, and difficult to define? In a
general way, one might ask how the three figures of the future are to be
laid out, one in relation to the other. Don’t they imply a multiplication of
the modes of temporality, one that renders untenable the Kantian thesis
of the atemporality of human freedom?
3
The Wheel of Time

(Schopenhauer)
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the problem of the temporality

of freedom remains implicit. Basically, it figures in embryo in the debates
about pre-determinism and sometimes breaks through across the cate-
gory of the possible. The conclusion of the two preceding chapters might
be formulated as follows: for man, the tree of life is a tree of possibilities.
The question is to know where this tree puts down roots. If it is rooted in
the principle of sufficient reason (Leibniz), the possibilities it contains
remain inaccessible to man, whose future is predetermined. Without
abandoning the principle of sufficient reason, Kant adds to the tree of
possibilities a second root, human freedom, understood as the first and
inscrutable ground of the adoption of maxims of the will. The branch-
ing of possibilities sketches out a future that is undetermined as regards
human actions. Certainly, the tension between freedom and the principle
of causality, laid out in the “Third Antinomy,” generates a series of apo-
rias, which we have attempted to resolve. Confronted with the problem
of freedom raised by the critical philosophy, one notes two opposed at-
titudes on the part of philosophers posterior to Kant. Either a return to
pre-determinism or a transcending of pre-determinism. The first way out
will be explored by Schopenhauer, the second by Schelling.
The Fourfold root of the

Principle of Sufficient reason
The author of the World as Will and Representation began his philosophical
career with a thesis on the principle of sufficient reason, which he tried
to promote to the rank of an intangible principle for the phenomenal
world. Here we find a new defense of the thesis of pre-determinism—
probably the last of this importance— all the more vigorous for relying
heavily on support from the Kantian philosophy. Are Schopenhauer’s
arguments really new? Do they offer a solution to the problem of the ar-
ticulation of the relation between time and freedom? The thesis of 1813,
73
74
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, set out to criticize
the illegitimate extension of the principle of sufficient reason beyond
the field of representations, the only field within which it remains valid.
Schopenhauer takes up Wolff’s definition (Ontologia, §70), inherited from
Leibniz: “nihil est sine ratione cur potius sit quam non sit,” that is, “nothing is
without a ground or reason why it is rather than it is not” (FR, §5, 6– 7).
Unless, of course we are talking about the principle of sufficient reason
itself! Schopenhauer notes that the principle of sufficient reason, how-
ever certain it might be, cannot be deduced a priori; rather it is assumed
in its four root forms and is, in this sense, without any reason. For any
demonstration already presupposes it, and only makes sense with refer-
ence to it. This principle is the condition of any possible object; it con-
nects the necessary relations between all representations. Four classes
of representation determine four forms, four roots of the principle of
sufficient reason. (1) When it concerns empirical representations, the
objects of external experience, it assumes the form of a principle of be-
coming, the law of causality. Following Kant, Schopenhauer affirms that
the principle of causality is valid a priori and suffers no exception. It is
expressed as follows: any change in the phenomenal world— the world
as representation— calls for a cause. The relation of cause and effect is
necessary; it is a product of that physical necessity which links worldly
phenomena with each other. (2) Abstract notions, concepts of reason,
give rise to judgments. The principle of sufficient reason becomes a prin-
ciple of knowledge linking judgment with its sufficient reason, the propo-
sition with its object, with a view to establishing its truth. The principle
of knowledge possesses a logical necessity. It implies that the truth of
judgments is to be found outside of them, in intuitive representations,
whether empirical or pure. Every true judgment must in the final analysis
be founded on an intuition. (3) The formal part of empirical representa-
tions is constituted by space and time, the a priori forms of pure intuition,
according to a definition Schopenhauer takes over from Kant. For this
third class of representations, the principle of sufficient reason is the
principle of the sufficient reason of being, establishing necessary relations
of succession and location as between empirical objects. Everything that
exists (as representation) exists as both spatial and temporal. Location
determines whatever is in space, and succession determines whatever is in
time, thereby rendering arithmetic possible. (4) The fourth class of rep-
resentations designates the immediate representations of internal sense,
acts of will. The principle of sufficient reason becomes the law of motiva-
tion, positing a necessary relation between motives and decisions. Moti-
vation is causation viewed from within, engendering a moral necessity
regulating the actions of living beings, animals just as well as humans. All
75
T H E W H E EL O F T I ME (S CHOP E NHAUE R)
human action necessarily flows from a decision, which is itself the result
of necessarily determined motives.
One sees that the first and the fourth forms of the principle of suf-
ficient reason are opposed to human freedom, the first on the plane of
effective action, the other on that of the will that lies at its root. In that
perspective, the freedom to will, understood as the power of man to act
in different ways in one and the same situation, is an absurdity, for the
choice results from a conflict of motives, and in such a way that it is de-
termined by “the more powerful motive,” “with precisely the same neces-
sity with which the rolling of a ball results from its being struck” (FR, §20,
72). Schopenhauer finds a sophism in the thesis of the “Third Antinomy,”
which defends the idea of a free (unconditioned) causality, whereas the
determinist antithesis remains an irrefutable consequence, deduced a
priori from the laws of reason.1 In this connection he mentions several
extracts from the work of Kant, notably the two passages examined in the
preceding chapter, where it is said that any complete knowledge of the
will of a man would make it possible to predict his future conduct with
certainty.2 There where Kant warned that such a knowledge was however
unavailable to man, Schopenhauer is content to concede that “this action
then ensues just as inevitably as does every effect of a cause, although on
account of the difficulty of fathoming and completely knowing the indi-
vidual empirical character and its allotted sphere of knowledge, it is not
so easy to predict, as with every other cause, what the action will be” (FR,
§49, 227).
Operari Sequitur Esse
Does the principle of sufficient reason, developed in accordance with

its four roots, still leave room for human freedom? Only the will-to-live,
identified with the Kantian thing in itself, is free, all powerful, for it is
groundless (grundlos), independent of the principle of sufficient reason,
which can only exercise its sway over the world as representation. The il-
lusion of free will (Willkür) arises only because the individual confuses the
will-to-live with his own will, which is only its phenomenal manifestation.
When the thesis of free will is defended “the fact is overlooked that the
individual, the person, is not will as thing-in-itself, but is phenomenon of
the will, is as such determined, and has entered the form of the phenom-
enon, the principle of sufficient reason” (WWR I, §23, 113). The Will3 is
not my will. So we have to distinguish the particular will of the individual,
which belongs to the fourth class of representation, subject to the law of
76
motivation, from the Will in general, which lies beyond the world as rep-
resentation. Kant had resolved the “Third Antinomy” by the doctrine of
the dual character, empirical and intelligible, of man. Causal determin-
ism is only valid of the former and not for the latter. Schopenhauer takes
over this conceptual distinction, in which he sees one of Kant’s most im-
mortal contributions, but he uses it to reinforce determinism, so ruining
human freedom. His demonstration is packed into section 55 of World as
Will and Representation.
Like all things, the individual has two characters, intelligible and
empirical. With Kant, the intelligible character designates a regime of
free and unconditioned causality. It figures as the atemporal seat of
human freedom, as the power to initiate absolutely a phenomenal series.
Schopenhauer reverses the meaning of this notion, by deducing from the
atemporality of the intelligible character its immutability and, as a result,
its lack of freedom: “The intelligible character of every man is to be re-
garded as an act of will outside time, and thus indivisible and unalterable”
(WWR I, §55, 289). The will means here not volition but the will-to-live,
assigning to each man his intelligible character, given with his individua-
tion. The empirical character only allows the temporal determinations of
his intelligible character to unfold over time, which intelligible character
is itself atemporal:
As the same theme can be presented in a hundred variations, so the

same character can be expressed in a hundred very different courses of
life. But however varied the outer influence may be, the empirical char-
acter, expressing itself in the course of life, must yet, however it may
turn out, accurately objectify the intelligible character, since it adapts its
objectification to the previously found material of actual circumstances.
(WWR I, §28, 159)
The acts and decisions of the individual flow necessarily from motives
inherent in his empirical character, which in itself is nothing other than
the temporal unfolding of his intelligible character. Up to now, Schopen-
hauer does nothing more than follow Kant’s solution to the “Third
Antinomy.” But instead of saving human freedom by situating it in its
intelligible character, he adds that the latter is in itself necessary. The
Kantian saving of freedom gets transformed henceforth into an act of
sabotage, for the distinction of the two characters founds a double de-
terminism, noumenal as well as phenomenal. The immutability of the
intelligible character has its repercussions for the empirical character,
all of which in turn implies that nobody is in a position to change him
or herself:
77
The character of a human being is constant; it remains the same

throughout his whole life. Under the changeable mask of his years,
his circumstances, and even his cognitions and views, we find the real
identical human being, like a crab in its shell, quite unchangeable and
always the same. (FW, 44)
One man, one character, one life. But one can only discover his empirical
character little by little across the series of his acts, a knowledge Schopen-
hauer calls “the acquired character,” and which emerges as a unique theme
across the thousand facts and gestures of the individual. Schopenhauer
compares our empirical character to the growth of a tree, expressed in an
irrepressible movement repeated in its entirety across all its branches, its
leaves, right down to the smallest bud: “In the same way, all man’s deeds
are only the constantly repeated manifestation, varying somewhat in form,
of his intelligible character, and the induction resulting from the sum of
these gives us his empirical character” (WWR I, §55, 289– 90).
The tree of which Schopenhauer speaks is not a branching of pos-
sibilities; it is a simple trunk composed of moral and physical necessity.
Man is not in fact his own creation, he is what he is once and for all, in
conformity with his intelligible character, which is at best a style recog-
nizable among others; but also a sort of destiny, an essence that always
already precedes its existence. Schopenhauer’s essentialism is summed
up in a well-turned phrase from the essay of 1838, On the Freedom of the
Will: “operari sequitur esse” (FW, 51): the acts result from the essence of the
individual. This essentialism implies a pre-determinism, defined on many
occasions with the help of the Kantian image of the eclipse, taken over
literally by Schopenhauer: “as Kant says, if only the empirical character
and the motives were completely given, a man’s future actions could be
calculated like an eclipse of the sun or moon” (WWR I, §55, 292). But he
stops short of following Kant in adding that it is possible, nevertheless,
to claim that man is free! For from where could such a freedom derive,
once its possibility has been excluded from the very conception of man’s
intelligible character, as also of his empirical character, which remains
a faithful reflection of the former? Much better to conclude that “his
conduct is, so to speak, fixed and settled even at his birth, and remains
essentially the same to the very end” (WWR I, §55, 293).
Pre-determinism runs up against the objection of free will. All
action results from an exercise of the will: “I can do what I will; I can, if I
will . . . But I am not able to will this because the opposing motives have
far too much power over me” (FW, 38). I always act only . . . “if I will.”
Precisely so retorts Schopenhauer; for the will in question is an external
and alienating principle, made up of desires, motives, and impulses, none
78
of which are chosen and all of which follow from our empirical character.
“If I will” therefore does not mean “if I choose,” but “if there is in me an
adequate motivation.” Free will, understood as the liberty of indifference,
the power of choice, the power to construct one’s personality through
one’s acts, to change oneself, is then a pure illusion, whose workings
Schopenhauer seeks to deconstruct. The first cause of this error is the
intellectualist illusion of a primacy of understanding over the will. The
will is supposed to choose the best course proposed to it by the mind.
However, it is always the will itself that decides, in the sense that it is the
most powerful motive that prevails, no matter what the mind might have
proposed. Velle non discitur (willing cannot be taught). The mind cannot
discuss the choice of the will precisely because the will is not a power of
choice but an intangible principle that produces its determinations with
an immutable necessity. So where do multiple possibilities come from?
From a mind that distinguishes the different possible choices in the form
of abstract notions: “it seems to the knowing consciousness (intellect)
that two opposite decisions are equally possible to the will in a given
case” (WWR I, §55, 290). But this alternative is illusory; for the course the
will is going to pursue has already been determined long in advance by
the intelligible character of the individual, just as it was inscribed in its
empirical character, programmed by the law of motivation. So in reality
there is only one possible course of action, which the mind only discov-
ers after the event, as the simple spectator and not the author of its acts.
Schopenhauer tried another image, that of a vertical mast on the point
of oscillating to the right or to the left under the effect of the wind. To
speak in this case of two possibilities, that of leaning to the right and
that of leaning to the left, is to ignore the laws of physics, according to
which the inclination is rigorously determined with necessity. As with
Spinoza, possibility is only due to subjective ignorance of causes. The un-
determined character of choice and of the future immediately following
from it is, in the same way, entirely relative to the subject; “in itself and
objectively, on the other hand, the decision is at once determined and
necessary in the case of every choice presented to it” (WWR I, §55, 291).
We think we are free a priori and discover a posteriori that we are not, that
our acts result irremediably from our character. Freedom always arrives
on the scene too late to be free.
This pre-determinism is the radical negation of what we have called
the branching of possibilities. How well is this position backed up? Scho-
penhauer could be criticized for having made things too easy for himself
with his comparison of free will with the oscillation of a mast or a weather
vane, phenomena that are only too evidently subjected to causal laws. In
the essay of 1838 (FW, 36– 38), he takes the more pertinent example of a
79
man who leaves his work at six. He is faced with a variety of possibilities,
which can be regarded as so many branches of the tree of possibilities
pertaining to this man: he can take a stroll, go to his club, watch the sun
set, go to the theater, visit a friend, and even leave the city without ever
coming back. In the end, the individual chooses to go home to rejoin his
wife. Did he act freely, as he thought he did? Schopenhauer emphasizes
that all the possibilities the man thought he had in his power are illusions;
appearing to be objective, realizable, they are in fact the fruit of a subjec-
tive process, and are out of the reach of the one by whom they are envis-
aged. The tree of possibilities is only an immense and immensely seductive
mirage. His analysis is more precise here than in the case of the mast. By
virtue of the motives by which it is upheld, a given possibility will only be
realized if the motives by which it is upheld are sufficiently powerful to
prevail over all the others. So each possibility bears its share of motivations.
The mind forged these different possibilities without managing to weigh
up all the motives. But the mind is not the only guilty party in this affair.
The illusion of free will also benefits from the complicity of the imagina-
tion, because “only one image at a time can be present in his imagination”
and “for the moment this image excludes all others” (FW, 37). In other
words, whenever the imagination represents possibilities, it only retains
one single motive, which seems sufficient to it for action, and it solicits the
will on this basis, thereby producing a vague impulse. The man strolling
around of an evening wants to go to the theater, for the simple reason
that it might prove to be entertaining, and he feels that this is well within
his power. But his imagination forgets all the other counter-motives (the
desire to economize on his expenses, to spend an agreeable evening with
his wife, to avoid a dispute, etc.), all of which results in the action of going
home turning out to be far more pressing. Cut off from the context of
favorable and unfavorable motives, the possibility remains empty, abstract;
it remains unreal in the sense that it is not realizable. This vague desire
can never be transformed into an effective act of will.
And what if the stroller decided not to return home just to refute the
philosopher who denies that he is free? Schopenhauer responds to this
objection that this very motivation— the spirit of contradiction— would
be just enough to push him to go to the theater, for example, but cer-
tainly not enough to persuade him to roam the whole world. The same
applies to suicide. It is not enough to carry on one’s person a loaded pis-
tol to claim the possibility of being able to kill oneself; another extremely
powerful motive must also be present, sufficient to oppose the instinct of
conservation. Let’s get back to our stroller who thinks he has lots of pos-
sibilities available to him. In truth, his tree of possibilities can be reduced
to one single, less adventurous possibility, that of returning home. But is
80
this really a possibility? In no way. For “until the relevant causes enter, it
is impossible for him to do anything; but then he must do it, just as the
water must act as soon as it is placed in the respective circumstances” (FW,
37). As long as the relevant motives are not present, the act is impossible,
it cannot take place. But as soon as the motives are given, the act can only
take place with necessity. The paradox of the possible is that it disappears
at the very moment it arises, by transforming itself into necessity! The
possible already no longer obtains when it makes its appearance. Scho-
penhauer is effectively falling back on the Spinozist dichotomy between
necessity and impossibility. The notion of possibility has no autonomous
reality, it is born of the finitude of the imagination combined with the
abstraction of the understanding, which ignores its subordination to the
will. As soon as the possible is divested of all ontological weight, the modal
conception of necessity, so important with Leibniz, no longer makes sense.
Schopenhauer takes up again Kant’s causal conception of necessity. The
status of being necessary does not entail the impossibility of the opposite,
but the fact of following from a given cause.
Man is indeed in a certain sense the sum of his acts, all of which re-
veal his acquired character, but his acts do not depend upon his choice.
It is the immutable will that dictates the final decision, and this from
the point of view of his intelligible character. So it is pointless regretting
what one has done, for one did not have the choice not to do it. As for
remorse— the ultimate objection to pre-determinism— it only amounts
to the sadness of discovering one’s true nature. Schopenhauer completes
his refutation of free will with a discrete rehabilitation of fatalism. Pre-
determinism is not an argument in favor of a lazy reason, since we remain
ignorant of what our future will be. Therefore, “because we experience
this not before but only after, it is proper for us to fight and strive in time”
(WWR I, §55, 302). Leibniz had already used our ignorance of the future
to defend his theodicy from the accusation of fatalism, thanks to his two
necessities, hypothetical as well as absolute. By rejecting the possible, and
the distinction following from it, Schopenhauer cannot avoid making
pre-determinism coincide with fatalism, which is not a pretext for inac-
tion, but the most effective cure against all useless suffering arising from
the illusion of free will.4
The Three Figures of Time
The flawless application of the principle of sufficient reason, in its four

forms, to the phenomenal world— to the world as representation— entails
81
a pre-determinist conception of the future, whose nicest formulation runs

as follows: “Accordingly, the whole course of a man’s life, in all its in-
cidents great and small, is as necessarily pre-determined as the course
of a clock.”5 The future is not a branching of possibilities, but can be
reduced to something necessary awaiting realization. What is the con-
ception of time that underlines such a pre-determinism? Three figures
of time can be found in the thinking of Schopenhauer. (1) The first is
directly derived from Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetics.” Time is a pure
form of intuition that encompasses all representations. It forms the a
priori and so purely subjective frame for the succession of phenomena:
“thus before Kant we were in time; now time is in us” (WWR I, Appen-
dix, 424). (2) A Heraclitean understanding of time is grafted onto this
idealist conception. Against Kant, Schopenhauer claims that “it is false
to say that time itself remains in spite of all change; on the contrary, it is
precisely time itself that is fleeting; a permanent time is a contradiction”
(WWR I, Appendix, 472). (3) The will-to-live is outside time; it is subject
neither to the form of intuition, which latter only concerns representa-
tions, nor to becoming. The eternity of the Will is manifest in the world
as representation according to a specific temporality, which takes the
form of an indefatigable renewal, a perpetual repetition. Thus “we can
compare time to an endlessly revolving sphere” (WWR I, §54, 279). The
end is never attained, for it is just a continual return to the beginning. A
repetition, for the existence of the individual, only consists in an indefi-
nite alternation between desire and its realization. Hardly has satisfac-
tion finally been obtained than man begins desiring again, or lapses into
boredom until a new desire is aroused, and so on. A mere repetition,
even regarding existence through history, which turns out to be the reca-
pitulation of the same drama, one whose personages and costumes alone
change, all of which Schopenhauer sums up with the formula: “Eadem sed
aliter,” the same things happen again and again, only differently (WWR II,
Supplement 38, 444).
From the standpoint of the eternal return of the Will, any progres-
sive and oriented conception of time is a tenacious illusion, just like the
impression of transition and becoming:
To the eye of a being who lived an incomparably longer life and took
in at a single glance the human race in its whole duration, the constant
alternation of birth and death would present itself merely as a continu-
ous vibration. Accordingly, it would not occur to it at all to see in it a
constantly new coming out of nothing and passing into nothing, but,
just as to our glance the rapidly turning spark appears as a continuous
circle. (WWR II, Supplement 41, 481)
82
What makes time arrive is not the future but the past6 — or better, the
future already contained and pre-inscribed in the past. The ultimate
truth of pre-determinism is the negation of the future as future, which
latter then becomes a reflection of the past, a simple curve on the circle
of time. Since man becomes a prisoner of the “wheel of time” (WWR II,
Supplement 41, 481), following an image that adds to the cyclical repeti-
tion that of torture, he can only seek to free himself from it. Moreover,
this deliverance is possible precisely because time has no more reality
than that of representations, to which its hold is limited. To get free of
the wheel of time, man has to break both with the world as representa-
tion and with the world as Will, the origin of the eternal return of time.
He has to escape from the tyranny of the will-to-live, and so break the
infernal circle of desire and boredom. That is, for Schopenhauer, the
only meaning of freedom, and an essentially negative meaning at that.
In man and in man alone, “freedom, i.e., independence of the principle
of sufficient reason, which belongs only to the will as thing-in-itself and
contradicts the phenomenon, may yet in his case possibly appear even in
the phenomenon” (WWR I, §55, 288)— through an aesthetic experience
of the beautiful and the ethics of compassion and detachment. I will not
elaborate further upon these well-known themes. Let us just bear in mind
that the progressive abolition of the will-to-live in all its forms amounts
to an abolition of time, designed to replace the illusory nothingness of
temporal becoming with the true nothingness that results from the nega-
tion of all willing, the idea with which the World as Will and Representation
terminates.
Two Aporia
What response can Schopenhauer offer to the problem that interests us

here, that of the articulation of freedom and time? Time is the very nega-
tion of all freedom, on the one hand, under the phenomenal figure of
the principle of sufficient reason, which makes of it a strictly necessary
succession, and on the other hand, under the form of a perpetual rep-
etition, making all change and all innovation impossible. Freedom, for
man, consists in freeing himself from time, through resignation and the
renunciation of the Will. This solution presents at least two difficulties.
The first bears on the conditions of the possibility of human free-
dom. As Lefranc notes, “the highest act the individual can undertake is
the abolition of the will by itself; this is how his individuality reveals itself
most profoundly, as also his freedom: man is not really free, he only
83
becomes an individual when the will destroys itself as will.”7 Freedom,

as renunciation and the self-destruction of the Will, can only emerge
through its own denial. The act by which the Will is negated, and which
contradicts all forms of the principle of sufficient reason, is the only free
act given in the phenomenal world. How is such an exception to the
principle of sufficient reason even possible? Schopenhauer leaves this
question without a response.
The second aporia concerns the principle of individuation. The
conception of time as eternal return implies that everything gets re-
peated, that there is nothing new under the sun. Differences between
individuals are therefore negligible differences from the standpoint of
the immutability of the species. We are familiar with the famous example
of the cat “playing just now in the yard” which, in its absolute identity,
is “still the same one that did the same jumps and tricks there three
hundred years ago” (WWR II, Supplement 41, 482). What distinguishes
individuals— the principium individuationis— is only their spatiotemporal
positions. This conception of the principle of individuation is not revolu-
tionary. Leibniz evokes it only to criticize it in his New Essays through the
personage of Philathète, who declares that “what is called the principle
of individuation in the Schools, where it is so much inquired after, . . . is
existence itself, which determines a being, . . . to a particular time and
place incommunicable to two beings of the same kind.”8 This solution
hardly suits Leibniz, for whom individuation flows from the principle of
indiscernibles, by virtue of which beings are distinguished by an intrinsic
and qualitative difference and not by an extrinsic and qualitative dif-
ference pertaining to their spatiotemporal position. Schopenhauer, on
the other hand, is resolutely in favor of this latter thesis: “For it is only
by means of time and space that something which is one and the same
according to its nature and the concept appears as different, as a plural-
ity of coexistent and successive things” (WWR I, §23, 113). The principle
of sufficient reason accounts for the reason for beings (causes, proofs,
intuitions, motives, etc.), while the principle of individuation explains
their differences, inasmuch as it differentiates beings that share the same
concept. Even if, for example, they belong to the same species, two indi-
viduals are different because they occupy the same space at two different
moments, or are in different places at the same time, or again in two
different places and times.
Let us set aside the fact that Schopenhauer’s rigid conception of
the species has been ruined by Darwinism. The problem, intrinsic to his
thinking, is that in the case of man, the principium individuationis can in
no way be limited to the space/time couple. For Schopenhauer recog-
nizes that with man, individuality impresses itself powerfully; everyone
84
has his own character, to which there corresponds a particular idea whose
manifestation he is: “every person is to be regarded as a specially deter-
mined and characterized phenomenon of the will, and even to a certain
extent as a special Idea [eigene Idee]” (WWR I, §26, 132). Schopenhauer
clarifies his thinking with the help of the Kantian distinction between the
empirical and the intelligible character of man: “The character of each
individual man, in so far as it is thoroughly individual and not entirely
included in that of the species, can be regarded as a special Idea [beson-
dere Idee], corresponding to a particular act of objectification of the will.
This act itself would then be his intelligible character, and his empirical
character would be its phenomenon” (WWR I, §28, 158). What is specific
to man is not possessing an intelligible character— for Schopenhauer
admits that all beings are similarly endowed— but to have an individual
intelligible character, to be, in a certain sense, an idea belonging only
to himself, a particular idea added in some enigmatic way to the idea of
humanity. Each individual idea manifests itself in the world of representa-
tions to bring to it an irreducible touch of novelty, of the unknown, which
prevents the circle of time from closing down on itself by battening the
future down to the past. The principle of individuation, as thought out
in the case of man, not only rests on uncertain foundations— the notion
of a “particular idea” sounds like an oxymoron— it even contradicts the
conception of time as eternal repetition.
Schopenhauer and Leibniz
If Schopenhauer’s position is considered along with all its implications,

one notes that it is very close to that of Leibniz. To be sure, Schopenhauer
hardly refers to the author of the Theodicy, whose optimistic theory of
preestablished harmony he does not share, which indeed stands directly
opposed to his existential pessimism and to his vision of the absurdity of
the world. As we saw above, he seems to take the other side against Leib-
niz when he identifies the principium individuationis as space and time. He
also criticizes him for not distinguishing different forms of the principle
of sufficient reason. However, he assumes two ideas of Leibniz, which play
a not negligible role in the aporias evoked earlier.
The Discourse on Metaphysics anchors the principle of individuation
in the notion of individual substance: “We can say that the nature of an
individual substance or of a complete being is to have a notion so com-
plete that it is sufficient to include, and to allow the deduction of, all
the predicates of the subject to which that notion is attributed” (Leibniz
85
1998a, art 8, 60). The individual notion of Alexander contains in itself

all the essential and accidental predicates attributed to him in the suc-
cessive course of his life, and which make up his unique singularity. In
the same spirit, Schopenhauer defines the individual character of a man
in terms of his “complete personality” (vollständige Persönlichkeit) (WWR I,
§26, 131). Leibniz’s complete notion is to the individual what Schopen-
hauer’s intelligible character is to man: a sort of preestablished destiny
that unfolds with necessity. In his Theodicy (art. 52), Leibniz compares
the human soul to a “spiritual automaton,” in which everything is cer-
tain and determined in advance. Leibniz’ pre-determinism is assimilated
by Schopenhauer in a secularized form, detached from any theologi-
cal context and disconnected from the theory of the infinity of possible
worlds. In The Basis of Morality, he writes that “the course of life itself
with all its manifold activities accordingly is nothing but a clockface of
that inner original mechanism” (Schopenhauer 1998, §20, 197). Leibniz
reserves knowledge of individual notions for God, while Schopenhauer
states that the intelligible character of the individual is unfathomable. In
both cases, the impossibility for man of knowing individuality in depth
is an argument that makes the thesis of pre-determinism inaccessible to
any empirical verification.
The second point in common between the two philosophers con-
cerns the determination of the principium individuationis. In confor-
mity with the principle of indiscernibles, Leibniz thinks that “no two
substances are entirely alike, and differ only in number . . . What Saint
Thomas affirms on this point about angels or intelligences (‘that here
every individual is a lowest species’) is true of all substances” (Discourse on
Metaphysics, art. 9, 1998a, 60). Saint Thomas was a partisan of individua-
tion through matter, with the exception of angels who, being immaterial,
were individuated through their form. Each angel was therefore one of a
kind. Leibniz extends the thesis of individuation through form to all be-
ings. Each substance has within itself an internal principle of distinction,
its complete notion, by virtue of which it can be distinguished qualita-
tively from all others. By means of his theory of the intelligible character
of the individual, identified with a particular Idea, Schopenhauer reaches
back to the Leibnizian doctrine of individuation through form, with this
notable difference, that it is only valid for men, and not for all beings.
From Leibniz to Schopenhauer, time is thought within the horizon
of the principle of sufficient reason, and the future, within the perspec-
tive of pre-determinism. The advances made by Kant with the help of a
practical conception of the possible are neglected by Schopenhauer, who
connects up with Leibnizian pre-determinism in an even more radical
manner, since the notion of possibility is divested of all ontological reality,
86
to become a simple subjective illusion. Schopenhauer has separated time

and free will. In his eyes, the Will alone is free, to the extent that it is not
subject to the principle of reason; but this Will also imposes a freedom
devoid of time and, by the same token, devoid of any individuation pos-
sible at its level: “for it is indeed one and the same will that objectifies
itself in the whole world; it knows no time, for that form of the principle
of sufficient reason does not belong to it, or to its original objectivity,
namely the Ideas” (WWR I, §28, 159– 60). On the side of representation,
the individual is temporal but he is not free. In Schopenhauer’s thinking,
we find either an atemporal freedom— the world as Will— or a tempo-
rality divested of freedom— the world as representation. Schopenhauer
refuses to consider that the freedom of the will might be temporal, and so
falls back upon the Kantian opposition of noumenal freedom and time:
“the dispute as to the freedom of the individual action, as to liberum ar-
bitrium indifferentiae, really turns on the question whether the will resides
in time or not” (WWR I, §55, 292). In replying in the negative, Schopen-
hauer makes of the intelligible character an objectification of the Will,
an immutable reality, which entails the fatalist thesis of pre-determinism
and the aporias of individuation. This conclusion seems inevitable; unless
freedom is something other than the auxiliary of the principle of suffi-
cient reason; unless time, as per Heidegger’s suggestion, is the “proper
principium individuationis” (Heidegger, The Concept of Time, 64: 124/21).
4
The Time of decision

(Schelling)
If the Kantian attempt to confer a temporal form upon the principle of

sufficient reason— via causal succession— is entirely fruitful for the phi-
losophy of knowledge, it seems, on the other hand, that the thorough-
going subjection of time (notably the future) to the principle of sufficient
reason generates insurmountable problems for practical philosophy, at-
tested in an exemplary way by Schopenhauer’s philosophical thinking.
Looking into the matter more closely, one finds that these aporias are al-
ready present in embryo in Leibniz, since the application of the principle
of bivalence to propositions concerning future contingents is founded
precisely on the principle of sufficient reason, which itself cannot ac-
commodate any indeterminateness with regard to the future. So there is
apparently an incompatibility between the principle of sufficient reason,
freedom, and time, in the sense that all three cannot coexist without con-
tradiction. But surely, an aporia as crippling as this ought to have been
identified by other philosophers? In fact, it was clearly taken note of by
at least one among them, and expressed in a radical form. In his Letters
to Moses Mendelssohn on the Doctrine of Spinoza, published in 1785 shortly
after the Critique of Pure Reason, Jacobi maintains that the principle of
sufficient reason implies the abolition of time, which is replaced by an
atemporal logical succession, as well as the suppression of freedom, now
subject to a necessarily causal order. According to him, this verdict is irre-
futable. Rationalism leads, ineluctably, via pantheism, to fatalism: “Every
path adopted by the demonstration leads to fatalism.” This critique takes
in the Leibniz-Wolff philosophy, which is “none the less fatalistic than that
of Spinoza” (Jacobi 1998, 123). Kant only just escapes this judgment, and
only to the extent that he himself prepared the case against rationalism,
by limiting knowledge to accommodate faith.1 Jacobi concludes that rea-
son is incapable of comprehending freedom, which cannot be reduced
to the principle of sufficient reason. Against rationalism, he defends a
philosophy of faith, alone capable, in his view, of doing justice to the exis-
tence of God, and of human freedom.
Fatalism as the destiny of rationalism! There is nothing new about
this charge. Leibniz already had to fight hard against the objection of
89
90
T H E P L AS T I CI T Y OF T I ME
fatalism, by trying to refute it in a way that did not convince Jacobi. By

pushing it forward onto the forefront of the scene, the latter did in fact
launch a challenge to the philosophers of the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury. A challenge all the more difficult to meet in that the problem of
fatalism is not just a problem of freedom but also a problem of temporal-
ity, something neither Jacobi nor the rationalism thinkers seem to have
been cognizant of. Fatalism assumes the complete pre-determination of
the future. But what is the future? What are the modalities of time that
now conflict with human freedom? As long as these questions are neither
resolved nor even raised, the problem of fatalism cannot but keep on
reemerging. These problems were never explicitly raised by the thinkers
of that epoch. We find reflections on freedom, but with no link to time.
However, there is one exception: the thinking of Schelling, who, little by
little, manages to call into question the atemporal conception of freedom
to think the temporality of freedom, in the context of which we find, for
the first time, that time has been characterized by the idea of plasticity or
at the least acquires an organic character.
The decision for Temporality

in the Treatise of 1809
In the treatise of 1809, entitled Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of

Human Freedom, Schelling sought to throw light on this obscure region of
freedom that Kant had taken to be inscrutable. His declared objective is to
“save man with his freedom, within the divine being itself [göttliche Wesen
selbst]2” (PI, 7: 339, trans. modified). To meet the challenge mounted
by Jacobi, Schelling will contest the different objections raised against
human freedom, such as fatalism, determinism, and pantheism, all of
which were incorporated at that time in Spinoza’s system, with regard to
which he maintains a distance. What is the essence of human freedom
in his view? It is the possibility of wrongdoing. Divine freedom is a will
of love, a capacity for the good. In the case of man, “the real and vital
concept is that freedom is the capacity for good and evil” (PI, 7: 352).
This concept of freedom arouses a classical objection, one that obliges
Schelling to modify his position. Does it not lead back to the freedom of
indifference, “a wholly undetermined capacity to will one or the other
of two contradictory opposites?” (PI, 7: 382). Indifference features as an
arbitrary element, the freedom to do good or evil. Leibniz had already
resisted this way of conceiving of freedom, which implies an absolute in-
dependence of man vis-à-vis God, and which ruins the entire enterprise
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T H E T I ME OF DE CI S I O N (S CHE LLI NG)
of theodicy.3 Schelling borrows his example of Buridan’s ass to refute

the freedom of indifference. A free will subject to the indifference of
equivalent alternatives could never take the least decision. But if he takes
over Leibniz’s critique of the freedom of indifference, he does not adopt
his solution. Leibniz’s notion of moral necessity, “the motivating causes
that only incline but do not determine the will” (PI, 7: 383), is in his
view a specious improvement upon determinism, for it only represents
a disguised form of absolute necessity, one which as such is incapable of
refuting fatalism.
In order to resolve the aporia, Schelling goes to great lengths to
show that freedom stems from a superior necessity, and which flows from
the very essence of the individual. For that, he relies explicitly on the
Kantian theory of freedom. Freedom is not bound by pre-determinism
because it is independent of natural causality: it is therefore “outside
or above all time” (PI, 7: 383). This equivalence between freedom and
atemporality is a recurring postulate in the treatise of 1809, and one
which is never called in question. In virtue of the latter, a free act stems
from the intelligible essence of the individual. At this stage, the thinking
runs up against a new difficulty, one that is going to dominate all that
follows. Every action is determined as being good or bad, just or unjust.
Schelling reminds us that there is no transition from the absolutely un-
determined to the determined. This is one of the fundamental axioms
of the philosophy of identity. Action stems from the intelligible essence
of the individual, which must therefore also be in itself determined. If
this is not so, either we fall back in the aporia of the freedom of indif-
ference: “the intelligible being should determine itself out of pure, utter
indeterminacy without any reason” (PI, 7: 384); or else we get caught up
in a vicious circle, since, in order to be determined, the will must already
have been determined.4 How to get out of this alternative? Schelling pro-
poses a promotion of the intelligible essence to the rank of a principle
of individuation. The transition from indecision to decision, from inde-
terminateness to determinateness, is possible, because the intelligible
essence out of which action stems is itself determined, singularized. The
peculiar nature of the individual, its essence, has to provide the principle
by which its action is determined: “For free is what acts only in accord
with the laws of its own being and is determined by nothing else either
in or outside itself” (PI, 7: 385).
Let us accept that choice is determined by our intelligible essence,
that it flows from what we are, from our inmost and most singular being.
Would not this singular and intelligible essence simply feature as an ava-
tar of the concept of a “complete notion” and of a “spiritual automaton,”
thereby taking us back to Leibniz’s pre-determinism? A new objection,
92
which could perhaps be met in the first instance by pointing out that what
Schelling had in mind was the Kantian idea of autonomy. But autonomy
relies on a law of reason, whereas here it is a matter of laws of essence.
For Schelling, autonomy is only the formal concept of freedom, and so
does not do justice to the reality of evil. More relevant is the reference to
Spinoza’s definition of freedom, in accordance with which “that thing is
said to be free which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and
is determined to action by itself alone” (The Ethics I, def. 7).5 However, we
are only exchanging Scylla for Charybdis, since this proximity to Spinoza
commits us to an approach condemned by Schelling, for the reason that
it leads to fatalism, in his view. Aware of this difficulty, he emphasizes
that the necessity that guides the process of action is not that of either
an external or an internal constraint, but a form of freedom, expressed
in a formula that corrects the preceding definition: “But precisely this
inner necessity is itself freedom; the essence of man is fundamentally his
own act [Das Wesen des Menschen ist wesentlich seine eigne Tat]” (PI, 7: 385).
Schelling makes of this inward essence the very act of freedom. Having
reached this point, his thinking stands at a crossroads, giving rise to two
opposed interpretations, thereby illustrating the tension between the two
conceptions of freedom that run through the treatise of 1809, superior
necessity and choice, predestination and decision, predetermination and
self-determination.
Let us begin by examining the interpretation I will call “essen-
tialist,” the one that enjoys the most support. Under this hypothesis,
the free will of the individual is neutralized by his intelligible essence,
which determines, once and for all, the entire series of his actions. The
individual can only act in accordance with the laws of his own essence.
Freedom is synonymous with fidelity, identity with oneself. Defining the
essence of the individual as its act makes nothing easier, since this act
is an eternal act and so situated beyond the domain of the conscious
will. Schelling could not be clearer on this question. The originary act
by which this essence is determined is an eternal act by its very nature.
Man has always already constituted his essence: “The act, whereby his
life is determined in time, does not itself belong to time but rather to
eternity” (PI, 7: 385– 86).
From this point of view, the conscious decisions related to freedom
simply serve to explain the consequences of the originary act, as if man
“had been what he is already from all eternity” (PI, 7: 386). Actions are
at one and the same time both necessary, since they flow from the inher-
ent essence of the individual, and free; to the extent that this necessity
coincides with authentic freedom, it conforms to the laws of its own es-
sence. Schelling gives the example of Judas: “That Judas became a be-
93
trayer of Christ, neither he nor any other creature could change, and
nevertheless he betrayed Christ not under compulsion but willingly and
with complete freedom” (PI, 7: 386). Judas is only able to unfold over
time his own essence which is itself eternal. We are very close to Leibniz’s
pre-determinism, but with two differences. The pre-determinism is here
reinforced; for since the necessity of actions is absolute, it excludes every
other possibility. By virtue of his originary act, man is responsible for his
acts: “he is like he is through his guilt, as much as he is right that it was
impossible for him to act otherwise” (PI, 7: 386). All the same, Schelling’s
predestination includes a certain kind of human freedom. Man is what he
is from all eternity. But his inherent and intelligible essence is not given
through any divine understanding, as with Leibniz, but follows from his
own original decision, like an “eternal act contemporaneous with the
creation that institutes the being of man itself” (PI, 7: 387). From the
first, man himself determines his own essence, from which all his actions
proceed over time. In the thinking of Schelling, everything takes place
as though it were man himself— and not God— who had determined the
whole course of his life in an originary act, which is both the beginning
and the end of his free will. Man loses his freedom through that very act
by which it gets expressed.
The essence of man is essentially his own act. Another interpretation—
let us say “existentialist”— is possible, and which places the emphasis on
the notion of act. Schelling’s thesis means that the inherent essence of
man is not “a dead sort of Being [ein totes Sein] and a merely given one”
(PI, 7: 385). Rather, man creates himself through his decisions, the free
act “precedes essence, indeed, first produces it” (PI, 7: 386). Certainly the
aporia is still there, since the inaugural act is eternal and is not accessible
to consciousness. Through this act, “the life of man reaches to the begin-
ning of creation; hence, through it man is outside the created, being free
and eternal beginning itself” (PI, 7: 386). If the inaugural act is eternal,
and if the singular essence that flows from it is itself out of time, the equi-
librium between necessity and freedom is broken in favor of necessity
alone. Any beginning, any action, can only be a repetition, the unfolding
of an essence fixed once and for all in an originary decision.
The core of the aporia lies in what Jacobi (1812, 248) called the
“abyss” between time and eternity, created by rationalist philosophers
who proved incapable of surmounting it. It is not necessary to assume the
wings of belief to cross this abyss. The only question is how to get past the
traditional concept of eternity. To save human freedom, the conception
of freedom as purely atemporal has to be abandoned, to make way for
time. This is the path adopted by Heidegger in his commentary on the
treatise of 1809. Divine eternity is not that of an absolute atemporality,
94
since “the Being of existing God is becoming in the primordial simulta-

neity of absolute temporality, called eternity” (Heidegger, Schelling, 42:
215/123).
Authentic eternity is the paradoxically contemporaneous charac-
ter of the three dimensions of time, the surpassing of linear succession.
Heidegger applies this notion to the inaugural decision of the essence.
This act is eternal not in the sense in which it might be absolutely out of
time, nunc stans intemporal, but because it puts man in possession of an
authentic temporality that gives him, in one single moment, an overview
of his past, his present, and his future. The inaugural decision constitutive
of the essence is a “decision for temporality” (Entscheidung zur Zeitlichkeit)
(Schelling, 42: 268/155, trans. modified):
Thus where temporality is truly present, in the Moment [Augenblick],

where past and future come together in the present, where man’s
complete essence flashes before him as this his own, man experiences
the fact that he must always already have been who he is, as he who has
determined himself for this. (Schelling, 42: 268/155)
In order to hold on to Schelling’s theory of freedom, Heidegger tries to

find in it his own conception of resoluteness, as developed in Being and
Time, a point which will be developed in more detail in chapter 6. The
contemporaneous character of the three temporal dimensions signifies
that in the moment of authentic decision, Dasein recuperates his past and
anticipates his future, thereby encompassing the totality of his temporal
existence between birth and death. Such a decision determines man’s
very own essence and constitutes his being on the basis of his own self.
Seen in this way, freedom coincides with the necessity flowing from reso-
lute decision. Freedom only remains free “where a choice is no longer
possible and no longer necessary” (Schelling, 42: 268/154). Freedom is
the act of overcoming indecision in a resolution, through a determinate
choice. One can certainly follow Schelling in describing this act in the
terms of an eternal beginning, on condition that it is made clear that what
is at issue is indeed a beginning again, an ever-varying reproduction of
the inaugural decision, and, as such, subject to becoming. The beginning
only really occurs if it remains temporal through and through. With each
really free act, human being recovers the original state of in-decision; he
carries through yet again the act of choosing his essence, which is at the
same time reconfigured. Beginning again is a creation and not a repeti-
tion of the same. True essence is not an eternal act fixed for all eternity,
but a temporal identity that never ceases to get modified on the occasion
of each new decision.
95
Heidegger’s interpretation has its merits, but it also has the demerit
of completely overlooking the tension inherent in Schelling’s conception
of freedom, and this by replacing the notion of essence with the more
plastic notion of existence. One’s own essence becomes one’s singular
existence, taken as a whole, and in the light of resolute decidedness.
Authentic freedom is the appropriation by man of his existence: “Only
a few, and they rarely, attain the deepest point of the highest expanse of
self-knowledge in the decidedness [Entschiedenheit] of one’s own being”
(Schelling, 42: 269/155). As soon as the inaugural decision regarding the
essence has been plunged into the bath of temporality, it becomes dy-
namic, susceptible to being altered at any moment. But it is difficult to
find such a dynamic conception of decision in the treatise of 1809, be-
cause Schelling has still not crossed the “abyss” between time and eter-
nity. Eternity still signifies independence with regard to time, and not a
superior temporality from which the decisive moment might proceed.
The question of temporality has still not been worked out and will only
truly be developed several years later in the Ages of the World.
The Ages of the World
In the treatise of 1809, human freedom is defined on the basis of a double

independence, vis-à-vis the causal series of nature and vis-à-vis God, in the
sense that human freedom is what, in God, is not God. Against Leibniz,
from now on Schelling upholds the view that, although, like all other
things, human freedom remains immanent in God, it nevertheless has
a root independent of God. The possibility of evil, which follows from
this independence, is what separates finite human freedom from God’s
absolute freedom. All the same, the aporia concerning the temporality
of freedom remains intact. For this concern with finitude does not go
so far as to enable us to understand how human freedom stands in rela-
tion to time. Following Kant, on whose authority he relies on this point,
Schelling considers “independence from time and freedom as correlate
concepts” (PI, 7: 352). Why? We know his reply, which relies on time being
perceived across the frame of natural causality, synonymous with external
necessity. Henceforward, freedom can only be conceived as lying “out-
side any causal connectedness, as it is outside or above all time” (PI, 7:
383). Independence with regard to causality necessarily brings with it,
from this point of view, independence with regard to time! The Kantian
association of time with mechanical causality, which runs through the
treatise of 1809 from beginning to end, makes it difficult to grasp the in-
96
volvement of freedom in time and so opens up once again the prospect

of fatalism.
Perhaps it is this difficulty which pushes Schelling to completely
overthrow his conception of time in the project, first envisaged around
1810, which he called The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter). As if any inves-
tigation into freedom, by dint of undermining the traditional concepts
of time and eternity, was bound in the end to shatter them! Here again,
it becomes abundantly apparent that reflection upon the enigmatic link
between human freedom and time is only surreptitiously present; for the
most part, it remains indirect, sporadic. It is up to us to bring it to light,
to reveal the lines of force that hold it together. Before addressing the
problem of human temporality, Schelling takes a long detour— a story
of the history of God— which leads him to the discovery of the organic
nature of time. How can this disclosure of the organic character of time
help in providing a new solution to the problem of the temporalization
of freedom?
This unfinished, but continually reworked text, The Ages of the
World, does not constitute, it should be said right away, an ethics. It is not
centered on the problem of human freedom, but resolutely oriented
towards an investigation whose primary objective is the originary being
in its very becoming, the life of God in its immemorial development
through different ages. If, here and there, it does include a few “ethi-
cal considerations” (sittliche Betrachtungen) on human freedom (AW Fr.,
223), the latter are, for the most part, only aimed at illustrating certain
fundamental events in the history of God with the help of anthropologi-
cal examples. As Xavier Tilliette emphasizes, it is indeed “the theologi-
cal instance and not the anthropological structure . . . that furnishes the
paradigm for Schelling’s undertaking” (1992, vol. 1, 599). All the same,
it is well worthwhile examining the sense and the significance of these
ethical considerations, as Wieland (1956) did in his day, by focusing his
interpretation on the existential dimension of the Ages of the World. But
does the latter really only furnish secondary considerations or does it al-
low us to think the relation of freedom and time in a new way? In order
to reply to this question, rather than starting out from the anthropo-
logical experience of time, as does Wieland, to move back eventually to
the history of God, I will start out in the reverse direction (as Schelling
himself clearly intended), with the history of God, the “system of times,”6
with a view to understanding how this history of God can illuminate the
question of the temporality of human freedom. How is such a transition
from divine to human time even possible? By virtue of a general analogy
Schelling draws between God and Man, which makes it possible for him
to claim that “the system of human times” is only a “replica [Nachbild], a
97
repetition, within a more restrained circle,” of the system of divine times

that dominates the history of God (AW 1811, 11).
The aim of the Ages of the World is to describe “scientifically”7 “the
history of the development of the originary being [Urwesen]” (AW 1811,
10), to show how the Absolute goes out of itself, to use the form of words
employed in the earlier writings. We are not talking about a philosophy of
history, in the Hegelian sense, but of a history of the primordial being or
of the most ancient of beings, and which goes back to the very source of
creation. In a dual movement, both archaeological and genetic, Schelling
seeks to get back to the origin of the creation of the world and to account
for the genesis of the present world, starting with the progressive (and pro-
gressively concealed) transition from the archaic age of the past. The ver-
sion of 1815 states explicitly that “God is the oldest of beings” (AW 1815,
8: 209). The “scientific history” presented in The Ages of the World is the
history of God in its temporal development, the history of a living God,
who is caught up in its own becoming. This divine history is set in the
context of a metaphysics of the will, freed from the constraints of the
philosophy of identity. Among the three principal versions (1811, 1813,
and 1815), only the first sketch gives us an idea of the totality of the his-
tory of God, within which four stages can be distinguished: the eternal
freedom of God, an archaic age situated in the past, the present world,
and the future age of the spirit. At the heart of this vast system of times,
the past is not our past, that of our world, but a more radical past, a time
before the world, just as the future at issue here is a radical future, a time
after the world. The originary being— in conformity with the turn taken
in 1809— is not that of an absolute identity but of the will. At the very
beginning of its history, which is just as much a non-beginning since noth-
ing comes before it, God is therefore nothing but a pure will, described
by Schelling in the terms of traditional German mysticism, that of Eck-
hart or Angelus Silesius.8 God is “the will that wants nothing, that desires
nothing,” it is “purity” (Lauterkeit),9 “undiluted joy” (AW 1811, 15– 16).
Subject to no existential desire, related to nothing except itself, this very
first freedom is the eternal freedom of God, the highest freedom, which,
because it does not want to become efficient, is a sort of nothingness.
This supreme freedom, which reigns over everything and over which
nothing reigns, is “the affirmative concept of eternity, or of what is above
and beyond time” (AW 1811, 14). Schelling’s point of departure is there-
fore God’s freedom, not that of man— an absolute freedom lying beyond
being and time. It is situated in the domain of the immemorial, the “Un-
vordenkliche,” that in the face of which nothing can be thought.
What drove this pure eternity to abandon its original felicity, and
go out of itself to unleash the system of times? For time certainly does
98
exist, just as certainly as does eternity. The solution to this enigma lies in
the appearance of a desire, of another will, “a will reaching out to exis-
tence” and which, in so doing, “engenders itself, thereby meriting the name
of an eternal will” (AW 1811, 17). If one wants to grasp the being of God
as will, one has to recognize the presence of two wills in one: a will that
wants nothing, that is love, effusion, and infinite communication. And an
eternal will to exist, that wants something determinate. Schelling takes up
again the idea of two principles of God— love and egoism— discovered
in 1809, by interpreting it in the light of the Kantian thesis regarding the
two universal forces of attraction and repulsion developed in the second
chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. The metaphysics
of the will is a metaphysics of force. Two wills imply two conceptions of
being, two forces, two principles at the very heart of God. Being as We-
sen, which characterizes the immemorial life of God, which is expansive
force, out-flowing, infinite profusion, the will of love in its purest form.
Identity therefore only designates the second facet of the absolute: being
as Sein, which is, on the contrary, attractive or cohesive force, contraction,
withdrawal, exclusion, ipseity, anger. According to a formula from 1815,
Being (Seyn) is “ipseity, particularity [Seinheit, Eigenheit]” and “seclusion
[Absonderung]” (AW 1815, 8: 210, trans. modified). Without this force of
contraction, the initial love would come to nothing, because love does
not have any being in itself, wants nothing for itself, renounces whatever
belongs to it. But without the will of love, the selfish force in God would
negate itself, would result in a continual contraction which would an-
nihilate all existence and render creation impossible. It is therefore the
conjoined action of these two fundamental forces of contraction and ex-
pansion that makes it possible to traverse the abyss between eternity and
time, so engendering the first age of the world, the past.
A time of darkness and of closure, the age of the past is the original
time, the antique night of chaos. This first period of the divine life is
characterized by the domination of the force of contraction over that of
expansion. This attractive force is the fundamental force, the original
force of nature. In this intermediary state, situated between the eternal
freedom of God and the creation of the world, the life of God is caught
up in an endless alternation of expansion and contraction, in which the
negating force always has the last word. Schelling describes this obscure
age of the past as an ever more lively combat between the two wills, the
two forces. The past that precedes our world is not a golden age but an
age of conflict. The hegemony of the force of contraction, constantly at
odds with its opposite, the force of expansion, gives rise to a time where
everything that is born is immediately held back in its élan, taken back,
annihilated. The age of the past can therefore be compared to “this turn-
99
ing wheel of generation,” a “primitive and inorganic time” (AW 1811, 53),

an indefinite cycle where every beginning is brought to an end almost as
soon as it has begun. As Hegel will do in his Encyclopaedia (§258, Remark),
Schelling compares the inorganic time of nature originally to the reign
of Chronos/Kronos, master of time “eternally engendering, eternally de-
vouring” (AW 1811, 68).
If Schelling defines the time of the age of the past as eternal time,
or again as possible time, it is because only an eternal beginning is to be
found in it, only a continual desire to begin over again, and so one that
never really begins at all. This inchoate time is “eternally commencing,
eternally becoming, always devouring itself and always again giving birth
to itself” (AW 1815, 8: 230), it is “the eternal contraction and the eternal
re-expansion, of the universal ebb and flow” (AW 1815, 8: 231). The de-
structive time described in Hegel’s philosophy of nature is found again
at the beginning of The Ages of the World, but with a different status. On
the one hand, it figures as the original foundation of the world, the first
form of time; on the other, this primitive and inorganic time is not the
only modality of time, does not itself define any more than one single
period of the Absolute, that of God’s initial life. Schelling describes in a
dramatic way the affects of originary being, caught in the wheel of gen-
eration, within the apparently inescapable cycle of life and death: dis-
tress (Noth), submission to necessity (Nothwendigkeit), terrifying solitude,
despair capable of arriving at madness. To be sure, life divine aspires, at
this stage in its development, to a liberation. At the same time, one has to
recognize that this liberation has already taken place, in an immemorial
time, and for the reason that at the very moment the story is being told
the nature of the world offers a pacified appearance, in the image of an
extinct volcano, fundamentally different from the chaos of the original
nature. The question then is: how did this chaotic state get pushed back
into the past?
In order that God should get detached from the age of the past, cut
itself off from inchoate time, the will of love has to prevail over the will
of contraction, without nevertheless abolishing the latter. Love is there-
fore the creative force that presides over the generation of the second
age of the world, it is “the factor underlying any development,” because
it alone “pushes originary being into abandoning its closure” (AW 1811,
57). Schelling describes creation of the present world in terms of the
Trinity. The Son is eternally engendered by the Father and forms the time
of the present, the time of love. But “as a result of engendering the Son,
the obscure and originary force of the Father itself withdraws into the
past and recognizes itself as past relative to the Son” (AW 1811, 59). What
has become of the force of contraction? It has not been abolished but
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pushed back into the past as past. In other words, the Father is the Son
of the Son, only becoming the Father retrospectively from the fact of the
existence of his Son, just like the archaic age of the divine life only really
becomes past through its relation to the present. Past and present have to
be posited together, in the same act of generation that is “scission” (Schei-
dung) and “de-cision” (Entscheidung) (AW 1811, 63). The initial inorganic
time is pushed back into the past by the present of a creative decision, in-
spired by love and productive of an organic and systematic time in which
the different dimensions— past, present, and future— are deployed and
distinguished, each one from the others. Without the force of love, time
would always be this destructive wheel Schopenhauer likes to talk about,
a wheel in which there is no distinction between present and past. Picking
up an image from Hesiod’s mythology, Schelling reminds us how Kronos
was dethroned by Zeus, “the master of the present” (AW 1811, 69). A pri-
mordial time, devoid of duration, closed in upon itself, is succeeded by
a time which gets disclosed, open to the present. The creative decision
marks the break with the simultaneity of the two wills, the selfish force
of contraction becoming the obscure but necessary background for true
love, which is not a pure expansion but egoism overcome. All of which
means that negative time has been repressed, and in such a way as to be-
come a still active foundation. The overcoming (Überwindung) described
by Schelling always presupposes a latent conflict, a dull tension between
what overcomes and what is overcome. The primitive and destructive
time remains the eternal but obscure foundation of creation, threatening
to rise up again if it is not constantly repressed by the present.
The creation of the world presupposes two generations, two deci-
sions, which Schelling differentiates ever more carefully in the course of
his successive sketches. The immemorial decision to engender the eter-
nal time of the age of the past precedes the creative decision properly so
called, the will to be revealed that definitively discloses eternity, rendering
explicit the system of times and creating the present world. The first is the
refusal of the eternal absolute, the second, a scission with the inorganic
time of the age of the past. The engendering of the present world is not
a creation ex nihilo, since it stems from this intermediary age of the past,
interposed between an absolute eternity and the age of the present. The
creative decision of the present world is the transfiguration of the primi-
tive and inorganic time of the past into a differentiated organic time.
The present engendered by the Son cuts itself off from the past
by positing it as past and, at the same time, opening up the future, the
third age of the world, the “age of the spirit” at the threshold of which
Schelling’s narrative ends. This last period of the divine life is defined by
a new relation situated in between the two primordial forces. While the
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past corresponds to the domination of the force of contraction and the

present to the preeminence of love, the future rests on the intimate unity
of the two wills, the negating force being totally repressed by love even
while remaining perfectly united with it. In this unity “we find again the
primordial purity” (AW 1811, 67), which makes of the spirit “the supreme
freedom, the purest will, a will which, without moving, sets everything
in motion and traverses everything” (AW 1811, 73). The third age of
the history of God culminates in a return to its initial serenity, a recon-
quest of absolute eternity, recuperated in the form of a future destina-
tion. It is because the present (Gegenwart) always contains an opposition
(Gegensatz) that this ultimate unity is precisely located in the future. The
few indications in the text of 1811, devoted primarily to the description
of the past (as in the other versions), suggest that this eschatological
future is not the future of Parousia, destined to be realized in the world,
but a radical and radically post-worldly future, a future that will never
be present.
The organic Character of divine Time
Our detour across the history of God is not yet at an end. Before we
address the question of human temporality, we first have to get clear
about the nature of the system of divine times. Recapitulating this his-
tory in its four fundamental stages, the divine history reveals itself to be
a “genealogy of time,” tracing its birth back to an absolute eternity and
a radical past, and reaching right up to its development in the present
and toward the future (AW 1811, 75). The three ages of the world— past,
present, and future— are not three dimensions or delimitations of time,
but three modes of temporality engendered by God, three effectively
different times: the devouring time of the past, the organic time of the
present world, the eschatological time of the future. Instituted together
by divine fiat, they form a “grandiose system of times” (AW 1811, 14).
Where does this system of times originate? It flows from the play of forces
inherent in the divine life. Without the force of contraction that tempers,
retards, and retains the expansion of love, we would find an absolute
eternity, the entire process would have been realized at one blow, and
instead of time we would have been faced, yet again, with an absolute
eternity. Without the force of love that opens up the initial closure and
drives all being to move out of its ipseity, the force of contraction would
have made of time an eternal beginning again, an inchoate eternity. Time
arises through the bipolar disjunction between two fundamental forces
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dynamically reunited in God. It is the metaphysics of force, of the will,

that leads Schelling to break up the framework of the mechanical con-
ception of time, a conception to which the treatise of 1809 still adheres.
The different configurations of the two primordial forces in fact confer
an organic structure upon the whole of time: “time taken together as a
whole is therefore organic” (AW 1811, 81).
The decisive thesis concerning the organic character of time has to
be understood in four complementary ways. (1) First of all, it implies the
omnipresence of time in all of its parts. Time is not a linear succession of
nows, external to each other; it is given in its entirety in each constitutive
moment, just as the whole of life is present in each part of the organism:
“thus time arises in each moment [in jedem Augenblick]; indeed it is the
whole of time that so arises, a time in which past, present and future are
dynamically disassociated, and so thereby at the same time conjoined”
(AW 1811, 74). (2) The organic character of time signifies more generally
its omnipresence at the heart of all beings. Time is not an empty frame,
but an internal and living time present in all things. Schelling rejects any
form of within-timeness: “nothing is born in time; on the contrary, it is
in everything that time is born again and again, immediately, and on the
basis of eternity” (AW 1811, 79– 80). So we have to talk of time in the plu-
ral: the synchronic plurality of the times inherent in different beings, the
diachronic multiplicity of the successive times in the life of one and the
same individual, the multiplicity of the ages in the history of God. Spring-
ing forth from the differentiation of opposed forces, time penetrates into
everything, every being bears within itself its own individual time, which
in every instance presupposes time in its entirety, as well as the future,
which itself alone guarantees the completeness of time. Schelling never-
theless upholds the thesis of a primacy of the future, in the sense in which
“complete time is the future” (AW 1811, 82). The future is at once the
eternal incompleteness of time, the always open horizon of the force of
expansion, of the will of love, and what attaches each thing to the total-
ity of the system of times. (3) The emergence of time in the moment is
the fruit of a creative decision. In one and the same movement, that of
decision, the creative generation of the Son institutes the present, posits
the past as past, and opens up the future. This decision is not a single
act carried out once and for all, for “at each moment the divine Son is
born, the Son through whom eternity is disclosed and expressed in time”
(AW 1811, 78). At every moment, that is to say, not in every now that runs
off “in time,” but each time that there is a decision, inasmuch as decision
produces a disclosure of the will. This is how the concept of the moment
(Augenblick) finds its way onto the philosophical stage, at this point where
the problem of the link between time and freedom arises. Insofar as it is
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manifest in divine temporality, the moment is the site of a continual crea-

tion of time,10 the ceaseless act of overcoming, surpassing the past, the
constant redeployment, through decision, of time in its entirety, of the
present, the past, and the future. (4) The three preceding points show
that the organic character of time prefigures the idea of the plasticity of
time, that is to say, its capacity to be transformed, reconfigured according
to diverse possible modalities, each of which depends upon a decision.
With his thesis concerning the organic character of time, Schelling
does battle on two fronts simultaneously. He gives up, once and for all,
the Spinozist position regarding the philosophy of identity. The praise
heaped on Spinoza in the Ages of the World— making of him both a mas-
ter and a precursor— should not be allowed to conceal the fundamental
divergence. Spinoza’s substance lacks both life and movement, since it
encloses the two fundamental forces in “an eternal, immobile, inactive
parity,” which makes it impossible to fathom the struggle between them
that engenders time (AW 1815, 8: 340). Time is not a simple abstraction
of the imagination, it is a dynamic differentiation of forces. Schelling’s
analyses are also directed against the mechanical concept of time— the
necessary succession of nows— underlying its familiar representation as a
measure (of motion), a framework for events (within-timeness), a cease-
less river carrying all along with it. Implicitly, he has Kant in mind here.
In opposition to the transcendental ideality of time, set up in the form of
representations, Schelling affirms the organic reality, the universal force
of time: “It is easy to say— and is now a universally accepted opinion—
that time is not real [wirklich], that it is not independent of our mode of
representation. . . . Yet everyone experiences without contradiction the
essential nature of time in their own actions and affections; time can af-
firm its formidable reality even to those who loudly proclaim its nothing-
ness” (AW 1813, 121– 22/122).
In the eyes of Schelling, Kant’s mechanical time is a sort of perma-
nent having-been, in the sense that, by virtue of the principle of causality,
each present time has already been necessarily determined by another past
time. Only the ideality of time, insofar as it does not affect the noume-
nal, is able to preserve freedom from this necessary causal connection.
At the cost, all the same, of an opposition, pushed to the limit in the
“Third Antinomy,” between freedom and time. The dynamic conception
of time makes it possible to disjoin time and causality. For Schelling,
causality can indeed be perfectly well explained without time, for the
effect is simultaneous with the cause. According to him, “circles made by
a pebble thrown into water are there at the same time as the action that
causes them; just like thunder where lightning strikes” (AW 1811, 80).
By contrast, temporal succession is not subject to causality. Just as soon
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as one tries to establish a temporal relation of succession between effect

and cause, one has to admit that instead of necessarily coming after its
cause, the effect often comes before it, since it is the effect which posits
the causes as cause, retroactively. Therefore, “in any relation of cause to
effect, a dynamic process, analogous to the process by which time is en-
gendered, seems to arise, and the priority of the supposed cause turns out
to be nothing other than a being-posited-as-past by the effect” (AW 1811,
80). So far from being subject to its cause, the effect engenders the latter
in the same way that the age of the present posits the age of the past, as
the son posits the father, as father. Schelling does not develop this intu-
ition. But we can draw the following consequence from it. If time is dis-
connected from causality, a causality that always connects necessarily the
effect with its cause, the present with a past that escapes its control, if, in
virtue of its organic character, time incorporates a certain plasticity, in
that case something like freedom— the ability to begin absolutely— can be
manifest in time. As soon as dynamic time makes possible, in the moment
of decision, an effective beginning, Schelling can, at one and the same
time, recognize the power of time, by refusing to make of the latter an
abstraction without force of the imagination, even while liberating free-
dom itself in its ability to effect a beginning. The solution to the conflict
between time and freedom is therefore not, as with Kant, the ideality of
time; it resides, on the contrary, in its dynamic and organic reality.
From divine to Human Time
The immemorial history of God unfolds in a system of times where His

freedom— the absolute freedom to reveal itself11— remains possible and
effective. What of human freedom? Can it also be integrated into the
more restricted system of human times, which is a replica of divine time?
At first sight, that is not indeed the case. The time in which man leads his
life, our time, belongs in fact to the present age of the world, to the time
of the world, always described by Schelling in the terms of Ecclesiastes:
there is nothing new “under the sun,” that is, in our world (AW 1811, 11).
This world has a specific time, but “only a time that has neither a genuine
past, for in the past what passes is solely what comes back again in the
following time, nor a genuine future, for in the future what has already
arrived keeps on being repeated” (Schelling 1989, 137). Apparent time,
suspended time, a time whose present is indefinitely prolonged, this time
can be summed up in the simple formula: a + a + a . . . But if the future
only repeats the past, how can freedom really begin anything at all? The
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solution lies in the analogy between Man and God, confirmed through-
out The Ages of the World, notably across the sayings of Hippocrates, ac-
cording to whom “everything divine is human” and “everything human
is divine” (AW 1813, 158/157). Schelling’s interpretation of Ecclesiastes
is intended to underline the finitude of the present world, possessing
neither a genuine past nor future, and to show that it presupposes an
immemorial past and a radical future situated respectively before and
beyond the present age of the world. The system of divine times— a real
time that can be symbolized by the series a + b + c— transcends absolutely
the limits of the actual world and our human way of counting time. But
precisely because it is a replica, an analogon of this divine time, human
time could not possibly be summed up as a simple repetition of the now,
impervious to any free act.
What is the meaning of this analogy? It does not mean that the time
of human life might be divided into three successive periods, periods
which might reproduce the three ages of the history of God. Rather, it
implies that the time of man also has to possess a dynamic and organic
structure, has to be laid out in different facets that break the monotony
of the time lying at the very heart of the world. Just like any other or-
ganic being, time contains “three main forces,” the force through which
“it constantly produces and maintains itself,” that by virtue of which it
“strives toward the outside,” and finally the unity of these two former
forces (AW 1813, 180/177). What really pertains to the force in ques-
tion is not to ignore its opposite, but to be able to overcome it, domi-
nate it.12 Hence, three possible relations of force, in each of which one
of the forces is posited as dominating the others. The temporal periods
of the divine life are not defined by one single force, they are regulated by
the domination of one force over the two others. To the three divine
times there correspond henceforward three modes of human temporal-
ity, defined by three possible relations of force, which can be designated
as follows: the time of the past, where the force of contraction prevails; the
time of the present, opened up by the expansive force; and the time of the
future, in which these two primordial forces are unified. Situated in the
horizon of the metaphysics of force, Schelling’s conception proves to be
richer and more complex than the binary Heideggerian schema, taken
up from beginning to end by Wieland, who contrasts inauthentic linear
time with authentic ecstatical temporality.13 To the distinction between
mechanical time (Kant) and dynamically organized time, another dif-
ferentiation has to be added, operated by freedom at the very heart of
the three forms of organically human temporality, that between “true,”
“authentic” (wahre, eigentlich) time and external time. Certainly, Schelling
did not always explain clearly this schema in three times that we have
106
tried to outline here. He tends in general to simply evoke them in short

passages, passages of an exceptional philosophical density, and which lay
the ground for his ethical reflections on time.
The Time of the Past
Schelling’s ethical remarks in the Ages of the World are relatively discrete.14
This is because the ethics in question is not, in his project, a normative
ethics of the Kantian type, with its laws, its commandments, nor an ethics
in the Spinozist sense, centered on the notion of eternity. Rather, the ethi-
cal considerations are intended to test the results obtained in the archae-
ology of the absolute, if it is indeed true, as Schelling thinks, that “the
depth of a philosophical principle is to be seen in the fact that it brings to
light a profoundly ethical meaning.”15 At the same time, Schelling leaves
the history of the absolute in suspense for a moment to deepen the inves-
tigation into human freedom as such. As has been noted by Courtine, the
ethical considerations seek “first of all to study the relations between the
intelligible character of man and his finite temporal freedom, or again,
and in a privileged manner, to examine the dynamic bearing of the times
at the moment of the decision” (1994, 12). Schelling himself indicates
that “ethical considerations suffice to show that the past, present, and
future are not simple concepts of relation at the heart of one and the
same time; that they are, on the contrary, by virtue of their highest sig-
nification, effectively quite different times, between which there is room
for a spacing and a gradation” (AW Fr., 223). Past, present, and future
therefore designate not just the three dimensions of time, but three
modes of temporality, determined in relation to the freedom of man
and susceptible to being hierarchically ordered, and this in accordance
with a principle that has to be specified. In other words, the philosophical
procedure of The Ages of the World becomes ethical when it questions the
different facets of human temporality, its relation to finite freedom and
the fundamental psychological affects that derive from it.
The time of the past is the replica of the primitive and inorganic
time that characterizes the first epoch of the life of God, the archaic age
of the past. I call it a time of the past not because it might be reducible to
one single dimension, but because it is entirely dominated by the force
of contraction, which prevents the moment of decision from being de-
ployed and which always situates the gravity of time in arrears. First and
foremost, and for the most part, we live in the time of the past. Hence,
most human beings know no other past than “that which, at every passing
107
moment, holds on to the passing moment, this past which obviously is not
itself past, that is, separated from the present” (AW 1811, 11). Paradoxi-
cally, the time of the past is a time without any true past. For “the man
who is not capable of detaching himself from all that happened to him
and to actively stand opposed to it, has no past, or rather he never gets
out of the past, since it lives constantly in him” (AW Fr., 222). The man
of the past has no past because he is his past, because he is incapable of
opening up the moment, of instituting a present that breaks with his past.
The past become for him this devouring time comparable to Kronos:
“constrained at every moment by a new contraction, by simultaneity . . . ,
it ceaselessly devours the creatures to which it gives rise” (AW 1811, 77).
Each new moment is carried back to that which was; the future, on the
very point of being opened up, gets closed down again, and in such a
way that this time contains no real beginning. On the contrary, the man
of the past allows himself to be inhibited by the force of contraction.
Constraining and delaying all élan, it never manages to initiate anything
new, his time being “the time without any beginning,” “the eternal time”
(AW 1811, 77). This time is the first to manifest itself to us, and for several
reasons. If it is true that “everything is but the work of time,” “each thing
only receives its specificity and its meaning from time” (AW 1811, 12).
Thus in the first instance we are the work of a past that never became
present for us. What we actually are, our origins, our nature, all this is
at the start the fruit of a history anterior to our horizon of experienced
past, which is still present in us in a certain way. In the time of the past,
this preexisting past— replica of the radically divine past— becomes a
ball to which one is chained. It is not an inactive and inoffensive past,
but a dead weight, a force restraining the present and preventing it
from developing.
For all that, this mode of temporality cannot be summed up by this
negative dimension. The time of the past is also a time of withdrawal, a
time of “involution” (Einwicklung), which precedes all effective “evolu-
tion” (Entwicklung) and so has to come first. A time of Being, of con-
tracted identity, a time of the conatus, this time of the past is that out of
which the identity of the individual gets forged in its constant unity. So
it also has its own legitimacy. Faced with the temporal dispersion of exis-
tence, it is to this archaic time that man can return to derive the source
of his unity, to recover himself, to look back at himself and attach himself
to all that he has been. The time of the past is ambiguous, for it is not
just a destructive and inhibiting time, but also offers a horizon for the
will to be, for the force of contraction and conservation that allows man
to gather himself together in himself, to “take a stand,” to re-collect his
selfhood in the feeling of his own unity: “Every physical and moral whole
108
requires for its maintenance a reduction, from time to time, to its inner-
most beginning. Man is rejuvenated time and again and becomes blessed
anew through the feeling of unity of his being” (AW 1813, 115/117, trans.
modified).
The time of the past provokes specific affects. It can be a time of
regret, of nostalgia, aspiring to a return of the past. But what nostalgia
discovers in its quest for an original unity is the profound anxiety aroused
by inorganic time, the very feeling of contraction, of the narrowness of
Being, of the absence of any opening or of escape. Present existence
thrusts its roots down into this negative time, this archaic and inorganic
time described in the age of the past; which in turn constitutes the ob-
scure ground of human life. Abandoned to itself, that is, given over to
the domination of the original force of contraction, the “nature of the
person, like the eternal nature, is a life of loathing and anxiety, a fire that
incessantly consumes and unremittingly produces itself anew” (AW 1815,
8: 265). The ontological primacy of the contractive force, under the fig-
ure of the time of the past, is the first source of the “bitterness [Bitterkeit]
which is, nay, must be, the interior of all life,” discussed in the version of
1815 (AW 1815, 8: 319). This bitterness that can reach right through to
“despair” (AW 1815, 8: 322), when the hegemony of the negating force
prevails conclusively over the force of expansion and so completely closes
down the future. How can man free himself from the hold of this tem-
porality? The originality of Schelling’s maneuver is to show that time is
not for man a brute given, an intangible necessity, for human temporality
entertains an irreducible and more or less implicit relation with freedom,
a freedom capable of configuring time in a variety of different ways.16 So,
“anything that still lives in indecision lives in the past, and just as long
as this state is prolonged,” to such a point that “for the one who stands
opposed to the split in himself [Scheidung in sich],17 time appears as a
rigorous and imperious necessity” (AW 1811, 85). The time of the past is
the time of indecision, it rests on the lowest degree of freedom: the in-
ability to project oneself towards a goal, the inability to begin something
new, to stick to a goal, the inchoate free will limited to a balanced indif-
ference, an inability to choose in such a way as to cut the Gordian knot
of possibilities. Using a play on words borrowed from Jacob Boehme,
Schelling assimilates choice to torment—Wahl ist Qual 18— emphasizing
in this way that it stems from an unenlightened will, which is “lack of free-
dom, irresolution” (AW 1811, 101). The time of the past is manifest as a
destiny just as long as freedom fails to emerge from indecision, from the
complete absence of decision. Just as involution precedes all evolution,
“necessity necessarily precedes moral freedom”; that is to say, freedom
is “preceded by the negation of freedom” (AW 1811, 95). This necessity,
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symbolized by the ceaseless wheel of devouring time, is not a blind fatum,

since it conceals within itself the possibility of another relation of free-
dom to time, disclosed through the second mode of human temporality,
the time of the present.
The Time of the Present
The time of the present is not the replica of the time of the world; rather,
it is the time of decision, a time that, on the contrary, interrupts the inces-
sant repetition of world time and its “nothing new under the sun.” The
time of the world is nothing other than the present dominated by the
time of the past, time suspended in its élan by the force of contraction.
The time of the present is an analogon of the creation of the world, de-
scribed in the age of the present, not of the world itself taken in this re-
petitive time: “like God, man is only raised to the supreme presence of
itself and of its spirituality, by the split in its Being” (AW 1811, 84– 85).
In the image of the divine creation of the Son, de-cision is indeed scis-
sion, crisis,19 rupture with the past and institution of a present. Without a
true decision, there can be no present, and “without a determinate and
decisive present, there can be no past” (AW Fr., 222). Only freedom as
decision can deploy the organic character of time in its three dimensions,
this in accordance with a new relation of forces whereby, henceforward,
it is the expansive will that prevails. This liberty is liberation, a way out
of indecision, and it has to be understood as “the self-duplicating force”
of the self, which separates itself from its old selfhood to produce a new
self open to the future and free with regard to the past (AW 1811, 97).
By comparing the decision to a kind of “transfiguration” (AW 1811, 98),
a creation of man by himself, Schelling renders intelligible the possi-
bility of a conversion to the good evoked by Kant in his Religion within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason (part 1, “General Remark”). As Schelling’s
Erlangen Lectures make perfectly clear, “if he is to have the power to begin
his ethical life from the very beginning, and even in the midst of time,
thanks to a radical decision,” man “has to be born again” (9: 218). Kant
never managed to think this transfiguration, because he assumed that
in its phenomenal manifestation the will was determined by a past over
which it had no control. Schelling, on the other hand, discovers that the
will has a retroactive power over the past, not that of changing it, but
that of deposing it, and so rendering it truly past. Decision as scission,
detachment from self, separation from the past, is what makes it possible
for man to change the ethical orientation of his life. Freedom no longer
110
means what it meant in the treatise of 1809, a withdrawal into the eternal
identity of an essence, but rather the reverse, the abandonment of iden-
tity, going out of self, openness to time.
In the time of the present, freedom decides for temporality. How
is such a freedom possible? Decision is possible because human time is
not a necessary and infinitely prolonged series of causes, but an organic
system of forces deployed by freedom itself. Freedom is this ability to
begin, which gives itself a time— the time of the present— a time out of
which its own decision can be born. So the time of the present, as op-
posed to that of the past, contains the possibility of an effective begin-
ning. It is the inaugural time of the beginning. Decision does not arise
out of time, as the treatise of 1809 still claimed;20 rather, it is manifest
in the interconnection, the reciprocal interaction of freedom and time,
the one making the other possible. What, more exactly, is this effective
beginning, which ensures the temporalization of decision? The strength
of Schelling’s analyses lies not in his having sought a beginning “in time”
(impossible, because always presupposing an anterior time), but in his
having discovered a “beginning of time” (AW 1811, 78), to which he gives
the name “moment” (Augenblick). In God, as in man, the act of engen-
dering initiated by decision “produces itself and has to produce itself at
every moment” (AW 1811, 97). Poles apart from the punctual now of the
abstract representation of time, the moment is the organic unity of the
three temporal dimensions, oriented by the force of expansion. It is the
beginning of time, or more exactly, of a time, to the extent that the deci-
sion rearranges in it the three dimensions of the past, the present, and
the future, and so inaugurates a new treatment of time. Time is certainly
“the whole of time in each moment” (AW 1811, 80), because the whole
of its temporality is in play each time man takes a decision, and so actual-
izes the moment.
How does the moment reorganize time? The moment is this “light-
ning flash of freedom” (AW 1811, 41) that frees man from the anxiety of
the past by separating him from himself, from all that he had been up
until then. The figures of the moment are diverse for man: the moment
of sudden distress, when he has to decide immediately; the moment of
reflection, through which he deliberates in view of some project; the mo-
ment par excellence of the decision to philosophize in which everything,
even God,21 has to be given up in the ecstasy of astonishment. Man, notes
Schelling, “is capable of higher things only to the extent that he is able
to posit himself out of himself— to the extent that he can become posited-
outside-himself [ausser-sich-gesetzt zu werden]” (AW 1813, 164/163). What
makes this going out of self possible is the ecstatical moment opened by
decision, which liberates the expansive force of time.22 In detaching the
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present from the past, decision posits the past as past, and, at the same
time, gives itself both a true past and a true present, that is to say, each
clearly delimited from the other and freely mastered. A resolute present,
a recovered past. Thus, “only the man who has the force to raise himself
above himself is capable of endowing himself with a true past, only he
will enjoy a true present just as only he will be able to confront an au-
thentic future” (AW Fr., 223). The resolute man is not his past, he has it,
possesses it like an inheritance, which he can vigorously contest, just as
he can also positively assume it. Instead of dragging his past behind him
like a ball, sticking to it permanently, he deposits it as past, at the cost of
a resolute decision that discloses the future: “The consciousness of hav-
ing something behind one, as one says, that is to say, of having posited it
as past, is both beneficial and salutary for man; it is only in this way that
the future becomes for him radiant and light, and this is the condition
on which he is able to propose something” (AW Fr., 223). Without a reso-
lute present, there exists neither a genuine past nor a genuine future.
The future remains obscure and closed. On the other hand, under the
effect of the creative decision, the center of gravity of time swings from
the past to the future, whose authentic character simply signifies that it
too has been posited, as such, freed from the repetition of the past, new,
unpredictable, open to receiving the project of a free will. In the time
of the present determined by decision, the primacy of the past, proper
to negating time of the past, gives way to the preeminence of the future,
which shows itself to be of a practical order.23
The moment of de-cision is not just separation, openness, it is also
the act of surpassing the past, an act accomplished by those who, “in a
perpetual victory over themselves, no longer look at what is behind them
but at what lies before them,” and in such a way that “the power of time
no longer has any hold over them” (AW 1811, 85). The devouring time
loses its structure of necessity, becomes the time of the past, inasmuch as
it is pushed back into the background by the present of decision, which
latter constantly breaks the initial simultaneity of the forces in favor of
the expansive will. What is the ultimate force that, in the last instance,
unleashes the decision? Schelling’s reply is the following: “It is thanks to
love alone that the past is abandoned” (AW 1811, 85). The time of the
decision is intrinsically ethical in that it is the time of love, of effusion, a
time beyond Being, in the sense in which Being is the force of contrac-
tion, of what is own and of selfhood. In the dumb struggle of the primor-
dial forces animating the time of the present, it is the expansive force of
love that dominates; it alone strives toward scission, “presses toward the
future” (AW 1811, 85). In Schelling’s eyes, the finite freedom of man
is not enough to surmount the original negating time; for that, love is
112
needed, love allied to time and freedom, rendering the future “radiant
and light.” Or rather, it is when freedom makes itself be love, expansive
will, a going out of self, a self-surrender, that it is able to accede to an
authentic future. Love, this force in us that pushes us beyond ourselves,
frees us from negating time, upholds our decision, inspires our resolu-
tion. If time “is allied to love alone” (AW 1811, 85), it is because only love
makes of time something other than a negating force: the very horizon
of freedom. The metaphysics of love is a key to resolving the antinomy
of time and freedom.
The experience of the time of the present give rise to opposed af-
fects. While nostalgia “clings to the past” and “lacks active love,” “delight
[Lust] is in the present” (AW 1811, 85). Pushed by love, the time of the
present is the time of delight, synonymous with confidence and hope,
but also synonymous with the time of desire, of an aspiration tending
toward the future, and so remaining unsatisfied as a result. The term Lust
signifies both the light feeling of openness to the future and the unac-
complished desire, the opposition inherent in each present between the
actual project and its future realization. The profound bitterness distilled
by the time of the past is driven away by decision, which itself comes up
against another form of anguish, of anxiety, no longer the feeling of the
narrowness of Being, but the disturbing sensation of the absence of any
ground. Anxiety is not limited to the negating time placed under the sign
of Kronos, it also accompanies any true decision, inasmuch as the latter
stems from a “region where, strictly speaking, there is no ground but
rather an absolute freedom, which is its own destiny, its own necessity”
(AW 1811, 93). Decision proceeds from a freedom that is itself its own
ground; in consequence, from a freedom without any ground. Schelling
describes this abysmal freedom in the terms Kant uses to qualify the ex-
perience, through reason, of something absolutely unconditioned.24 To
decide is to situate oneself “in the proximity of the abyss, in the ground-
lessness of eternity, which terrifies anyone capable of being made aware
of it” (AW 1811, 93). Moment, decision, and anxiety, understood as fear
in the face of the absence of any ground, are in this sense irreducibly
connected. This idea, developed later by Kierkegaard in his Concept of
Anxiety,25 leads Schelling to clarify the specific origin of decision. Each
free act reaches back up, so to speak, to the eternal freedom, that of the
immemorial life of God, with a view to redeploying this inaugural eter-
nity in organic time, in the ecstatical moment of resolution, just as if any
decision was, on every occasion, a repetition of the creation of the world.
Decision, as divine as it is human, is this narrow passage leading from the
infinite to the finite, from the undetermined to the determined, from the
eternal to the temporal, a disturbing passage sought in vain in Schelling’s
113
first philosophy of identity. This passage is properly speaking not a pas-

sage at all, but an abrupt dis-closure, a scission presupposing a double
wrenching away: rupture with regard to the “terrible” abyss of eternity,
and a further rupture with the past, that is, the suspension of negating
time. In the history of God, these two ruptures correspond to two distinct
generations, that which opens up the initial eternity upon time and the
age of the past, and that concerning the creation of the Son, marking
the birth of the age of the present. Human decision, replica of the divine
prototype, makes these two generations coincide. It is a break, operating
within one and the same time, that of the moment, a break with both
eternity and the time of the past.
The Alternative of Freedom Faced with Time
Schelling’s ethical considerations lead to an opposition, at the heart of

the organic system of human times, between two modalities of time, the
authentic time of the present, founded in decision, scission; and the time
of the past, a time of irresolution, of non-separation, which remains in-
authentic, since withheld from the one who refuses to determine its time
out of its very own self. What is the relation between these two temporali-
ties? The time of decision pushes back the time of the past like an ob-
scure ground, which continues to be present in the form of withdrawal.
Only the present posits the past as past, but in such a way that the past
still remains sheltered in its ground. To grasp the repressed presence of
the time of the past lying at the very heart of the time of the present, of
our present, is comparable “to the fear with which a man learns that his
peaceful dwelling has been constructed on the crater of an ancient vol-
cano” (AW 1811, 13). Negating time of the past dominated by the force
of contraction is this principle “which, when it is inactive, serves as our
base and support,” and which, if it ever became active again, thereby
emerging from the ground, “would not fail to consume and destroy us”
(AW 1811, 13). In other words, decision always has to begin over again, to
suppress the time of the past, for it must not be allowed to fall back into
the endless wheel of devouring time. The response decision represents
to this ever-present threat of a return of suppressed time is the constancy
of its resolution. Decision takes place in the moment, but to be effec-
tive it must never cease, not in the sense that it has to be reformulated
at every moment but, on the contrary, by being posited once and for
all: “that what is posited once, is posited forever and cannot be sublated
again. . . . If one does not remain steadfastly by what one has once posited,
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then everything will become fluid as it progresses, and everything will

wear away again, so that in the end nothing really was posited” (AW 1813,
135/135). For irresolute man, time is just this perpetual beginning again
that forestalls all progress and any true advance. This capacity for endur-
ance, which precisely makes of decision a resolution, Schelling calls “char-
acter.” Having character means knowing how to decide, and holding to
one’s decision. It is possible that he borrowed the term from Kant. But
in contrast to the latter, Schelling does not set up in man an opposition
between his intelligible character, the atemporal seat of freedom, and his
empirical character, subject to psychological causality. The character of
man is of one and the same substance; it is this continual dynamic of the
self, “this principle of differentiation by virtue of which alone he is him-
self and remains distinct from all others” (AW 1811, 94). The character
of a man is “the distinctiveness, the particularity of what he does and who
he is. . . . Men who hesitate to be wholly one thing or another are called
characterless; but resolute men [von dem Entschiedenen] are said to have
character if they reveal a determinate expressing of their whole essence”
(AW 1813, 177/175, trans. modified). Resolute decision, inasmuch as it
occupies the point of intersection of freedom and time, is the veritable
principium individuationis, looked for in vain by Schopenhauer. It installs
a temporal identity that weaves into a unique monogram the past, the
present, and the future of the individual.
The authentic time of decision and the inauthentic time of the
past offer to freedom an alternative that Schelling only gets to formulate
clearly on one occasion, at the end of the version of 1811. The ecstatical
moment of decision, bursting out of the abyss of eternity, places man at
a crossroad, faced with two possibilities:
He can, in the act of the splitting itself [im Akt der Scheidung selbst],
either surrender to it, or transform his new freedom into a means of
resisting it— and that is indeed the possibility on which in the end
moral freedom rests. Only the surrender to the other and better self is
properly resolution [Sich-Entschliessen] (se résoudre),26 disclosure [Sich-
Aufschliessen], opening, only this is properly decision [Entscheidung].
While, on the other hand, any refusal to surrender to it is not veritable
resolution but rather a closing down upon oneself [Einschliessen], obsti-
nacy, obduracy, even though deliberately undertaken. (AW 1811, 98)
The two forms of freedom, either resolution or withdrawal into self, de-
termine the two possible modes of temporality examined earlier, the time
of the present or the time of the past, which, between them, constitute
the fundamental alternative of freedom face to face with time. The time
115
of the past does not arise solely from a passively simple irresoluteness,
but also rests on a choice of selfhood, on the closing down of the self.
Henceforward, freedom cannot be limited to the figure of the decision,
as if egoistic irresoluteness was the fruit of an inexorable necessity. Con-
sidered under all its aspects, human freedom is the power of decision
and withdrawal, of expansion and contraction, of the time of the present
and the time of the past. Before forming an alternative— an either or27—
these two possibilities are created together by a freedom which, by the
fact of its existence, posits both of them. Resolution and irresolution have
to be seen to share the same status of possibility, just as “an equal possi-
bility of good and evil is necessary for there to be freedom,” according to
the teaching of the treatise of 1809, reproduced in The Ages of the World
(AW 1811, 99). All the same, these two options cannot have the same
value, for they do precisely constitute an alternative. So between them a
gradation slips in, a hierarchy in favor of the veritable decision. Hence
the ethical character of this alternative, which now has to be specified.
In what way is Schelling justified in calling the freedom situated before
these two possibilities “moral”? Resolution, as openness, dis-closure, is the
condition of a certain well-being and so already, and for this very reason,
carries an ethical value. Schelling suggests as much when he writes that
“the secret of any sane and vigorous life consists, obviously, in never allow-
ing time to become external to the self and so never falling away from the
principle that engenders time” (AW 1811, 84). But what is it that makes it
possible for man to prevent primitive and inorganic time from rising up
again in him, if not resolute decision? Decisive man is thus borne along
by time, while irresolute man, “delivered over to exteriority,” contracted
on his being, “carries time” like a burden (AW 1811, 84). To carry time
or to be carried by time, to let time become external to the self or to ap-
propriate it, this is the formulation of the alternative that human freedom
confronts in its temporal dimension.
To the ethical dimension of resolution, which makes of the latter
the condition of a happy life, a purely moral aspect can be added.
Schelling situates the morality of the decision not in its identity with
self, its autonomy, but in its adopting the inverse movement to self-
externalization, the movement of disclosure that he names “sacrifice.”
To decide is a kind of self-duplication, a giving up of the old self in favor
of a new self, better because freer, more in control of temporality. The
alternative between the time of decision and the time of the past has a
moral bearing, because every decision is at bottom always a sacrifice of
one’s own selfhood. Renouncing one’s own life is the very principle of
the good, of that love which surmounts the initial egoism, while attach-
ment to self, obstinate egoism, the contraction of love down to self-love,
116
constitutes the obscure principle of evil. Schelling illustrates this ten-

sion between sacrifice and the desire to enter into self with the words
of the Evangelist: “He who saves his life will lose it and he who loses his
life will save it” (AW 1811, 99). He who refuses the openness of deci-
sion, with a view to preserving his own being, falls into the devouring
time of the past; he who freely consents to the sacrifice of resoluteness
finds, opening before him, an authentic and open future. In the crea-
tion of the Son, God is split into two, and this split, understood as a sac-
rifice of self, is “what constitutes the highest moral act in man” (Stuttgart
Lectures, 7: 436).
The alternative between these two modes of temporality is then not
a choice where everything can be placed indifferently on a par; it offers
two clear possibilities, clearly stratified in accordance with the criterion
of moral freedom. The time of the present is privileged, to the extent
that it is allied with freedom, with that true freedom that is able to make
a decision and so raises itself to the heights of self-sacrifice. Contrary to
Schelling’s first writings, the ethical reflections of The Ages of the World
offer us no explicit moral commandment. All the same, a new categori-
cal imperative can be extracted from the latter, and which then makes
it possible to define the relation of human freedom to time: No more:
Be yourself!28 On the contrary: Split yourself off from yourself! Separate
yourself from yourself, and have the courage to make the sacrifice of
de-cision!
The Time of the Future
In order to be complete, the system of human times has to include a

third and ultimate mode of temporality, which we propose to call time of
the future, by reason of the fact that it repeats the third age of the history
of God. In the image of the latter, it can be defined by the intimate unity
of the two primordial forces of contraction and expansion, disjoined and
stratified in the other two modalities of time. The specific freedom of
the time of the future is a freedom distinct both from irresoluteness and
from decision; it corresponds to “a properly spiritual freedom,” “an ab-
solute serenity [Besonnenheit]” (AW 1811, 101), the “composure [Gelassen-
heit]29 that thinks about nothing and rejoices in its non-being” (AW 1813,
134/134). Serenity, in its difference from delight (Lust), made up as it is
of desire and tension, is the experience of calm unity, of “a unity pouring
forth from the intimate collusion of the separated terms” (AW 1811, 66).
The Ages of the World contains many passages in which Schelling describes
117
the infinite aspiration of man to be returned to a peaceful nothingness,

and so to a certain form of eternity. After having been limited, life “as-
pires to find itself again at large in that peaceful nothingness in which
it found itself earlier, and yet, for all that, it is unable to do so because
it would have to bring to an end that life it has itself taken upon itself”
(AW 1811, 34). This mode of temporality is not nostalgia in the face of
an original state that has always already been lost; rather, it is the search
for an equilibrium situated not in the past but beyond any present. When
the will of love is no longer at odds with the will to exist, it becomes the
will that, while existing, wants nothing, the will that detaches itself from
willing in order to become serene. It is this will that everything aims for:
“Every created thing, every man in particular strives, in truth, only to
return to the condition of nonwilling” (AW 1813, 134/134). The time of
the future is the reign of the will that wants nothing, the time of serenity.
The time of decision, striving towards its future projects, is from now on
supplanted by a new form of temporality, in which man seeks to detach
himself not merely from the past, but from time itself, insofar as time is
engaged in the polar contradiction of opposed forces. The time of the
future is a desire for eternity; it links up with the Spinozist temptation of
eternity, summed up in this formula that strictly speaking is valid only of
this last modality of time: “Time itself is nothing but a constant yearning
for eternity” (AW 1813, 124/125).
Upon the time of the future a new form of the moment gets grafted,
the moment understood as an experience of eternity: “Think!— have you
ever enjoyed those rare moments of such blissful and perfect fulfilment,
when the heart desires nothing, when you could wish these moments to
remain eternally as they are, and when they actually are like an eternity
to you?” (AW 1813, 136/136). As opposed to the ecstatical moment of
decision, which throws man into the future, the moment of supreme
felicity is the moment of an absolutely fulfilled will, a will which, for that
very reason, remains perfectly calm, quiescent. In this singular moment,
man short-circuits time, so to speak, abolishes the incompleteness of the
future and anticipates, in his present, the state of absolute serenity. The
Ages of the World attempts such a description, employing the vocabulary
of the German mystics, in particular Angelus Silesius, whose epigram
Schelling might have adopted as his own: “You have to be carried forth
beyond yourself. Launch your spirit beyond space and time. Only so can
you be, at each instant, in the eternal.”30 What man has to seek above all
else, is “purity,” which is “detachment from everything” (Abgeschiedenheit
von allem), according to the words of Meister Eckhart (AW Fr., 214– 15).
But the pure moment of eternity is for man a finite instant; it breaks the
course of ordinary life, but only to fall back immediately into the play
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of temporal forces. Schelling stresses this in what follows the preceding

citation of the 1813 draft: “Think of this and try to remember now, in
just such moments, a will is already at work producing itself, although
unbeknownst to you and without your effort— indeed, you could not
prevent this production. This will soon pulls you back to yourself; it tears
you away, back into the activities of life” (AW 1813, 136/137). These mo-
ments of absolute felicity never last long, they mostly exist in the past, as
objects of nostalgia, or in the future, as objects of an infinite desire. The
time of serenity is always a provisional plenitude, a momentary suspense
of the temporal differentiation of forces, a time of the future. The ultimate
reason for this is that for man, the whole unity of the forces to which
the will aspires “can only be always on the way, constantly generating
itself and so, in a word, and from the point of view of the present, future”
(AW 1811, 66).
How does the finitude of human freedom arise in relation to time?
The system of human times is a replica, an analogon of the system of
divine times. A replica is not an identity, and indeed suggests the idea
of a distinction, even of a loss. What is the difference between human
freedom and divine freedom? The Ages of the World is relatively reticent
on this question. The version of 1815 contains one of the only passages in
which Schelling asks himself in what this divine life differs from “all other
life and specially from human life” (AW 1815, 8: 261). The first difference
lies in the mortality of man, not in the Heideggerian sense of a being-
towards-death implying a closure of the future,31 but rather in the sense
that “the succession and concatenation is dissoluble in human life and in-
dissoluble in divine life” (AW 1815, 8: 261). While God remains perpetu-
ally elevated, man in the course of his existence can always regress, fall
back into the devouring time of the past. The second difference advanced
by Schelling consists in this, that “succession in God is actual and hence
not one that happened in time” (AW 1815, 8: 261). God is deployed in a
system of times, but in such a way that eternity “contains time subjugated
within itself” (AW 1815, 8: 262). This implies, on the other hand, that
human life is irreducibly subject to temporality. Man has cut himself off
definitively from his anchorage in the absolute eternity of God. He can
no longer get back to the shore. If perfect and continual serenity is im-
possible for him, this is because he cannot abolish the temporal force of
expansion, constantly gouging out the incompleteness of the future. Not
to want anything is still wanting nothing. The will always finishes up by
insinuating itself surreptitiously into the pure moments of felicity, which
become fitful just as soon as time seeps into them. In a certain way, the
finitude of man is concentrated in his freedom for the future. Contrary
to God who, as Spirit, has the power of omniscience thanks to which
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he is able to discern the future in its totality, man does not have the
gift of prophecy.32 The relation of man to his future is not a matter of
knowledge, of the narrative or any rational exposition, but one of pre-
sentiment, divination (Ahnung), and of infinite aspiration: “The past is
known, the present is discerned, the future is divined. What is known is
told, what is discerned is exposed, what is divined is foretold” (AW 1811,
3). The incomplete character of the Ages of the World might well have been
anticipated on the basis of its celebrated incipit. If the finitude of man
means his incapacity to do anything but prefigure the future, without ever
managing to suppress his distance from it, to discern its depths, then any
attempt to know that age of the future is impossible, and has to give way
to this “speechlessness of science” (AW 1811, 103), evoked by Schelling
at the end of the version of 1811.33 Narration has to stop short of that
radical future which God alone knows, and which, for man, remains out
of reach.
Let us recapitulate these analyses. By the discovery of the organic
character of time, Schelling succeeds in showing that time, for God as
for man, is not a monolithic reality; it can be transformed, and as a result
exhibits different facets. Henceforward, it is no longer necessary to as-
sume its transcendental ideality, in the manner of Kant, with a view to
conferring such an atemporal freedom upon human being. Such an atti-
tude comes down to de-realizing time, offering a solution to the problem
of the agreement between time and freedom, which, however, always
arises at the expense of the former. Against such a procedure, Schelling
seeks to think the “terrible reality” of time, even while taking account
of its possible integration with human freedom. This is how we have
been able to distinguish, in the system of human times, three mode of
temporality— the time of the past, the time of the present, and the time
of the future— founded respectively on three modalities of freedom: ir-
resoluteness, decision, and serenity. As a result, Schelling opens the way
to a thesis regarding the plasticity of time. All the same, his conception of
time is still marked by the nostalgia of eternity, a nostalgia pervading the
third mode of temporality, that which concerns the time of the future.
In certain passages, Schelling seems to recoil before the idea of a total
temporalization of freedom, making of the character of man, once again,
“an eternal (never-ceasing, constant) deed,” incapable of figuring as the
object of any choice (AW 1813, 177/175). The time of the future stands
opposed, in its very principle, to the finitude of human freedom, which
is perpetually thrown out of eternity. We draw the following conclusion
from the above. The true alternative regarding human freedom is not to
be located between time and eternity, even if the latter is draped with the
veil of the future, but between the time of the past and the time of the
120
present. Does it thereby become possible to grasp the relation between

time and freedom, a relation lying at the very heart of time, without ap-
pealing to any form of atemporality? Is it possible, in other words, to think
human freedom without yielding, in any way whatever, to the temptation
of eternity?
5
The Moment (Kierkegaard)
Hidden at the heart of time, there exists a suspense, a pause, making

it possible for freedom to weave its projects into the temporal woof of
the world: such is the moment. In his sketches of the Ages of the World,
Schelling distinguishes two figures of the moment. In the ecstatical
moment of decision, which is the beginning of time— the time of the
present— rupture with the past and disclosure of the future, there reso-
nates, in the time of the future, the moment of felicity offering man an
experience of eternity. Eternity or time? Such is the equivocal character
of the moment figuring at the center of the thinking of Kierkegaard. In
what concerns the link between time and freedom, the Danish philoso-
pher who set his seal upon the concept of the moment (øjeblik)1 remains
indispensable, no matter how often his thinking might have been picked
up later by such other thinkers as Sartre, Heidegger, or Levinas. From
Schelling to Kierkegaard, the transition appears to be well marked out.
The latter was familiar with the treatise of 1809 on human freedom, hav-
ing in his possession a copy of the first edition. He refers to it in The Con-
cept of Anxiety (CA, 59), which adopts a similar procedure, consisting in
starting out from the problem of freedom in its relation to evil, through
chapters 1 and 2, to address, in chapter 3, the question of its temporali-
zation. As Wahl had already seen, the understanding of sin as human
freedom’s experience of vertigo and anxiety is already sketched out in
the treatise of 1809.2 Like Schelling, Kierkegaard envisages evil from the
standpoint of possibility, leaving it to ethics to examine it in its reality. He
reformulates the alternative between the esthetic and the ethical in the
terms employed by Schelling, who, bear in mind, defined freedom as the
“capacity for good and evil” (PI, 7: 352). In Either/Or, Kierkegaard makes
it quite clear that “rather than designating the choice between good or
evil, my Either/Or designates the choice by which one chooses good and
evil or rules them out” (EO 2, 169). The choice of oneself, characteristic
of the ethical stage, is the choice between good and evil, to the extent
that it posits both together as the poles in accordance with which the will
has to be determined in each instance.
When Schelling was appointed at the University of Berlin in 1841,
Kierkegaard made the journey from Copenhagen to attend his lectures
devoted to positive philosophy. But once the enthusiasm of the first lec-
121
122
tures had worn off, he declared in a letter to his brother Peter of February
27, 1842, that “Schelling rambles on in an impossible way. . . . I am too old
to listen to lectures, and by the same token, Schelling is too old to give
them. His entire theory of powers betrays a supreme impotence.”3 He
went home disappointed before the end of the term! This does not mean
that Kierkegaard remained estranged from Schelling’s philosophy, whose
orientations he prolonged in certain respects, starting with the emphasis
placed on freedom and existence as irreducible to reason. Heidegger
makes a point of this filiation when he writes, in his book on Nietzsche,
that Kierkegaard restricted Schelling’s notion of existence to “the being
which ‘is’ in the contradiction between time and eternity— that is to say,
to human being” (6.2: 433). Tilliette finds many connections between
the two authors among which are the notions of “time, the eternal and
the moment” (1992, vol. 2, 466n). Colette thinks that over and beyond the
divergences, “the common point between Schelling and Kierkegaard
nevertheless remains the fact that the experience of temporality is fun-
damental for all thought about freedom” (1985, 116– 17).
To be sure, it would be difficult for me not to support this last claim,
which illustrates the central thesis of this book. But on what does this
point in common rest? Certainly not on a direct reading of the texts, since
Kierkegaard could not have known about the unpublished manuscripts of
the Ages of the World, those very texts in which Schelling explores the do-
main of the temporality of freedom. In his lectures of winter 1841– 1842,
from which the notes taken by Kierkegaard have come down to us, no
trace is to be found of the concept of the moment.4 The principal source
for this concept in the thinking of the Danish philosopher is the Platonic
notion of exaiphnès (the moment, the instant, the sudden), as witness the
long note in the Concept of Anxiety devoted to the third hypothesis of the
Parmenides (CA, 82– 84n; see also 88).5 In these circumstances, the pro-
motion of the concept of the moment by Kierkegaard owes nothing to
Schelling, even if his procedure leads, as we shall see, to similar results— to
take only the equivocal character of the moment as torn between time and
eternity. One is obliged to conclude that this point in common between
the two thinkers stems from the phenomenon under investigation— from
time itself— and not from any hypothetical influence.
My objective then is not to locate traces of Schelling’s thinking in
the work of Kierkegaard, nor even to study, for its own sake, his treatment
of the question of time, a “question that has cost many a philosopher
his reason” (EO 2, 308). What I propose to do is identify the responses
offered by the latter to the question of the temporalization of freedom.
Nor will it do to simply say that “freedom,” “possibility,” and “temporality”
are the three “categories” of his thinking;6 rather, it will be necessary to
123
T H E MO M ENT (K I E RK E GAARD)
show how they are related each to the other. All the more difficult since
this question is not posed explicitly in his work, even though, in my view,
it is undeniably present. How does Kierkegaard resolve the opposition,
brought out by Kant, between freedom and necessity, liberty and time?
We have seen in the preceding chapters that the (practical) concept of
the possible allows for an articulation of the relation of human freedom
to the future. How does the matter stand with Kierkegaard? Was he aware
of the phenomenon of the plasticity of time? Just like possibility, the mo-
ment is situated at the intersection of freedom and time. What are its dif-
ferent figures? Is the moment an “atom of time,” or an “atom of eternity”?
The School of Possibility
As future, time offers freedom a field of play appropriate to it: the totality
of possibilities. What does the possible amount to? The Concept of Anxiety,
published in 1844, offers this answer: “The possible corresponds exactly
to the future. For freedom, the possible is the future, and the future is
for time the possible” (CA, 91). As this citation implies, possibility for
Kierkegaard retains in the first instance a prospective and practical sense.
Prospective possibility is the form time takes in its relation to human free-
dom, insofar as the latter finds itself faced with a totality of future pos-
sibilities. This sense of the possible is obviously not one that is limited to
logical non-contradiction. It is rooted in human freedom, understood as
a pure ability, the kind of ability described in the celebrated analysis of anx-
iety. Anxiety is the psychological state that precedes the qualitative leap of
sin, a state falling between possibility and its passage towards reality. It is
born of the conjunction of two situations. The divine prohibition— “only
from the tree of knowledge of good and evil you must not eat”— awakes
in Adam the feeling that he is able to do something he does not under-
stand; for in his state of innocence, he remains ignorant of the meaning
of good and evil. He can do something he knows nothing about. Anxiety
is the daughter of nothingness and possibility; it awakens in Adam “free-
dom’s possibility” (CA, 44), in the double sense of the possibility of being
free and of a possibility committed to its own freedom. At the stage that
precedes the sinful act, freedom is not limited by any knowledge, it is
“the anxious possibility of being able” (CA, 44). The possibility of freedom
is not burdened with the determinations of good and of evil, does not
refer back to freedom as the ability to choose the good or the evil: “The
possibility is to be able” (CA, 49). This formula expresses the rootedness
of possibility in human freedom. The possible is what freedom is able
124
to do, abstraction made of any system of values capable of grading or of

trimming possibilities.
It would be wrong to see in these analyses a cult of possibility as
such. Kierkegaard stresses the fact that pure possibility, the source of
vertigo and anxiety in man, is not the terminus ad quem of freedom but
rather its terminus a quo. Anxiety in the face of possibilities is only what
characterizes the dreamy soul that has to project itself into the real, it “is
entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not
by necessity, but in itself” (CA, 49). True freedom consists in overcoming
the trial of anguish through choice and decision. This is why man has to
enroll in the “school of possibility,” has to traverse the anguish of possi-
bility in order not to be its victim. For possibility, as a category— “the
weightiest of all categories” (CA, 156)— is a two-edged sword, liberating
and dangerous, salvational and destructive. On the one hand, it sharpens
freedom and throws its weight behind the moment of choice. On the
other, on account of its weight, it can paralyze a vertiginous will incapable
of deciding, or even terrorize the individual by duplicating reality with a
number of possible negations, perditions, or destructions. Kierkegaard
is aware that the student of possibility can go wrong and indeed become
suicidal. In a less tragic role, he gives the example of the hypochondriac
capable of imagining all kinds of illnesses, who gets his health back just as
soon as he has to face events saturated with reality. To look possibility in
the face, undergo the anxiety of possibility, means becoming conscious of
the fact that “in possibility all things are equally possible” (CA, 156), just
as much in the most unexpected happiness as in the most terrible hor-
ror. Paradoxically, the school of possibility fits man for reality, teaching
him to recover the flavor of the real, to love life in all its aspects which,
compared to the anxiety-ridden character of possibility, thereby become
reassuring. He is cured by it inasmuch as it frees him from the limitations
and smallness of existence, whose vicissitudes amounts to little compared
with the abyss of the possible. In its practical and essentially prospective
form, possibility has a double function; it forces man to take account of
his freedom and so brings him back to the ground of reality, assuming at
least that he is capable of confronting the trial of anxiety. If he manages
to do so, he is ready to take on all the hazards, obstacles, and sufferings
of life, whose barb has been broken by contact with possibility.
Prospective possibility is therefore basically oriented toward the
real, a future destined to become present. The school of possibility is a
school of freedom and reality. This status of the possible, as the promise
of reality, already emerges in Either/Or, where “the person who lives es-
thetically sees only possibilities everywhere; for him, these make up the
content of the future time, whereas the person who lives ethically sees
125
tasks everywhere” (EO 2, 251). The individual who chooses the ethical is
not indifferent to possibility. Quite the contrary! For him too the future
is a totality of possibilities. He simply takes these possibilities as tasks to
be chosen and to be accomplished in reality, while the aesthete prefers
to let them parade before his eyes with a view to contemplating them in
their purity. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
sums up the opposition as follows: from the esthetic point of view, possi-
bility is “superior to actuality”; from the ethical point of view, it’s the very
reverse (Postscript, 318).
In the thinking of Kierkegaard, possibility means many things, and
the value he accords to it depends on which of these meanings is adopted.
Prospective possibility stands out in contrast to what I will call a fictional
possibility, floating above the real in the sense that it has no anchorage in
reality and so is never destined to become real. This type of possibility is
either a disturbance due to anxiety, as in the case of the hypochondriac,
or, on the contrary, a flight from anguish into the arms of an abstract hap-
piness. In the last chapter of the Concept of Anxiety, devoted to the school
of possibility, Kierkegaard takes care to distinguish freedom’s possibility
from a fleeting possibility, which can be summed up in a dream of get-
ting lucky or happy, disconnected from reality: “From wretched men who
never knew what possibility is, and who, when actuality had shown they
were not good for anything and never would be, mendaciously revived a
possibility that was very beautiful and very enchanting, while the founda-
tion of this possibility was at the most a little youthful giddiness, of which
they ought rather to be ashamed” (CA, 156). Such a possibility is only a de-
ceitful illusion invented to flee from the real, to cover over an insupport-
able reality. It is imagined, caressed, dreamed up by someone, but never
realized. It is on this second form of possibility that is grafted what The
Sickness unto Death (appearing a few years later in 1849) diagnoses as “pos-
sibility’s despair.” Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the
temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. Despair arises when
one of these terms is sacrificed in favor of the other, when a disequilibrium
is introduced into this fragile synthesis. The despair of possibility stems
from a lack of necessity, and from the resulting excess of possibilities. The
self loses itself in this infinite game of possibilities, all seeming to be possi-
bility to it. Cut off from any attachment to necessity, its “possibility seems
greater and greater to the self; more and more becomes possible because
nothing becomes actual. Eventually everything seems possible, but this is
exactly the point at which the abyss swallows up the self” (SD, 36). The
imagined possibilities file past much too rapidly to be susceptible to reali-
zation, even if only in part. At bottom, the self doesn’t even seek to ac-
complish such possibilities, which would come down to allowing them to
126
dissipate like mirages. It is enough merely to contemplate them, as in an

extraordinarily distorting mirror, giving back an inaccessible reflection.
Possibility becomes a fantasy, which degenerates into diverse pathologies
(nostalgia, imaginative melancholy, hope, fear, anguish).
To this list could be added the case of the personage from the story
entitled “A Possibility,” which, in the Stages on Life’s Way, tells the story
of a bookkeeper obsessed by the idea that he might have had a child by
a prostitute following upon a night of debauch. Not having any way of
verifying this possibility, he regularly walks the streets of the town looking
at every child as potentially his own. Little by little this situation plunges
him into a self-consuming melancholy: “Every new possibility the unfortu-
nate bookkeeper discovered sharpened the saw of concern he was draw-
ing all by himself and the bite of which he himself suffered” (SL, 286).
Even if he had known the truth, it is highly likely that he would have re-
mained wrapped up in his obsession, for his illness is an imaginary illness,
nourished by possibility alone. Only the death with which this story ends
brings an end to his torment, and this by eliminating all further possibili-
ties. The possibility from which the bookkeeper suffers is an imaginary
possibility, specific in this, that it is retrospective, by contrast with the pos-
sibilities dreamed up by the desperate, and which are oriented towards
the future, even if it is quite out of reach.
Let’s get back to The Sickness unto Death. He who suffers from the
despair of possibility is in the perilous situation of someone who has left
reality behind. The other form of despair, which is the opposite of the
latter, is the despair of necessity. The despair of necessity, born of the lack
of possibility, takes two forms: everything has become either necessary
or else trivial. The excess of necessity characterizes the determinist and
the fatalist, both now placed upon the same plane, that of pure necessity.
In considering everything as necessary, in replacing God by necessity—
Kierkegaard most probably had in mind Spinoza’s deus sive natura— the
fatalist loses his self, for he breaks with that synthesis of necessity and
possibility by which the latter is constituted. Possibility is to necessity what
the vowels are to the consonants. Without it necessity remains dumb,
asphyxiating, despairing. To avoid this pitfall, the individual can take
an intermediary course, by trapping necessity in the snare of banality.
Instead of deploying possibility in its disquieting novelty, he strives to
limit it to what is already familiar, to the trivial. Rather than completely
repressing possibility, he prefers to carefully blunt its bite by sacrificing
the imagination to the usual course of events. This takes the form of the
“philistine-bourgeois mentality,” which “thinks that it controls possibility,
that it has tricked this prodigious elasticity into the trap or madhouse
of probability, thinks that it holds it prisoner” (SD, 41– 42). While the
127
fatalist runs up against an implacable reality whose hard necessity he has

himself fashioned, but which is capable of inducing him to recover the
sense of the possible, thanks to the despair it engenders, the “philistine-
bourgeois” man lives in a false complacency, one that makes every remedy
impossible, just as if the probable played the role of a balm constantly
applied to placate the effects of his unhappiness, even while preventing
him from dealing with their root source.
Is there any remedy against the despair of necessity? Yes, it obviously
consists in giving the one in despair a sense of the possible, which will op-
erate on him like a salutary whiff of oxygen. But how to get him to inhale
it? Kierkegaard claims that only faith can save the one in despair, by con-
veying to him the sense of the possible. In the last chapter of the Concept
of Anxiety, entitled “Anxiety as Saving through Faith,” he tells us that the
school of possibility has to lead to faith, in the absence of which there is
a real risk of suicide (CA, 155– 62). In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard
clarifies this idea with the formula: for God and with God, “everything is
possible” (SD, 38). Faith can combat all forms of fatalism, and can battle
“madly, if you will, for possibility, because possibility is the only salvation”
(SD, 38). It draws its strength from God, who is possibility in “a pregnant
sense” (SD, 40). With the help of God, everything becomes possible for
the believer, even the most improbable things.
Four conclusions can be drawn from Kierkegaard’s conception of
possibility. First of all, the reality of the possible. Possibility is rooted in
human existence— a synthesis of freedom and necessity— it flows from
the power of freedom and cannot be driven out, so that even the toughest
fatalist remains imbued with possibility, for which very reason we could
talk about a repressed possibility. Kierkegaard brings to light the “pro-
digious elasticity” of the possible, which can be indefinitely stretched by
the imagination, deployed in every direction, or held back, like a tinge
of regret in the eyes of the “philistine-bourgeois.” From the very fact that
it is caught up in existence, whose multiple garbs it adopts, possibility
can take on many forms: prospective, fictional, retrospective, probable
possibility. This is what I will call the plasticity of the possible. This plas-
ticity of the possible does not mean that man can become the master of
possibilities. Very often he turns out to be their victim, even sometimes
their slave, as in the case of the obsessed bookkeeper. Possibility is rooted
in the power of human freedom; but in Kierkegaard’s view, this power
comes from God, the absolute source of all possibilities, the Lord of the
possible. For to God alone everything is possible. Applied to man this
proposition loses its meaning, becomes the emblem of the despair that
loses itself in dreaming of possibilities. Hence Kierkegaard’s conclusion:
without God, without faith in God, nothing is possible.
128
Three Figures of the Moment
Freedom, possibility, temporality. This is the triad that imposes its rhythm
upon human existence. What of the third term? The first answer that
comes to mind leads to the notion of the moment, with regard to which
it is worth recalling the well-known definition from Concept of Anxiety:
“The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each
other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time
constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time” (CA,
89). But however famous this definition might be, could it not figure
as the tree that hides the forest? Does it not overlook other concepts of
the moment offering a more concrete appearance? The polyvalence this
word harbors in Kierkegaard’s writings makes of it the title of a new prob-
lem.7 To sort things out, I will distinguish three modes of temporality as a
function of the three stages of existence: the esthetic, the ethical, and the
religious, from which we shall derive different meanings of the moment.
Let us begin with the esthetic stage. He who lives esthetically only
wants to live in the moment. His maxim is that life is to be enjoyed, carpe
diem. No trace of eternity is to be found in this form of the moment, which
takes on a transitory and ephemeral character.
It is demented (viewed esthetically, it is comic) for a being who is eter-

nally structured to apply all his power to grasp the perishable, to hold
fast to the changeable, and to believe he has won everything when he
has won this nothing— and is duped— to believe he has lost everything
when he has lost this nothing— and is no longer duped. The perish-
able is nothing when it is past, and its essence is to be past, as swiftly as
the moment of sensual pleasure, which is the furthest distance from the
eternal— a moment in time filled with emptiness. (Postscript, 422)
The esthetic moment is not an atom of eternity, but a speck of time,

quickly swept away by the past. By the same token the enterprise of living
in the present is condemned to defeat. Hardly has one grasped it than
one loses it, and so has to recover it all over again. This is why in Either/Or,
Johannes the Seducer makes use of an infinite variety of strategies to dif-
fer the moment of enjoyment, to prolong its ineluctable evanescence.
Living in the moment is therefore a race in pursuit of the moment, in
the image of Don Juan, going from conquest to conquest. A vain race,
since the esthetic moment is nothing; being constantly threatened with
disappearance, it drags man into an absurd bustle, a febrile hastiness. The
“essential esthetic thesis” is that “the moment is all and to that extent, in
turn, essentially nothing, just as the Sophistic thesis that everything is true
129
is that nothing is true” (Postscript, 298– 99). For the individual trapped in
the esthetic stage, the moment is everything because it is the aim of his
existence, because he wants to live in it, melt into the pure present of en-
joyment. But in conferring a disproportionate emphasis on this aspect of
time, he banalizes and devalues it: every moment of time can be grasped
and tasted. As a result, the moment loses whatever reality it might have
had, is emptied of all meaning. If everything is a moment, nothing is a mo-
ment, the moment becoming a now like all the others, and whose transi-
tory character borders on nothingness. In this sense, the moment is noth-
ing. To spend one’s life pursuing the moment leads straight to despair, the
fate reserved for the one who lives esthetically, according to Kierkegaard.
In the incipit of Either/Or, he portrays the turmoil that afflicts es-
thetic existence. The personage “A” confesses his disillusionment in a
kind of journal (“Diapsalmata”), from which we can derive certain spe-
cific features of the temporality belonging to the esthetic stage. The rela-
tion to the past takes the form of a passive dependence: “What is going
to happen? What will the future bring? I do not know, I have no presenti-
ment. . . . Before me is continually an empty space, and I am propelled
by a consequence that lies behind me. This life is turned around and
dreadful, not to be endured” (EO 1, 24). Because he is incapable of an-
ticipating the future, of projecting himself otherwise than under the form
of abstract and unrealizable possibilities, the disciple of the esthetic lets
himself be guided by the past, he lives his life in reverse, from the past
toward the future instead of from the future toward the past. He has al-
ready lived his life before he lives it. Every attempt to catch hold of the
future is doomed to failure: “Time passes, life is a stream, etc., so people
say. That is not what I find: time stands still, and so do I. All the plans I
project fly straight back at me; when I want to spit, I spit in my own face”
(EO 1, 26). The inability to project oneself into the future is linked to his
being bogged down in an immobile time, described in the phenomenon
of boredom. The much sought-after moment gets transformed into a
dreary present into which desire falls back. Is it boredom that prevents
the plans from being developed over time, or is it the failure of these proj-
ects that provokes boredom? Both these phenomena remain, no doubt,
in a relation of reciprocal interaction, which reinforces them mutually.
The result of this mode of temporality, reminiscent of that time of the
past described in the previous chapter, is a fatalist attitude that leads on
to indifference. Whatever one does, whatever one might choose, one
finishes up regretting it: “Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and
you will also regret it. Marry or not marry, you will regret it either way”
(EO, 38). To live esthetically is to suffer one’s life instead of living it, to
carry time like a burden instead of being borne along by it.
130
The ethical stage consists in refusing this passive attitude vis-à-vis

time. Now the center of gravity has become the concept of choice, de-
veloped by Kierkegaard in several senses. In its original form, the ethical
choice is a choice of choice, an absolute choice, that is, the decision to
make genuine choices, choices that will direct the course of an existence
taken in hand. As the disillusioned reflections of “A” show, the esthetic
stage offers no alternative, since choice changes nothing with regard to
either one’s regrets or the despair that infiltrates into existence like a le-
thal poison. On the other hand, the ethical stage is the choice of a situa-
tion where choices become decisive. That is why “B,” the representative
of ethics, declares that “what is important in choosing is not so much to
choose the right thing as the energy, the earnestness, and the pathos with
which one chooses” (EO 2, 167). The choice of the ethical is at the same
time a choice of oneself. Who is this myself? It’s “the most abstract of all,
and yet in itself it is also the most concrete of all— freedom” (EO 2, 214).
The choice of oneself is the choice of freedom and this in a double sense.
The individual chooses to be free, and this choice is the manifestation,
par excellence, of his freedom. In the ethical stage, the particular choices
are affected with a moral value, freedom becomes freedom to choose
between good and evil. In choosing the ethical, the individual posits the
alternative between good and evil.
And what of the temporality that belongs to ethical existence? The
reply to this question takes us back to the notion of the moment. The
ethical moment is “the moment of choice,” described by “B” in the fol-
lowing lyrical terms:
When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear,

starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then
before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the
eternal power itself, then the heavens seem to open, and the I chooses
itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the soul has seen the high-
est, which no mortal eye can see and which can never be forgotten;
then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles
it for an eternity. (EO 2, 177)
The ethical moment corresponds to that precise moment in time when

the individual chooses itself. Contrary to the esthetic moment, which is
purely temporal, it arises at the crossroads of the two powers that are time
and eternity, and in a way that remains enigmatic. We might think that
its eternal dimension stems from its marking a suspension, a provisional
halt in the infinite succession of time, thereby creating a before and an
after. A provisional halt; for if it is indeed true that the moment of choice
131
is both rare and difficult, nobody can remain for long at this peak. The
esthetic moment is ephemeral, the ethical moment is serious, because the
individual runs the risk of no longer having the same capacity for choice
if he waits until the following moment. Choice cannot be postponed or
drowned in an endless deliberation oscillating between different possi-
bilities of equal value. Possibilities are not objects of contemplation, still
less of fascination, they are tasks destined to be accomplished in reality.
In proportion as the moment of choice is decisive and true, to that ex-
tent “the moment of deliberation” is abstract and lacks reality (EO 2,
163). In the direct lineage of Leibniz, Kant, and Schelling, Kierkegaard
rejected the freedom of indifference, which paralyzes choice. It hardly
even suffices to describe the esthetic stage. But he who lives ethically has
to choose without prevarication that possibility which is in conformity
with his personality. From this point of view, the moment marks both a
breach and a continuity in the web of existence. A breach since, at the
moment of choice, the individual “is at the very beginning, because he
is choosing himself according to his freedom” (EO 2, 251), he is starting
a new phase of his existence. But in contrast to Schelling, Kierkegaard
insists more on the other facet of the moment, the continuity of the
self with itself: “An individual thus chooses himself as a complex specific
concretion and therefore chooses himself in his continuity. This concre-
tion is the individual’s actuality, but since he chooses it according to his
freedom, it may also be said that it is his possibility or, in order not to use
such an esthetic expression, it is his task” (EO 2, 251). Producing oneself
is, at the same time, remaining faithful to oneself, advancing one’s own
personality and, at the same time, giving rise to something unpredictable,
something new.
In the Concept of Anxiety, the moment of choice is referred to anxi-
ety. At the time of Either/Or, anxiety is limited to the esthetic stage. The
ethical concept of the moment developed there nevertheless throws light
upon the Concept of Anxiety, in accordance with which only with the mo-
ment does there arise that division between “the present time, the past
time, and the future time” (CA, 89). In positing a before and an after, the
ethical moment deploys the three dimensions of time in their respective
differences, each of which receives a new signification. In place of the
ephemeral now, we now have the peak of the moment. In place of the
hostile power of a future closed to all projects, a totality of possibilities
which are so many tasks to be accomplished. In place of the ball and
chain of the past, an inheritance freely chosen and assumed. Kierkegaard
compares the one who chooses himself to someone who inherits, some-
one who attains his legal majority and can take possession of that wealth
which was already his, without his being able to dispose of it.8
132
The other category describing the relation to the past— concerning

both ethics and religion— is resumption or repetition (gjentagelse in Dan-
ish). This notion is even more polyvalent than that of the moment. Let
us begin by saying in what it does not consist: the monotony of habit,
the pure repetition of the same as the same, which is impossible in itself
but which, when existence gets near to it, can only provoke boredom.
Constantine Constantius, one of the two protagonists of Repetition, gets a
bitter taste of it when he tries to redo his journey to Berlin in the exact
same way, and finds that even if the places have remained more or less the
same, all his feelings have changed. Is it impossible to do something over
again? No, at least not if repetition is neither a melancholic return to the
past nor an anxious hope, but a continuation of the past in the present
and in the future: “Repetition and recollection are the same movement,
except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated
backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward” (Repetition,
131). What has been is still, in a certain sense, to come. Kierkegaard’s
favorite example is marriage, presented as a victorious struggle against
time. The faithful spouse “has not fought with lions and trolls but with the
most dangerous enemy, which is time. . . . Like a true victor, the married
man has not killed time but has rescued and preserved it in eternity” (EO
2, 138). In marriage the spouse has to constantly deserve his possession
over again, re-create the bonds of the lover every day and in such a way
that the present, instead of being fossilized by the past, still continues to
be enriched by it. Repetition is “a beloved wife of whom one never wea-
ries” (Repetition, 132) and who one finds ever more beautiful. This con-
ception of the repetition puts the accent on continuity, stability, fidelity.
This is why Kierkegaard can say that Leibniz was the only one to catch a
glimpse of it, no doubt thinking of the passage from the Theodicy in which
he claims “that the present is big with the future” (art. 360).
But this reference to Leibniz hides another aspect of repetition,
which is no less important, its dimension of rupture and of a radically new
beginning. Repetition is also a resumption, a renewal, a re-creation, all
of which presupposes a separation and a previous crisis finding its resolu-
tion in the former. It is the young man who renews his engagement after
having broken it, Job who gets reconciled to God. Seen in this way, the
repetition is not the immanent continuation of the past in the present,
it is the metamorphosis of an existence which constantly begins again, a
“transcendence” that “separates repetition from the former existence by
such a chasm that one can only figuratively say that the former and the
latter relate themselves to each other as the totality of living creatures in
the ocean relates itself to those in the air and to those upon the earth”
(CA, 17). The image of the chasm hardly agrees with the Leibnizian idea
133
that the future can be read into the past. Rather, it relates to the religious
sense of the resumption, whose transcendence is no longer a relation to
the past or to the future but to a divine eternity, which is “the true repeti-
tion” (Repetition, 221).
Ethical temporality lays out the three notions of the moment (pres-
ent), resumption (past), and of possibility (future). This mode of tem-
porality is founded in a specific form of freedom— the ability to choose
in accordance with values that are ordered in an ethical hierarchy— just
as esthetic temporality refers, for its part also, to the freedom of indiffer-
ence. Kierkegaard states, without going into any further details, that “the
conception of time is the decisive element in every standpoint [esthetic,
ethical, religious] up to the paradox, which paradoxically accentuates
time” (Postscript, 299). Can we not find a mode of temporality that belongs
to the religious stage? Surely the religious stage is characterized by a rela-
tion to God and so to eternity, which is a privilege of the latter? This is no
doubt true; except that, for human existence, eternity still does assume
a temporal form, that of the future. Hence, “the eternal relates itself di-
rectly to the eternal, but an existing person can relate himself forward to
the eternal only as the future” (Postscript, 424). Through the future, eter-
nity penetrates incognito into time, in order to offer itself to man without
blinding him with its brilliance. So our earlier question should be refor-
mulated in these terms: is there a specifically religious relation of man to
the future? Kierkegaard provides us with a particularly enlightening reply
in one of his Upbuilding Discourses (1843): “The Expectancy of Faith.”
The theme of good wishes exchanged between those close to each
on the first day of the year is the point of departure for a reflection upon
the future. Men for the most part wait for something to happen in the
future. But this attitude is equivocal. On the one hand, it is opposite to
the esthetic stage, which flees the future into the present, but making
the very reverse error, fleeing into the future to forget the present. In
this sense, it would be better for us not to pay too much attention to the
future, and “the complaint so often heard that people forget the pres-
ent for the future is perhaps well founded” (UD, 17). One is reminded of
Pascal’s thought, quoted in our introduction: “The present is never our
end. Past and present are our means, only the future is our end. And so
we never actually live, though we hope so, and in constantly striving for
happiness it is inevitable that we will never achieve it” (1995, 21). On the
other hand, Kierkegaard underlines the fact that it is precisely our ability
to be concerned with the future that attests to the greatness and nobility
of man. But “how much do we dare to be occupied with the future? The
answer is not difficult: only when we have conquered it, only then are we
able to return to the present, only then do our lives find meaning in it”
134
(UD, 17). Faced with the future, the true attitude is to struggle with time
and not to take flight into the present, which only reaffirms itself at the
outcome of the struggle. How can man win his battle against the future,
a battle so unequal that it seems impossible to win? Kierkegaard describes
all the difficulties. The future is everything, the totality of time, such that
man will never be able to get to the bottom of it. The future is a secret,
and thought tries to discover its indiscernible possibilities. All for noth-
ing; the future remains a “nebulous shape” (UD, 18), an elusive nothing-
ness. It is not, to the extent that it has no other reality than that of the
possibilities man projects in it. Henceforward, the future is an intimate
enemy of man, since “it borrows its power from him himself, and when
it has tricked him out of that it presents itself externally as the enemy he
has to encounter” (UD, 18). Yet, no one can be stronger than he is. The
struggle with the future is a desperate struggle of man against himself.
However, man does have a number of weapons with which to con-
duct his battle. One might think that there is nothing new under the
sun, that the future is not entirely open and contains a little of the past.
So the experience of the past offers an entire arsenal of conjectures, of
hypotheses with which to predict and master the future. But however ef-
fective these weapons might be with regard to the present and the past,
they lose their edge, and become difficult to wield, when they take on
the future. For “fear accompanies guessing, anxiety conjecture, and un-
easiness inference” (UD, 19). Human freedom constitutes a quite fragile
suit of armor against the power of time. How should man confront the
future? Kierkegaard compares man faced with the future to a sailor lost
in the ocean. To get back on track, he does not look at the ever-changing
waves, he observes the stars, which offer him fixed points of reference. It
is the same with faith:
By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal. By the

eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground
of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed.
What, then, is the eternal power of human being? It is faith. What is the
expectancy of faith? Victory— or, as Scripture so earnestly and so mov-
ingly teaches us, that all things must serve for good those who love God.
But an expectancy of the future that expects victory— this has indeed
conquered the future. (UD, 19)
Faith awaits victory, and this waiting for victory is precisely already a vic-
tory. Why? Because the believer is freed from the anguish of the future;
he is no longer subject to it as a hostile and unfathomable power, but
submits to it as to a faithful and constant ally. Kierkegaard claims that
135
in his struggle against time, man would have no chance without the in-
tervention of God, who looks after those who believe in him. At the reli-
gious stage, confidence in providence is the reply human existence prof-
fers for the problem of awaiting the future, the only strategy capable of
carrying the day. Kierkegaard distinguishes four forms of awaiting, each
and every one of which is destined to fail. The joyful spirit only awaits
happiness and ignores the unhappiness that might strike at any moment.
The miserable soul, on the contrary, doesn’t expect anything more of
life and has lost even those presents which might hold out hope for the
future. The man of experience sees these two attitudes as two sides of
the same coin. He knows that when one is enjoying happiness one must
be prepared for unhappiness, and vice versa. But he is haunted by a
doubt like a thorn in the flesh, for he is also exposed to the vicissitudes
of life, to unsatisfied desires or needs, and so on, all of which he is only
prepared to endure up to a certain point. The believer is not troubled
by these doubts, nor is he deceived by the cruelty of life, for he places his
confidence in God and not in the world. Faith does not pay homage to
God only when all is going well, but is maintained even in adversity. What-
ever happens, faith knows it is going to win, even when the victory re-
mains invisible.
Kierkegaard’s theory of the three stages of existence is not a pro-
gressive liberation of time, one that concludes with an ascent to eternity.
Quite the contrary, “to the degree that time is accentuated, to the same
degree there is movement from the esthetic, the metaphysical, to the ethi-
cal, the religious and the Christian-religious” (Postscript, 299). The orien-
tation toward the eternal that guides the believer like the polestar goes
along with an accentuation of time. But what time are we talking about
here? The time of the present. Pascal was certainly right to say that the
preoccupation with the future risks sacrificing the present. Kierkegaard
reformulates the objection as follows: “An expectancy without a specified
time and place is nothing but a deception; in that way, one may always go
on waiting; such an expectancy is a circle into which the soul is bewitched
and from which it cannot escape” (UD, 23). The only way of relating to
the present, of breaking the magical circle of time, is to triumph over the
future. And the only way of winning this victory is faith: “The believer,
therefore, is finished with the future before he begins with the present,
because what has been conquered can no longer disturb, and this victory
can only make someone stronger for the present work” (UD, 19). In other
words, “one is finished with the future only by conquering it, but this is
precisely what faith does, since its expectancy is victory” (UD, 27). Kierke-
gaard sketches out what I shall call the circle of freedom and of time, and
which runs from the future towards the present. Freedom cannot stand
136
in relation to the present and so result in action, except by way of a pre-

vious relation to the future. From this point of view, the temporality of the
religious stage is not a flight from time into eternity, but is characterized
by an unswerving confidence in the future, based on faith in providence,
from which there results a complete openness to the present.
Is there a form of the moment proper to the religious stage? Cer-
tainly, if Philosophical Fragments is to be believed. For in this text Kierke-
gaard, in the guise of Climacus, distinguishes two forms of the moment
in the context of an inquiry into the teaching of truth. The moment is
that instant of time in which the disciple accedes to the truth. For Pla-
tonic thought, such an instant is an inconsistent accident, the simple
occasion for releasing the process of reminiscence, through which the
master (Socrates) gets the disciple to pass from a forgotten truth to a
truth remembered. In Christianity, the moment is on the contrary de-
cisive, because the disciple cannot accede to the truth except through
the master (Christ), who gets him to effect the transition from untruth
to truth. The truth is not recovered but received. The religious moment
takes account of the moment of conversion to the truth:
And, now, the moment. A moment such as this is unique. To be sure, it

is short and temporal, as the moment is; it is passing, as the moment is,
past, as the moment is in the next moment, and yet it is decisive, and
yet it is filled with the eternal. A moment such as this must have a spe-
cial name. Let us call it: the fullness of time. (PF, 18)
The moment of conversion is decisive but not in the sense in which it

might be the fruit of a decision, as at the ethical stage, but because it
marks a special break in the life of the individual, a second birth ac-
cording to the Paulian motif recuperated by Kierkegaard at this point.
It derives its exceptional intensity— which makes of it “the plenitude of
time”9— from this upheaval it provokes in man. Contrary to the ethical
moment, born of the choice of freedom, the religious moment is con-
ferred by the master in the person of Christ and so stems, in the last in-
stance, from grace.
Let us sum up our analyses. The three stages of existence are
founded in three forms of freedom (indifference, ethical choice, faith),10
likened to three forms of temporality, each of which contains three fig-
ures of the moment. The esthetic moment is ephemeral and fleeting,
the ethical moment is serious and disquieting, the religious moment is
intense and sudden. Are we talking about three concepts of the moment
or about three modalities of one and the same phenomenon? As is sug-
gested by the previous citation, the moment, even in its religious form, is
137
always temporal, transitional, and so is still precisely a moment suspended

between time and eternity. By the same token, the esthetic moment, a
pure atom of time, is only an abstraction, in the sense that the individual
seeks to detach itself from its eternal dimension. In short, we find three
different relations pertaining to one and the same phenomenon, the
moment, point of intersection of time and eternity. The polysemy of the
moment only reflects its plasticity, that is, its capacity to accommodate
several possible forms depending on the mode of existence in which the
individual happens to find itself. This plasticity of the moment, which
we find for the first time with Schelling, is inscribed in the more general
phenomenon of the plasticity of time. Kierkegaard has this in mind when
he claims that the past and the future have to be thought according to
the categories of becoming and of the possible, and not sacrificed on the
altar of necessity. In “The Expectancy of Faith,” he formulates it more ex-
plicitly: “The future is indeed light and elusive and more pliable than any
clay, and consequently everyone forms it entirely as he himself is formed”
(UD, 20). And in fact we have seen that the future is given differently as a
function of the attitudes man adopts towards it, displaying features that
range from a lack to an excess of possibilities, from sclerotic probability
to an absolute openness toward God, for whom “everything is possible.”
Without offering any further explanation, Kierkegaard has shown he un-
derstands that the condition of the possibility of human freedom lies in
the plasticity of time.
Time and Eternity
From the standpoint of the preceding analyses, we can only agree with
David Brezis when he stresses the equivocal character of Kierkegaard’s
thinking about time, covering, as it does, both an evaluation of eternity
and a rehabilitation of temporality.11 In certain texts, Kierkegaard rails
against the attempt to get rid of the eternal by seeking, most notably, to
live in the ephemeral moment, and this in the mode of esthetic existence.
The anxiety about eternity, which “can contrive a hundred evasions,” is
qualified as “demonic” (CA, 154). In other passages, he condemns the
eternity of the Hegelian system, foreign to time, by contrasting it with the
“concrete eternity” (Postscript, 312) of ethical or religious existence, which
gets temporalized under the form of the future. The mystical existence
that takes flight from the world is “a failure to appreciate temporality”
(EO 2, 250), which is the common lot of humanity. The eternity of the
moment is a provisional experience which has to be surpassed in action:
138
When the individual has grasped himself in his eternal validity, this
overwhelms him with all its fullness. Temporality vanishes for him. At
the first moment, this fills him with an indescribable bliss and gives
him an absolute security. If he now begins to stare at it one-sidedly, the
temporal asserts its claims. These are rejected. What temporality is able
to give, the more or less that appears here, is so very insignificant to
him compared to what he possesses eternally. Everything comes to a
standstill for him; he has, so to speak, arrived in eternity ahead of time.
He sinks into contemplation, stares fixedly at himself, but this staring
cannot fill up time. Then it appears to him that time, temporality, is his
ruination. (EO 2, 231)12
If the individual contemplates the moment rather than seizing it like

a springboard for his action, if he exclaims: “Stop moment! You are so
beautiful!” (Goethe, Faust, v. 1700), then time recalls him to himself by
bringing the experience to an end, by making the moment, the con-
stantly changing moment, disappear. Temporality gets entangled in the
moment of felicity— as Schelling already noted— only to corrupt and
dissolve it. The more one seeks eternity, the more time becomes a hos-
tile environment that brakes, suspends, forecloses all projects. But to
stick to such an affirmation is to misunderstand that temporality is not
only a “ruination,” but also plays a salvational role: it comes crashing in,
preventing man from dwelling in eternity, from forgetting himself and
so losing himself in the fascination of eternity. The individual who comes
to terms with his eternal value is overwhelmed by the very plenitude of
the latter. But his mistake is to have chosen himself in the wrong way. He
didn’t recognize himself in his temporal freedom: “if he does that, that at
the very moment he chooses himself he is in motion . . . ; he can remain
in his freedom only by continually realizing it” (EO 2, 232). Under the
figure of the future, time allows him to relate to eternity as to a burning
bush, “whose fire has penetrated it without consuming it” (EO 2, 232).
This is what makes of temporality the “greatest of all the gifts of grace”
(EO 2, 250).
These arguments show that human freedom cannot be a refusal of
time for Kierkegaard. The choice of one’s true self, the choice which de-
fines the self, is also a choice of time, by virtue of which the latter moves
from the moment to the present, from possibility to action. Existing is a
difficult and absorbing task, and which consists in holding together time
and eternity, in combining the one with the other without sacrificing
either of the two terms.13 The ambiguity of Kierkegaard’s thinking about
time stems from this quite specific conception of human existence, whose
internal tension is best described with the help of the Platonic image of
139
the winged harness (Phaedrus, 245c– 252b). Existing human being is like
a coachman whose carriage is drawn by two horses, an infinitely rapid
“Pegasus” and an “old nag” who has difficulty in moving forward. The
winged Pegasus symbolizes eternity, the nag symbolizes temporality. With
Plato, the bad horse finishes up dragging the soul out of the field of truth
and making it fall from the sky to the earth. In Kierkegaard’s rendering,
each horse is necessary to release the passion of existence: “I have often
thought about how one might bring a person into passion. So I have con-
sidered the possibility of getting him astride a horse and then frightening
the horse into the wildest gallop, or even better, in order to draw out the
passion properly, the possibility of getting a man who wants to go some-
where as quickly as possible (and therefore was already in something of
a passion) astride a horse that can hardly walk” (Postscript, 311). Passion
arises out of the combination of eternity, which accelerates, shortens, and
intensifies existence, and temporality, which slows down, temporizes, and
sharpens desire by differing it. If temporality is a weight, it’s a salutary
weight that brings human being back down to the ground of experience
and action: “in his fall, he understood that he was too heavy for his dream,
and ever since he came to love the weight that made him fall” (Pierre
Reverdy, Poèmes en prose, 1981, 54).
We are nearing the end of this chapter and it seems that the ambi-
guity of the moment, oscillating as it does between time and eternity, is
still not resolved. All the same, we might still want to ask whether eternity
does not enjoy a discrete primacy. For Kierkegaard, existence is a struggle
against time which can only be won thanks to eternity, which latter ap-
pears as a weapon destined to master the adversary without eliminating
it. Eternity is more often posited as an indispensable auxiliary rather
than condemned as a vain temptation. The relation of man to the eternal
passes by way of faith, the religious stage: “Time is and remains a danger-
ous enemy. External stimuli can help for only a short time. If a person is
going to persevere it must be on his own, and not even this is possible if
day after day his religiousness does not absorb eternity into temporality’s
resolution. Hence, every person who remains faithful can thank God for
it” (SL, 321– 22). The struggle of man against time would be doomed
from the start if he did not benefit from divine support, the support pro-
vided by faith. Faith does not close the gap between time and eternity,
picked out as a challenge by Jacobi; it builds no bridge between the two
but requires a leap, the salte mortale into eternity. But a vision of this kind
has its price: no more than Schelling, Kierkegaard does not manage to
conceive the relation between time and eternity at the very heart of time.
Perhaps eternity is just a highly paradoxical reply to the problem that
preoccupies us here, that of the link between freedom and time? Is faith
140
the only way out of the silent and invisible struggle man ceaselessly con-
ducts against time? It is much to be feared that in the sea of temporality
the sailor is deprived of any polar star and must henceforward give up all
hope of finding any fixed and eternal point of reference. All the more so
inasmuch as eternity can exert a dangerous fascination, turn into a siren’s
song leading the sailor astray in spite of himself. Does the individual have
to be attached to the mast of the ship, like Ulysses, to protect him from
such a danger? Perhaps the solution consists in simply not thinking or liv-
ing time in the light of eternity, which in one way or another comes down
to depreciating it, as the unflattering image of the nag makes only too
clear. From then on, one has to be guided by the instruments on board.
Kierkegaard does moreover offer us a few, and which figure as so many
attempts to resolve the problem of the temporalization of freedom: the
plasticity of the possible, corresponding to the plasticity of the future,
and the concept of the moment, whose ethical form— the moment of
choice— offers human freedom a precious compass, making it possible
for him to chart a path across the ocean of time.
6
decision for Temporality

(Heidegger)
With authors like Kant, Schopenhauer, and Schelling, the problem of

the link between time and freedom has not yet been finalized. It gives
rise to a number of reflections without ever being posed explicitly in all
its breadth and complexity. Even the ethical considerations on time and
human freedom in the Ages of the World are marginal initiatives with re-
gard to the initial project of the work— to describe the history of God—
which latter remained more or less incomplete, and for the most part un-
published, before Schröter’s edition of 1946.1 Nevertheless, this problem
is the invisible presupposition for other highly controversial questions,
like that of the relation of freedom to causality or to history, which were
the object of a number of thematic analyses. The more one moves up the
history of philosophy from the past to the present, the more the problem
of the reciprocal relation between time and freedom emerges and begins
to dominate the minds of certain philosophers. As a result of his promo-
tion of the concepts of the possible and of the moment, Kierkegaard’s
philosophy constitutes a decisive break, opening a path of thought lead-
ing from Heidegger to Sartre, two great theoreticians of freedom and
of time. Between the two, it appeared to us necessary to insert a chap-
ter on Bergson, because he proposes a different path from the former.
In the French philosophical tradition, Bergson is the only philosopher
to undertake a thematic reflection on the temporality of freedom, one
which makes it possible to dispense with the concepts of the moment and
of the possible. To what extent is this path viable?
Getting beyond the antinomy of freedom and time implies the idea
that time possesses a kind of plasticity, and that freedom is temporal inso-
far as appeal is made to possibility. It is in the light of this hypothesis that
in this chapter, I will deal with the thinking of Heidegger. How does the
analytic of Dasein help to resolve the antinomy of freedom and time? A
not very Heideggerian question, one might say, given that Being and Time
claims, before all else, to be a treatise in fundamental ontology, and to
respond to the question of being in this way. However, I maintain that the
ontological procedure is duplicated, at the level of the analytic of Dasein,
by a practical reflection. According to the ontological approach, time is
141
142
the horizon of being— of the being of Dasein and of other beings. In the
practical perspective, which I favor, temporality is the horizon of human
action. This is what makes it possible to talk of a practical philosophy,2
or even of an ethics,3 in Being and Time, on condition, all the same, that
it is shown how these two approaches, the practical and the ontological,
get structured.
Why do I use the word “practical”? Because the analytic of Dasein
is also an analytic of freedom. Practical means here what stems from
freedom, and nothing else. This term is quite rare in Being and Time,
perhaps because Heidegger did not want to deviate from the ontological
perspective announced at the very start of the work. However, the motif
is present in outline, throughout the first two sections of the published
work, however repressed it might be. If need be, the Marburg lectures
of summer 1928 (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic) offer a continua-
tion of the central role of freedom in Being and Time. Summarizing, in
the form of positions, the content of his work that has only appeared re-
cently (in 1927), Heidegger claims that “the basic metaphysical essence
of metaphysically isolated Dasein is centered in freedom,” understood as
“the possibility of choosing oneself expressly [sich-selbst-eigens-zu-wahlen]”
(MF, 26: 175, 244). The term “metaphysical” does not have a pejorative
sense in this context; for it refers to the idea of a “metaphysics of Dasein,”
through which Heidegger, in this course of lectures, renames his exis-
tential analytic. As for the expression “choice of oneself,” it stems from
the philosophy of Kierkegaard, whose ideas find other echoes in Being
and Time— the link between the possible and the future, anxiety, the mo-
ment, repetition— so many indications that this work really does include
an ethical dimension.4
Freedom is at the center of the essence of Dasein. Temporality as
“the ontological meaning of care” (Being and Time, §65) is also at the
heart of the essence of Dasein. However, there cannot be two centers.
Here we are faced not so much with a contradiction as with a correlation,
as tight as it is obscure, between freedom and time. Hence the following
questions. What are the figures of human freedom brought to light by
the analytic of Dasein? And what are the relations they entertain, in each
instance, with temporality?
Thinking Causality out of Freedom
Since Leibniz at least, the question of freedom has come up against the
problem of pre-determinism, following from the principle of sufficient
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DE C I SI O N FOR T E MP ORALI T Y (HE I DE GG ER)
reason in its causal form. With Kant, this aporia has been raised to the
rank of an antinomy of reason, whose solution we have examined. How-
ever, one finds no trace of the problem of causality in Being and Time.
Nothing stands in the way of the process of action initiated by resolu-
tion and “freedom towards death.” The world of beings “present-at-hand”
(Vorhandene) and “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandene) offers no resistance to the
free projects of Dasein, who encounters as his principal obstacle not the
causality of the world but that of his own mode of being, a mode of
being dominated, “initially and for the most part,” by “falling” (Verfallen).
Does this mean that Heidegger could have missed such a problem? Not
at all. He broaches it in his lectures of the summer term 1931, entitled
The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, intended as a
commentary on Kant’s practical philosophy. Heidegger’s thesis is that
Kant thought freedom along two quite different lines, which are hardly
consistent with each other.
In the first, opened up by the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant made
of freedom a problem of causality, by showing that man is a particular
case of a being subject to causality— a being also endowed with a free or
unconditioned causality. In this way, he is only able to demonstrate the
possibility of freedom, that of an agreement between free and natural
causality. Quite rightly, Heidegger insists on the fact that the concepts of
free causality and of an intelligible character should be valid from the
start for all beings. Only in a second phase of his thinking, developed in
the solution to the “Third Antinomy,” does Kant show that these concepts
only make sense for man. The concept of action (wirken) is used just as
well for man as for matter. All these remarks seek to point out that by
making of freedom a special case of the more general case of causality,
Kant has misunderstood the specific mode of being of Dasein, tied down
as was his conception of Dasein to “being present-at-hand” (Vorhandene).
Even when Kant takes great pains to distinguish man as a person from
inanimate or natural things, he remains locked up in the ontology of
beings present-at-hand, and for the simple reason that causality is the
fundamental category for this type of being. For Heidegger, freedom can-
not be a mode of causality, for it stems from the essence of Dasein, from
existence (Existenz), in the sense of section 9 of Being and Time, and not
from that inner worldly being to which the category of causality applies.
In short, freedom is an existential category of Dasein, while causality is
a category of beings “within-the-world.” This ontological confusion has
repercussions for the determination of time. In his solution to the “Third
Antinomy,” time is envisaged by Kant out of the principle of causality; it
is an “irreversible succession, i.e., it has a definite direction” (HF, 31: 186). In
a more general way, time is considered primarily and exclusively in its
144
relation to what happens in time.5 The manifestation of the free act in

time is in consequence enigmatic, if only because Kant transposes the
temporality of present-at-hand beings— within-timeness— over to man.
Heidegger reiterates his critique with respect to the second Kantian
approach to freedom. In the practical critique, Kant thought the practical
actuality of freedom, understood no longer as a possible mode of causality,
but as a specific privilege of man as a reasonable being: his autonomy.
No more than the first way, this second approach does not avoid the
confusion between existence and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit): “The
first way treats the possible freedom of a present-at-hand being [Vorhandene]
in general, the second treats the actual freedom of a specific being, i.e., of
the human being as person” (HF, 31: 265, trans. modified). Let us leave
Heidegger with the responsibility for these judgments. We have seen in
our second chapter that it was possible, within the thinking of Kant, to
distinguish other modes of temporality, making it possible to get around
certain of these aporias. In Heidegger’s eyes, the facts of the matter have
to be completely reversed. Freedom is not a problem of causality, it is
causality which is a problem of freedom. This claim, a claim with which
he concludes his lectures of 1931, is never explained in detail. Heidegger
simply indicates that the freedom in question is “the condition of the possi-
bility of the manifestness of the being of beings, of the understanding of being”
(HF, 31: 303). It is a question of what I will call “ontological freedom,”
which consists in letting beings be encountered. As the condition of the
possibility of the manifestation of being, freedom renders possible the
categories of being, and so also those of causality. In this sense, causality
gets grounded in the freedom of Dasein. Henceforward, there is no rea-
son to see Dasein as opposed to causality, even less to make of causality
an obstacle to freedom, the latter effectively providing the foundation
for the former.
Freedom thus understood must now however not be grasped as a
property of man since, on the contrary, it is man himself who remains a
possibility, a property of freedom. Freedom in its ontological signification
is the freedom of being, in the sense of the subjective genitive. It consists
in letting beings be. This conception of freedom is presented at length in
the conference of 1930: On the Essence of Truth. Freedom is the essence of
truth, to the extent that it is “the engagement in the disclosure of beings
as such” (On the Essence of Truth, 9: 189/126). The lectures on Kant from
1931 specify that a freedom of this kind is “the ground of the possibility of
Dasein,” “something prior even to being and time”— “the root of being and
time” (HF, 31: 134– 35). Ontological freedom lies at the root of being in
the sense in which it furnishes the condition for the understanding of
being. But in what sense does it lie at the root of time? Surely, the whole
145
effort of Being and Time consisted in characterizing time as the condition

of the possibility, the indispensable horizon for any understanding of
being. Here freedom proves to be more radical than time. Along another
route, we anticipate Sartre’s thesis: freedom is the source of time.6 All the
same, it is a question of a strictly ontological freedom, detached from any
practical consideration, of a freedom which, at bottom, is atemporal or
pre-temporal. It therefore can be of no help in resolving the problem
of the articulation of the freedom of Dasein in connection with its own
temporality.
Let’s go back to the previous thesis, according to which causality is
founded on freedom. Heidegger develops this idea in his essay of 1929 on
The Essence of Reasons (Vom Wesen des Grundes). He holds that the principle
of reason, whose form within-the-world is causality, is rendered possible
by human freedom, which latter now takes on two meanings. Heidegger
sets aside the Kantian conception which makes of freedom a causality
without a cause, a spontaneity. The power to initiate becomes secondary,
derived as it is from a more original form of freedom, which turns out
to be much the same as the transcendence of Dasein. Here we find again
the ontological freedom, whose structural connection with causality has
been made clear. The principle of reason is rooted in transcendence,
since it relies upon the capacity of Dasein to surpass being with a view to
understanding being under the figure of the ground (Grund). Dasein tran-
scends itself towards the world, it “forms the world” (ist weltbildend) (ER, 9:
158/89), in the sense in which it is the act of understanding that grasps
and anticipates the totality of beings. This “surpassing to the world [Uber-
stieg zur Welt] is freedom itself” (ER, 9: 163/103), a freedom that consists
in grounding and establishing the world (in German: stiften, begründen,
Boden nehmen). Freedom is the freedom to ground. In configuring the
world, it renders possible the understanding of beings as “cause” or “mo-
tive.” Analyzing freedom in the light of such concepts is then to confuse
the ground with what it grounds, the originary with what is derived there-
from. Freedom— in the ontological sense— is neither a kind of causality,
nor is it subject to causality, for it is the foundation of any conception of
causality, the very origin of the principle of sufficient reason.
Heidegger develops a second form of freedom— which I will call
“practical”— one that brings us back to the field of existence and of action.
Freedom is freedom for the ground (zum Grunde). However, ground means,
for Dasein, “the project of possibilities of itself ” (Entwurf von Möglichkeit seiner
selbst) (ER, 9: 167/111). The project of the world deployed by Dasein is
the proposal of certain possibilities and the withdrawal of others. Free-
dom opens “realms of possibilities” (Ausschlagbereiche von Möglichem) (ER,
9: 173/125). It renders beings possible through transcendence and the
146
understanding of being. It grasps being on the basis of other possibili-

ties, just as appears in Leibniz’s formulation of the principle of reason,
which defines reason (ratio) as “cur aliquid potius existit quam aliud”;
which is why something exists in this way rather than otherwise (ER, 9:
172/125). Inquiring into the reason or the ground for something is to
ask why it exists in this way rather than in some other way, therefore to
draw the thing into the circle of possibilities. The concept of possibility
guarantees the transition from the ontological form of freedom to its
practical form. As the origin of the principle of reason, freedom is the
“reason for reasons” (Grund des Grundes), and as such it is itself without
any ground, the “‘abyss [Ab-grund] of Dasein” (ER, 9: 174/127, 129). Here
we find Heidegger taking up again an essential aspect of human free-
dom that had been emphasized by Kant— for which free choice, as the
first subjective ground for the admission of maxims, is itself inscrutable
(unerforschlich)— as also by Schelling, who noted that in the capacity for
good and evil that characterizes human freedom, one finds reunited “the
deepest abyss and the loftiest sky or both centra” (PI, 7:363). The abyss of
human freedom is opened up by Dasein’s ability to be:
As this kind of reason, however, freedom is the “abyss” of Dasein, its

groundness or absent ground. It is not as though the only kind of free
behaviour were groundless [unmotivated] behaviour. Instead, as tran-
scendence, freedom provides Dasein, as “ability to be,” with possibili-
ties which gape open before its finite choice, i.e., in its destiny. (ER, 9:
174/127– 29, trans. modified)
Sartre was inspired by this passage to define freedom as the groundless

ground for the choice of oneself, a choice every human being is con-
demned to making. At the hand of Heidegger, freedom is what deploys
the ramification of possibilities. The possibilities in question do not
simply possess an ontological meaning, for they define the choice of Da-
sein, and in so doing include a practical dimension. This freedom is finite,
because its ability to be is irremediably affected with an inability: the pow-
erlessness of Dasein’s “being thrown” (Geworfenheit), making it impossible
for it to escape its immersion in a world of beings; the powerlessness of
Dasein facing transcendence, whose temporalization as “primordial hap-
pening” (Urgeschehen) “does not stand within the power of freedom [steht
nicht in der Macht dieser Freiheit]” (ER, 9: 175/129). In the preceding pages
of his essay, Heidegger reminds us that transcendence has its root in the
ecstatico-horizontal constitution of time, without specifying whether free-
dom, just like the transcendence with which it is identified, is rooted in
time or whether, as is laconically implied in the lectures of 1931, it is on
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the contrary time which is rooted in freedom. The phrase we have just
cited makes it possible to decide in favor of the first hypothesis. If free-
dom has no power over the temporalization of transcendence, it is less
originary than the latter. So the enigmatic words written in the margin of
Heidegger’s edition of 1929— “(Da-sein) origin— freedom— temporality”
(ER, 9: 175)— can be interpreted as a descent towards what is always more
originary. But this poses at least two difficulties.
1. At the end of the 1920s, one notes an ontological turn in the problem-
atic of freedom, understood less and less on the basis of Dasein (being-
towards-death, ability to be, finite choice, etc.), and ever more with refer-
ence to being (letting beings be, disclosure of the truth of being). The
essay of 1929, The Essence of Reasons (Vom Wesen des Grundes), is situated at
the juncture of this shift, and so expresses the ontological freedom absent
from Being and Time in terms of practical freedom, which in turn gets
eclipsed after the conference: On the Essence of Truth. What is the result
of this reversal for the problem of the relation of freedom and time?
2. When Heidegger defines man as a “being of distance” (Wesen der Ferne)

(ER, 9: 175/131, trans. modified), he brings out Dasein’s ability to hatch
possibilities and to project itself into them, far beyond the actual world
of beings— a phenomenon that, in a general way, gets laid out in terms
of what I have called the branching of possibilities. Man is a being of
distance because he is a being of possibilities. The notion of possibility
serves to mediate between ontological freedom and practical freedom,
all the more obscure for not being defined by Heidegger. To understand
the relation of freedom to time, I propose to get back to Being and Time,
with a view to clarifying the existential concept of possibility, and so trying
to deduce from it different figures of the freedom of Dasein.
Freedom and Possibility
Freedom is not a problem of causality but of possibility. What in fact is the

meaning Heidegger gives to this concept? It is surprising that a concept
so fundamental to the existential analytic should never be explicitly de-
fined. Heidegger only provides us with a meager bundle of indications,
allowing us however to trace the outlines of his response. The course of
lectures at Fribourg from 1921 to 1922 (Phenomenological Interpretations of Aris-
148
totle) contains one of the first references to the theme of possibility. Life
is something which “bears possibilities and is its possibilities, itself as a
possibility.” This concept has to be understood in a “phenomenologically
rigorous way” that “has nothing to do with logical or a priori possibility”
(61: 84). Heidegger says no more on this subject. Possibility in the logical
sense is something we can think a priori: the atemporal non-contradiction
at the heart of Leibniz’s theory of possible worlds. In the phenomenologi-
cal sense, it is something we bear within us and that we can be.
It is conventional to turn to section 50 of Being and Time to grasp the
Heideggerian conception of possibility, where you will find his famous
definition of death as the possibility of the impossibility of Dasein. But
the phenomenological elucidation of this possibility finds its substruc-
tures earlier on, in section 31 devoted to “understanding” (Verstehen).
Understanding is one of the existentialia of Dasein, along with the affec-
tive disposition of “state-of-mind” (Befindlichkeit).7 This existentialia does
not have an epistemological aim, it is not primarily concerned with Da-
sein’s capacity for knowledge or intellect (Verstand), which only figures as
one of its derivatives, just like intuition and thought. Understanding is a
sense of the possible, it is a power Dasein has, unique in its kind, to relate
to possibilities. Without saying so explicitly, Heidegger plays on three
meanings of understanding, according to which Dasein understands itself
as “ability-to-be” (Seinkönnen) (the practical sense), understands beings
which are not itself, things of one kind or another (the pragmatic sense),
and understands being in general (the ontological sense).
Where does the concept of possibility come from? From the very
being of Dasein, from which it is indeed derived. Dasein is that being who
is not but who has its being to be (Zu-sein). It8 does not possess its deter-
minations as fixed qualities of an essence, for they are just so many ways
of being possible, ways that define its “existence” (Existenz). Dasein is its
ability-to-be (Sein-können) and being-possible (Möglich-sein). It is “in every
case what it can be, and in the way in which it is its possibility” (SZ, 143).
It is because Dasein has to be, exists, that it is the bearer of possibilities
with regard to which it stands constantly in relation. Understanding is the
knowledge Dasein has of its possibilities, “the incessant exploration of pos-
sibilities,” according to the happy formula of Jean Greisch (1994, 190).
In this quite particular context, the word “understand” has to be under-
stood in the sense in which one says for example that “one understands a
situation,” that is, that one grasps all its possibilities. Just like the existence
from which it stems, understanding has an ecstatical character. It is not
enough for Dasein to simply contemplate its possibilities; it projects itself
towards them. It is these possibilities in the mode of the project, which
latter creates a field of play for its ability-to-be: “As projecting [Entwerfen],
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understanding is the kind of Being of Dasein in which it is its possibilities

as possibilities” (SZ, 145).
What is the meaning of the possibility in question here? Heidegger
reminds us that it has nothing to do with empty logical possibility— the
non-contradictory— or with the contingency of a present-at-hand being
(Vorhandene)— that whose contrary is possible (in the logical sense). This
concept of possibility is perfectly legitimate as long as it is restricted to
the field of logic. For logic, possibility is always a simple possibility, it is
inferior to actuality and still more so to necessity. With Leibniz, the value
of the possible increases with its tendency towards existence. In the wake
of Kierkegaard, the existential analytic inverts the hierarchic ordering of
possibility and actuality, thereby effecting a phenomenological destruc-
tion of the logical concept of possibility: “Higher than actuality stands
possibility” (SZ, 38). For what reason? Because “possibility as an existentiale
is the most primordial and ultimately positive way in which Dasein is char-
acterized ontologically” (SZ, 143– 44). Possibility is not a lack of reality,
it is an ability to be, a way of being of Dasein. The primacy of existential
possibility over actuality stems from the primacy of Dasein over other types
of being, which can itself be traced back to the distinctive relation of Da-
sein to being, which it alone is capable of understanding— in short, the
primacy of possibility stems from the primacy of being over beings.
Heidegger characterizes possibility as the most original ontological
determination of Dasein, without indicating what content this same exis-
tentiale might retain. All the same, the sketch of a reply can be attempted,
by falling back upon the deduction of possibility from the being of Dasein
itself. Dasein is ability-to-be and being-possible, and as such is replete with
possibilities it understands and towards which it projects itself. For this
reason, possibility is nothing present-at-hand (vorhanden), or ready-to-
hand (zuhanden) inasmuch as it transcends all presence.9 But it is also not
thought as an ideal situated beyond existence. In the positive, that is, the
existential, sense, possibility (Möglichkeit) consists precisely in being able
(mögen). This apparent tautology signifies that possibility is not a repre-
sentation floating before the mind, but a way of being of Dasein, one that
refers to its ability to be— it is an ability and not a knowledge. “Crossing
the Rubicon to conquer Rome,” “picking the apple from the tree of para-
dise,” to take Leibniz’s examples, are logical possibilities which are out of
reach for me, that I cannot be but can only think about. Strictly speaking,
these possibilities don’t even need a Dasein to think them in order to exist
as logical possibilities. Existential possibility, on the other hand, is rooted
in the existence of a singular Dasein, aims at a modality of existence that
Dasein can be, encompasses all that it can effectively accomplish, within
the limits of that unsurpassable possibility which is its own death. Far from
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floating in the atemporal world of ideas, possibilities are ways of being,

situated in a ramifying process rooted in the ability to be of Dasein.
What is possible is what Dasein is able to be, that is, is able to choose.
This way of viewing things is limited, since it does not suppress the circular
character of the definition (“being able to” means “having the possibility
to”), but it does emphasize the practical dimension of possibility, which
corresponds to the practical meaning of understanding. Heidegger es-
tablishes an equation between understanding, being-possible, and being-
free. In understanding oneself as ability-to-be, Dasein takes account of its
freedom. In the course of section 31, the motif of freedom is introduced
in a negative way. For “possibility, as an existentiale, does not signify a free-
floating ability-to-be in the sense of the ‘liberty of indifference’ [libertas
indifferentiae]” (SZ, 144, trans. modified).10 To understand freedom in this
way, a way unanimously condemned by Leibniz, Kant, or Schelling, is to
misunderstand the ability-to-be out of logical possibility, as if Dasein found
itself faced with a range of equivalent possibilities, among which it could
make its choice as it pleased, as if it could detach possibilities from their
ramifications. Ability-to-be founds existential possibility, which aims at a
mode of existence that Dasein can be. What kind of existence are we talk-
ing about? Dasein is “the possibility of Being-free for its ownmost ability-
to-be [Möglichkeit des Freiseins fur das eigenste Seinkönnen]” (SZ, 144, trans.
modified). An objective and a subjective genitive has to be read into this.
Dasein has the possibility of being free, and it is a possibility that belongs to
the free being it is itself. Freedom is then both a possibility that Dasein has
to take over, that of authentic existence and of its own ability-to-be, and
a fundamental determination of the being of Dasein, being-free, under-
stood as an ability-to-be that makes it possible for it to be able to choose
the possibility of authentic existence, a possibility which, “initially and for
the most part,” is obliterated by the “One,”11 and by falling into everyday
life. Being-free is the power of Dasein to lose itself and to find itself again,
to misunderstand itself in terms of the world, or to understand itself in
terms of itself. Even when it has plunged right up to its neck in inauthen-
tic existence, and precisely in this situation, Dasein is “delivered over to
the possibility of finding itself again in its possibilities” (SZ, 144).
The lectures of 1927 on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology confirm
the practical dimension of understanding. This existential structure “is
the condition of possibility for all kinds of comportment, not only practi-
cal but also cognitive” (BP, 24: 392). The project inherent in it is “the way
in which I am the possibility; it is the way in which I exist freely,” that is,
“the authentic meaning of action [der eigentliche Sinn des Handelns]” (BP,
24: 392– 93). The ability-to-be is also an ability-to-act. The introduction of
the theme of freedom makes it possible to clarify the dichotomy “authen-
151
tic/inauthentic” (eigentlich-uneigentlich), one that runs right through the

entire existential analytic. Inauthentic understanding is the way Dasein
understands itself on the basis of beings within-the-world and not on the
basis of itself as ability-to-be. The adjective “inauthentic” does not mean
that this understanding is not effective (wirklich), and there is moreover
no moral connotation to it. It simply tries to come to terms with a mode
of existence. Heidegger also makes it clear that the “projection can be
accomplished primarily from the freedom of our ownmost peculiar [ei-
gensten] Dasein and back into it, as authentic [eigentliches] understanding”
(BP, 24: 395). In this passage, one sees clearly that authentic comes down
to something very like free. In what sense?
The being-free of Dasein has this paradoxical characteristic of being
both an ability-to-be that provokes the branching of possibilities and one
of the possibilities aimed at by this ability-to-be. Envisaged from the first
point of view, being-free is an ability-to-choose. Thus, “the Dasein becomes
what it is in and through this understanding; and it is always only that
which it has chosen itself to be, that which it understands itself to be in
the projection of its own peculiar ability-to-be” (BP, 24: 393). Heidegger
does not raise the question of choice in section 31 of Being and Time, but
the latter is present as a leitmotif throughout the existential analytic, as
can be seen from what follows in the treatise, and which we will deal with
later, and as is already shown in section 4. After having affirmed that the
understanding of being is a characteristic of Dasein’s being, insofar as its
own being is that which is an issue for it, Heidegger adds:
Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence— in terms of a

possibility of itself: to be itself or not to be itself. Dasein has either cho-
sen these possibilities itself, or got itself into them, or grown up in them
already. Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does
so by taking hold or by neglecting. (SZ, 12)
There does exist an alternative to freedom in the face of possibilities.

Dasein’s possibilities are ways of existing, in the face of which its behav-
ior can vary. They can be divided up into an alternative distinguishing
two fundamental possibilities, being oneself (authentic existence), or not
being oneself (inauthentic existence, falling), taking hold of oneself or
failing to do so. The first of these alternatives is defined by the choice
of possibilities, which is a way in which Dasein chooses itself. The second
offers several cases of possible figures: Dasein can fall into possibilities,
that is, let itself get taken over by circumstances. It may have grown up
in them, inherited such possibilities through its education or its family,
and so on. In both these two cases, the possibilities in question are never
152
the object of a choice. But even when Dasein chooses its possibilities, it
can also miss them: “In every case Dasein, as essentially having a state-of-
mind, has already got itself into definite possibilities. As the ability-to-be
which it is, it has let such possibilities pass by; it is constantly waiving the
possibilities of its Being, or else it seizes upon them and makes mistakes
[ergreift sie und vergreift sich]” (SZ, 144, trans. modified). Missing a possi-
bility means either failing to understanding it or else having to give it
up because of the choice itself. For, “freedom, however, is only in the
choice of one possibility— that is, in tolerating one’s not having chosen
the others and one’s not being able to choose them” (SZ, 285). Heidegger
points out here the finitude of being-free. Dasein is not the absolute mas-
ter of possibilities, not just in the sense that it can only choose a very few
among them, but also because possibilities are, in the existential sense,
“thrown’” (geworfene) possibilities: initially and for the most part, it inher-
its them, or finds itself in them, without having chosen them. The project
that calls for an understanding of possibilities is not a planning of the
future, as a result of which “one throws oneself into projects”; it consists
in a constant activity of Dasein, featuring as its response to already given
possibilities, and so is constantly exposed to failure. What is essential all
the same is that the alternative of freedom in the face of possibilities
remains an alternative, since it still belongs to Dasein to decide between
the two possibilities fundamental to its existence, which necessarily also
includes that of falling.
Insofar as Dasein is being-in-the-world, it has an understanding of
beings within-the-world, which has to be distinguished from that under-
standing Dasein has of itself as ability-to-be (practical meaning of under-
standing). This understanding of being ready-to-hand (Zuhandene) or
being present-at-hand (Vorhandene) has a pragmatic sense, since it con-
cerns Dasein’s dealing with the things of the world (pragmata). Under-
standing then means “being able to manage something,” “being a match
for it,” “being competent to do something” (SZ, 143). The ability-to-be
becomes an ability-to-do. The pragmatic understanding projects and
grasps possibilities at the ontical level: “That which is ready-to-hand [Zu-
handene] is discovered as such in its serviceability, its usability, and in its
detrimentality” (SZ, 144). Understanding a thing means being capable
of utilizing it thanks to the grasp of all its possible uses and meanings—
that is, being aware of all its possibilities. Dasein has an understanding
of itself and of those entities which are not itself, because it is the only
being capable of an understanding of being in general. The practical
and pragmatic meanings of understanding presuppose an ontological
sense of this existentiale, with which section 31 concludes: “Understand-
ing of Being has already been taken for granted in projecting upon pos-
153
sibilities” (SZ, 147). The understanding of the being of beings makes

it possible to deal with beings in everyday life, action, and knowledge.
Ontological understanding is always a projection of possibilities. Even
if it remains tied to Dasein, the possibility in question here no lon-
ger designates a way of being of Dasein; rather, it seeks an openness
toward being, as when Kant talks of the “conditions of the possibility.”
Whether Dasein exists authentically or inauthentically, as falling, it has a
pre-ontological understanding of being, which still remains for the most
part unconceptualized.
An examination of section 31 of Being and Time shows that the con-
cept of “understanding” establishes a link between the practical and the
ontological perspectives of the existential analytic. It makes it possible to
distinguish three senses of understanding, which also imply three senses
of the possible: practical, pragmatic, and ontological. Possibility refers to:
(1) the ability-to-be of Dasein; (2) the possibilities internal to beings; and
(3) conditions of the possibility of being. In Being and Time, being-free is
still not tied down to ontological possibility, but is developed out of the
first sense of the possible. It is the ability of Dasein to be itself or not to be
itself. But “being-oneself” is precisely what Heidegger means by freedom,
whose ethics appeals to the categorical imperative: “Become what you
are!” (SZ, 145). Being-free is not to be confused with freedom, which is
only one of its possibilities, and certainly the most important. The need
to make this distinction is confirmed by several passages in Being and
Time. In the course of his analysis of anxiety, inspired by Kierkegaard,
Heidegger writes: “Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its
ownmost ability-to-be— that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing
itself and taking hold of itself [Freisein für die Freiheit des Sich-selbst-wählens
und— ergreifens]” (SZ, 188, trans. modified). Being free is the ability to
choose oneself or not to choose oneself, the power for or against free-
dom, assuming that not choosing oneself is still a way of being, a decision,
which stems from being-free. Being-free that has fallen is still free. What
Heidegger calls freedom is being-free in its ownmost or authentic form.
Being-free in its broadest sense is the ability-to-be for “the possibility of
authenticity and inauthenticity” (SZ, 191). Precisely because Dasein is free
for “authentic existentiell possibilities” it “can comport itself towards its
possibilities, even unwillingly; it can be inauthentically; and factically it is
inauthentically, initially and for the most part” (SZ, 193). In other words,
“the Being of Dasein is essentially ability-to-be, it is Being-free for its own-
most possibilities and . . . exists only in freedom for these possibilities or
in lack of freedom [Unfreiheit] for them” (SZ, 312, trans. modified). Being-
free is an ability for being for or against freedom.
In its inauthentic form, being-free, which develops into un-freedom,
154
is characterized by a deficit of possibilities, by unchosen, limited, re-

pressed, obliterated possibilities. Falling, which is the mark of inauthentic
existence, is Dasein’s way of being unfree— what Heidegger calls “alien-
ation” (Entfremdung). This “alienation closes off from Dasein its authentic-
ity and possibility, even if only the possibility of genuinely foundering. It
does not, however, surrender Dasein to an entity which Dasein itself is not,
but forces it into its inauthenticity— into a possible kind of Being of itself ”
(SZ, 178). Dasein is stuck in possibilities it has not itself decided, whether
because it inherited them, as we have seen, or because others chose them
for it: “Dasein’s everyday possibilities of Being are for the Others to dis-
pose of as they please” (SZ, 126). In the “dictatorship” of the “One,” pos-
sibilities have not disappeared since Dasein, as being-possible, constantly
projects itself upon such possibilities. They are simply reduced, stuck in
the rut of mediocrity: “In this averageness with which it prescribes what
can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that
thrusts itself to the fore” (SZ, 127). It is impossible to eradicate Dasein’s
possibilities of being. One can only level them down, restrain them, or
obliterate them. In falling, the field of possibilities is reduced in favor of
the actual: “The average everydayness of concern becomes blind to its
possibilities, and tranquillizes itself with that which is merely ‘actual”’ (SZ,
195). Fallen possibility is inferior to the actual, of which it only represents
the pale copy, excluding any emergence of novelty. The atrophy of pos-
sibilities in falling— nothing is truly possible any longer— sometimes goes
along with the inverse phenomenon; here “everything seems possible.”
Possibility is no longer rooted in the ability-to-be of Dasein, it becomes the
object of a purely wishful aspiration, of a vague desire which diverts all
genuine possibilities just as surely as the “One”: “In the wish, Dasein proj-
ects its Being upon possibilities which not only have not been taken hold
of in concern, but whose fulfilment has not even been pondered over
and expected” (SZ, 195). So Dasein only dreams its possibilities instead of
choosing them and carrying them through.12
Only this “fallen” concept of possibility, whether it be a shadow of
the reality or an illusory dream, falls under Bergson’s critical hammer.13
Heidegger’s concept of possibility is by contrast wholly prospective: exis-
tential possibility as rooted in the ability-to-be of Dasein, whose ownmost
form is death. This point is well known. I only want to go back over the
link between death, being-possible, and being-free. Death, which Hei-
degger even distinguishes from the event of passing away, is the pure
and simple possibility of the impossibility of Dasein— an unsurpassable
possibility, “which is certain and at the same time indefinite” (SZ, 258).
What makes of death the ownmost possibility of Dasein? Certainly, Dasein
is alone faced with death, no one else can die in its place. But, as Sartre
155
points out (BN, 534), that is true of all other possibilities of Dasein, where
the latter cannot be replaced, represented. Nobody, for example, can
love for me and, to adopt even more commonplace examples, nobody
can drink, eat, sleep in my place. The reply is to be sought in the very
nature of possibility. Death is the ownmost possibility, for it is a possi-
bility that will never be anything else but a possibility, a possibility that
will never be present for Dasein. All other possibilities— loving, eating,
drinking, traveling, and so on— are possibilities that have been realized
or which can, in principle, be realized by Dasein, and so become available
to it. With death, on the contrary, Heidegger has in mind a possibility
free of all actuality, a possibility in the purest state. As Romano notes,
this concept of possibility is the very opposite of Leibniz’s concept: “If
for Leibniz the reality of the possible increases in proportion to its pro-
pensity to being realized, here, it’s the possibility of the possible that
increases in proportion to its unavailability.”14 The less possibility is real
and the more it is possible, the more valuable it becomes in the light of
the existential analytic. Death is therefore in itself the ownmost possibility
of Dasein, because Dasein is at bottom a being-possible.15 With its death,
Dasein finds itself again by virtue of an ontological affinity, a community
of being— that of the possible.
In our terminology, death is practical possibility in its purest form.
Practical because it refers on to authentic freedom, understood as free-
dom towards death. Being-towards-death guarantees the mediation be-
tween death and freedom. It consists, for Dasein, in understanding, in the
existential sense, the possibility of the impossibility of its existence: “This
possibility must not be weakened: it must be understood as a possibility, it
must be cultivated as a possibility, and we must put up with it as a possibility,
in the way we comport ourselves towards it” (SZ, 261). Being-towards-
death is the lucid grasp of my death as a possibility that can arise at any
moment. A possibility both disturbing and joyous, if it is true that “lucid-
ity is the wound closest to the sun” (René Char). Thus, “along with the
sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized ability-
to-be, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility” (SZ, 310, trans.
modified). Being-towards-death is anxiety in the face of pure possibility
mixed in with the painful experience of the fragility of my existence, of
my finitude— the experience of total impossibility— and at the same time
a deliverance that hands me over to my freedom and to the multitude of
my possibilities:
Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the “One”-self, and brings

it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported
by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned16
156
freedom towards death— a freedom which has been released from the
Illusions of the “One,” and which is factical, certain of itself, and anx-
ious. (SZ, 266, trans. modified)
Why is being-towards-death a form of freedom? Because it possibilizes all

Dasein’s possibilities. To my death, the possibility and the impossibility of
all my possibilities, there corresponds my freedom, which is the possibility
of all my possibilities— the possibilization of possibility (Ermöglichung).
The anticipation of death gets Dasein to understand that its existence is
finite, that the choices it has made are irreversible, for possibilities never
present themselves two times over. The threat of the impossibility of all
Dasein’s possibilities awakens and reveals in the latter the existence of its
possibilities. More profoundly still, the understanding of death as a possi-
bility Dasein is permanently, leads Dasein back to its ownmost being: its
being-possible. Freedom towards death sets up a double movement. It
frees Dasein from its lostness in inherited and alienating, fortuitous, and
provisional possibilities: “Only Being-free for death gives Dasein its goal
outright and pushes existence into its finitude. Once one has grasped the
finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multi-
plicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one— those of
comfortableness, shirking and taking things lightly— and brings Dasein
into the simplicity of its fate” (SZ, 384). In this way it leads Dasein back
to its own ability-to-be as choice among possibilities, whether inherited
or original and, across this choice, to the choice of oneself: “When, by
anticipation, Dasein becomes free for its own death, it is liberated from
its lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves
upon it; and Dasein is liberated in such a way that for the first time it
can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities
lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped” (SZ, 264,
trans. modified). Anticipation of death is not fascination with a pure
possibility, a sterile despair; it turns around into choice for possibilities
that are given before my death, that is, for possibilities which punctuate
existence from birth to death.
What exactly does choosing mean, for Dasein? Heidegger clarifies
this notion through the concepts of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) and
resolution (Entschluß), which are analyzed in the wake of being-towards-
death. Resoluteness is a distinctive form of openness (Erschlossenheit); it
designates the authentic understanding that Dasein develops with respect
to itself as being-in-the-world and ability-to-be. It is a sort of state of mind
of Dasein, allowing it to be available for possibilities. As such, resoluteness
is undetermined from an existentiell point of view; it resolves nothing
in particular save perhaps to hold itself open to possibilities in general,
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which latter constitutes its existential determination. This is why it ap-

peals to resolution, decision, which lays holds of possibilities and decides
between their ever-ramifying proliferation as a function of each situation.
Resolution determines resoluteness by bringing to an end the indefi-
niteness of Dasein’s ability-to-be, in which it runs the risk of becoming
imprisoned: “In resoluteness, the issue for Dasein is its ownmost ability-
to-be, which, as something thrown, can project itself only upon definite
factical possibilities. Resolution [Entschluß] does not withdraw itself from
‘actuality,’ but discovers first what is factically possible; and it does so by
seizing upon it in whatever way is possible for its ownmost ability-to-be
in the ‘One’” (SZ, 299, trans. modified). Resolution is what transforms
resoluteness into effective choice between definite possibilities. Section
62 sets up the link between freedom for death and resoluteness through
the notion of “anticipatory resoluteness” (vorlaufende Entschlossenheit),
which names the lucid anticipation of death from which there follows
openness to possibilities: “Nor does wanting-to-have-a-conscience, which
has been made determinate as Being-towards-death, signify a seclusion
in which one flees the world; rather it brings one without Illusions into
the resoluteness of ‘taking action’” (SZ, 310). It is resolution, decision as
projection, disclosure and determination of possibilities, which functions
as the spearhead of action. For authentic existence is not a second exis-
tence which would come to replace fallen existence, it is not suspended in
an indefinite world of possibilities, like an ideal beyond any experience,
but is realized at the very heart of the world of beings, to the point that
it becomes a “modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon”
(SZ, 179). However, without decision, resoluteness, on account of its exis-
tentiell indefiniteness, leaves everyday existence unchanged. So we should
emphasize, along with Jean-Luc Nancy (1993, 82), the “mundanity of
decision,” which is in each situation the “decision of existence” through
which Dasein exposes itself to possibility, but a definite, factical possibility
already existing in the world:
Resoluteness, as authentic Being-one’s-Self, does not detach Dasein from

its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating “I.” And
how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authenti-
cally nothing else than Being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the Self
right into its current concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand,
and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others. (SZ, 298)
Freedom for death makes possible freedom as resoluteness and resolu-

tion in view of definite possibilities. The passage from un-freedom to free-
dom presupposes a regression right up to that choice of existence, which
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was perverted by the “One.” But, “‘making up’ for not choosing signifies
choosing to make this choice [Wählen dieser Wahl]— deciding [Sichentscheiden]
for an ability-to-be, and making this decision from one’s own Self. In
choosing to make this choice, Dasein makes possible, first and foremost,
its authentic ability-to-be” (SZ, 268, trans. modified). The fundamental
choice of one’s own existence— the choice of the choice, the resolution
for the possible— pushes the free-being out of falling and into freedom,
and so makes possible the other determinate choices which punctuate
the free existence of Dasein across each decision.
We have made considerable progress in the analytic of freedom
and its practical dimension. Freedom towards death as the possibility
of the possibility of Dasein is the choice of oneself in view of one’s own
existence. It presupposes the free-being of Dasein, which is a power, an
ability for the possibility of both authenticity and inauthenticity, freedom
and un-freedom. Being-free is not a freedom of indifference for which
both modes of existence would be equivalent, since authentic existence
is that by which Dasein exists on the basis of itself, and is therefore, in this
sense, authentically free. Freedom is being-free in its authentic form, the
ability-to-be as ability-to-be, the being-possible as being-possible— “the
quiet force of the possible” (SZ, 394).
The Plasticity of Temporality
Let’s get back to our initial question, which can be reformulated as fol-
lows. What is the link between practical freedom in all its diverse figures—
being-free, fallen freedom, freedom for death— and temporality, which
itself exhibits several facets? To disentangle the complex connections
between freedom and time, it is useful to analyze (a) the Heideggerian
conception of temporality in all its multiplicity (primordial time, the
world-time, the now-time); (b) the temporality of fallen freedom (inau-
thentic time), and then (c) authentic freedom (primordial time).
What is striking in Heidegger’s conception of time is the multi-
plicity of its modes, framed in a sort of temporal triptych. Based on Being
and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology, it is possible to distinguish
three fundamental modes of temporality— primordial time, the world-
time, and the now-time17— each of which can be analyzed out again into
different forms.
(1) In Being and Time, Heidegger set himself the task of distinguish-
ing a “primordial” or “originary” (ursprüngliche) time which he calls “tem-
porality” (Zeitlichkeit), thought as the origin (Ursprung) of the different
159
modalities of time that regulate our existence. The analysis of temporality

culminates in section 65 of Being and Time, the high point of the work,
with its celebrated definition, recapitulated in the notion of ‘ekstatikon’
borrowed from Aristotle,18 and which is formulated first in Greek and
then in German: temporality is “the ἐκστατικόν pure and simple. Tempo-
rality is the ‘primordial outside-of-itself’ in and for itself’ [‘Außer sich’ an und für
sich selbst’]” (SZ, 329). The very temporality of time, its origin always al-
ready presupposed by the diverse forms of time, is its ecstatical character.
The primordial ecstatico-horizonal temporality is the unity of the three
ecstasies of the future, the past, and the present. It contains three aspects.
As temporality (Zeitlichkeit) (a), it is the ontological sense of care, that
which constitutes the unity of Dasein, which is, purely and simply, tempo-
ral being. As Temporality (Temporalität) (b), it is aimed at the condition
of the possibility of the understanding of being— time as the horizon of
being. Zeitlichkeit and Temporalität are the two faces of one and the same
phenomenon, primordial time, depending on whether it is engaged in
the perspective of Dasein (putting the accent on its ecstatical dimension)
or on being (emphasizing its horizontal character).
(2) Dasein is being-in-the-world and its temporality is consequently
deployed within the world. Heidegger calls temporality insofar as it tempo-
ralizes itself in the world, “world-time” (Weltzeit) (SZ, 414). This is the time
we tell, that we allow ourselves, the time of our daily preoccupations—
the “time with which we concern ourselves” (besorgte Zeit) (SZ, 411)—
time that we can save or lose. This mode of temporality is already a form
of falling, since it understands time out of present-at-hand entities, by
favoring the present, the now, at the expense of the future. The world-
time has four principal determinations: spannedness (the now is never
instantaneous, however brief it might be, it is spanned, it includes an
interval, a duration extending into the past and the future); datability
(the now is datable, it can be referred to events in the world that make it
possible to date it); significance (the now is situated in a context of action
by virtue of which it is an opportune or inopportune time, a time to do
this or that; it is this last determination that is most important for the
worldhood of time); publicity (the now is expressible by and intelligible
to everyone, it belongs to no one). The time of the world is linked to lan-
guage, it is par excellence the time one talks about and which is expressed
linguistically (“first,” “then,” “formerly,” “tomorrow,” etc.). It is finally the
time in which we find ourselves, we and other beings, within-timeness
(Innerzeitigkeit).
(3) In order to reckon with time, Dasein makes use of instruments serv-
ing to measure time (sun, clock, calendar, watch, etc.). On the one hand,
the measure of time is, along with language, an element of world-time.
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On the other, it can engender a new mode of temporality, the “now-time”

( Jetzt-Zeit). World-time makes it possible for Dasein to reckon with time,
the now-time being employed to count time. We are now crossing a new
threshold in the downward spiral of falling, for this now-time is world-
time reduced to the state of a ready-to-hand being (the watch, the clock),
world-time insofar as abstraction has been made of the relation of Dasein
to the world.19 It is characterized by an indefinite and linear succession
of punctual nows, which “float in the air” cut off from their significance
and their datability. This now-time is associated with “natural” time, which
is infinite and which “passes” ceaselessly from the future toward the past.
The notion of passage appeals to the representation of time as a fixed con-
tainer “in which” events go by; it reinforces the phenomenon of within-
timeness, which is, like measure, a feature in common with both world-
time and now-time, a point of juncture between the two. Armed with all
these structures, now-time is seen to lie at the root of the ordinary concep-
tion of time, an overdetermined concept covering three quite different
meanings.20 It corresponds to our familiar understanding of time (4),
the only one we make explicit use of in our everyday concerns, because
we are incapable of coming to terms with our own mode of temporality,
world-time and, a fortiori, primordial temporality. It also designates the
time measured by our watches and used by science (5), what Bergson
calls “spatialized time.” Finally it designates the metaphysical concept of
time which, from Aristotle to Bergson and running through Hegel, does
little more than conceptualize our familiar understanding of time (6).
Each mode of temporality is both a specific conception of time and
a form of existence, which determines the being of Dasein. In this sense,
Heidegger also talks of an “authentic” and an “inauthentic” time (SZ, 331).
Authentic time (7) is the temporality that upholds the authentic existence
of Dasein, the unity of the project, the repetition and the moment; this is
the time of freedom. Inauthentic time (8) is the time of falling, marked
by awaiting, forgetfulness, and making-present. It is a mixture of world-
time and now-time. Upon the couple, authentic and inauthentic time,
is grafted the opposition between authentic (9) and inauthentic (10)
historicity (SZ, §§74– 75). Historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) designates, on the
one hand, the individual temporality of Dasein as fate (Schicksal) (11), its
existence between birth and death and, on the other hand, the collective
temporality of a people, its common destiny (Geschick) (12).
Counting all these subdivisions we find a dozen modes of tempo-
rality, which make of time a prolific monster difficult to understand in
its unity! Ricoeur sees in this multiplicity of the modes of temporality a
“dispersion of the notion of time” (1988, 67), which runs the risk of losing
its coherence. It is true that Heidegger does not succeed in adequately
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deriving the time of nature from primordial temporality. But the multi-
plicity of time is saved from dispersion by the notion of ecstasis, which
constitutes the unity of the phenomenon of time, what makes all the
forms of time modalities of temporality, in the sense that they all derive
from primordial temporality. In the irreversible character of the succes-
sion of nows, a trace of primordial temporality can still be found, for the
ecstasis of the future is what prevents Dasein from going “back” to the
past (SZ, 426). This is also true of world-time, centered on the now, one
of whose determinations is tension, “spannedness” (Gespanntheit) (BP,
24: 372) or extension, “stretchedness” (Erstreckung) (BP, 24: 374). The
now of daily concern, the now as “the moment when I do this or that”
is never punctual, undivided, it always carries a certain extension. It is a
moment replete with the immediate past and already turned towards the
nearest future, so stretched between past and future, and this tension is
an expression of the ecstatical dimension of time, diminished it is true
but present all the same.
What makes itself known behind the thesis of a multiplicity of
modes of temporality is the phenomenon of the plasticity of time,21 a
thesis Heidegger evokes in certain texts. The lectures of 1929–30 show
that the different forms of boredom (“being bored by . . . ,” “to be bored
with . . . ,” “profound boredom”) depend upon the diverse forms assumed
by time: “This being affected by time in boredom, however, is evidently
a peculiar impressing of the power of that time to which we are bound. This
entails that time can oppress us or leave us in peace, sometimes in this
way, sometimes in that. This is ultimately bound up with its own capacity
for transformation [Wandlungsfähigkeit]” (FC, 29/30: 148). A passage from
Basic Problems of Phenomenology of 1927 points up this transformability of
time in another perspective:
Dasein’s temporality does not constantly temporalize itself from that

temporality’s authentic future. Nevertheless, this inconstancy of exis-
tence, its being generally irresolute, does not mean that in its existence
irresolute Dasein at times lacks its future. It only means that temporal-
ity itself, with respect to its different ecstasies, especially the future, is
changeable [abwandelbar]. (BP, 24: 409)
Temporality temporalizes itself according to different possible modalities,

which are so many transformations of itself. The future, for example, tem-
poralizes itself as not-yet-now (now-time), waiting for . . . (world-time),
or coming to self (primordial time). Insofar as it exhibits plasticity, the
multiplicity of temporality is a chance for freedom, for it offers Dasein
the possibility of passing from inauthentic to authentic existence, from
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un-freedom to freedom. In order that freedom should be temporalized,

it is necessary, in fact, that time should be able to accommodate it, in a
certain sense. Temporality temporalizes authentic time, which is the time
of freedom. The question is to know whether it is temporality that trans-
forms itself by delivering Dasein from falling, or whether it is Dasein that
can itself modify its mode of temporality and so gain access to its authen-
tic freedom. In other words, to which should the initiative be granted, to
time or to freedom?
The Primacy of the Future as the Temporal

Expression of the Primacy of the Possible
First of all, we have to clarify the relation of Dasein to temporality. Tempo-

rality is deduced from the existential structures of Dasein, and it features
as the condition of the possibility of the latter. In this way, temporality is
the “ontological meaning of care,” by which we have to understand that it
is that which renders possible the being of Dasein in its totality. Meaning is
synonymous here with possibilization. Care in fact exhibits three facets: it
means “ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (a world) as Being-alongside (en-
tities encountered within-the-world”) (SZ, 327).22 The future founds the
being ahead-of-oneself (Sich-vorweg), as well as the existentialia which are
connected with it, as understanding, projection (Entwurf ), and existen-
tiality (Existenzialität). Being already in a world is rooted in having-been
(Gewesenheit), just like facticity and thrownness (Geworfenheit). Making-
present (Gegenwärtigen) makes possible being alongside entities within-
the-world and results in falling (Verfallen). Primordial temporality ar-
ticulates the structure of care as a whole, thereby rendering possible a
unification of Dasein’s existential structures. The three phenomena of
“towards-oneself” (Auf-sich-zu), of “back-to” (Zurück-auf ), and “letting-
oneself-be-encountered-by” (Begegnenlassen von), that is, the future, the
having-been, and the present, are three ecstasies of temporality, which is
henceforward defined as being the “ekstatikon” pure and simple.
Heidegger’s strategy is to make temporality appear by setting out
from the analysis of Dasein’s authentic mode of existence. This had been
defined at section 62 as anticipatory resoluteness, which names Dasein’s
capacity for existing in the light of its ability-to-be, that is, for its being-
towards-death and for holding itself in this possibility. But anticipatory
resoluteness is itself rendered possible by “letting-itself-come-towards-itself”
(das in der Moglichkeit sich auf sich Zukommen-lassen), which is the way the
future shows itself originally (SZ, 325). The future (Zukunft) is what makes
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possible anticipatory resoluteness. Across the future, temporality makes

it possible for Dasein to relate itself to possibility in general and to its
own death in particular, and this in the mode of the project. And that is
why Heidegger talks about it using a play with words like the “coming”
(Kunft) to self (zu) of Dasein in its owmost ability-to-be. In this way the
essential difference between logical possibility and possibility in the exis-
tential sense gets clarified. This difference is temporality. Dasein’s possi-
bilities are temporal, they are ways of being towards what is to come, and
through which it relates to its future. This is the sense in which we should
understand the enigmatic statement from Basic Problems of Phenomenology
of 1927, according to which time “is the origin of possibility itself” (BP,
24: 463). Possibility is prospective, if only because it stems from the tem-
poral dimension of the future, which is its horizon. Understood in the
light of temporality, the existential definition of possibility can be freed
from its persistent circularity: possibility is ability-to-be, in the sense in
which it is the coming to self of Dasein— its coming-towards-itself.
Why does Heidegger accord such preeminence to the ecstasis of
the future? The primacy of the future over the present and the past is
the temporal expression of the primacy of the possible over the actual. It
stems from the depths of the very nature of the temporal ecstasis. As the
lectures of 1927 explains, the Greek term “ἐκστατικόν” (ekstatikon) means
“stepping-outside-self” (das Aus-sich-heraustreten) (BP, 24: 377). The ecsta-
sies of temporality constitute for Dasein a continual going out of self: a
projection towards the future, a return to what has been, and an encoun-
ter with beings. Dasein is not “initially and for the most part” closed up in
itself, in the image of Leibniz’s monad, with a view to then going out of
itself, but it is always already outside, split up into the three dimensions
of time. It is not here and now, but far ahead in its future, in view of its
project, far behind in its past, and right there in the world of beings. In
the lectures of 1928, Heidegger clarifies the notion of ecstasis by means of
other concepts, and in such a way as to make it possible for him to rectify
the excessively spatial or spatializing aspect of the notion of “stepping-
outside-self.” The temporal ecstasis signifies the “getting-carried-away”
(Entrückung), the “raptus” (rapture), the “élan” (Heidegger refers to
Bergson’s “élan vital”), the “throw” (Wurf ), from which he derives “being
thrown,” “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), as well as the projection (Entwurf ).
In other words, “temporalization is the free oscillation [Schwingung] of
the whole of primordial temporality; time reaches and contracts itself”
(MF, 26: 265– 69). Among the three temporal ecstasies, it is certainly the
future that corresponds best to all these determinations. The having-been
throws me towards what I am no longer, what I have been. But I still am,
in a certain way, with myself, on the ground of a reality which I was. The
164
present also is ecstatical, never coinciding with itself. It transports me

over towards beings, into the world; and it is from this point of view the
temporal origin of intentionality.23 Through intentional consciousness,
I find myself within a surrounding world, which is, there again, more or
less familiar to me. Thereby I grasp the real world. But with the ecstasis
of the future, I leave the terra firma of reality; I push out from the shore.
The ecstasis is a going out of self, and it is all the more radical precisely
there where it sets forth towards what I have never been, in the direction
of what I am not, towards the world of pure possibilities: the future. The
future is for Dasein the most temporal, for it is the most ecstatical, the
leap into the unknown, whose unique pattern is the certain, though in-
definite, possibility of its death.
If time, in the form of the ecstasis of the future, is the source of all
possibility, it is not difficult to see that it is also the condition of the being-
free of Dasein, understood as ability-to-be and as being-possible. Primor-
dial temporality opens up a field of play for Dasein’s freedom. Inasmuch
as the future is the horizon of all possibilities, it is also the condition of
the possibility of being-free, for it is quite simply the ultimate condition
of the possibility— the condition of all possibility whatsoever. It would be
wrong to conclude too hastily that primordial temporality is only the con-
dition of the authentic freedom of Dasein. In reality, it is the condition of
the possibility of existence in the authentic as well as in the inauthentic
sense, as is shown in section 65 of Being and Time: “Temporality temporal-
izes, and indeed it temporalizes possible ways of itself. These make pos-
sible the multiplicity of Dasein’s modes of Being and especially the basic
possibility of authentic or inauthentic existence” (SZ, 328). The trans-
formability of temporality makes possible the diverse modes of existence
of Dasein. Certainly, Dasein’s very own existence stays closer to primordial
time than to falling, through which indeed it gets forgotten. But from
an ontological point of view, temporality is the condition of being-free
either for freedom or un-freedom. In this way, the ecstasis of the future
makes possible being-towards-death, “either authentic or inauthentic”
(SZ, 325). This ambivalence of primordial temporality is confirmed in
the lectures of 1928. Instead of deducing primordial temporality from
authentic existence on the basis of anticipatory resoluteness, as in Being
and Time, Heidegger brings out the ecstatical character of time from an
analysis of “awaiting” (Gewärtigen), which designates the passive and inau-
thentic relation of Dasein to the future conceived as a succession of nows,
which are never yet present. Even in the phenomenon of awaiting, or of
waiting for illustrated by hope, fear, or disturbing impatience, Dasein is
not content to collect, in the present, future events coming towards it; it
always already projects itself towards what exists afterwards, and so opens
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the way for any beings to come. Dasein’s entire behavior faced with the
future, whether authentic or inauthentic, is rendered possible in advance
by this “getting-carried-away in the then” (Entrückung in das Dannhafte)
(MF, 26: 265), which is nothing other than the ecstasis of the future surg-
ing up out of primordial temporality.
In virtue of its ecstatical character, primordial temporality is noth-
ing ontical, has nothing to do with beings; strictly speaking, we cannot
even say that it “is,” for it “temporalizes itself” (zeitigt) in the unity of its
three ecstasies (SZ, 328). This redundant formula— temporality tempo-
ralizes itself— is aimed at excluding the idea that time “is” a flux, or a
frame in which events go by, or again, a succession of nows. All these
representations, to be found in the ordinary understanding of time and
sometimes even more elaborately, in the sciences, tend to conceal its
ecstatical dimension, by reifying it, by objectifying it like an element of
nature, no matter how fundamental an element it might be. Conversely,
the attempt to found the unity of the dimension of time in the “internal
time-consciousness” or in an “intentional” subjectivity, in the manner of
Husserl, is equally just a way of leveling down its ecstatical character, of
fixing it in an enduring subject running through the temporal flow (MF,
26: 264). If one identifies the temporal ecstasies with the continuous
syntheses (retentions and protentions), it becomes impossible to think
the radical going out of self that pertains specifically to time. Two at-
titudes, which are the two sides of one and the same error committed
by Dasein “initially and for the most part”: to think time not as such but
out of beings, whether or not these beings belong to the world of things
or whether they are thought according to the subjective model of self-
consciousness; for in both cases the result is the same, a forgetfulness
of the ecstatical character of time. In opposition to any such procedure,
Heidegger stresses that the unity of the three ecstasies is itself ecstatical;
for “temporality is itself the self-unifying ecstatical unity in ecstatical tem-
poralization” (MF, 26: 266, trans. modified).24 The ecstatical character of
time lies at the root even of primordial temporality, for it is at the origin of
the latter, what is most temporal about time, the very source of time itself.
The de-ontologization of temporality, marked by the use of the con-
cept of ecstasis, reproduces the de-substantialization of existence that fig-
ures in Being and Time. Dasein is not in the manner of beings within-the-
world; it exists, it has its being to be, that is, it has to be defined before
all else as a totality of possibilities towards which it can project itself. Its
existence is not of the order of beings present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), of
subsistence, for it is itself ecstatical, projects itself permanently towards
possibilities to be accomplished. From this point of view, the ecstatical
character of temporality appears as the origin of the “ek-sistence” of Da-
166
sein, of its temporal being-outside-of-itself as the latent signification of

being-in-the-world.25 Primordial and so ecstatical temporality is the condi-
tion of the being of Dasein as ability-to-be, being-possible, being-free, quite
independently of the question as to whether this being-free exists in an
authentic or inauthentic way. The constant expulsion from the familiarly
present is the fate of Dasein’s temporal existence, so that what pertains to
temporality is the continual disappropriation of this separation from self,
in a perpetual going outside of self, which can even become, as with an-
ticipatory resoluteness, a way of coming back to self authentically.
Authentic Time
In the light of its plasticity, temporality appears as an invisible, impal-

pable, and immaterial medium, distinct from beings and being, whose
only highly unstable element is the ekstatikon in its pure state, which can
assume many forms. Primordial temporality temporalizes itself according
to different modalities, each of which founds the different modes of exis-
tence of Dasein. What is the mode of temporality of authentic existence
and of the authentic freedom that flows from it? It is precisely what Hei-
degger calls “authentic time” or “authentic temporality.” Even though it
tends to coincide with primordial temporality, Dasein’s authentic tempo-
rality is not entirely identical with the latter. To be sure, certain Heideg-
gerian formulae suggest a strict parallel between primordial temporality
and the being of Dasein in its very own existence. In the conference of
1924 on “The Concept of Time,” Heidegger takes it to be the key word
for understanding time out of its self and he does affirm the identity of
time and Dasein: “Time is Dasein” (64: 123/20). The question “What is
time?” becomes the question “Who is time? More closely: are we ourselves
time?” (64: 125/22). The lectures of 1925–26 entitled Logic: The Question
of Truth tell us that care is the “facticity of time” (21: 409). Section 65 of
Being and Time makes it clear that temporality is “the ontological mean-
ing of care,” and sometimes even evokes “primordial” and “authentic”
temporality (SZ, 329). Should we read this as a reduction of primordial
temporality to the being of Dasein in its authentic existence?
One might reply, with Heidegger, that the formulation of the prob-
lem in terms of the opposition of “subjective” to “objective” time is in
vain, for time is more objective than any possible object, since it renders
possible any being within-the-world, and more subjective than any pos-
sible subject, because it renders equally possible the being of the being we
ourselves are. To this should be added a more general consideration. If
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temporality was one and the same with the being of Dasein, if it featured,
so to speak, as an existentiale, then Dasein would, in the image of God,
be its own condition of possibility, its own foundation. A third response
consists in recalling the horizontal structure of time, by virtue of which
each ecstasis includes a specific horizon of being, lying at the root of our
understanding of entities. The only horizon analyzed by Heidegger is that
of the “praesens,” which completes the ecstasis of present, making possible
the apprehension of beings as ready-to-hand (Zuhandene). This thesis on
time, sketched out in Being and Time (§69c), developed in the Basic Prob-
lems of Phenomenology (§21), clearly shows how closely associated the two
aspects of time actually are, the one turned towards Dasein as temporality
(Zeitlichkeit), and the other, towards being itself, as the Temporality of being
(Temporalität). In its horizontal form, time, far from being limited to the
condition of the possibility of the structure of Dasein, is rather “the primal
fact” (das Urfactum), the impersonal act of opening oneself to the world:
“the ecstatical unity of the horizon of temporality is nothing other than
the temporal condition for the possibility of world and of world’s essential
belonging transcendence” (MF, 26: 270). The non-subjectivist dimension of
the Heideggerian concept of time holds not only of its horizontal char-
acter, it already follows from the notion of the ekstatikon, whose neutral
form—das ekstatikon— is the index of the neutrality of originary tempo-
rality. The temporal ecstasis does not belong to the order of knowledge,
of consciousness, still less to that of intuition. It lies at the root of Dasein,
whose possibility it temporalizes. It is an anonymous élan present at the
heart of the self, anterior to the differentiation between authentic and
inauthentic existence. This is why it is necessary to distinguish originary
ecstatic temporality, which is the neutral and impersonal surging up of
the three ecstasies, from the authentic temporality of Dasein, in which it
seeks to maintain itself as close as possible to the “power of the source,”
without ever letting authentic time coincide perfectly with its origin.26
Dasein tries to get on top of its own temporality, by means of anticipatory
resoluteness and of decision, and that is where its freedom resides. But
it cannot abolish the degeneration that separates it from its primordial
temporality. To name this absolute precedence of temporality over Da-
sein, Heidegger defines the latter as the “absolutely earliest,” the “source
of all enablings (possibilities)” (Quelle aller Ermöglichungen) (BP, 24: 463).
In its authentic existence, that is, its existence grounded in itself and on
the basis of resoluteness, Dasein resides at the source of time, but it is not
the source, the origin of time.27 Ecstatical temporality is much more that
which, in me, is not me. Understood in its brute facticity, my temporal
existence consists, first of all, in not being myself, in differing from my-
self, the being-outside-of-myself of the ekstatikon being a perpetual going
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out of self. The question of the source of time goes beyond Dasein in the
direction of the origin of the ekstatikon itself, which refers to nothing
other than itself.
Just as authentic existence is not another existence but another
way of grasping one’s inauthentic existence, so authentic temporality is
not another form of time, but a modification of inauthentic time, in the
sense of another mode of temporality, more directly rooted in primordial
temporality. From this unique source can be derived the two possibilities
of authentic and of inauthentic existence, the latter being a flight in the
face of the former. Each temporal ecstasis therefore includes two modali-
ties, authentic and inauthentic:
Understanding is grounded primarily in the future (whether in antici-

pation or in awaiting). States-of-mind temporalize themselves primarily
in having been (whether in repetition or in having forgotten). Falling
has its temporal roots primarily in the Present (whether in making-
present or in the moment). (SZ, 35, trans. modified)
So authentic temporality, which makes freedom possible, structures the

three ecstasies in their authentic modalities. The authentic future, as
anticipation, makes possible being-for-death, while the authentic past,
as having-been, is the condition of repetition. The authentic present,
the moment (Augenblick), is the mark not of falling but of what precisely
makes it possible for Dasein to avoid falling and to accomplish decision.
In opposition to Leibniz, who thought that future contingents are certain
and determinate, we could say that the authentic future, as defined by
Heidegger, is, in the image of the death that makes it possible, certain
and indeterminate. It is certain, because it flows from transparent reso-
luteness itself, and nevertheless indeterminate, by virtue of the indefinite
character of death, which makes of it “the indefinite time” (Die unbestim-
mte Zeit) (The Concept of Time, 64: 118/14, trans. modified), and also in
the sense that Dasein can always choose another possibility in place of
that on which it had decided. For, “as fate, resoluteness is freedom to
give up some definite resolution, and to give it up in accordance with the
demands of some possible Situation or other. The steadiness of existence
is not interrupted thereby, but confirmed in the moment” (SZ, 391, trans.
modified). The existential determination of resoluteness is in fact an
opening up of the possible, which is existentielly indeterminate, in the
sense that it is anterior by nature to the concrete choices that it makes
possible. Resolution makes it possible to determine resoluteness, by pro-
jecting it into the world. But this determination of resoluteness does not
eliminate its indeterminateness, so little so that resolution has to be regu-
169
larly repeated, that is, confirmed or abandoned. The certainty of resolu-

tion is inseparable from its indeterminateness, which is not the same as
irresoluteness, but, quite the contrary, guarantees its freedom. The “cer-
tainty of the resolution signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility
of taking it back— a possibility which is factically necessary” (SZ, 308).
The authentic future is then certain and indeterminate. In the strict
sense, only resoluteness corresponds to the authentic future, and the mo-
ment is the form resoluteness gives to the present. The moment is the
authentic present, “the resolute rapture [entschlossene Entrückung] with
which the Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and circum-
stances are encountered in the Situation” (SZ, 338), “the look of reso-
luteness for action” (Blick der Entschlossenheit zum Handeln) (FC, 29/30:
226, trans. modified). If the future is the condition of resoluteness, as the
opening up of the possible, the moment founds the decision, as choice
and resolution. This key concept, already to be found in Schelling and
Kierkegaard,28 and which will be taken up again by Sartre, plays the role
of “unlocking” temporality, thereby providing freedom with a mode of
access to the possible. But only on condition that the notion of the mo-
ment be purged of all ambiguity, that it designates a leap in time and
not an exit toward eternity.29 In the incessant ecstasis of temporality, the
moment is the lightning flash of freedom, openness, the kairos making
it possible for Dasein to exist authentically, that is, freely. Just like a flash
of lightning in the night, it is both a sudden break in the course of life
and a view that sheds light on existence as a whole.30 It is the moment
that ensures the passage, the conversion of inauthentic to authentic exis-
tence, and precisely because it is the authentic modality of the present,
the ecstasis in which falling is implied in the inauthentic mode of making
present. In other words, Dasein can only get free of falling on the basis of
the latter, on the basis of the present.
The moment is temporal through and through. It is a phenom-
enon of authentic time, which possesses several properties: it is ecstatical,
worldly and rare. As opposed to the punctual now closed in on itself, the
moment is ecstatical in the active sense of the term; it projects Dasein out
of itself and into the situation opened up by resoluteness. From the fact
of the existential primacy of the future, the moment comes last in the pro-
cess of action, and presupposes both Dasein’s anticipation of the future
and its repetition of the past. Resoluteness implies in fact a return to the
past which is confirmed or rejected in the light of the project. But in dis-
tinction from anticipation, which projects itself towards possibilities in
the future, the moment has a worldly dimension; it features as a view on
the world, which carries Dasein over into determinate possibilities, the cir-
cumstances and incidents in which its action unfolds. In this sense, every
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moment is the “moment of genuine action” (FC, 29/30: 427) (Augenblick

des wirklichen Handelns), the cutting edge of decision-making. Contrary to
the now of ordinary time, which never stops thrusting itself forward in an
inexhaustible profusion, the moment is rare, for Dasein lives initially and
for the most part in an irresolute manner, in the inauthentic present of
falling. Even when it exists authentically, it is incapable of holding itself
constantly in resoluteness; for it has to get back to the world-time which
is the time in which its project are accomplished. For all these reasons,
Dasein only rarely maintains itself at the cutting edge of the moment. Its
existence is only punctuated by a handful of decisive moments, moments
in which and from which it can be genuinely free.
Authentic time— as ecstatical unity of anticipation, of having-been,
and of the moment— is then the condition of the possibility of freedom
as resoluteness and of Dasein’s choice of itself. Freedom is not really free,
unless it moves around the circle of temporality, which runs not from
the future to the past via the present but from the future to the present
via the past. From this it follows that the circle of temporality is neither
a refusal of time (Schopenhauer), nor a way out from time to eternity
(Kierkegaard), but a continual affirmation of time. This authentic mode
of temporality is on many points identical with that we have called, in
our chapter on Schelling, the time of the present, founded in the de-
cision that opens up the future, breaking with the weight of the past
and giving rise to the moment.31 As Heidegger himself noted with re-
gard to Schelling, true freedom presupposes a “decision for temporal-
ity” (Schelling, 42: 268/155), which is, precisely, a time of decision. As
with Schelling, decision implies a “rejoinder” (Erwiderung) to the past,
by which should be understood either a pure and simple rejection, a
“disavowal,” or the renewal of an inherited but henceforward chosen
possibility (SZ, 386).
The peculiarity of Heidegger is to have emphasized, unlike all his
predecessors (for instance, Kant, Schelling, Bergson), the finitude of au-
thentic temporality. On the one hand, mortality is an unsurpassable limit
to the plasticity of time. Dasein cannot overlook its own death, so it cannot
make of its temporality something infinite. On the other hand, mortality
is the very condition of being-free and of freedom in its authentic form—
the foundation of the plasticity of time. The authentic future is indeed
the condition of the possibility of freedom for death. For this reason,
“the authentic future is temporalized primarily by that temporality which
makes up the meaning of anticipatory resoluteness; it thus shows itself as
finite” (SZ, 329– 30). Inasmuch as it exists as finite, as being-towards-death,
Dasein accedes to the authentic dimension of the future. The closure of
the future signifies not an irremediable failure to accomplish anything,
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a powerlessness; rather, it makes possible the complete realization of Da-

sein, who can exist authentically as a whole, gather together the totality of
its existence, an existence stretched out between birth and death, all this
in the resolute anticipation of the future, the free repetition of the past,
and the opening upon the moment.
We now understand better in what sense Heidegger, in his confer-
ence of 1924, “The Concept of Time,” made of time the true principium
individuationis: “In the Being-future of anticipation, the Dasein, that on
average is, becomes itself; in anticipation it becomes visible as this one
singular uniqueness of its singular fate in the possibility of it singular
past” (64: 124/21, trans. modified).32 Individuation does not reside in the
choice of an exceptional existence, it stems from the capacity, accessible
to each, to take one’s own destiny in hand through the anticipatory reso-
luteness of one’s future. So time is the principle of individuation only as
authentic time, oriented toward the future. This is why, in Being and Time,
Heidegger links individuation with the exceptional possibility of death,
which “does not just ‘belong’ to one’s own Dasein in an undifferentiated
way; death lays claim to it as an individual Dasein [als einzelnes]” (SZ, 263).
The lucid consciousness of death individualizes (vereinzelt) the Dasein,
thereby showing it that its existence is a finite totality of future possibili-
ties. But these possibilities remain a dead letter if freedom, under the
figure of resoluteness and of decision, does not seize hold of them, either
to reject them or to make them happen. Which brings us to temporality:
that resoluteness, through which Dasein dares to be entirely itself, opens
for it the path towards authentic time. Temporality, mortality, freedom
are then the three roots of the principle of individuation. Heidegger only
mentions the first two, which however remain ineffective if they are not
completed by the third. Individuation is born of the game of freedom
and of time, it stems from human freedom, which configures the future
and clears a path, a uniquely personal path, among the ramification of
possibilities.
Sartre takes Heidegger to task by saying that human freedom does
not have to be mortal to be free, for the irreversibility of time confers a
reality and a gravity upon choice on each separate occasion. Even an im-
mortal freedom would be finite, to the extent that it would not be able
to accomplish all the possibilities inscribed in the tree of its possibilities:
“From this point of view, the immortal man like the mortal is born several
and makes himself one. Even if one is temporally indefinite— i.e., with-
out limits— one’s ‘life’ will be nevertheless finite in its very being because
it makes itself unique. Death has nothing to do with this. Death occurs
‘within time,’ and human-reality by revealing to itself its unique finitude
does not thereby discover its mortality” (Sartre, BN, 546). However, this
172
way of looking at things has the demerit, at least from a Heideggerian

point of view, of presupposing a linear conception of time as an indefi-
nite succession of nows “in which” choices have to be made. But if the
choice of freedom is inseparable from the authentic time that makes it
possible, and if this time has an essentially different structure from that
of the series of nows, then the equation between freedom, being-towards-
death, and the finitude of the future has to be accepted. The second and
more general objection is formulated by Heidegger himself: “But ‘does
not time go on’ in spite of my own no-longer-Dasein?” (SZ, 330). Beyond
my death, surely, innumerable events can go on happening right into the
future? In this sense, surely time is infinite? Heidegger’s argument con-
sists in showing that the infinity of the succession of nows, an infinity no
one would want to deny, represents no objection to the thesis concerning
the primordial finitude of time, since it is derived from it. In other words,
the infinity of successive nows is only possible on the basis of primordial
temporality, which manifests itself as essentially finite: “Only because pri-
mordial time is finite can the ‘derived’ time temporalize itself as infinite”
(SZ, 331). Infinite time can only be derived, non-primordial, and so es-
sentially negative. It stems from the ordinary understanding of time, as
an uninterrupted succession of nows. To deny the primordial finitude of
time is a way of fleeing in the face of death, this in accordance with the
attitude of falling into which Dasein is plunged initially and for the most
part. In this sense, infinity is not just a feature of the time of the now, it
is one of the ways of recognizing inauthentic time.
inauthentic Time
What are the determinations of inauthentic time? Just as one should

not identify authentic time with primordial time purely and simply, so it
is worth distinguishing inauthentic time from the time of the ordinary
understanding of time, the now-time ( Jetz-Zeit). Heidegger makes this
point en passant: “‘time’ as ordinarily understood does indeed represent
a genuine phenomenon, but one which is derivative. It arises from inau-
thentic temporality, which has a source of its own” (SZ, 326)— in falling.
The ordinary understanding of time is the way in which Dasein represents
time insofar as it is plunged into inauthentic existence. Inauthentic time
is not a simple representation but a way of existing, which upholds the
inauthentic existence of Dasein, just as authentic time is the horizon of
authentic existence. To be sure, certain features of the phenomenon of
time do proceed from the time of the now, notably infinity. But as we shall
173
see, inauthentic time carries other characteristics stemming in part from

falling, in part from the world-time.
The Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle of 1921–22 already
contains a detailed phenomenology of life in its facticity, and which pre-
figures the study of falling. The categories of factical life are mobility,
anxiety (with reference to Pascal), dispersion, flight from self, fall (Sturz),
and the loss of self in the busyness of worldly affairs. All these determina-
tions are only disjecta membra of one and the same phenomenon, which
Heidegger designates with the concept of “ruinance” (Ruinanz) (61: 131).
The time of life in its facticity is, for Dasein, its ruinance (a neologism
which could translate Aristotle’s concept of “phtora”). It provokes in Da-
sein a tendency to fall, to perdition, breaking up the cohesion of its exis-
tence little by little. What pertains to life in its facticity is that there is
never enough time, for “ruinance itself takes away ‘time’” (61: 140). The
more it wants to “have” time, the less it possesses it and the more it is pos-
sessed by it. But what time are we talking about? In this course, Heidegger
makes little of the mode of temporality underpinning factical life, which
will only be thematized in section 68c of Being and Time, entitled “The
Temporality of Falling.”
Initially and for the most part Dasein lives in falling, because it un-
derstands its being and its time out of the world of things, of the enti-
ties within-the-world. Falling existence is marked by curiosity, distraction,
restlessness, fidgeting, dispersion, alienation, and hustle. Daily concerns
push Dasein into a frantic agitation and a useless “turbulence” (Wirbel)
(SZ, 177– 78). All these attitudes presuppose a specific mode of tempo-
rality in which the three ecstasies are reorganized. Dasein gets entangled
ever more deeply into the network of ready-to-hand entities, the world
of things. Instead of being a projection toward possibilities, the relation
to the future is a simple “awaiting,” engaged in the pursuit of the pres-
ent. What an insatiable curiosity awaits from the future is what it seeks
in itself, not possibility but reality, which is supposed to be superior to
possibility. Henceforward the future loses its primacy in favor of the pres-
ent. Awaiting (Gewärtigen) is a making-present (Gegenwärtigen), a thirst
for the present, which seeks out the present for itself. But the present
constantly escapes its grasp, and as soon as it disappears, it is abandoned
for another present. This evanescent present is diametrically opposed to
the moment, for it leaves no room for resolute decision, with regard to
which it represents a continual obstacle. As such it is the source of Da-
sein’s alienation. Because it is stuck on the present, the future cannot fall
back upon the past. The preoccupation with the present brings with it an
increasing forgetfulness with regard to the past, which never attains the
status of having-been. Making-present, in conjunction with awaiting and
174
forgetfulness, constitutes the condition of the instability and the restless-

ness of fallen existence.
Inauthentic time is then the unity of awaiting, of making-present,
and of forgetfulness. It is a mixture of the now-time and world-time. From
the first, it inherits the idea of infinity and that of time passing, which
derives from forgetfulness and from flight in the face of death: “Dasein
knows fugitive time in terms of its ‘fugitive’ knowledge about its death” (SZ, 475).
In its frantic busyness, fallen Dasein is always looking at its watch, for it
never has time “to waste.” Inauthentic time takes the form of the now-
time, as soon as Dasein considers its time as something disposable, profit-
able, measurable, freely divisible into days, hours, minutes, seconds, and
so on. Even if Heidegger does not point this out, it is obvious that for
him inauthentic time also pertains to world-time. It includes datability,
to be found, for example, in the form of the agenda, significance— the
time to do this or that— publicity, in the sense in which inauthentic time
is the common time of everyday existence. Watch, agenda, calendar are
so many attempts to shut time up in ready-to-hand beings (Zuhandene), in
instrumental things— attempts destined to fail if it is true that temporal-
ity is not a thing, is nothing objective. What defines the phenomenon of
inauthentic time in its unity? Inauthentic time is characterized by a sort
of degeneration of the ecstasies of primordial time, which becomes at
once both an enclosure in the present and a perpetual abandonment of
the present. An enclosure in the present, to the extent that “we are most
frequently lost in this present and it appears as though future and past or,
more precisely, the past as having-been, were blacked out, as though Da-
sein were at every moment always leaping into the present” (BP, 24: 376,
trans. modified). A perpetual abandonment of the present, for the ecsta-
sies of inauthentic time, the ekstatikon of temporality, is a “ruinance,” to
take up the expression from the lectures of 1921–22, since it provokes
an incessant dispersion of Dasein, a continual divergence of its existence
away from its freedom, a loss of its present.
The Heideggerian description of falling makes us think of the Pas-
calian triad, “inconstancy, boredom, anxiety,”33 which is the insignia of
entertainment. Strictly speaking, however, only the first and the third
aspects have been examined up until now. For all that, the central theme
of boredom does arise in Being and Time as early as section 71, devoted
to the “Temporal Meaning of Dasein’s Everydayness.” Heidegger shows
that the inverse of hustle is monotony, routine, habit, which envelop daily
existence in a fog. This is the inevitable outcome of inauthentic time. The
more the possibilities of Dasein are repressed by the “One,” the more exis-
tence falls back upon reproducing the past instead of creating something
new. But the question of the specific temporality of monotony is not really
175
addressed until the lectures of 1929–30, entitled Fundamental Concepts of

Metaphysics, which we are going to examine in the next sections.
Temporality of Freedom
What are the answers we have been able to bring to our basic question
concerning the relation of freedom and time? Freedom, in its practical
sense, is being-free for authentic freedom or for un-freedom (falling).
Primordial temporality is the condition of the possibility of being-free in
its two fundamental possibilities, authentic and inauthentic. For it attests
to a plasticity that makes it possible for it to be transformed into different
modalities, both represented and lived. Authentic freedom, as freedom
for death and for Dasein’s choice of itself, is rooted in authentic time, the
ecstatical unity of coming-to self, of having-been and of the moment. Fall-
ing arises within the horizon of inauthentic time, making-present, and
forgetful awaiting. The relation of freedom to time is thought by Hei-
degger in terms of the condition of possibility. Time renders possible that
freedom of being-possible which is Dasein; for, precisely, it is, as future,
the source of all possibility. The difficulties are however by no means all
resolved. The question of the link between time and freedom becomes, in
fact, that of the reciprocal transition from inauthentic to authentic time.
The path from primordial time to inauthentic time is well marked
out by Heidegger. The up-rush of ecstatical primordial time gets dimin-
ished little by little in getting further from its source to become the world-
time, with which Dasein reckons in its daily preoccupations, then the now-
time attributed to nature, in which the ekstatikon is covered over by the
continual flux of the nows. Heidegger describes this derivation stage by
stage in sections 79– 81 of Being and Time, by trying to show the genesis
of the ordinary conception of time out of primordial time. The flight
of Dasein in the face of its being-towards-death, falling, its tendency to
understand time first and foremost out of things, explains the origin of
inauthentic time and the determinations by which it is accompanied:
the now-time and within-timeness. The process of derivation follows a
Platonic schema, which is laid out in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Hei-
degger states that “all origination and all genesis in the field of the onto-
logical is not growth and unfolding but degeneration, since everything
arising arises, that is, in a certain way runs away, removes itself from the
superior power of the source [die Übermacht der Quelle]” (BP, 24:438, trans.
modified). He establishes a parallelism between temporality and Plato’s
idea of the Good, which is, according to the famous formula, “beyond
176
being,” and so “has the function of light, of illumination, for all unveil-
ing of beings or, in this case, illumination for the understanding of being
itself” (BP, 24: 402).34 Plato failed to identify correctly the true source of
the light radiating from the idea of the Good. For it is not a matter of eter-
nity but of its opposite: temporality! We know that for Plato what comes
first in the ontological order— the idea of the Good— comes last in the
order of experience, which latter necessarily begins with opinion before
climbing up to knowledge of the ideas. First of all we live in the sensible
world and our knowledge is reducible to an appearance of knowledge.
We find an echo of the allegory of the cave in Heidegger’s conception of
derivation. What comes first in the ontological order— primordial tem-
porality, the horizon of any understanding of being— comes last in the
order of experience, of life in its facticity. And what comes first in the
order of experience, what Dasein knows initially and for the most part,
clock time, the time attributed to nature, comes last in the ontological
order, and this because ordinary time is the most degraded, the furthest
removed from authentic temporality.
From the very fact of falling, Dasein exists right away in the mode
of inauthentic time, which it wrongly confuses with true time, just as the
prisoners in the Platonic cave take shadows for real objects. Inauthentic
time is a sort of invisible cave, all the more formidable for imprisoning
Dasein without its even being aware of it. The true difficulty is not grasp-
ing how Dasein falls from authentic to inauthentic time— he has always
already fallen into it— but how it gets free of the time of falling to regain
the time of authentic existence. Authentic freedom is a conversion of
the prisoners of the cave towards the light, which “is nothing but a draw-
ing oneself back from this oblivion to the recollection of the prius, in
which there lies enclosed the enabling of understanding being itself”
(BP, 24: 465). If falling is so powerful, how can Dasein break the chains
of inauthentic time, regain primordial temporality in its authentic form?
Through the moment and through decision, one might be inclined to
say. But is it the moment that makes decision possible or, on the contrary,
the decision which creates the moment for itself?
This last question, which takes us to the heart of the problem of
the temporality of freedom, is not taken up by Heidegger; for it takes
him away from his principal objective, the clarification of the meaning
of being. So we only have a few indications. In Being and Time, it seems
that the transformation of inauthentic time into authentic time is the
work of resoluteness, which frees Dasein from falling. This is what we find
in at least two passages: “When resolute, Dasein has brought itself back
from falling, and has done so precisely in order to be more authenti-
cally ‘there’ in the ‘moment’ as regards the situation which has been dis-
177
closed” (SZ, 328, trans. modified). Resolution opens the authentic future
and so gives itself the moment, which latter makes decision possible.
Freedom, as being-towards-death and resolution, temporalizes authentic
time. Thus the present “never arrives at any other ecstatical horizon of
its own accord, unless it gets brought back from lostness by a resolution,
so that both the current Situation and therewith the primordial ‘limit-
Situation’ of Being-towards-death, will be disclosed as a moment which
has been held on to” (SZ, 348– 49, trans. modified). Without the decision
of freedom for temporality, the present would never be anything else but
the imprisoned making present of the now. This reading is confirmed by
the course of lectures of 1927, which defines the moment as “the present
that is held in resoluteness and springs from it [die in der Entschlossenheit
gehaltene und aus ihr entspringende Gegenwart]” (BP, 24: 407).
The moment is born of decision. But what gives birth to decision
itself? In the inauthentic time of falling, dominated by passive awaiting,
forgetfulness and an exclusive preoccupation with present things, au-
thentic temporality is not entirely eliminated. It is still manifest in the
form of a call, the call of conscience (Gewissen), which, from the most
remote recess of forgetfulness silently invites Dasein to choose, and con-
vokes it to its most authentic ability-to-be.35 At any moment, Dasein can
then in principle break with the ruinous time of falling. It can, from the
fact of resolution, appropriate its own temporality in an anticipation of
the future that unfolds before it through the free repetition of the past
and the ecstasis of the moment. Authentic temporality and inauthentic
time are two fundamental possibilities of Dasein, with which it is con-
stantly confronted. Henceforward they constitute an alternative, one Da-
sein is free to decide between in the sense of authentic existence. Before
every form of particular choice, before the “choice of choice,” defining
authentic freedom as deciding for its own possibilities, we find primor-
dial temporal freedom, understood as choice for authentic time or inauthen-
tic time. Towards what could I be called by conscience, if not toward this
alternative, which it calls me to silently? All practical imperatives presup-
pose the choice for authentic time, which is the genuine content of the
call. The alternative of freedom confronted with time is the alternative
of being-free and being-unfree— an alternative that confronts freedom
with itself.
This alternative between authentic and inauthentic time is found
again, at least implicitly, in the analysis of Dasein’s historicity. The con-
cept of historicity designates the temporality of Dasein envisaged in the
integrality of its existence between birth and death: It is Dasein’s fate
(Schicksal). Contrary to what one might think, the choice of this term
does not imply any fatalism on Heidegger’s part, since historicity, like
178
the temporality from which it is derived, carries two modalities, authen-

tic or inauthentic, which depend upon the attitude of Dasein, resolute
or fallen:
The temporality of authentic historicity, as the moment of anticipatory

repetition, deprives the “today” of its character as present, and weans one
from the conventionalities of the “One.” When, however, one’s exis-
tence is inauthentically historical, it is loaded down with the legacy of a
“past” which has become unrecognizable, and it seeks the modern. But
when historicity is authentic, it understands history as the “recurrence”
of the possible, and knows that a possibility will recur only if existence
is open for it fatefully, in a moment, in resolute repetition. (SZ, 391– 92,
trans. modified)
The constant forgetfulness of the past, which characterizes inauthentic

time, produces a sort of return of the repressed. When Dasein exists in the
mode of falling, the past becomes a heritage to which one is subjected,
a ball that cuts existence off from new possibilities and inhibits all deci-
sion— by engendering what I have called the time of the past. Inauthentic
historicity is not an ineluctable destiny, for it is born of the fact that the
“One” deprives itself of choice and so remains “blind for possibilities”
(SZ, 391). When Dasein ceases to take flight from freedom and assumes
the choice of its own existence, the authentic past takes the form of a
reserve of possibilities, to be rejected or repeated, as a function of the
specific project adopted. What belongs to repetition is to grasp the past
itself as possible. We see here the whole importance of the existential of
possibility, omnipresent in Dasein as ability-to-be. Possibility arises from
the ecstasis of the future, but it is not limited to the latter. The possibili-
ties opened up by the authentic future in fact possibilize the past itself
(repeatable possibilities) as well as the present (possibilities given in the
situation). So we also find an alternative between authentic and inau-
thentic historicity, one which prolongs that between authentic and in-
authentic time, thereby confirming the originally temporal character of
freedom.
The Power of Time
Existing freely means therefore, in the last instance, turning toward the
light of primordial temporality, existing within the horizon of authen-
tic time. On at least one occasion, Heidegger invokes the intimate link
179
between freedom and time, this in a remark in the lectures of 1928, where
he makes of freedom the essence of Dasein:
But every Dasein reveals time itself— and yet time long remains
something strange. Only seldom do we take possession of time, which
possesses our very selves in a metaphysical sense; only seldom do we
become master of this power which we ourselves are; only seldom do we
exist freely. (MF, 26: 257– 58)
What does Heidegger have in mind with the idea of the “power of time”?
If one refers to Being and Time, the power of time consists in going out of
self (ekstatikon), in ceaselessly breaking up Dasein’s existence in the three
temporal ecstasies of the future, of the having-been, and of the present.
In the Basic Problems of Phenomenology of 1927, time is compared to the idea
of the Good, it is the “superior power of the source” (BP, 24: 438, trans.
modified). The superior power consists in making being possible. Consid-
ered in its relation to Dasein, time reveals itself as both an alienating and a
liberating power. In falling, the ekstatikon becomes a power of dispersion,
a “ruinance” that continually robs Dasein of its freedom and plunges it
into a frantic race after the present. The power of time is all the more
alienating for being present at the very heart of Dasein, whose condition
of the possibility it is. Dasein is the power of time, for this power consti-
tutes its very being, and yet it is not this power, because, initially and for
the most part, it is incapable of appropriating it. Hence, one might add,
the strange ( fremd) and disturbing (unheimlich) character of the power of
time, a power we ourselves are without being it.
What does it mean to become the “master” of time? Certainly not
struggling to lock it up into available things— watches, clocks, and so
on— making it possible to measure it, even if in an ever more precise
way! Even less trying to use it to organize the frantic busyness of Dasein,
seeking to make his “employment of time” ever more profitable. It is only
when the lightning flash of the moment illuminates its existence that Da-
sein can appropriate its temporality within the limits of its finitude, even if
it is true that it is incapable of coinciding with its primordial temporality,
nor becoming the complete “master of time.” In the moment, the ecsta-
sis of time carries Dasein towards itself, instead of getting lost outside of
itself. Because it tries to reverse the centrifugal flow of inauthentic time,
the moment is as difficult as it is rare, just as is the freedom implied by it.
Where does the moment come from? From resolute decision, says
Being and Time. But the question has only been displaced: for where does
resolute decision come from? Certainly, freedom is its own foundation;
it refers to nothing other than itself, and that is why it is an abyss, accord-
180
ing to the formula of The Essence of Reasons. But wouldn’t Dasein have to
be in a special state of mind to get itself free of the “One” and commit
itself to freedom? Kierkegaard, and Sartre after him, saw in anxiety this
singular experience in which freedom finds itself face to face with itself,
suspended in the moment of choice. Curiously enough, Heidegger, who
does also afford this specific state of mind a fundamental role in his ana-
lytic of Dasein, connects it with being-possible and with freedom but not
with the moment. What makes it possible for the moment to arise is not
to be found in anxiety but in boredom. Surprising as this claim might
seem to be at first sight, it is, however, one that is developed in the first
part of the lectures from 1929–30 entitled The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics. One might take the analyses on boredom developed in these
lectures as a phenomenology of inauthentic time, and which can be used
to complete those sketched in Being and Time.
Inauthentic time is the time of instability and dispersion, making-
present and forgetful awaiting. However, a dialectical relation between
busyness and boredom can be found, and which features as its hidden
side. The more Dasein gets involved in the world of beings, the more it
becomes preoccupied with things, the more it is exposed to boredom,
in particular each time it is frustrated in its activities. The first form of
boredom (Langweile) consists in being bored by something (a book, a
spectacle, a situation).36 It is recognizable in that Dasein’s existence is
dragged out— time goes by slowly (lange Weile)— and in that it leaves Da-
sein empty, in the sense in which things turn their backs on it, leave it
cold, have nothing to offer it, as if the world of ready-to-hand beings
itself put a stop to Dasein’s frenzy. Dasein tries in vain to recover its busy-
ness through a “pastime,” which only succeeds in increasing its boredom.
Let us take the example cited by Heidegger of waiting in an isolated and
empty station. In its first appearance, the time of boredom is marked by
an awaiting that tries desperately to make its object present (the arrival
of the train). This form of boredom merely reinforces inauthentic time,
since it rests on Dasein’s relation to the inauthentic future, and is derived
from its frantic busyness. It is when we are the “slaves” of our daily preoc-
cupations, when we make of time something that should not be “lost,”
that a wait in a station can plunge us into a painful, even an intolerable,
boredom. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that boredom is also a
disturbance of inauthentic time. Awaiting refers to no present moment,
the present no longer being available. Dasein never stops looking at his
watch but only to confirm that the now-time is losing its apparent reality,
since the lived time of boredom shares no features with the measurable
time of the watch. In boredom, time passes slowly, minutes appear as
long as hours and some “last an eternity.” The now-time is both posited
181
(“the train will arrive in four hours,” “only an hour has gone by!”) and
disqualified in its superficial uniformity. As for world-time, it loses its
significance. The time of boredom is not a time to do this or that, it is a
time of nothing, empty time, cut off from any possible activity. Boredom
appears as a grain of sand, disrupting the silent mechanism of inauthen-
tic time in both of its interconnected components, the now-time and the
world-time.
The second form of boredom (being bored with . . .) is illustrated
by the invitation to a dinner. This time the boredom does not come from
the event, which offers all that one has the right to demand of it, but
from Dasein itself. So it is all the more enigmatic and overwhelming. I
ought to have been having a good time, and yet I am bored. Where does
this boredom come from? Instead of trying to economize its time, Dasein
now decides to waste it in order to be entertained. The time of boredom
pushes Dasein one notch further into inauthentic time. Dasein tries to get
entirely absorbed in the present. It forgets what it did and does not even
think of what it has to do. This forgetfulness with regard to the concerns
of the day before and those of tomorrow is even more profoundly an at-
tempt to forget the concern, the care that constitutes the being of Dasein,
and with it the ecstatical character of the time by which it is conditioned.
One notes in fact “a peculiar dissolution of the future and having-been
into the mere present” (FC, 29/30: 187– 88). This present becomes an
indefinitely dilated now, a standing now whose past is locked away and
whose future is tied up in advance. This immobility of time in the dilated
now is what provokes boredom. Just like the first form, the second form
of boredom is both a reinforcement of inauthentic time (one which leans
close to the now-time) and a disturbance of inauthentic time, since enter-
tainment does at least have the merit of breaking with the frantic busy-
ness of the specific time of falling. Being capable of wasting one’s time is
a less profound lapse into inauthentic existence than “never having any
time to lose,” as when one is carried along by the flood of one’s slavish
preoccupation with things. In moving from one form of boredom to the
other, however, Dasein only moves from Charybdis to Scylla: for “not only
does time in its standing not release us, it precisely summons us, it sets
us in place” (FC, 29/30: 189). Entertainment is the attempt to turn away
from primordial time. But through boredom, time not only consigns us
to the immobile now, it drags things out still further.
The more Dasein tries to kill time with pastimes (first form of bore-
dom), the more it seeks to get free of time through entertainment, dis-
traction (second form of boredom), the more time imposes itself in all
its power. On several occasions, Heidegger uses this concept to describe
the relation of time to Dasein at work in the phenomenon of boredom.
182
Thus, boredom reveals that we are constantly oppressed by time: “This

being affected by time in boredom, however, is evidently a peculiar im-
pressing of the power of that time to which we are bound” (FC, 29/30: 148).
The power of time certainly constitutes a limit to its plasticity. It resists
all attempts on the part of Dasein to neutralize it or get rid of it, and so
drags the latter into the spiral of boredom, leaving it empty and dragging
it out. With Pascal, boredom is the inverse of inconstancy and anxiety,
these three affects referring to each other in the circle of distraction. For
Heidegger, boredom is an equivocal tonality, the gray face of inauthentic
time, synonymous with monotony and involvement in the now, and so a
possible path to authentic time. For if time is “the regular pulse of some
unassailable monster [unantastbaren Ungeheuers]” (FC, 29/30: 147), an
“entrancing power” (FC, 29/30: 223), it is also a power we are ourselves,
capable of transforming us. The power of time is a limit to the plasticity
of time and not a suppression of the latter.
The first two forms of boredom derive from the phenomenon of
profound boredom— it is boring for one (es ist einem langweilig)— which
offers a possible way into primordial time, that is, to “Dasein’s innermost
freedom” (FC, 29/30: 205). In what sense? Heidegger gives as an example
the boredom experienced walking one Sunday afternoon in the streets
of a major town. Dasein is left empty in the midst of beings, divested of its
daily personality, plunged into an indifference that dominates the world
of things. Nothing interests it. Beings are withdrawn from it, and make it
impossible for it to act. Profound boredom stems from the overpowering
power of time, which renders any pastime, or any attempt at distraction,
superfluous. But then what has happened to the experience of primor-
dial time? It so happens that the triple horizon of time then gets brought
to light in its entirety, future, past, and present. In profound boredom,
Dasein is divested of its fascination for beings, enveloped by the horizon
of time understood as what it is primordially, that is, a possibilization of
the manifestation of being in its entirety:
Time is that which, in this boredom, strikes Dasein into time’s entrance-
ment. Through such entrancement it gives beings as a whole the possi-
bility of a telling refusal of themselves to the Dasein that is entranced,
i.e., the possibility of holding before Dasein as it were, as unexploited,
the possibilities of its doing and acting in the midst of these beings
and with reference to them. This entrancing power of time is thus that
which is properly telling in refusal. (FC, 29/30: 223)
Profound boredom is rooted in primordial time, a power of alienation

and entrancement (Bannen), one that withdraws from Dasein all possi-
183
bility of action and leaves unaccomplished, unexploited, those possi-

bilities that have been lying fallow. But if this is how it is, where is the
experience of freedom? How can entranced Dasein still be free? Surely
profound boredom is on the contrary the most extreme experience
of inauthentic time, of non-freedom, a paralysis of action? And that is
certainly the only too familiar result of boredom. But the originality of
Heidegger’s analysis consists in showing how the most radical penetra-
tion into inauthentic time— profound boredom— make it possible for
Dasein to gain access to authentic time and to its most intimate freedom.
This enigmatic transition is ensured by two fundamental concepts, the
possible and the moment. First of all, profound boredom is the refusal
of beings as a whole and the manifestation of possibilities latent in Da-
sein. Dasein no longer does anything with its possibilities, whether in
the practical or the pragmatic sense. For this very reason it finds itself
referred to the most extreme point of genuine possibilization, time in its
horizonal dimension. We have seen that Dasein can inherit its possibili-
ties, can also miss them, be plunged into them, or be tangled up in them,
without ever having chosen them. In profound boredom, Dasein’s pos-
sibilities, whatever they might be, remain latent. They are maintained
by the power of time in the state of pure possibilities, divested of the
weight that Dasein’s projects might confer upon them. In this sense, the
refusal of possibilities is also an experience of the possible as possible,
uncontaminated by any element of the real. Dasein gets to know time as
the entrancing element, as that which really makes possible. What this
portends is nothing less than “the freedom of Dasein,” in that it “resolves
itself [sich entschließt] to act here and now in this essential respect and
in this chosen and essential possibility of its self” (FC, 29/30: 223– 24,
trans. modified). Through a dialectical reversal, the un-freedom of bore-
dom turns into authentic freedom, defined in line with Being and Time
as choice of possibilities, resolution and decision in view of a determi-
nate possibility. The condition of the possibility of resolute decision
is the moment: “This resolution [Sichentschließen] of Dasein, however,
namely in each case to be in the midst of beings what it is given to be in
its determinateness— this resolution is the moment [Augenblick]” (FC,
29/30: 224, trans. modified). Time liberates Dasein, by offering him the
possibility of the moment of resoluteness, which breaks through the
enclosure, the “entrancement” of time. The metamorphosis of deep
boredom into freedom is the doubly conjugated effect of the possible
and the moment, which is itself the “possibility of whatever is possible”
(29/30: 229). To understand this duplication of the concept of possi-
bility, the first has to be understood in the ontological sense— what
makes it possible— and the second, in the practical sense— what Dasein
184
is able to accomplish. The moment is what makes possible the choice

of possibilities.
Contrary to what one might have expected, profound boredom is
the manifestation of primordial time in its dual dimension, both hori-
zontal and ecstatical, as the amplification of the horizon of being and as
an assignment in the moment. Time gets temporalized in a rhythm of
expansion and contraction. What becomes of the relation of freedom to
time? With Heidegger, we find a confirmation of the principal thesis of
this book: in the moment, “time itself, that which properly makes Dasein
possible in its action, is at work” (FC, 29/30: 224). (Primordial) time is
the condition of the possibility of freedom. In the lectures of 1929–30, we
note nevertheless a reversal of these roles. It is no longer freedom which,
in decision, gives itself the moment as the condition of its effectuation,
according to the schema we have identified in the existential analytic of
Being and Time. Now it is primordial time which alone confers upon Dasein
the possibility of freedom. The moment is the grace of time and not the
fruit of resolute decision. Thus, “the extremity of the moment is neither
chosen as such, nor reflected upon and known. It manifests itself to us as
that which properly makes possible” (FC, 29/30: 227, trans. modified).
Certainly, the moment always presupposes the resoluteness of Dasein to
grasp it, in order to project itself upon precisely existential possibilities.
The alternative of freedom faced with time is in no way abolished. Across
this alternative, what is foreseen is what Dasein could be if it gained access
to its own freedom. The moment opens up the possibility of freedom,
which Dasein alone can understand and carry out. For all that, the initia-
tive assumed by the moment stems from time and not from Dasein: “The
temporal entrancement that becomes manifest in this: ‘it is boring for
one’ can be ruptured only through time” (FC, 29/30: 226). How could
it be otherwise when the freedom of Dasein is precisely neutralized by its
entrancement? Time offers Dasein the alternative between inauthentic
and authentic time, even while obliging it to choose the path of authentic
existence: “Boredom is the entrancement of the temporal horizon, an entrancement
which lets the moment belonging to temporality vanish. In thus letting vanish,
boredom impels entranced Dasein into the moment as the properly authentic possi-
bility of its existence” (FC, 29/30: 230, trans. modified). Time forces Dasein
to be free.
What conclusion can be drawn from this? Dasein is the power of
time. From falling to authentic freedom, the mode of expression passes
from the subjective to the objective genitive. In inauthentic time, Dasein
is subject to the power of time without being it. Dasein is constituted by it,
belongs to it, and yet cannot master it. An alienating, disturbing, entranc-
ing power, time is the source of ruinance, of dispersion, of forgetfulness.
185
In authentic time, Dasein is the power of time, in the sense that it finds
in time the condition of its pure and simple ability-to-be and its acting.
Without ever being able to coincide with the ekstatikon of primordial tem-
porality, Dasein is held at the source of time, is raised to the peak of the
moment. The temporal ecstasis becomes resolution, transport, and élan
towards the future. Boredom supplies the needed mediation between the
inauthentic time of falling and the genuine time of authentic freedom.
Time drags Dasein into the spiral of an ever more profound boredom, to
finish up freeing him for the moment. The moment is offered by time
in the refusal that presages it. Primordial time is then the source of au-
thentic freedom. It is the power of time that both entrances Dasein and
prevents it from vacillating in the midst of beings in a state of falling,
time that refuses and renders possible, paralyzes and frees, at one and
the same time. The ultimate possibility of the possible is not freedom but
time, in the ecstatical moment.
The phenomenology of boredom modifies in part the conclusions
of the preceding analyses. And this chapter could well conclude with a
summary of these conclusions. Temporality is expressed in a number of
different senses, which are so many facets of its plasticity. Freedom in the
practical sense is a matter of possibility and not of causality. Primordial
(ecstatico-horizontal) time is the condition of being-free as ability-to-be
and being-possible. Inauthentic time (awaiting, forgetfulness, making-
present) is the horizon of un-freedom (falling), authentic time (anticipa-
tion, repetition, moment) that of authentic freedom (resolution). Prac-
tical freedom presupposes a temporal freedom, which confronts Dasein
with the alternative of the two fundamental possibilities of authentic and
inauthentic time. The authentic future is a flowering of indeterminate
possibilities rooted in the being-free of Dasein. Inauthentic freedom is
the leveling down of the authentic future by the “One,” which reduces
the latter to a totality of paths traced in advance, whose arrival is simply
awaited by Dasein. Since Dasein exists initially and for the most part in
the mode of inauthentic time, it is the plaything of the power of time. If
the phenomenon of boredom brings a response to the problem of the
conversion of inauthentic into authentic time (which is only a modifi-
cation of the former), it gives the impression of being a sort of “deus ex
machina,” coming to save Dasein in extremis from its mortal entrapment
in falling. It seems doubtful to me that profound boredom can almost
miraculously transform the now indefinitely stretched out over time
into the ecstatical moment, at the very moment when Dasein has sunk
deepest into inauthentic existence, and in such a way as to be brought
back to its ownmost possibilities even while these have been rejected.
To make of time a power, even one that is transformable, comes down
186
to minimizing Dasein’s freedom, reduced to the status of a response to a

call, for which it is not even itself responsible. The analysis of boredom
discretely announces the eviction of practical freedom in favor of onto-
logical freedom, which brings the second part of the lectures of 1929–30
to a close.37 The fateful question of the origin of the moment remains
in suspense.
7
Time as the Source of Freedom

(Bergson)
This third and last part continues the inquiry into the field of French
philosophy. Here again, I am not attempting an exhaustive study, but
am simply selecting a few philosophical figures that seem to me the most
relevant for the question of the relation between time and freedom: Berg-
son, Sartre, Levinas. The chronological order would have us pass directly
to Sartre and Levinas, both of whom read Heidegger very carefully. But
given the question that interests us, it is worth examining in advance
the philosophy of Bergson, who presents a quite original point of view,
to the extent that he sets out to think the temporality of freedom while
dispensing with the notions of the moment and of the possibile.1 His
first book, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Essay on the Im-
mediate Data of Consciousness), published in 1889, is largely devoted to
the resolution of the problem of the relation of time and freedom, even
though Bergson does not clearly state the problem in this way. The En-
glish translator of the work, Frank Lubecki Pogson, made no mistake
when, with the agreement of the author, he called the English transla-
tion of the essay, published in 1910, Time and Free Will (London: George
Allen and Unwin). Similarly, the German version of the work was called
Zeit und Freiheit (translated by Paul Fohr [Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1911]).
Bergson understood that the discovery of duration and the critique of
the quantitative conception of time made it possible to pose the ques-
tion of its relation to freedom. In other words, according to Bergson, the
problem of time is not just that of its nature— what is time?— but above
all that of the hidden and implicit relation obtaining between freedom
and time. So how should we describe this relation between freedom and
time? This is the question, an entirely practical question that arises just as
soon as one no longer restricts the investigation of time to the conditions
of the possibility of the kind of quantitative measurement it permits in
different natural sciences.
To carry through such a project, the question of time has also to be
freed from the prism of eternity. On this point, Bergson brings both Scho-
penhauer and Schelling under one and the same critique. As he reminds
us in his Creative Mind,2 an investigation into duration has to replace that
189
190
T H E MY S T E RY O F T HE FUT URE
into eternity: “Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have al-

ready called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intu-
ition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that we are applying
the same method. But of course, their intuition was an immediate search
for the eternal! Whereas, on the contrary, for me it was a question, above
all, of finding true duration” (CM, 30). The fascination with eternity not
merely fails to get hold of genuine time, that is, duration, it finishes up
fixing freedom in an essence, as the thinking of Schopenhauer shows,
Schopenhauer for whom the identification of being with the Will is in
reality an elimination of human freedom: “To place will everywhere is
the same as leaving it nowhere, for it is to identify the essence of what I
feel within myself— duration, outpouring, continual creation— with the
essence of what I perceive in things, where there is evidently repetition,
previsibility, necessity” (CM, 48– 49).
The discovery of the Temporality of

Freedom in the Essay of 1889
The third chapter of Time and Free Will bears exclusively upon the prob-
lem of freedom. This part of the work is less the application of the theory
of duration to a special case than the outcome of the work, its true goal,
with regard to which the two first chapters are only “an introduction”
(TFW, xxiv). Bergson presents the problem of freedom in the light of
an opposition— a hardly veiled allusion to Kant’s “Third Antinomy”—
between the partisans of free will, understood as pure spontaneity and
the power to choose, and the defenders of mechanical or physiological
determinism. Like Kant, he wanted to show that this opposition of free
will and determinism is in reality a false problem, a misunderstanding, a
senseless question whose illusions need to be deconstructed. But while
Kant was ready to pronounce both the thesis and the antithesis true, each
from a different point of view, Bergson was to prove that the two contrary
affirmations are both false: they share the same fundamental error, which
is that of confusing time with its spatialization, with the result that each
affirmation is constantly transformed into the other. To understand this,
we have to begin by getting rid of the prejudices ordinary language, the
sciences, and even philosophy have introduced into our perception of
things and ourselves, with a view to gaining access, through reflection, to
the “immediate data of consciousness.” This interior conversion makes it
possible for us to discover in ourselves a pure duration, which is the same
as the continuous succession of states of mind in their qualitative multi-
191
T I ME AS T HE S O URCE OF FRE E DO M (BE RGSON)
plicity and heterogeneity.3 Grasping just such a duration in its incessant

emergence makes it possible to draw two distinctions which are essential
for the resolution of the problem of freedom.
Because consciousness is primarily turned toward the external
world and preoccupied with the action it intends to realize, its concrete
and mobile duration is constantly objectified, thingified, repressed in
favor of the necessities of social life. The profound and so fundamental
ego, which lives in this concrete duration, is eclipsed by the superficial
ego, which ensures contact with the world at the cost of an inevitable
spatialization of duration, taken in the snare of language. First, and most
often, our ego is just the “shadow of the self projected into homogeneous
space” (TFW, 128). In our daily actions, we are not attentive to the con-
fused mass of our impressions, we are like “a conscious automaton,” get-
ting up mechanically in the morning at the sound of the alarm, acting
according to familiar habits (TFW, 168). Bergson refutes with discrete
irony Leibniz’s theory of the spiritual automat, whose present is big with
the future, for it fails to distinguish the profound from the parasitic ego
projected forth from it.
The distinction between the profound and the superficial ego is
only the consequence of a more original division between real duration,
which is true, and so non-quantifiable, time, and the time represented
by our intellect as a succession of punctual instants each external to the
other, forming a homogeneous medium, useful for action or instrumen-
tal manipulation in that it provides a way of measuring movement. The
first is a succession without mutual externality, the second, mutual ex-
ternality without succession.4 Just as measurable time is not duration but
a fourth dimension of space, so the superficial ego is not the profound
ego, the “deep-seated self which ponders and decides, which heats and
blazes up” (TFW, 125). Already one catches sight of the correlation link-
ing freedom with time, since the loss of duration is also a loss of freedom,
the spatialization of time a forgetfulness of this interior ego, who alone is
capable of taking decisions.
The critical deconstruction of the initial opposition— between free
will and determinism— is entirely founded on the theory of pure dura-
tion. With regard to the second term of the opposition, Bergson pro-
ceeds in three different directions, refuting psychological determinism,
the principle of causality (in its illegitimate application to the ego), and
pre-determinism. (1) Associationist psychology claims to have discovered
the laws of the mind explaining the necessary connections between our
motives, but it commits the mistake of decomposing the ego into a nu-
merical multiplicity of psychic states and of substituting an aggregate
of feelings, sensations, and ideas for the ongoing flow of the duration,
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whose moments interpenetrate, and then attempting an artificial recon-

struction of the former through a juxtaposition of such states. After hav-
ing fragmented and spatialized duration, psychological determinism in-
troduces relations of causality between the states of the ego. The whole
problem is to know if such a procedure is legitimate. (2) Bergson con-
tests this with an argument as simple as it is effective, and which has as
a consequence the disjunction of time and mechanical causality. In its
determinist acceptation, the law of causality signifies that the same cause
always produces the same effect, which presupposes a mathematical and
so calculable preexistence of the future in the present. However, psy-
chic duration is continually changing; in it, “the same moment does not
occur twice” (TFW, 200). By virtue of its very nature, which is that of pure
heterogeneity, no regularity can ever be observed in it. One can never
bathe twice in the river of duration. The application of the principle of
causality is then only legitimate for the spatialized time of matter, homo-
geneous and quantifiable, but not for duration; for the qualitative states
of real time do not link up with each other in the causal sense. (3) It is
then strictly impossible to predict an action, once the latter emanates
from our profound ego. One can only live duration, not foresee it. Berg-
son excludes any idea of our predicting our actions, whether in fact or in
principle, relying on the idea that duration is synonymous with progress
and unpredictable novelty. On this point, he again finds himself opposed
to Kant, who claimed, as we have seen,5 that a complete knowledge of the
psychology of a man and of his environment would make it possible to
calculate his future conduct with as much certainty as the eclipse of the
moon or of the sun. A position Bergson refutes as follows:
Do we not determine beforehand the conjunctions of heavenly bodies,

solar and lunar eclipses, in short the greater number of astronomical
phenomena? Does not, then, the human intellect embrace in the pres-
ent moment immense intervals of duration still to come? No doubt it
does; but an anticipation of this kind has not the slightest resemblance
to the anticipation of a voluntary act. Indeed, as we shall see, the rea-
sons which render it possible to foretell an astronomical phenomenon
are the very ones which prevent us from determining in advance an act
which springs from our free activity. For the future of the material uni-
verse, although contemporaneous with the future of a conscious being,
has no analogy to it. (TFW, 192– 93)
Asking whether an act could or could not be predicted, once all its an-
tecedents were known, is an empty question because it comes down to
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Figure 3. A choice between two possibilities (TFW, 176)
applying, to real duration, the principle of causality, that principle which

alone makes it possible to predict events in the material world. In this
way qualitative duration is confused with quantitatively spatialized time,
the time relevant to the calculation of the laws of movement. The mathe-
matical time of equations is a number, which can be reduced or pro-
longed as one pleases, but duration is an incompressible reality. Even
if an individual Paul possessed a complete knowledge of the conditions
under which another individual Peter acted, he still would not be able to
predict the action of the latter, at least not unless he became Peter him-
self at the very moment he acted! Only at the cost of a negation of the
qualitative and singular character of any duration is it possible to engen-
der the illusion of the predictability of action. This analysis leads Bergson
to distinguish two figures of the future, with nothing in common between
them. The future of the material universe is entirely predetermined on
the model of the eclipse of the sun or moon. Matter is “inertia, geometry,
necessity” (ME, 17). The future of conscious beings is on the contrary
unpredictable, creating an irreducible “zone of indetermination” in the
world (ME, 17).
Does the refutation of determinism in all its diverse forms make it
possible to admit the opposite hypothesis of free will? Nothing could be
less certain. The idea of a choice between two contrary actions that are
equally possible is for Bergson another illusion, presupposing several in-
tellectual operations whose mechanism needs to be dismantled. He rep-
resents the processes of free will with the following schema (figure 3),
representing a ramification in what we have called the tree of possibilities:6
At the instant O, the individual can choose between two possibili-
ties, X and Y. He hesitates, deliberates, and finally opts for one of the
two, even while feeling that the other alternative was equally possible.
But is this really how things happen? Not at all, according to Bergson,
who refutes this theory of free will in two ways. First of all, he proceeds
194
in a dialectical fashion. Just as the action has to be linked to the choice

made by the self, so, according to this logic, the choice has in turn to
be linked to the activity of the self in the period (M-O) prior to that in
which the choice occurred. To claim that the self chooses indifferently
at O between X and Y is to act as if the line M-O never existed. But this
line M-O implies an activity oriented in advance in the chosen direction,
and which bars the way to the other option. Thus the theory of free will
can easily be reversed into its opposite, determinism, which holds that
if the individual chose the option X rather than Y, it was by virtue of an
“absolute necessity” (TFW, 179).
This refutation might seem contrived. For it supposes that the line
MO determines the choice made in O, precisely what the partisans of free
will contest. Nevertheless, Bergson does propose another more profound
critique, based on his conception of duration. To construct the above dia-
gram, duration is spatialized over again, replacing its dynamic progress
with a static instant (O) and its pure succession with a pure simultaneity,
and this because the two options of the choice (X and Y) are both sup-
posed to be present to consciousness at the same time, awaiting the same
moment, that of the choice. This suspension of time consists in confusing
the accomplished act with the act in the process of being accomplished,
the running off of time with the time that has run off, and this accord-
ing to a retrospective procedure, since one only introduces the idea of
possibility after the event, by imagining, after the act has been executed,
another virtual act that might equally well have been chosen. So one is
able to say that the contrary action was equally possible. But in duration
itself there is no simultaneity, no instant O. Simultaneity only exists in
space, in the bifurcation drawn on the page between X and Y. The whole
diagram is misconceived: “there is no line MO, no point O, no path OX,
no direction OY” (TFW, 180). In Bergson’s philosophy, the tree of pos-
sibilities, with all its ramifications, can have no other meaning than that
of a spatialization of duration. It arises not out of time but out of space.
So Bergson sets both the defenders and the adversaries of freedom
against each other, for the reason that they are the victims of the same illu-
sion, which incites them to confuse duration with space, the profound ego
with its spatialized projection. The first make of succession a simultaneity,
the second transform duration into quantifiable and homogeneous time.
But in between the determinists, for whom “the act is the resultant of a
mechanical combination of the elements,” and the philosophers of free
will, for whom “the free decision would be an arbitrary fiat, a true creation
ex nihilo,” there exists a third course, which is “to replace ourselves in pure
duration.”7 Such is the teaching of the essay of 1889. True freedom con-
sists neither in the relation of the act with what might have been, nor in a
195
deliberative oscillation between two possibilities; it corresponds to a cer-

tain quality of action, inasmuch as the latter expresses the entire personal-
ity of the individual, and follows from the pure spontaneity of its duration.
If freedom is given immediately to consciousness, if it is both clear and
indefinable by means of the traditional concepts of philosophy, certain
but inexpressible in everyday language, it can still, for all that, be desig-
nated and thought. So Bergson quite closely associates two conceptions
of freedom that might be called artistic and temporal. The free act is the
act of which only the true ego would be the author, the act that expresses
the profound ego, in the way in which the work reflects the genius of the
artist. From this point of view, “we are free when our acts spring from our
whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable
resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his
work” (TFW, 172). This first intuition, based on the artistic paradigm,
itself presupposes a genuinely temporal conception of freedom, which
designates a conversion of consciousness oriented henceforward toward
the profound ego, toward pure duration: “we live for the exterior world
rather than for ourselves; we talk more than we think; we are acted more
than we act ourselves. To act freely is to take possession of ourselves once
again, to replace ourselves in pure duration” (TFW, 231– 32).
Freedom designates both this movement of return to self from spa-
tialized time to real time and its coincidence with the pure duration with
which the temporal conversion concludes. Behind this way of grasping
freedom, we find the idea of an alternative for consciousness as between
the spatialized time of the anonymous ego and the heterogeneous time
of the profound ego, between the repetitive time of the “conscious au-
tomat,” the prisoner of its habits, and the recuperation of the self in pure
duration. What is the meaning of this alternative? How does the self bring
about its conversion to duration? Bergson does not explain this clearly,
limiting himself instead to a reference to the “bold novelist”— one thinks
of Proust— who found out how, through his work on language, to bring
us into contact with ourselves (TFW, 133).8 If freedom consists in placing
ourselves back into pure duration, this has even more radical implica-
tions; for it implies that, in its original form, freedom has to reestablish
contact with true time; in other words, that freedom is time or that time
is in itself freedom. This discovery makes it possible for Bergson to resolve
the antinomy between time and freedom, reducing to the minimum the
difficulties raised by Kant’s “Third Antinomy,” which places “freedom
outside time” and raised an “impassable barrier” between the world of
phenomena and the world of things in themselves (TFW, 235). He notes
with irony that if one makes of time a homogenous reality subject to
causal determination, “the only thing left is to turn freedom out of doors,
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or, if you cannot entirely throw off your traditional respect for it, to es-
cort it with all due ceremony up to the supratemporal domain of ‘things
in themselves,’ whose mysterious threshold your consciousness cannot
cross” (TFW, 238).9 Kant’s fatal error was to have applied the causal pre-
determinism that is specific to the external world to the internal world
of consciousness, which then led him to commit a second error: situating
freedom outside time to save it from causality.
For Bergson, the “Third Antinomy” is a false opposition, no matter
what meaning one might attribute to causality. If one takes causality in
the Humean sense, as the habit of associating two events that regularly
succeed one another, it implies no necessary relation and so preserves
freedom. But if one considers the latter in the light of determinism— the
mathematical preexistence of the future in the present— it leads us to
distinguish duration and spatialized time, consciousness and matter, free-
dom and causal necessity. For “the more one strengthens the principle of
causality, the more one accentuates the difference separating the psycho-
logical from the physical series” (TFW, 210). Freedom can only reemerge
by contrast with the pre-determinism of matter. As a result, causality in its
two possible senses “leads to the idea of human freedom as a natural con-
sequence” (TFW, 216). The internal world of the facts of consciousness
constitutes, at the very heart of nature and not in opposition to it,10 a zone
of indetermination, of freedom, which is precisely duration. True free-
dom is not outside time, it proves to be temporal through and through.
The process of decision has to be understood out of this specific
temporality of freedom. We saw in part 2 that decision was a fundamental
point of juncture of freedom and time. Contrary to Schelling, who, above
all, made of the latter an act of rupture, Bergson insists on the organic
continuity of decision. Its degree of freedom depends upon the link estab-
lished between the ego and duration. The more the decision flows from
the fundamental ego, the more it takes its start in interior duration, the
freer it is. Bergson explains this principle of correlation between freedom
and time in the following passage: “It is the whole soul, in fact, which gives
rise to the free decision: and the act will be so much the freer the more
the dynamic series with which it is connected tends to be the fundamental
self” (TFW, 167). The motives examined by deterministic psychology are
only capable of rigorously explaining the banal, everyday actions of the
social ego, prisoner of the automatisms of language and habit, but they
do not infringe upon the profound ego, with its thoughts, its intimate and
inexpressible feelings, from which proceeds the genuinely free decision.
Cast in the flux of duration, decision is not a hesitation between two pos-
sibilities but a dynamic progress, where the ego is in a continual process
of becoming, carrying along with it its inspiring motives, until the free act
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Figure 4. The process of decision (TFW, 191)
materializes like “an over-ripe fruit” (TFW, 176). By the same token, the
decision can never be anticipated in advance. As a unique individual event,
it can only be lived out following the meandering stream of its continuous
temporality: “As far as deep-seated psychic states are concerned, there is no
perceptible difference between foreseeing, seeing, and acting” (TFW, 198).
Bergson compares duration to an “organic evolution” (TFW, 226)
or to a process of maturation. In other texts, he talks about duration as a
“perpetual efflorescence of novelty” (CM, 95). But efflorescence is not a
ramification. The branching of possibilities presupposes alternatives, bi-
furcations between possibilities, which does not make much sense in Berg-
son’s thinking. Efflorescence is the play of multiples forces,11 diverse feel-
ings which alternatively make up our duration and in such a way that one
single tendency finishes up carrying the day, in the image of the decision
which falls like an “over-ripe fruit.” There are no other branches with other
fruits that might fall. If one wants to represent the process of decision with
all the limits that such a spatialization inevitably brings with it, it has to be
sketched out along a single curve progressing continually ahead (figure 4):
In figure 4, the duration in which the decision is taken is the line
MOXY, a line that is progressively traced out. The different options envis-
aged are not given simultaneously at one point on the line, they are suc-
cessive (X, then Y). At the moment Y where the decision is taken, there
are no other available possibilities. This does not mean that the line MOX
determines this decision. To risk a metaphor, we will say that the decision
is, like Angelus Silesius’s rose, “without a why.” Determinist causality has
no hold over the duration of the ego. If we reflect retrospectively on our
action, “we find that we have decided without any reason, and perhaps
even against every reason” (TFW, 170), and this absence of any tangible
reason, or cause, is the most striking mark of our freedom. Bergson offers
us here a new version of what I have called the principle of insufficient
reason. Any reason, all the motives identified by psychology, can perhaps
explain the acts of the superficial and everyday ego, but they do not suf-
fice to untie the indefinable knot that attaches a free decision to the pure
duration of the profound ego.
Bergson’s analyses offer several decisive advantages, and first of all
the disjunction of duration and causality, from which there follows the
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idea of a correlation between the free act and pure duration. But they also
contain a number of aporias, as a result of which the problem of freedom
is bound to arise again in a new way rather than being definitely settled
as a sort of misunderstanding. Let us deal with two of the principal dif-
ficulties. Given the dominance of action, what Bergson will later call “at-
tention to life,” freedom remains a rare privilege, reserved for those who
have managed to get on the track of real duration. The free act is itself
difficult to observe and to describe, even for the one who is its author, and
precisely because its representation tends to deform and to spatialize the
genuine duration of action.12 The weight of the “parasitic self” of social
life has as a result that “many live this kind of life, and die without having
known true freedom” (TFW, 166). Whether it is expressed in a movement
of the whole body or by a simple word, an action can be recognized by
virtue of the fact that it modifies, disturbs the totality of images and events
that constitute the world, even while being entangled in them. But by the
same token, every act realized in the world brings with it a sacrifice of
the singularity of the ego in favor of an impersonal and common reality.
The genuine freedom of the ego looks as though it has to remain inactive
and purely contemplative, in order to be true to itself.13 Spatialization is
both the condition of action, destined to find its way into the world, and
what hides, betrays the author of the action, the profound ego. From
the paradox arises a second aporia, concerning the transition from the
deep-seated self to the superficial self, if it is true that in action, “it is the
deep-seated self rushing up to the surface” (TFW, 169).14 How does this
externalization of the profound self get set up? What are the intermediate
steps between pure duration and the spatialized time of action?
The Pragmatic Theory of Memory
So the problem of freedom is still not resolved. It will be left to Matter and
Memory to bring some solutions to the aporias we have just taken note of.
Bergson’s central idea is to distinguish an infinity of possible levels within
consciousness, all of which are distributed between two opposed planes,
that of dream and of pure memory, oriented toward the personal past
of the profound ego, and that of action centered on the present and so
standing in contact with the world: “Between the plane of action— the
plane in which our body has condensed its past into motor habits— and
the plane of pure memory, where our mind retains in all its details the
picture of our past life, we believe that we can discover thousands of dif-
ferent planes of consciousness, a thousand integral and yet diverse repeti-
199
tions of the whole of the experience through which we have lived” (MM,
322). So consciousness is conceived according to the image of the in-
verted cone, whose base represents the totality of memories accumulated
in pure memory, and the summit, the sensory-motor present of duration,
ceaselessly progressing forward, therefore charged with the past and ori-
ented toward the future “in virtue of the fundamental law of life, which
is a law of action” (MM, 194). It is memory that ensures the link between
the plane of dream and that of action, by inserting the individual’s purely
interior duration into the homogenous time of the external world.
The well-known distinction between the two forms of memory—
pure memory, dated, an irreducible moment of my history, and habit-
memory, the fruit of a long work of learning and of repetition— is aimed
at founding what I shall call a pragmatic theory of memory, which com-
pletes the theory of perception. Just as perception is what sketches the
possible action of my body on objects and of objects on my body, so
memory, in its two modalities, both practical and contemplative, upholds
the process of action, functioning so to speak as its pivot:
But these two extreme states, the one of an entirely contemplative

memory which apprehends only the singular in its vision, the other of a
purely motor memory which stamps the note of generality on its action,
are really apart and are fully visible only in exceptional cases. In normal
life they are interpenetrating, so that each has to abandon some part of
its original purity. The first reveals itself in the recollection of differ-
ences, the second in the perception of resemblances: at the meeting of
the two currents appears the general idea. (MM, 201– 2)
Strictly speaking, three kinds of memory have to be distinguished here.15

Immediate memory (1) accomplishes the auto-conservation of the past
in the present of duration, what Husserl will call retention or primary
memory. In the wake of the latter, pure or contemplative memory (2)
ensures the integral conservation of the past, by recollecting the totality
of dated, personal memories accumulated in the mind unconsciously. In
this way, the mind accumulates an immense reserve of memories, which
are available to serve motor memory (3) when it comes to action. Its com-
plex task is to actualize pure memories in the form of memory-images,
and to select those which are the most useful for working out the final de-
cision.16 Motor memory is therefore a memory that imagines and repeats,
that generalizes and actualizes the past in the light of the present, “to in-
sert the largest possible part of itself into the present action” (MM, 219).
Contracted down to the present, oriented towards immediate perception,
it is entirely at the service of action. In this sense memory is, for Bergson,
200
the indispensable auxiliary of freedom, its spearhead: “To act is just to

induce this memory to shrink, or rather to become thinned and sharp-
ened, so that it presents nothing thicker than the edge of a blade to ac-
tual experience, into which it will thus be able to penetrate” (MM, 130).
This pragmatic theory of memory implies a spiritualist conception
of the past. For if memories are integrally conserved and if the brain, on
account of its materiality, only operates in the present, a moment which
is constantly renewed, one is obliged to admit with Bergson that the past,
once detached from the actual point of perception, can only be recol-
lected in and through the mind, that memories “exist virtually, with that
existence which is proper to the things of the spirit” (MM, 322). Another
decisive consequence is the determination of the meaning of time as going
from the past towards the future, the pure present being “the invisible
progress of the past gnawing into the future” (MM, 194). These different
elements, illustrated by the diagram of the inverted cone, throw some light
on the problem of the relation of the profound ego with the acting ego,
which is in fact upheld by motor memory. But the central paradox of the
essay of 1889 reappears from another standpoint. Bergson insists on the
fact that memory, in its pragmatic function, produces a necessary gener-
alization of pure memories, often invoked to help the decision-making
process. The more memory is contracted into the present, the more the
experience of the profound ego is depersonalized and banalized.17 So one
comes up again against the initial paradox: how can the ego be free if the
price of action is the sacrifice of its singularity, the only thing that makes
of it the true author of its act? Either freedom is active but anonymous, or
else it is personal, but purely contemplative. It was probably in order to get
out of this dilemma that Bergson completed his conception of memory
with a theory of character. In selecting and repeating certain memories,
memory structures the character of the individual, who is a constantly
renewed synthesis of all its past states, reunited in a chain to which the
mind connects each of its decisions: “Collecting, organizing the totality of
its experience in what we call its character, the mind causes it to converge
upon actions in which we shall afterwards find, together with the past
which is their matter, the unforeseen form which is stamped upon them
by the personality” (MM, 225– 26). Motor memory has the power to model
the past, with a view to forging the character present in all the decisions
of the individual, thereby establishing a continuity between the ego and
its action, which becomes an expression of its personality.
The solution of this paradox brings with it however another diffi-
culty. If our entire past psychic life is unconsciously preserved, if it is con-
densed in a character that impregnates all our actions, does it not then
hang like a dead weight upon the present of consciousness, so preventing
201
decision from unfolding freely? Given this hypothesis, does it not then
become quite difficult to hang onto the idea of duration as the ceaseless
emergence of novelty, that is, of freedom?18 On this question Bergson
adds that our character “conditions our present state, without being its
necessary determinant” (MM, 191). For what reason? Because the deci-
sion that flows from pure duration does not simply express a continuity
with regard to the character but also makes a break, an unforeseeable
leap, which it might be better to call a creation, even though Bergson
does not use this term here, due to his suspicion of that theory of free
will which, in his view, reduces freedom to a creation ex nihilo. In the ac-
complishment of the free act, the mind, in the image of Plotinus’s One,
gives what it does not have, or rather, it gives more than it has, if it is true
that “the activity of the mind goes far beyond the mass of accumulated
memories” (MM, 226). The mind is not the prisoner of its past, it founds
its decision on its character, even while founding its character on its acts,
which add to the decision “something entirely new” (MM, 243), part of
an unpredictable creation. The analyses of Matter and Memory explain
the notion of duration in this way, putting the emphasis on the creative
dimension. Duration is what resolves the paradox of freedom, by explain-
ing how the free act is both an expression of the character and of an
unpredictable novelty, the continuous accumulation of the past and the
creation of the future. By the same token, the correlation between the act
and duration is thought more precisely: “The greater or less tension of
their duration, which expresses, at bottom, their greater or less intensity
of life, thus determines both the degree of the concentrating power of
their perception and the measure of their liberty” (MM, 279).
The essay of 1889 already indicated that the more the act flowed
from duration, the more it is free, leaving in the shade the question of the
mediation between the profound and the acting ego. In Matter and Memory,
Bergson’s position is clearer, in that he completes the artistic conception of
freedom with a dynamic conception, thought out in terms of intensity and
force: the more duration is intense, the more it is capable of engendering
free actions. In other words, the more the interior force of memory retains
the past in the present, the more it is capable of influencing the future, of
projecting the personality of the profound ego into actions in the world:
Not only, by its memory of former experience, does this consciousness

retain the past better and better, so as to organize it with the present
in a new and richer decision; but, living with an intenser life, contract-
ing, by its memory of the immediate experience, a growing number
of external moments in its present duration, it becomes more capable
of creating acts of which the inner determination, spread over as large
202
a multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please, will pass more

easily through the meshes of necessity. (MM, 332)
It is motor memory that gives the ego the force to resist spatialization, at
least in part, along with the depersonalization that accompanies all action.
The creation of the future by the mind is the measure of its capacity to con-
tract the past into an experience replete with recollections only wanting to
blossom into action. There is indeed an intimate correlation between the
intensity of duration, its burden of selected and accumulated memories,
and the efficacity of freedom, which latter admits, in consequence, an infi-
nite number of degrees, running from the anonymous freedom of the man
who remains the prisoner of his social habits and the creative freedom of
the one who knows how to situate himself in pure duration.
The Creation of Self by Self
The ramifications of the problem of freedom are to be found in the later

works of Bergson, from which I shall select only those points which are
important for the question that concerns us here. In Creative Evolution,
duration is interpreted as life, and is transposed to the totality of the be-
ings of the universe, inert things, passing across animals to reach man, in
whom the élan vital attains its most complete form. Bergson emphasizes
the fact that freedom is first of all the creation of the future, not a crea-
tion ex nihilo, but a creation out of duration, a “creation of self by self”
(création de soi par soi) (CE, 9), thanks to which the ego is able to make
itself what it is:
And just as the talent of the painter is formed and deformed— in any
case, is modified— under the very influence of the works he produces,
so each of our states, at the moment of its issue, modifies our person-
ality, being indeed the new form that we are just assuming. It is right
to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary to
add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are
creating ourselves continually. (CE, 9)
Even if we are not the artists of our life, we are at least its artisans, in the
sense that we never stop modeling our past through our memory and
modifying our future by our own acts. On this subject Bergson evokes the
image of the painter, but we might just as well think of the sculptor, who
forms his basic matter with successive strokes, bearing in mind Plotinus’s
203
precept: “Never stop sculpting your own statue” (Enneads 1.6). What is
continually presupposed by these artistic, dynamic, and temporal concep-
tions of freedom is the plasticity of time, by virtue of which duration is
not given in any definite form, fixed once and for all, even that of a con-
tinual flowing, but is capable, on the contrary, of knowing, through the
action freedom exerts upon it, qualitative variations of intensity, changes
of form, which run from the real and dense duration of the creator— the
artist, the savant, or the philosopher— to the spatialized time of the man
who lives like an automaton in society. The phenomenon of the plasticity
of time breaks through in certain of Bergson’s texts as in this passage
from the article entitled “The Possible and the Real”:
Artisans of our life, even artists when we so desire, we work continually,

with the material furnished us by the past and present, by heredity and
opportunity, to mold a figure unique, new, original, as unforeseeable as
the form given by the sculptor to the clay. (CM, 93– 94)
The matter of which we are made, and which we can mold or sculpt, is
a paradoxical matter, invisible, intangible, in a word immaterial; for it is
composed of the past, the present, and, do we even have to add, of the
future immanent in our duration. By virtue of the plasticity of our dura-
tion we are “to a certain extent” what we do. This qualification suggests
implicitly that the plasticity of duration is limited. Even though Bergson
never explicitly addresses this question, we can say that duration contains
several properties,19 which make it impossible for us to transform it as we
please. Duration is incompressible. In other words, one has to wait until
the sugar melts:
If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until
the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time
I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally
well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were
spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience,
that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I can-
not protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is
something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute. (CE, 12– 13)
Duration is irreversible. The ego can never relive a past state as such. The
famous revivals of involuntary memory described by Proust are in fact a
modification of the past, making of the latter a new present. Finally, dura-
tion is unpredictable. The ego has no power to anticipate its own duration.
But this last determination is both a limit and a condition of the plasticity
204
of duration. Only because duration is unpredictable is it possible for it to

bestow freedom upon creation and action. The unpredictability of dura-
tion is synonymous with its creativity.
The relation of freedom to time is thought both as a coincidence
and a correlation. A coincidence, since duration signifies “invention, the
creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new’” (CE,
14), that is, in the case of man, freedom. A correlation, in the sense that
the degree of freedom enjoyed by someone depends upon the intensity
of that person’s duration, assuming that the latter cannot be quantified.
The article of 1911 entitled “Life and Consciousness” clearly brings this
to mind: “Is not the tension of the duration of a conscious being the
measure of its power of acting, of the quantity of free creative activity
it can introduce into the world?” (ME, 22). Certainly; and it is this that
convinces Bergson that the direction freedom imparts upon time runs
from the past towards the future. So, “the greater his hold on the past in
his present, the heavier is the mass he is pushing into the future against
the eventualities preparing. His action, like an arrow, flies forward with
all the more force the more tensely his representation has been stretched
backward” (ME, 20, trans. modified).20
The Problem of the Possible
Bergson grants the future a primacy of a practical order. The arrow of

time runs from the past to the future. This thesis on the direction of dura-
tion leads him to discuss the idea that the point of departure for actions
was to be sought not in the past, where the present draws its creative élan,
but in a certain anticipation of the future. As we have seen with Leibniz
and Kant, the form under which the future is anticipated is the possible,
a crucial category for the question of the articulation of freedom and of
time. Is Bergson’s critique of the possible compatible with the project of
reconciling time and freedom? In Time and Free Will, the notion of free
will, defined as the power to choose between different possibilities, is
refuted by the argument according to which duration is pure succession
without simultaneity. Free will is an illusion of simultaneity. In The Creative
Mind (especially in the essay “The Possible and the Real”), the critique of
free will becomes more radical: it is the very notion of possibility, which is
an illusion. Bergson distinguishes two forms of the possible. In its nega-
tive sense, which is the only legitimate one, the possible is what is not
impossible, that is, which finds no insurmountable obstacle to its reali-
zation.21 In a positive sense, which is illusory, the possible is an idea whose
205
realization preexists in the present. One imagines that “everything which

occurs could have been foreseen by any sufficiently informed mind,” that
“from all eternity it has existed as possible, in some real or virtual intel-
ligence” (CM, 21, 22). By a virtual intelligence might be meant Kant and
his conditional pre-determinism (an infinite intelligence, knowing all the
circumstantial and psychological data concerning an individual, could
calculate his future conduct as surely as an eclipse of the moon). By a real
intelligence would be meant what Leibniz had in mind when he made the
divine understanding the locus of all possibilities, an immense “cupboard
reserved for possibles” (CM, 100), according to Bergson’s ironic formula.
In this case, the conception of the possible goes along with a principle
of the retrogradation of truth: “If the judgment is true now, it seems to
us it must always have been so” (CM, 22). The future is already given in
the past in such a way that, if one believes Leibniz, it was true a hundred
years ago that I would write this today.
We know how Bergson deconstructs this theory of the possible. Just
as nothingness presupposes being, the possible contains more than the
real; it includes not just the real that has taken place but also a mental
act that projects its image into the past retrospectively. The possible is
the mirage of the present in the past, an illusion prolonged into the
future through a kind of reasoning by analogy. Since we know that the
future is going to become present, “we are convinced that the image of
tomorrow is already contained in our actual present, which will be the
past of tomorrow, although we did not manage to grasp it” (CM, 101).
If the actual present is contained in the past in the form of the possible
(the actual present was possible), then this means that the future present
is also contained in the actual present in the form of the possible (the
future present is already possible). This is how we arrive at the idea that
the future preexists as possible in the present. However, it is only when
I get down to writing today that this very possibility takes on a meaning,
like the shadow born of the real. Such a possibility only accompanies
the real (what is real is a fortiori possible) rather than preparing it. So it
constitutes no justification for any judgment, whether retrospective or
prospective. Bergson inverts the classical schema of action, which wants
the possible to preexist the real, in the figure of an idea, of a project, of
an intention, and so on, with a view to being realized in the present. But
it is the contrary which is true. Freedom creates the possible just as well
as the real, in the image of a work of art of which one can only say that it
has been possible once its creation has been completed. Duration being
an inexhaustible welling up of unpredictable novelty, the future could
not preexist in the present like a seed, a still unknown potential possibility
ready to enter upon the scene of existence. Far from realizing a project,
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the truly free action surprises its own author and escapes him to a certain
degree. There exists an irreducible difference between imagined action
and its realization, between the possible and the act.
These well-known analyses are often disconnected from their philo-
sophical objective, which is to get beyond the opposition represented by
the two camps of free will and determinism in an ever more radical way, a
position which formed the point of departure of the essay of 1889. If the
idea of possibility as a potentiality only needing existence to become real
is illusory, this implies that freedom is neither a choice between possibili-
ties nor a process determined in advance, and where everything would
in consequence be predetermined. In both cases it looks as though the
future was already given. Determinists think that the future preexists in
the present, to which it is not therefore able to contribute anything new.
The partisans of free will for their part consider that the will realizes a
possibility worked out in advance in the form of a project. There again,
there is no true novelty. This critique of possibility carries with it a practi-
cal implication which appears at the end of the article on “The Possible
and the Real”: “If we put the possible back into its proper place, evolution
becomes something quite different from the realisation of a program: the
gates of the future open wide; freedom is offered an unlimited field” (CM,
104). According to Bergson, it is useless to think of the future as a tree
of possibilities, to make of it the preferred locus of human freedom. On
the contrary, such a conception overlooks the intrinsic creativity of dura-
tion. Freedom, which consists in keeping as close as possible to duration,
close to a source whose destiny it is to create, runs not from the possible
to the real, from the future to the present, but, on the contrary, from the
past to the present, or better, from the present to the present, the latter
accumulating all the time in a continual creation of self by self, in the
image of the snowball. This is when one has to admit that the future is
“indeterminate and therefore unforeseeable” (CM, 25), without adding
that it is either contingent nor necessary: “Would not the existence of
time prove that there is indetermination in things? Would not time be
that indetermination itself?” (CM, 93). To claim that the future is indeter-
minate and contingent, in Aristotle’s sense (On Interpretation, chapter 9),
is to surreptitiously apply to it the category of the possible, by seeing in it
something whose contrary is impossible. For Bergson, the indetermina-
tion of the future is total, precisely there where it gets rid of the notion
of possibility, which always implies, in his view, a pre-determination of the
future in the present.
Did Bergson ever manage to reconcile his critique of the possible
with his defense of freedom? It does indeed seem impossible to think
human freedom without reference to the possible. To logical possibility
207
(what is not impossible) and retrospective possibility (the mirage of the

present in the past), a third meaning of the possible has to be added,
one that is overlooked by Bergson, which is prospective possibility, the
anticipation of the future by the will (project, intention). It is not diffi-
cult to agree with Bergson in thinking that the possible is not something
preexisting and so predetermined from all eternity in some divine un-
derstanding, as if the tree of possibility had grown to full maturity in one
instant. The possible grows and ramifies in proportion to the existence
upon which it is grafted. Freedom creates possibilities, not just retro-
spective possibilities corresponding to the reality of its own acts, but espe-
cially prospective possibilities invented to develop its own future. Bergson
emphasizes that making of freedom the accomplishment of a possibility
anticipated by the will comes down to losing the unpredictable novelty
that characterizes any truly free act. What has already been willed is al-
ready déjà vu. But nothing of this kind ever takes place. Novelty, which is
effectively the mark of true, creative freedom, stems from the difference
of the act vis-à-vis the past just as much as the future already anticipated
as possible. In other words, the real is never the same as its anticipation
as possible, the present will never resemble the future. To pretend other-
wise is to deny the qualitative difference between present and future. The
realization of prospective possibility already brings with it a gap, a sense
of the unexpected, of surprise with regard to what had been anticipated.
To take Bergson’s example, the artist does not create blindly or haphaz-
ardly but has a theme in mind, a more or less well-elaborated subject
whose realization in the work will be more or less faithfully accomplished.
But this falling short of fidelity necessarily makes up a part of the task of
creation. For it remains faithful to what ought to be the work of an artist
who can say: “I only remain faithful in my unfaithfulness” (Paul Celan).
The process of free action cannot be understood by abstracting
from prospective possibility. To deny notions of possibility and of choice
is to reduce freedom to a blind spontaneity, to a spectator only able to
uncover the meaning of its action after its realization. Bergson, who re-
fuses such a conception and insists on the active character of freedom,
is nevertheless occasionally induced to discretely rehabilitate the idea
of choice between possibilities.22 The clearest text on this subject is the
paper on “Life and Consciousness.” By selecting the memories it inserts
into perception, memory sketches out several possible actions for the
self: “For if, as we said, consciousness retains the past and anticipates the
future, it is probably because it is called on to make a choice. In order to
choose, we must know what we can do and remember the consequences,
advantageous or injurious, of what we have already done; we must foresee
and we must remember” (ME, 14).
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One might be tempted to say that what we have here is a factical

freedom of the superficial ego caught up in spatialization, therefore far
removed from that true freedom which is founded in pure duration. But
this would be wrong. On the contrary, the day-to-day life of the super-
ficial ego is an automatic activity, in which choice is replaced by habits
that make it unnecessary for it to decide. In what follows, Bergson puts
consciousness, choice, and freedom on the same plane: “On the other
hand, when it is that our consciousness attains its greatest vivacity? Is it
not at those moments of inward crisis when we hesitate between two, or
it may be several, different courses to take, when we feel that our future
will be what we have made of it?” (ME, 15, trans. modified). Between what
can consciousness hesitate if not between one or several possibilities, in
the prospective sense? If this is so, and if time is a “vehicle of creation and
of choice” (CM, 93), then the idea of a ramification has to be retained.
A ramification whose root is human freedom. Curiously, Bergson admits
the idea of a ramification of the past, “which grows like a plant, like a
magic plant that, at every moment, transforms its leaves and flowers” (ME,
23, trans. modified). The past gets modified and developed in proportion
as the duration of the ego assimilates the present. Why would it not be
the same with the future? Only insofar as it is a development ramifying
out into prospective possibilities, feeding on its duration, that the future
is the condition of the possibility of human freedom.
Bergson discovered that freedom lies in our coincidence with pure
duration, and that this coincidence makes it possible for us to establish,
through the mediation of memory, a genuine correlation between dura-
tion and action, pointing, like an arrow, from the past in the direction of
the future. However, we still find ourselves faced with three difficulties
that do not seem to have been resolved in the frame of this philosophy.
(1) As we have just seen, the condition of the temporality of freedom and
of the plasticity of time is a positive concept of prospective possibilities,
a concept that needs to be clarified. (2) By making of real time a dura-
tion which is in itself creative, Bergson does justice to the link between
freedom and time, but he also thereby conceals its negative or destruc-
tive dimension, what might be called the negativity of time and which, in
what lives, is manifest in aging and death. (3) This rejection of negativity,
of nothingness, is found in the very conception of freedom, from which
he withholds even the power to deny, to refuse, a refusal evident in the
very notion of choice. These problems prescribe a double task, which
lies at the heart of the philosophies of Sartre and Levinas: rethinking
the relation of freedom and time without losing sight of their respective
negativities; restoring the notion of possibility, even while upholding the
thesis with regard to the unpredictability of the future.
8
Freedom at the root of Time

(Sartre)
With Bergson, the reciprocal connection established by Kant between

time and the principle of causality is called in question, in the sense in
which it is restricted to spatialized time. Another form of time is pos-
sible, however, one which, liberated from causal determinism, becomes
the auxiliary of freedom. This temporality of freedom is the condition of
that creation of self by self that Bergson talks about. Consciousness of the
negativity of time is increased at the same time as that of the negativity of
freedom. The articulation of these two negativities passed by way of the
notion of the possible, a characteristic of the modality of the future, on
the one hand, and of the other temporal horizon of freedom. Between
Leibniz’s predetermined possibility, contained from all eternity in the
understanding of God, and Bergson’s retrospective illusion, there is room
for a prospective possibility based on freedom, a non-being not yet exist-
ing, capable, or not, of being realized. The rehabilitation of possibility is
rooted in a conception of freedom as choice, which itself presupposes a
new understanding of human existence. In De l’acte, published in 1937,
Louis Lavelle, six years before the publication of Being and Nothingness, al-
ready gives expression to Sartre’s celebrated formula according to which
existence precedes essence:
We should not be afraid here to reverse (with regard to man) the

classical relation that speculative philosophy has always established
between the notions of essence and existence. If I ask who I am before
I ask whether I am, I recognize the primacy of essence over existence.
But I could not have thought that I am except in an experience which
reveals first of all that I am. . . . But existence only makes sense for us in-
sofar as it allows us not to realize an essence already posited in advance
but to determine it through our choice and to coincide with it. (Lavelle
1992, 94)
Lavelle reformulates Bergson’s idea, affirming that we are what we make

of ourselves and that we create ourselves continuously.1 Sartre will say that
man is only what he makes of himself. These points of convergence indi-
209
210
cated in my view not so much a hidden connection but the persistence of

a problem, that of the link between time and freedom. For the thesis that
existence precedes essence, according to which man is the result of his
free choices, presupposes a specific relation of freedom with time, more
particularly, with the future. This is why Lavelle writes that “in the future,
it is our ego itself which is at work and which is constantly re-created by
us” (Lavelle 1945, 287). For those who think that essence precedes exis-
tence, time goes from the past towards the future according to necessary
causal laws. The future is already contained in the present, being only
a predetermined future which simply unfolds what is already there. For
those on the contrary who hold that existence precedes essence, time
springs out of the future to enter the present and get deposited in the
past. The future is a constellation of undetermined possibilities, and
the past is a totality of realized possibilities. Even while breaking with the
spiritualist perspective of Bergson and Lavelle, Sartre picks up the torch
of the question of temporality and freedom. To which he offers answers
which are in part new, inspired by the phenomenology of Husserl and
Heidegger. How does he structure freedom, defined as the negativity of
human being, with regard to time?
is the Future determined

or Undetermined?
The condition sine qua non of freedom is the plasticity of time. If time
is entirely subject to causal determinism, freedom is an illusion, for the
future is necessary, fixed in advance in its very being. In this sense, all
determinism is a pre-determinism. The choice of freedom presupposes
a contingent future, composed, in what concerns human acts, of possi-
bilities that might or might not transpire. Time is plastic in the sense in
which the future can take several possible figures, sketched out accord-
ing to the choices and projects of freedom, which itself lies at the root of
different modes of temporality. To the time of things, regulated by the
principle of causality, there has to be added a time of freedom, proper
to man. To uphold the above, diverse forms of determinism have to be
refuted; for they all finish up reifying time and denying its plasticity. In
other words, a critique of determinism is the prior condition for any re-
flection on the temporality of freedom.
Did Sartre follow a procedure of this kind? An indication in this
direction is that the problem of determinism is broached in the very
first chapter of Being and Nothingness, entitled “The Origin of Negation.”
211
F R E EDO M AT T HE ROOT OF T I ME (S ARTRE)
Nothingness is at the heart of being, which it presupposes. Since being in

itself is fully positive, it cannot produce this nothingness, whose origin has
to be sought elsewhere: in a being that nihilates, namely, human being,
the being through which nothingness comes into the world. Sartre calls
it the “For-itself” (le pour-soi), in opposition to the fully positive being,
the “In-itself” (l’en-soi). To back up his reasoning, he analyses the act of
questioning. Positing a question presupposes the possibility of a negative
reply, so the possibility of negation. The questioner realizes a “nihilating
withdrawal in relation to the given” (BN, 23), which as a result of being
questioned begins to oscillate between being and nothingness. In order
that such an interrogation should be possible, the questioner has to have
the “permanent possibility of dissociating himself from the causal series
which constitutes being and which can produce only being” (BN, 23).
The cause produces an effect which entirely depends upon its cause, and
in such a way that in this process there are not the slightest interstices
through which nothingness could slip in. If the questioner was in fact
subject to universal causal determinism, he would be unable to question.
But questioning is possible, and precisely because the question creates
a nihilating step back: “the questioner must be able to effect in relation
to the questioned a kind of nihilating withdrawal, he is not subject to
the causal order of the world; he detaches himself from Being” (BN, 23).
The act of interrogation makes it possible for the For-itself to introduce
nothingness into being and so get free of the causal determinism of the
world. Sartre identifies freedom with this nihilating power, of which the
questioning act is only one form among others, privileged by its inaugural
position. The conception of freedom as negativity, “this possibility which
human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it” (BN, 24),
provides Sartre with a principle enabling him to resolve the problem of
the opposition between freedom and determinism, one that goes back to
Kant’s “Third Antinomy.” As the power of producing nothingness, free-
dom has the capacity to isolate itself, to free itself from the causal series
by which being-in-itself is bound.
With Kant, as we have seen, the form taken by universal determin-
ism for men is psychological determinism, true in principle if not in fact.
If one could know all the motives of man in their last details, one could
calculate his future conduct as certainly as the eclipse of the moon.2 But
on the one hand, such a knowledge is not available to man who is unable
to discover causal laws in the realm of mind, while on the other hand, man
remains free from the noumenal standpoint, which is strictly atemporal.
In contrast to Kant, and in the wake of Bergson, Sartre tries to work out
a temporal freedom, which leads him to refuse psychological determin-
ism. A procedure of this kind, which begins with the analysis of what it
212
means to question, is prolonged in the study of perception, in which the

question of the temporality of consciousness is addressed. Sartre’s aim
is to show that “by identifying consciousness with a causal sequence in-
definitely continued, one transmutes it into a plenitude of being” (BN,
25– 26). In other words, the negativity of the For-itself gets converted into
the positivity of the In-itself, which renders unintelligible the process of
consciousness. Sartre takes the example of the perception of Peter’s room
in which he is not present. Consciousness grasps the room in a series of
successive perceptions. The succession of these perceptions is accompa-
nied by the continual introduction of negativities, which are not given
in the being-in-itself of the room. In itself, the book Peter has skimmed
through is not Peter’s book, but an anonymous object existing entirely in
the present. Only for a consciousness that perceives them do the traces it
carries have the meaning of a past referring back to Peter. So the absence
of Peter is perceived across a series of negativities attached to objects pres-
ent in the room and which are produced by the perceiving consciousness.
Sartre draws from this the conclusion that “the succession of my ‘states of
consciousness’ is a perpetual separation of effect from cause, since every
nihilating process must derive its source only from itself” (BN, 27). The
nihilation (néantisation) inherent in the perception of Peter’s absence is
not a worldly effect but is the contribution of consciousness. So it is not
exposed to the causal order of the world. As a psychic process of nihila-
tion, consciousness produces a continual rupture between the immediate
psychic past and the present. But this rupture does not allow for a solu-
tion appealing to the continuity of the temporal flux in consciousness,
for “nothing” separates the present from its immediate past, this nothing
being precisely nothingness itself (BN, 28).
Consciousness “carries nothingness within itself as the nothing which
separates its present from all its past” (BN, 28). Here we get to appreciate
the progress made since The Transcendence of the Ego (1936), from which
certain conclusions seem to have been integrated into Being and Noth-
ingness (1943). In the essay of 1936, Sartre takes up again some of the
conclusions of Husserl’s lectures of 1905 on the Phenomenology of the Con-
sciousness of Internal Time. Pre-reflexive consciousness constitutes its own
unity as the absolute flux, with appealing to a transcendental ego, which
latter relies much more on the immanent unity of the flux of conscious-
ness. The self-consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity, a “transcen-
dental field” without a subject containing neither negativity nor freedom:
“Consciousness is frightened by its own spontaneity because it senses this
spontaneity as beyond freedom” (Sartre 1957, 100). No link is established
between immanent time of consciousness and freedom. At the end of the
analysis of perception developed at the beginning of Being and Nothing-
213
ness, consciousness is always grasped as a pre-reflexive and continuous

temporal flux, with this difference all the same, that nihilation has now
been introduced into the process, which makes it possible from now on
to make the spontaneity of consciousness coincide with the freedom of
the For-itself. The nihilating power of freedom bears upon the causal
order, from which it can always abstract itself and more particularly from
the past. For “freedom is human being putting his past out of play by
secreting his own nothingness” (BN, 28). Human being is his past in the
mode of not being it. The inveterate gambler always has the possibility of
rejecting his past, of deciding not to gamble anymore. But by the same
token, when he approaches the green table, he experiences what Sartre
calls “anguish” (angoisse)3 in the face of the past (BN, 33), all his resolu-
tions become ineffective, because the past moment of his decision can
itself also be placed out of play. The repentant gambler experiences at
this moment “the permanent rupture in determinism; it is nothingness
that separates him from himself” (BN, 33).
The experience of anguish or anxiety discloses freedom in relation
to the future rather than the past. In front of the green carpet, the gambler
feels the anguish of falling back into the vice of his past, but what he is
anxious about is still a future possibility. The famous example of the prec-
ipice is Sartre’s opportunity to describe the temporalization of freedom
in the direction of the future.4 On the edge of the precipice, I am afraid
of falling. Fear obeys the logic of causality. I am situated like a thing in
the midst of the universal determinism of the world, subject to objective
causes like the slippery character of the path. I react by projecting pos-
sible courses of action to escape the danger. But these courses of action
are precisely my possibilities. They are not determined by external causes.
I am not even myself their cause in the sense in which I would have to
carry them through. I can always do the opposite. Because my possibilities
are contingent, they are not predetermined either by the exterior causes
of the world or by myself considered as a cause. In order that my possi-
bilities should be considered as determined, I have to postulate a psycho-
logical determinism, according to which the instinct of self-preservation
would be a sufficiently powerful motive to determine my future conduct.
However, my anguish begins at the moment when I discover that the fear,
the horror of the precipice does not determine my future behavior: I can
throw myself into the abyss in spite of everything. Anguish is certainly, as
Kierkegaard noted,5 the vertigo of freedom, born of a freedom that frees
itself from the causal order of the world at the risk of losing itself. From
the distinction between fear and anguish, causality and freedom, there
arise two figures of the future. Fear hands me over to a “strictly deter-
mined” transcendent future (BN, 31). This future is transcendent in the
214
sense in which it lies beyond the For-itself, belongs to the world In-itself,
exists among beings subject to the principle of causality. In fear, I am the
one I will be. I badly want to avoid the precipice, and do whatever has to
be done to avoid the danger. My future is predetermined, takes on the
figure of necessity.
Anguish breaks with the causal order. It is the call to freedom as
the power to nihilate motives and causes. So anguish offers me an un-
determined future, a totality of possibilities that I can realize or can not
realize. In anguish, “I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it”
(BN, 32). I am the one I will be, to the extent that my project of walking
along the path implies that of going around the precipice. I am already
at the end of the path, beyond the precipice. But I am not the one I will
be, for I am separated from this near future not just by time but especially
by my own freedom, which introduces a nothingness between my pres-
ent and my future. At any moment I can change my mind, change my
project. For Sartre the future remains contingent and undetermined. It
contains possibilities which I can either realize or not realize, and which
are determined by no cause either within or without the For-itself. This
contingency of the future stems from the nihilating power of human
freedom. As a free being, I am the one I was and the one I will be in the
mode of not being it. Freedom has to be defined in relation to time: it is
the power of putting the past out of action and of transforming the future
into a multiplicity of undetermined possibilities.
With Sartre, the plasticity of time means that it is not a monolithic
reality, since it can offer freedom at least two figures of the future, de-
termined and undetermined. The critique of determinism on which this
thesis relies is tackled in the fourth part of Being and Nothingness, (“Being
and Doing: Freedom”). What is supposed to determine action? The situa-
tion in which I find myself, my past, my motives. With regard to the first
hypothesis, Sartre objects that the act is motivated not by a given state of
affairs (economical, political, etc.), but by an ideal state, which is still ab-
sent and projected by the For-itself. To act is to want to modify the world,
no matter how little, so to project an alternative state which is not yet
present. In action, consciousness bears on a non-being to come, which is
its goal. The origin of the act is a lack, a negativity. Since “what is can in
no way determine by itself what is not” (BN, 435), the present situation
is not the cause of action. It is the For-itself alone, as nihilating power,
which commits itself to action.
Nor is the act determined by the past of the one who acts. For the
For-itself has “the permanent possibility of effecting a rupture with its own
past, of wrenching itself away from its past so as to be able to consider it
in the light of a non-being and so as to be able to confer on it the mean-
215
ing which it has in terms of the project of a meaning which it does not
have” (BN, 436). The For-itself can certainly not change the past, but it
can modify its meaning. The project carries with it a retrospective view
on the past from the future. In the light of the end that I try to realize, I
am going to give my past and my present a new meaning that reinforces
this end. From this point of view, it is the act that determines the past in
its meaning and not the reverse. To the partisans of determinism, Sartre
agrees that every action has a motive, a reason, as well as an intention,
an end aimed at. As such, the action brings about the unity of the three
temporal ecstasies: “The end or temporalization of my future implies a
cause (or motive); that is, it points toward my past, and the present is
the upsurge of the act” (BN, 436). But the error of the determinists is to
consider that the motive is the cause of the acts. The motive never suf-
fices to explain the act— in conformity with the principle of insufficient
reason, a new version of which is to be found here— because it is in effect
constituted by the For-itself as a motive on the basis of a free act, which
itself has no motive. The motive is the outcome of the project. Sartre gives
the example of the revolutionary. It is not because he suffers that the
worker decides to revolt, it is because he makes of revolution his project,
that he determines his suffering as one of the motives for his action.
There is no act without a motive but there is no motive without an act
that constitutes it. The motive, the act, and its goal, the three elements
of the process of action, do not stem from the principle of causality, they
are founded in freedom, understood as “pure temporalizing nihilation”
(BN, 438).
The preceding analyses bear on psychological determinism criti-
cized in all its aspects. Sartre completes these analyses with a discussion
of Leibnizian metaphysical determinism. He sets out from the idea, de-
fended by Leibniz, according to which it could have been possible for
Adam not to take the apple. Sartre allows him two points. Adam’s free-
dom implies his contingency, in the sense that the contrary of his action
is possible. In addition, the act accomplished by him is a commitment of
his whole person, for if Adam had not collected the apple, he would not
have been the same Adam. So to say that Adam might not have picked
the apple comes down to saying, in effect, that “another Adam might
have been possible” (BN, 468). At the moment he acts, the real Adam
coexists with an infinity of possible Adams, carrying with them a more or
less important modification of the attributes composing his substance.
But Leibniz falls back into necessitarianism for at least two reasons. The
first relates to the status of possibility. In Leibniz’s theory of preestab-
lished harmony, the possible only exists as a thought in the divine un-
derstanding, it is an “abstract possible” (BN, 469), or a “thought which
216
is only thought” (BN, 97). Even though it bears within itself a tendency to
existence, the Leibnizian possibility can never rejoin the real world, but
rather runs alongside it in a parallel trajectory extending to infinity. For
Sartre, the possible is neither the fruit of our subjective ignorance, as Spi-
noza thinks, nor a non-contradictory reality belonging to another world
on the margin of the existing world, destined to remain nothing but a
thought in the divine mind. The possible really does possibilize, letting
human being know who he is. Detached from its theological and meta-
physical context, Leibniz’s initial proposition acquires a different mean-
ing. Adam can not pick the apple. Another act then engenders another
Adam, therefore another world. But for Sartre, this other world is not a
possible world fixed forever in the divine mind, it is the “revelation of
another face of the world,” which corresponds “to another being-in-the-
world of Adam” (BN, 469).
If however, with Leibniz, the possible remains enclosed in the divine
understanding, it is because the act of the individual is contained in its
essence from the very beginning. This is the ultimate origin of Leibniz’s
necessitarianism, the principle of the praedicatum inest subjecto. Adam’s act
“is strictly necessitated by the very essence of Adam,” which reduces his
contingency to nothing (BN, 468). If Adam chose not to pick the apple,
he would not have been Adam. But can Adam choose to be another
Adam? Not at all, because “the essence of Adam is not chosen by Adam
himself but by God” (BN, 468). In the economy of the creation, the es-
sence of Adam has been chosen from all eternity by God, and in such a
way that it can only unfold in the real world according to the logic of its
predicates. In Sartre’s eyes, we are talking about a reduction of chronol-
ogy to logic and about a negation of freedom. In suppressing time one
also suppresses freedom. One might agree with Leibniz in thinking that
the act committed by Adam flowed from his essence, but only on condi-
tion of admitting that the essence of Adam was chosen by Adam himself
and not imposed upon him: “For us, indeed, the problem of freedom is
placed on the level of Adam’s choice of himself— that is, on the deter-
mination of essence by existence” (BN, 469). Sartre recuperates in a new
form the decisive thesis of Schelling, who, in order to avoid the paradoxes
of pre-determinism, claimed that the essence of man is fundamentally
his own act.6 For Leibniz on the contrary, essence precedes existence,
which latter is included in the complete notion of each individual. Sartre
reminds us that, for human reality, “essence comes after existence. Adam
is defined by the choice of his ends; that is, by the upsurge of an ecstatical
temporalization which has nothing in common with the logical order”
(BN, 468). While Schelling pushed the original choice of the essence
back to an eternity situated beyond the frontiers of consciousness, Sartre
217
made of the former a conscious and temporal act. In getting freedom

back again, he was able to recover time.
The Temporality of the For-itself
Freedom is pure temporalizing nihilation. This means that there is an

interweaving between freedom and time, in the sense that the one is
not possible without the other. How is this relation of mutual belong-
ing to be characterized? In the same way that Heidegger shows in Being
and Time how Dasein’s existentialia presuppose the ecstasies of temporal-
ity, so Sartre describes each immediate dimension of the For-itself with
reference to a dimension of time. Contrary to the In-itself, which is pure
identity with itself, adherence to itself, the For-itself is a “presence to self”
understood as a “detachment on the part of being in relation to itself,”
an “impalpable fissure,” a “decompression of being,” which is nothing
other than nothingness (BN, 77– 78). Consciousness is non-thetic con-
sciousness of self and relates only to itself in a pre-reflective mode, which
implies a distance from itself, a non-coincidence with self which stems
from its nihilating power. So the For-itself needs the present to be itself,
but the presence to itself of the For-itself is a presence fractured by its
own negativity, which defines the temporality of its presence. The two
other fundamental structures of the For-itself are also marked with the
seal of temporality. Facticity, which designates the contingence of pres-
ence, refers to the dimension of the past, in the sense that the For-itself
is not the foundation of its own existence, which is always already there,
emerging from a past that it is in the mode of not being it. As for the
possible, it is easy to see that it is itself only possible in reference to the
future. The possible is “the something which the For-itself lacks in order to
be itself” (BN, 102), the being the For-itself has to be while having the
power to not be it. As was shown by the analysis of anguish, such a possi-
bility requires that the future remain undetermined, in the absence of
which it would be an illusion.
Sartre follows up his study of the immediate structures of the For-
itself with a phenomenology of the three temporal dimensions, intended
to deepen the link sketched out between the For-itself and time. To grasp
the past as a cerebral trace or an image is to miss the dimension of the past;
for a trace, just like an image, is something present. In order not to sur-
reptitiously reduce the past to the present, one can say, with Bergson, that
the past event still exists, that it retains its place for all eternity but that, as
opposed to the actual present, it is no longer effective. The past would be
218
a present that has ceased to be effective. But then, Sartre asks, how can we
understand the way in which the past returns to haunt the present if it has
been deprived of all activity? Husserl’s solution, which consists in making of
the past a series of retentions of consciousness, does not manage to avoid
the trap represented by the instantaneity of the cogito. Retentions are vain
attempts at transcendence, and which remain imprisoned in the present
of consciousness. And from now on Sartre will be much more critical of
Husserl’s intentionality: “Consciousness, as Husserl conceived it, cannot
in reality transcend itself either toward the world or toward the future or
toward the past” (BN, 109). Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time-
consciousness is rejected without appeal, for reasons we will have to go
into later. However, Husserl gets it right on one point. The past is nothing
without a consciousness that grasps it as such. Sartre reminds us of his thesis
with regard to the atemporality of the In-itself. The In-itself is character-
ized by its immediate identity with itself. It has neither a past nor a future
and exists entirely in a present deprived of negativity; “the past has slipped
away from it like a dream” (BN, 109). The past is then always the past of a
human reality, which alone has a past: “There is a past only for a present
which cannot exist without being its past— back there, behind itself; that
is, only those beings have a past which are such that in their being, their
past being is in question, those beings who have to be their past” (BN, 114).
The For-itself is its past in the mode of not being it. This dialecti-
cal relation presupposes a certain identity of the For-itself with its past.
From this point of view, one should not say “I was my past,” or “I have my
past” but “I am my past” (BN, 115). What does such a proposition mean?
I am my past in the sense that I am one with the act I have done, as if my
past stuck to my skin. Without this adherence of the past to the present,
responsibility would not make sense, freedom could deviate each time
into an always renewed present. But the past weighs with all its weight
on the existence of the For-itself, for the past is what it is and cannot be
changed in its content. What is done is done in such a way that it consti-
tutes a form of the In-itself at the heart of the For-itself. This saturation
of the present by the past attains its peak in death, where the For-itself is
nothing but its past. Death “changes life into Destiny” according to the
formula of Malraux, cited by Sartre (BN, 115). It fixes the existence of
the For-itself in a series of completed acts accomplished once and for all:
“by death the For-itself is changed forever into an In-itself in that it has
slipped entirely into the past. Thus the past is the ever growing totality of
the In-itself which we are’” (BN, 115). Death is the flawless coincidence of
the For-itself with its past, the For-itself made totally past. But that means
that “so long as we are not dead, we are not this In-itself in the mode of
identity. We have to be it” (BN, 115).
219
Thus, as long as I am alive, I am my past in the mode of not being

it, that is, “I am not my past” (BN, 116). The distance between myself and
my past seems to stem from time itself. I am not my past, I was it, I have
been it. Thus, “that heavy plenitude of being is behind me; there is an
absolute distance which cuts it from me and makes it fall out of my reach,
without contact, without connections” (BN, 118). Freedom as a nihilat-
ing power is what constantly creates this gap between my present and
my past. We have in fact seen that freedom has the capacity to nihilate,
to neutralize the past. This implies that everything I am, I am precisely
on account of my past. My essence is my past, according to the phrase
used by Hegel and reproduced by Sartre— “Wesen ist was gewesen ist” (BN,
120)— and reciprocally, my past is my essence. It defines what I am, more
exactly what I have been up until now. To say that I am irritable is to say
that I have been irritable up until now, in my past acts, but I can change
this character trait at any moment, and this by acting in another way.
Consequently I am never my past but only have to be it through actions
which might or might not be repeated. The For-itself is always beyond its
past and can only assume it through an act, that recuperates it only by
placing it at a distance from himself. The past is “the In-itself which I am,
but I am this In-itself as surpassed [dépassé]” (BN, 118). It is a For-itself that
has become In-itself and which remains behind the For-itself, a heaviness
both conserved and surpassed at the same time. This paradoxical struc-
ture of an In-itself that the For-itself has to be without being able to be it
fully, Sartre identifies with facticity: “The Past in fact, like Facticity, is the
invulnerable contingency of the In-itself which I have to be without any
possibility of not being it” (BN, 118). The contingency of the In-itself—
its complete absence of foundation— gets communicated to the For-itself
from the standpoint of its past. Just as the For-itself can never be its own
foundation, it cannot be its own past, which for all that constitutes it
in its essence. The For-itself fails to be its own foundation, because the
latter constantly slides away into a past that escapes him. The question is:
whether it is the past that defines facticity, in the sense that it features as
the condition of its possibility, or whether, on the contrary, it is facticity
that installs the past. Sartre does not try to resolve this difficulty, simply
affirming that “‘Facticity’ and ‘Past’ are two words to indicate one and
the same thing” (BN, 118).
The past is the In-itself that perpetually haunts the For-itself. By con-
trast, the present arises directly from the For-itself, as the presence of the
For-itself to itself and to the world. This presence is intentional, for the
present is present to the things it intends. It is conscious of these things
even while conscious of not being them. Intentionality is a transcendence
that projects the For-itself outside itself in the world of the In-itself, but
220
it contains an intrinsic negation by virtue of which the For-itself distin-

guishes itself constantly from the objects it intends, knowing that it is not
itself these objects. From this negativity inherent in intentionality, Sartre
deduces the negativity of the present, which is precisely “this negation
of being, this escape from being inasmuch as being is there as that from
which one escapes” (BN, 123). The present is, in the sense that it is the
presence of the For-itself to the world and to itself, and it is not, for it is
the perpetual flight of the For-itself in the face of being. Towards what
does the For-itself flee? The present passes from the fact that the For-itself
continually flees the present world toward the future that is not yet. The
For-itself is temporal from beginning to end. It is not what it is (its past)
and it is what it is not (its future).
What is the relation of the For-itself to the future? Just as for the
past, Sartre begins by emphasizing that the future only makes sense for
the For-itself. The In-itself does not includes a future, it is entirely what it
is in a compact present. It is only through human reality that the future
gets into the world. So the new moon announces a future full moon only
for a For-itself that actually perceives it. For all that the future is not a
representation of the For-itself, which would in consequence drag it back
to the present. Nor is it a “now” awaiting its actualization, in which case it
would be reified and would fall back into the domain of the In-itself. The
future “is what I have to be in so far as I can not be it” (BN, 125). As such,
it is disclosed in the projection of the For-itself towards what it is not yet.
This understanding of the future as project makes it possible to refute two
other conceptions of the future, as protention on the part of conscious-
ness or as anticipation on the part of the imagination. The transcendence
of the project implies a tearing away of the For-itself from its present and
a leap into non-being. This is precisely what Husserl’s protentions can-
not do, which “pitifully fall back on themselves— like flies bumping their
noses on the windows without being able to clear the glass” (BN, 100).
For Sartre internal time consciousness is like a glass house from which it
is impossible to escape, whether in the direction of the past or the future.
But would it not be possible for the imagination to accomplish a transcen-
dence of the future, projecting me into a virtual world in which I am who
I am not? In no way. This imaginary world is in fact situated right alongside
the real world, running parallel to it, while the future world envisaged
by the project is a new figure of the world, already present in Itself in the
form of possibilities created by the For-itself.
The future is nothing but the For-itself waiting for itself as a pres-
ence still to come, what is lacking to the For-itself to be itself. In its project,
the For-itself wants to be something in-itself (it wants to be happy, brave,
to be a doctor, etc.), but it never gets further than a new form of the For-
221
itself. For like the horizon, the future recedes as we advance towards it. It
offers a reflection of being but only gives it as possible. This moving status
of the future emerges even more clearly when it is compared with the
past, which is the being I am in the mode of not being it. If I can adopt
different attitudes in order not to be my past, hold it at a distance, away
from myself, this always happens on the basis of an identity that it is not
possible for me not to be. I can not be my past precisely because, first and
foremost, I cannot not be it: “The past is, to be sure, the being which I
am outside of myself, but it is the being which I am without the possibility
of not being it” (BN, 128). The future on the other hand is linked to the
structure of possibility of the For-itself; it is what I have to be even while
being able to not be it. The distinction between past and future passes by
way of possibility. I am my future with the constant possibility of not being
it. Up to now we have brought to light the reciprocal relation that unites
time with the For-itself. In turning to the future, it becomes clear that this
relation itself rests on that of time and freedom. If I am my future only
in the mode of the possible, it is because in fact “my freedom gnaws at its
being from below” (BN, 128). The For-itself is separated from its future
by a nothingness which is: its freedom. The future is “what I would be
if I were not free and what I can have to be only because I am free” (BN,
128– 29). Freedom is a nihilating power which extracts from the future
a profusion of undetermined possibilities, which might or might not be
realized. In claiming that the For-itself is an “infinity of possibilities” (BN,
129), Sartre catches a glimpse of the idea of the ramification of possibili-
ties, according to which freedom, in its relation to the future, transforms
human existence into a complex set of possible sequences, ramified as a
function of the choice of the individual on each occasion.
With regard to this game of possibilities, a radical pre-determinism
like that of Laplace is only a fiction. To claim that all future events are pre-
dictable in principle presupposes a “preliminary revelation of the future
as such,” which can only stem from a “being which is its own future,” the
For-itself (BN, 124). But as soon as one posits the For-itself, one posits
freedom, therefore the indeterminateness of the future. In other words,
“determinism appears on the ground of the futurizing project of myself,”
and so refutes itself (BN, 127). To be valid, pre-determinism would para-
doxically have to dispense with the future, the future through which the
freedom of the For-itself slips in and so ruins it. Time would have to be
reduced to a deductive logical order. The negation of freedom can only
be achieved at the exorbitant cost of the negation of time. Once one rec-
ognizes that time is not an illusion, freedom has to be admitted.
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant thought that only the atempo-
rality of the intelligible character could save freedom on the noumenal
222
plane, even while making it clear in the second Critique that man gives
himself this intelligible character.7 Sartre rejects this solution. The free
project “is not non-temporal, only to acquire time later.” This is why we
“reject Kant’s ‘choice of intelligible character’” (BN, 480). For Sartre,
time is perfectly compatible with freedom, precisely because it is no lon-
ger equivalent to strict causal necessity. Understood in the light of the
project that carries it along, the future does not predetermine the For-
itself in any way at all; it only sketches out in advance the frame within
which the For-itself will be what it is not yet. The future is not, in the
sense that it is not fixed in advance in a series of predetermined events;
it possibilizes itself in a multiplicity of possibilities which emerge out of
the project of the For-itself. What attests to a phenomenon of this kind?
The experience of anxiety, which reminds the For-itself of the indeter-
minateness of its future, a future it is only in the mode of being able to
be it, and which reveals the contingency of the future, threatened by the
vertigo of the possible. In Sartre’s philosophy, the future is contingent in
a sense that is just as much causal as modal: it is uncaused because it stems
from the nihilating power of freedom as the foundationless foundation
of my project; and it is not necessitated, since its contrary is always pos-
sible, since it depends upon the choice of the For-itself, who can always
give up his project.
Two Hypotheses about the relationship

of Freedom and Time
The relation of freedom to time is dialectical, a game of identity and

difference. In what concerns the second aspect of the relation, freedom
is characterized by the power to suspend the past, to break with the In-
itself permanently carted along in the For-itself. Even if it is impossible to
change the past in its content, the For-itself can always give it a new mean-
ing as a function of its project. The nihilating power of freedom “implies
for consciousness the permanent possibility of effecting a rupture with
its own past, of wrenching itself away from its past so as to be able to
consider it in the light of a non-being and so as to be able to confer on
it the meaning which it has in terms of the project of a meaning which
it does not have” (BN, 436). Breaking with the past does not mean starting
again from scratch but seeing it in the light of the future. That is possible
because the future contains a certain plasticity that renders it available
in part for freedom. But here again, the relation of the For-itself to the
future is negative in the first instance. Freedom “gnaws” at the future, to
223
the extent that it continually introduces a nihilating distance between the

For-itself and its possibilities: “My possibilities do not exist but are possibil-
ized because they are eaten away from within by my freedom; that is, what-
ever my possible may be, its opposite is equally possible” (BN, 196– 97).
Freedom lightens the future constantly, offering it the form of the pos-
sible, thereby relieving it of the weight of the In-itself which might other-
wise attach to it.
That there is a close correlation between freedom and time in Sar-
tre’s philosophy is beyond doubt. But this correlation is a bit obscure.
To clarify matters, we need to develop two hypotheses. The first, dualist
hypothesis, consists in thinking that time and freedom are two processes
of nihilation which exist in a relation of reciprocal action. Freedom pos-
sibilizes the future, which in return gives it the distance of the “not yet”
that makes it possible. Certain texts run in this direction. In the course
of the analysis of anxiety, Sartre explains that I am not my future not only
because I am free at any moment to change my project, but also because
“time separates me from it” (BN, 32). He indicates in what follows that the
“nihilating structure of the pre-reflective cogito” and the “nihilating struc-
ture of temporality” constitute “two types of nihilation” (BN, 34). At the
end of the section entitled “The For-Itself and the Being of Possibilities,”
he writes that “this nothingness that separates human reality from itself is
at the origin of time” (BN, 102). The whole problem is to know if we are
talking about human freedom or of a more original nothingness which
would lie at the root of both freedom and time. The solution to this prob-
lem is postponed until a later part of the work. In any case, the chapter
on temporality makes it possible to construct a second hypothesis, a mo-
nist hypothesis this time. There we find Sartre talking about temporality
as a structure internal to the For-itself. The For-itself does not encounter
time as a being external to it and already given in advance, it temporal-
izes itself: “Temporality exists only as the intra-structure of a being which
has to be its own being; that is, as the intra-structure of a For-itself. Not
that the For-itself has an ontological priority over temporality. But Tem-
porality is the being of the For-itself in so far as the For-itself has to be
its being ecstatically. Temporality is not, but the For-itself temporalizes
itself by existing” (BN, 136). Sartre reformulates the Heideggerian thesis
of section 65 of Being and Time, according to which temporality, defined
as ecstasis, is the ontological meaning of care, the specific mode of being
of Dasein. But whereas with Heidegger as we saw in chapter 6, temporal-
ity has an ontological priority over Dasein, which is not itself the source
of time, Sartre, even though he won’t admit it, accords the For-itself an
ontological priority over temporality, which stems from the nihilation
proper to freedom.
224
Man is the being that hatches nothingness in the world. By his

freedom, he introduces possibility and time into the In-itself, an In-itself
which is in itself atemporal. From this point of view, freedom is the nihila-
tion at the root of time: “The pure temporalizing nihilation of the in-itself
is one with freedom” (BN, 438). In temporalizing itself, freedom tempo-
ralizes time and gives itself what makes time possible. If, according to
Sartre, Husserl never managed to get past the instantaneous conception
of the cogito, it is because the original flux of internal time consciousness
is a pure and anonymous immanence, which leaves no room for the tran-
scendence of freedom: “Since, on the contrary, it is consciousness which
temporalizes itself, we must conceive of the original choice as unfolding
time and being one with the unity of the three ecstasies. . . . Thus free-
dom, choice, nihilation, temporalization are all one and the same thing”
(BN, 465). I think this identification ought however to be understood in a
genetic sense, by respecting the order in which it is formulated. Freedom
as choice is a nihilating power that temporalizes time.
How? The notion of moment provides us with a good model. From
Schelling to Heidegger, and by way of Kierkegaard, the moment has been
conceived as the “lightning flash of freedom,”8 the form of time man
gives himself when he makes a decision. For Schelling in particular, the
moment is not a beginning in time but a beginning of time itself, since at
each moment the whole of time arises in the dynamic unity of the three
temporal dimensions. Sartre belongs within this tradition of thought, to
which he is committed in particular by his reading of Heidegger, from
whom he derives the philosophical move that consists in completely tem-
poralizing Kierkegaard’s notion of the moment, by emptying it of all
reference to eternity. In Being and Nothingness, the moment, renamed
“instant” (“instant” in French),9 is situated at the heart of the immanent
temporality of the For-itself; it is the break choice produces in its ecstati-
cal unity, marking the beginning of a new project and the end of a pre-
vious project: “Thus the new choice is given as a beginning in so far as
it is an end and as an end in so far as it is a beginning; it is limited by a
double nothingness, and as such realizes a break in the ecstatical unity
of our being” (BN, 467). Fruit of the nihilating power of freedom, the
instant is a nothingness surrounded by two negations, that of a preced-
ing choice henceforward pushed back into the past and that of a future
project which still is not. The instant occurs each time that the For-itself
commits itself to a fundamental modification of its project. The repre-
sentation of the point-like instant “t” of physics and of our watches is not
simply a spatializing of time, as Bergson thought, it creates also the il-
lusion that the instant could exist independently of the For-itself in the
objective succession established by the time of the world. Contrary to the
225
instant “t,” the true instant is not given, it does not exist in advance of
any choice since it arises out of the future project, which alone defines
the instant as instant, that is, the present as beginning. The instant is the
past pushed back into the past by a new future. Choice makes the instant
“spring forth as the nihilating rupture of the temporalization” (BN, 467).
A vicious circle might be suspected in the claim that freedom creates the
instant, which, at the same time, creates the condition of its own possi-
bility. But this circle is explained by the thesis— unquestionably doubt-
ful as we shall see— that freedom temporalizes itself while temporalizing
time as its own foundation.
The cut that the instant introduced into temporalization is double-
edged, which explains why it is so difficult to grasp. On the one hand, it
is a constant threat for the For-itself, for which it represents the perpetual
modifiability of its project: it suffices for the latter to become aware of the
contingent and unjustifiable character of its choice “in order to cause the
instant to arise, that is, the appearance of a new project on the collapse
of the former” (BN, 480). Because it is grounded in freedom, the project
has to be continually renewed, and is exposed on each occasion to the
risk of the instant, which retains the possibility of an abandonment. In
this sense, choice “is haunted by the specter of the instant” (BN, 467). On
the other hand, the instant liberates, for it makes possible “the frequent
upsurge of ‘conversions’ which cause me totally to metamorphose my
original project” (BN, 475). Sartre evokes the instant in which Raskolnikov
decides to give himself up: “These extraordinary and marvellous instants
when the prior project collapses into the past in the light of a new project
which rises on its ruins and which as yet exists only in outline . . .— these
have often appeared to furnish the clearest and most moving image of
our freedom” (BN, 476). Far from being a threatening source of anxiety,
these instants are full of joy faced with the openness of the future.
Whether it is threatening or liberating, the instant is always the work
of a freedom that temporalizes time. If Sartre is to be believed, there
exists a demiurgic power of freedom in what concerns temporality, two
other examples of which can be provided regarding the past. If there is
something to which the For-itself seems to be subjected it is the irremedi-
able character of the past, the impossibility of changing what has been.
The past is the In-itself that haunts me from a distance and which I am
quite incapable of attaining. It is not what determines me, but that on
the basis of which alone I can determine my project. Freedom, as rup-
ture with the past, relies upon the past whose existence is henceforward
presupposed: “Every action designed to wrench me away from my past
must first be conceived in terms of my particular past; that is, the action
must before all recognize that it is born out of the particular past which it
226
wishes to destroy” (BN, 496). Does the For-itself not find itself confronted
with an unsurpassable limit here? Not at all, according to Sartre, who
seeks to deduce from freedom itself the irrevocable dimension of the
past. The past only received the meaning of an irremediable past when
it is surpassed by the choice of the For-itself, who posits it as over. In
other words, “the irremediable quality of the past comes from my actual
choice of the future” (BN, 497). The negativity of freedom makes it pos-
sible to leave the past in its place, to isolate it from the present by throw-
ing it back into the domain of the definitive, situated out of the reach of
change. Sartre wants to reverse the line of force between freedom and
the past, when he holds that “in order for the future to be realizable, it is
necessary that the past be irremediable” (BN, 497), by which he should
be taken to mean: the past is irremediable because the future is realiz-
able, because the project of the For-itself constitutes it as such. Certainly,
he recognizes that the past contains an unchangeable element— “I had
whooping cough when I was five years old” (BN, 497)— but this is tied
into the meanings conferred upon it by the For-itself, and cannot be
distinguished from the latter. There is no brute past, the past exists and
takes on meaning only for the For-itself, who thereby proclaims its com-
mand over it: “Thus all my past is there pressing, urgent, imperious, but
its meaning and the orders which it gives me I choose by the very project
of my end” (BN, 498). The meaning of the past is always “in suspense,”
always awaiting the decision of the For-itself (BN, 501).
The same reasoning is applied to the irreversibility of time— the
impossibility of reliving the past— which seems to constitute an obstacle
to freedom, though in reality it secretly confirms the latter. This idea ap-
pears on the occasion of his discussion of the Heideggerian conception
of death. For Sartre, death is in no way the necessary condition of human
freedom. It is a purely contingent event that strikes the For-itself from
without, by enfolding it in the shroud of the past. This critique of Hei-
degger should not be seen as a negation of finitude. Only a finite free-
dom can in fact be free. Freedom is choice and this choice gets projected
towards one possibility to the exclusion of all the others. If the For-itself
were not finite, it could realize any possibility and choice would not really
be a choice. But for Sartre it is quite unnecessary to appeal to mortality
to explain the finitude of the For-itself: for the latter flows from the irre-
versibility of time which prevents it from taking up again past possibilities
which it had given up. This irreversibility is a limit to the plasticity of time,
conferring all its weight upon each one of our choices. The tree of pos-
sibilities does not allow one to climb down from one branch to another.
But Sartre is less interested in pointing out this limitation than showing
that irreversibility stems from freedom itself, to the extent that it is choice
227
that impresses upon non-selected possibilities the indelible trace of the

past: “The very act of freedom is therefore the assumption and creation
of finitude. If I make myself, I make myself finite and hence my life is
unique. Consequently, even if I were immortal, it would not be allowed
to ‘get a second chance’ [reprendre mon coup]; it is the irreversibility of
temporality which forbids me this, and this irreversibility is nothing but
the peculiar character of a freedom which temporalizes itself” (BN, 546,
trans. modified). Freedom is at the root of time in its three dimensions.
It is at the origin of the instant, of both the irremediable and the irre-
versible character of the past, of the indetermination of the future— it
temporalizes itself in temporalizing all of time.
Three Attitudes Faced with Time
The time that freedom gives itself, what Sartre most often calls “tem-
porality,” is characterized by the indeterminate character of the future,
which is the privileged dimension out of which it has to be interpreted.
Temporality springs forth from the project, which in return throws light
upon the past. Against the latter we find another figure of time which is
nothing more than a reification of freedom in itself: “psychic temporal-
ity,” the succession of states of consciousness. This temporality is derived
from the original temporality of the For-itself, born of the habitual re-
flection through which consciousness grasps its own flux as an object in
itself that it is. Here Sartre relies on the analyses of The Transcendence of
the Ego (1957, 52– 54), which established a clear distinction between an
unreflected consciousness turned toward the world and the ego of reflec-
tive consciousness, appearing to itself as a transcendent psychic object,
with its accompanying states, affects, qualities. Psychic time is the time of
reflection in the sense of a turning back of intentionality upon conscious-
ness, whose objective is to neutralize its own projection towards the world
and to degrade the original temporality of the For-itself into that of an In-
itself. Faced with the precipice, I become aware of the danger, I am afraid,
I am my fear, which becomes an objective affect designed to determine
my future action to avoid the precipice. From this point of view, psychic
temporality looks very like what with Schelling I called “the time of the
past.” By contrast with the original temporality of freedom, it accords an
essential priority to the past and a predetermination of the future, which
is already there in advance in the past. Psychic temporality expresses “the
ultimate meaning of determinism,” which is “to establish within us an
unbroken continuity of existence in itself” (BN, 440), by transforming
228
motives, decisions, and actions into psychic data in themselves, related

among themselves by laws of cause and effect.
Sartre makes use of the notion of “psychic time” to criticize Berg-
son. He blames him for having confused original temporality, which is
not but which temporalizes itself, with psychic temporality, which is, or
even better, which has been. For him, “psychic temporality is an inert
datum, closely akin to Bergson’s duration, which undergoes its intimate
cohesion without effecting it, which is perpetually temporalized without
temporalizing itself ” (BN, 167). Bergson’s duration cannot be entirely
identified with psychic temporality since it is, as we have seen in the pre-
vious chapter, the very source of freedom, and so remains foreign to
any form of causality. This is no doubt why Sartre uses rather a vague
expression— “closely akin”— to establish this connection. His complaint
against Bergson comes down to his having defined freedom in terms
of time, while what he ought to have done is define time in terms of
freedom. With Bergson, freedom consists in coinciding with pure dura-
tion, which is the fundamental given, making the free act possible as the
tree does fruit. In Sartre’s eyes, this temporal freedom is certainly unpre-
dictable, but it is too reassuring, for it establishes a relation of similarity
between the ego and its act comparable to that between the father and
his child. By founding freedom in the continuity of duration, Bergson
curbed its negativity and so missed the “cataclysmic power” of the latter
(BN, 42). To justify such a power, freedom has to be conceived as the
primary and original negativity of the For-itself, which itself temporalizes
time. Time stems from freedom and not the reverse.
What is the status of psychic temporality? It is equivocal. On the
one hand, psychic temporality is a merely ideal world, a virtual world
resulting from the reflection of a consciousness that watches itself living
rather than living its freedom. It duplicates real temporality like a shadow
permanently accompanying it. On the other hand, “this phantom world
exists as a real situation of the For-itself” (BN, 170), for the For-itself can be
determined as a function of its psychic duration, it can act on “account”
of its hatred, its weariness, its despair. But all these motives inhabiting psy-
chic temporality are transcendent, that is, in the form of determined and
determining affects they are only objects constructed by reflection, which
cannot constrain the For-itself to act unless it chooses to do so. Psychic
duration is the mode of temporality belonging to “bad faith,” which vainly
tries to flee from its freedom. Original time and psychic time are there-
fore two modes of temporality each of which has its own reality: “Here we
are then in the presence of two temporalities: the original temporality of
which we are the temporalization, and psychic temporality which simul-
taneously appears as incompatible with the mode of being of our being
229
and as an inter-subjective reality, the object of science, the goal of human

acts” (BN, 159). These two temporalities are not simply juxtaposed. They
constitute an alternative, the alternative of freedom face to face with time.
Even though Sartre never said so, this alternative is present right through
the analyses of Being and Nothingness, and takes the form of three possible
attitudes vis-à-vis time. (1) The For-itself can use the original temporality
opening up on the future— decision as choice of freedom in the dual
sense of an objective and a subjective genitive. In assuming his freedom
for his project, he gives himself such an original temporality. (2) But the
For-itself might on the contrary seek to flee from his freedom, by adher-
ing to a psychic duration in a conduct of bad faith, thereby making of
the past the primordial dimension of time. (3) Such an attitude is itself
rooted in a deeper temptation of the For-itself, to abolish its temporality
by an impossible coincidence with itself, which Sartre identifies with the
desire of the For-itself to be God: “The eternity which man is seeking is
not the infinity of duration, of that vain pursuit after the self for which I
am myself responsible; man seeks a repose in self, the atemporality of the
absolute coincidence with himself” (BN, 141– 42). The temptation repre-
sented by eternity is the ultimate form the refusal can take, the refusal by
the For-itself of its own original temporality.
For Bergson, freedom coincides with time (as duration). For Sartre,
time (as original temporality), coincides with freedom. Inasmuch as it
maintains a monopoly of nihilation, the freedom of the For-itself is the
source of time. This thesis presents at least two major difficulties. One
might first of all ask whether the demiurgic power of freedom is not dis-
proportionate, as if Sartre had transposed over to man the mode of an
infinite freedom derived from Descartes’s God, the creator of time and,
at each instant, of finite temporal beings.10 Certainly, the For-itself can-
not make itself “master and possessor” of temporality, the plasticity time
offers freedom being limited by the irreversibility of the past and uncer-
tainty with regard to the future. But these limits are considered by Sartre
as conditions freedom gives itself in order to realize itself. It is freedom
that makes the past irreversible by rejecting unchosen possibilities, and it
is freedom again that makes the future undetermined through its project.
One gets the feeling that the reconciliation of time and freedom is ac-
complished at the expense of the former. Does Sartre not make it too
easy for himself, when he reduces time to the freedom of the For-itself?
The price to be paid for such a position generates a second, just as fatal
difficulty: being-in-itself is said to be strictly atemporal.11 The universal
and objective time of the world is nothing more than the projection by
the For-itself of its own temporality upon the In-itself, “the shimmer of
nothingness on the surface of a strictly a-temporal being” (BN, 216). But
230
a theory of this kind runs up against phenomena such as the existence,

at the heart of the In-itself, of change and causality, which Sartre has all
the difficulty in the world of coming to terms with.12 He has no more
success than Husserl in deriving the time of the world from the time of
consciousness, the time of being from the time of the For-itself. To resolve
this difficulty, the presence of time has to be thought through in all the
various domains of being, the For-itself just as much as the In-itself, this
by understanding the relation of freedom to time without dissolving one
of these two terms into the other.
9
The Fecundity of Time (Levinas)
Time and Freedom. The meaning of the title of this book should by now
be apparent. There is no human freedom without time. But the opposite
is not true. I don’t want to say that time needs human freedom to manifest
itself. Time has not waited for human being to exist! Time is given, but
in such a way that it makes human freedom possible through the future,
the condition of the ramification of possibilities, and through the present,
the condition of decision. If we placed time first in the title of this book,
it was in order to insist upon this primacy. In order to think the relation
of freedom to time, the philosophers examined previously have mostly
followed two paths. The first consists in recognizing the temporal dimen-
sion of freedom, even while appreciating that its supreme finality lies in
surpassing time and gaining access to eternity (Schelling, Kierkegaard).
Even Bergson, after having conceived time sub specie durationis, reintro-
duces the theme of the “eternity of life,” in which the élan vital allows us to
participate.1 The second path puts the emphasis on the finitude of human
freedom (Heidegger, Sartre), which goes along with an abandonment of
the temptation of eternity. Freedom temporalizes itself from the future
to the present, passing by way of the past. The whole question is whether
this circle of temporality does not finish up by closing down on freedom,
as Schopenhauer claimed, whether, in other words, freedom does not
find itself once again prisoner of a temporality that has lost its plasticity,
as in the anxiety described by Sartre, or the phenomenon of boredom
examined in the chapter on Heidegger. In both cases, the surging up of
the liberating moment looks like an enigmatic deus ex machina. But there
is another difficulty. What about the reductive character of the Heideg-
gerian thesis concerning the finitude of time? Is it not possible, as Kant
certainly thought,2 to defend the thesis of the infinity of time? In a note
discretely placed at the end of Being and Time, Heidegger himself suggests
that eternity might be understood as a “more primordial” and “infinite”
temporality, even while leaving this question open.3 Between the classical
conception of eternity as an atemporal present and the inverse concep-
tion of an originary finitude of time could there be room for a third way—
that of the infinity of time? And where will it take us?
The philosophical interest offered by Levinas for this inquiry is pre-
cisely that of having taken this little-explored third way, which seeks to
231
232
avoid the pitfalls of either eternity or finitude. In his review of La présence

totale, a work of Louis Lavelle that appeared in 1934, Levinas writes:
The great merit of M. Lavelle consists in his having made us aware of

the following truth, that the rehabilitation of the present is the only
way of undoing the tragic game of time. But with Lavelle, the victory
over time is an exit beyond time. Even though the being that upholds
the subject is a pure act and in no way a substance, Lavelle’s present re-
mains atemporal. It represents the crossroads of time and eternity, but
the promise of happiness is an arrow directed toward eternity.4
Time has to be rehabilitated as time and not under the form of eternity,
which is the negation of time. The infinity of time has to be found at the
heart of time, without denying its finitude. This is how the problem has
to be confronted.
The Weight of the Present
To resolve this problem, Levinas takes on a phenomenology of existence

whose point of departure lies in the present. Basing our examination on
two more or less contemporary works, Existence and Existents (1947) and
Time and the Other (1948), we can distinguish four stages in his analysis.
1. If one cannot think the existent without existence, one can on the
contrary conceive “existence without the existent” (EE, 57– 64 and TO,
44– 61). We are not talking about nothingness but about its contrary,
the impossibility of non-being, the persistence of that undetermined and
anonymous being no one calls in question, the ceaseless rustling of the
“there is,” whose troublesome presence we perceive in moments of wake-
fulness or insomnia.
2. To exist, the existent must already have detached itself from the ob-
scure ground of existence, in a hypostasis that defines the present: “The
present is the event of hypostasis. The present leaves itself— better still,
it is the departure from self. It is a rip in the infinite beginningless and
endless fabric of existing. The present rips apart and joins together again;
it begins; it is beginning itself” (TO, 52). The present marks the sub-
ject’s mastery over its own existence, announcing its hold over existence,
233
T H E F EC U NDI T Y OF T I ME (LE V I NAS )
thereby conferring upon it its freedom, understood as the power to be-

gin. A first form of freedom that makes one think of Kant’s transcenden-
tal freedom, except for two differences, that it is temporal through and
through, since it is rooted in the present, and also bears no relation to
causality. On this last point, Levinas holds on to Heidegger’s determina-
tion not to think freedom out of causality.
3. The present is the only way the existent can break with the anony-
mous being of the “there is” and posit itself as a subject, “the master of
time” (EE, 98): “As present and ‘I,’ hypostasis is freedom. The existent is
master of existing. It exerts on existence the virile power of the subject.
It has something in its power. It is a first freedom— not yet the freedom
of the will, but the freedom of beginning” (TO, 54). But this mastery is
illusory, for the assumption of existence by the subject includes a dialec-
tical turning. The beginning is “made heavy by itself; it is the present of
being and not of dream. Its freedom is immediately limited by its respon-
sibility. This is the great paradox: a free being is already no longer free,
because it is responsible for itself. Though it is a freedom with regard
to the past and the future, the present is an enchainment in relation to
itself” (TO, 55– 56). We have seen, especially with Schelling, that there is
a weight of the past. This expression designates a specific temporality—
the time of the past— in which freedom continually abdicates its power
of decision and, incapable of breaking with the past, only succeeds in
reproducing it passively. Such a freedom carries time rather than being
carried by it. Levinas’s originality consists in showing that there also exists
a weight of the present. Even if it is free with regard to the past, the present
is nevertheless weighed down by its perpetual return on itself. The pres-
ence of the present “is due to its irremissibility, its inevitable return to
itself, its inability to detach itself from itself. . . . The present, free with
respect to the past, but a captive of itself, breathes the gravity of being
in which it is caught up” (EE, 79). How to grasp this gravity of the pres-
ent? It stems, first of all, from the fact that freedom, once posited, gets
inverted into responsibility. At this stage of the analysis, responsibility
is not any obligation towards others, but the entanglement of the sub-
ject in itself, the impossibility of getting rid of oneself. The paradox of
freedom is that it bears within itself its own negation: the inexorable
fact of being responsible for oneself, whether one wants it or not, of
having to take account of oneself. This materiality of freedom, its heavi-
ness, is the return of the “there is” upon the present, whose weight is all
the heavier for resulting from the only instance capable of depositing
it, freedom.
234
In this way, Levinas criticizes Sartre for having missed this tragic di-
mension of freedom, chained to itself as to its fate: “in Sartre’s philosophy
there is some sort of angelical present. The whole weight of existence
being thrown back onto the past, the freedom of the present already situ-
ated is above matter” (TO, 62). Surely, however, Sartre emphasized that the
human being is condemned to being free, that the least of his acts sticks to
his skin? Certainly, but he did not understand that in its temporal dimen-
sion, the weight of existence bears down just as much from the past upon
the present as from the present upon the present. The instant weighted
with the anxiety described in the example of the precipice is strictly power-
less to detach itself from itself. In this situation, the individual finds him-
self the prisoner of the instant which was supposed to free him. Moreover,
Sartre never explains how the latter gets free of the anxiety that paralyzes
him, simply noting that “indecision in its turn, calls for decision. I abruptly
put myself at a distance from the edge of the precipice and resume my
way” (BN, 32).5 Getting out of the instant remains entirely enigmatic. In
this paradoxical form, the present is riveted to itself, like the instant of the
continuous creation of Descartes and Malebranche, incapable by itself of
getting to grips with the following instant.6
Heidegger drew attention to this peculiar property of existence, to
be able to transform itself into a burden: “The pallid, evenly balanced
lack of mood [Ungestimmtheit], which is often persistent and which is not
to be mistaken for a bad mood, is far from nothing at all. Rather, it is in
this that Dasein becomes satiated with itself. Being has become manifest
as a burden” (SZ, 134). In the lectures of 1929–30, this lack of mood is
disclosed as a quite specific mood, that of boredom. Dasein is weighed
down, gets bored with itself to the point of becoming a stranger to itself.
Levinas also describes the heaviness of the present with the help of deter-
minations borrowed from the phenomenon of boredom. Weariness with
oneself comes from the impossibility of getting rid of oneself, from the
refusal to exist. Laziness is the impossibility of beginning, inherent in any
beginning. Tiredness (“fatigue”) is the perpetual withdrawal of the pres-
ent from itself, which tires of always having to take charge of itself.7 Char-
acteristics that make one think of boredom, tedium, are sometimes cited
for this reason: “Time is the renewal of the subject, but this renewal does
not banish tedium” (EE, 92). The series of instants is a monotonous rep-
etition, the same bogged down in the same. The last sentence of Levinas’s
Totality and Infinity follows Baudelaire in invoking “tedium, fruit of the
mournful incuriosity that takes the proportion of immortality” (TI, 307).
The liberation of the present is a false liberation, one that imprisons the
subject in the inchoative weariness of the instant, inducing— profound
boredom. What can get one out of it? The instant itself? In no way. Con-
235
trary to what Heidegger claims in the lectures of 1929–30, one cannot

expect from the instant, the decisive moment, any liberating power, since
it is the very reverse that chains the subject to itself. The future? No better.
The present in fact “refers only to itself, starts with itself, it is refractory to
the future,” which cannot be deduced from it (EE, 73, trans. modified).
Eternity? Even less. Far from being the royal road to eternity, the instant,
by its very evanescence, represents rather the exact opposite. In place of
eternity, it only offers a perpetual reiteration.
4. Levinas concludes that it is impossible to think time in its three dimen-

sions exclusively out of the subject, as Heidegger tried to do. Taken by
itself, the subject only makes it possible to conceive the present, detached
from what precedes and what succeeds it. The present only leads to the
present. From it alone one can deduce neither the past nor the future,
still less eternity. For a solitary subject “the future, as virginal instant, is
impossible” (EE, 29). For all that, time exists and cannot be limited to the
present alone. Where does the future come from, if it does not spring
from the subject? Levinas’s answer is well known. It is the other in its
absolute alterity that unfolds temporality according to its three dimen-
sions, and first of all that of the future. The thesis according to which
time is constituted by the relation to the other is evoked at the end of
Existence and Existents: “If time is not the illusion of a movement, paw-
ing the ground, then the absolute alterity of another instant cannot be
found in the subject, who is definitively himself. This alterity comes to me
only from the other” (EE, 93). The other frees me from the instant by
giving me time, and first of all the future. Not that the subject is initially
isolated in the solipsistic instant, with a view to making contact with the
other later, and so acceding to time. The subject exists from the first in
accordance with a temporality that presupposes the relation to the other,
of which however he is quite unaware, as if the latter had been, from the
very first, plunged in forgetfulness. Levinas’s procedure looks like a new
phenomenological reduction of time, one that no longer leads the sense
of time back to its egological origin, as with Husserl, but to its intersubjec-
tive source, which latter precisely cannot be constituted by consciousness:
the other in its absolute alterity. Levinas interprets Descartes’s first proof
of the existence of God through the idea of infinity as the opening of the
subject to the absolute transcendence of the other.8 For the question of
time, it is the second proof, based on the continuous creation, that more
discretely provides the relevant paradigm: it is the other who re-creates
me at every instant, in the sense that he alone can get me out of the in-
stant, effect the transition to the following instant.
236
From this point of view, the future is a resurrection of the present.9

The future granted by the other implies in fact the death of the preced-
ing instant and the birth of a new instant. The instant is totally negated
to reemerge more instantly in its total novelty. A beginning again that is
henceforward, for the subject, a true beginning. By contrast with Bergso-
nian duration, this conception of time implies the discontinuity of time,
which will be emphasized in Totality and Infinity: “Time is discontinuous;
one instant does not come out of another without interruption, by an ec-
stasis. In continuation the instant meets its death, and resuscitates; death
and resurrection constitute time” (TI, 284). This structure of time, Levi-
nas adds, presupposes the relation of self to other. The solipsistic instant
of the subject, which ceaselessly threatens to get enclosed in itself, has to
be distinguished from the “miraculous fecundity” (EE, 93) of the inter-
subjective instant, which resurrects the Same as the Other.
In making of each instant a genuinely other instant, a new begin-
ning, it is the other that grants time. This gift of time is equally a form of
pardon. Levinas refers to this briefly at the end of Existence and Existents,
when he notes that true freedom consists “in negating oneself, but in
having one’s being pardoned by the very alterity of the other” (EE, 94).
Allowing one’s own being to be forgiven means being disburdened of the
weight of existence through the other, being freed from the entangle-
ment in the present. Levinas develops this conception of time in Totality
and Infinity, this time by connecting forgiveness with the problem of the
past. Forgiveness is “the very work of time,” “it permits the subject who
had committed himself in a past instant to be as though that instant had
not passed on” (TI, 283). Forgiveness is a liberation from the past, by not
allowing the latter to be forgotten. Rather, it purifies the past of its weight
without ever, for all that, forgetting it. Time frees the past of its weight
because it relieves the weight of the present— by constantly resuscitating
the present.
The Limit of the Possible
If the subject is not the master of time, if time reaches him rather from
the transcendence of the other, what are we to make of his relation to
possibility and to the future? Can the future still be thought as a ramifica-
tion of possibilities, now that such possibilities are defined in relation to
the power of the subject in which they are inevitably rooted? This is what
is at stake in the critique of Heidegger’s being-towards-death, a critique to
be found throughout Levinas’s entire work. In Time and the Other, the path
237
followed to disclose the alterity of time— and its relation to the other— is
not the analysis of the instant but that of death and of possibility. Death is
the impossibility of the possibility and not, as Heidegger sees it, the possi-
bility of the impossibility. It would be easy to agree with Levinas when he
claims that “this apparently Byzantine distinction has a fundamental im-
portance” (TO, 70n). For it designates nothing less, as we shall see, than
the distance separating the finitude from the infinitude of time! Death is
unknown; it remains “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no
traveler returns” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 1). As a result, the
mystery of death announces an event that touches the subject in its most
intimate depths, but over which it has no command, an event situated
beyond its possibilities. But, by virtue of his freedom, is man not capable
of taking hold of possibilities? Yes, to some extent. Levinas does not con-
test this mastery, which he characterizes very exactly as a “power to be able”
(TO, 82). In his practical definition, examined earlier, possibility consists
in fact in being empowered, being able to do something. But death is
precisely what strikes the subject with powerlessness, what strips it of its
mastery. Faced with death, “we are no longer able to be able” (TO, 74). Far
from rendering freedom possible, death is the unsurpassable limit that
resists all our projects. Understood in its impossibility, death “indicates
that we are in relation with something that is absolutely other” (TO, 74).
In this sense, the mystery of death proclaims the mystery of the other,
which itself refers on to the mystery of the future. Immortal beings could
never emerge from their solitude. Death, on the other hand, is this rela-
tion of the subject to an absolute and anonymous alterity, that makes it
possible for it to receive the alterity of the other.
How does this analysis of death make it possible to confirm the the-
sis concerning the intersubjective constitution of time? Death opens on
an anonymous and ungraspable future, cut off from my present, at least
insofar as my death is for me the end of any new now. And such a separa-
tion between my present and my future death is salutary; for as soon as
this future enters into the present, the subject disappears! When death
is there, I am there no longer. In order that this future unfolds as time,
however, it has to enter into relation with the present, without destroying
the latter. This presence of the future in the present cannot however come
about save “in the face-to-face with the other” (TO, 79). In this face to face,
the subject is exposed to an absolute alterity, present here and now, but
of such a kind that neither of the two terms of the relation is abolished
by the other. “Each of us can receive a part of the mystery of the other
without divulging its secret” (René Char). The subject is preserved in its
existence by the alterity of the other, and, in return, the alterity of the
other is not comprised by it. The other is a presence which grants me the
238
future, not an encroachment of the present on the future, but rather of

the future on the present. Hence the astonishing definition of the future:
“The other is the future” (TO, 77). We are not talking of the destructive
and unassumable alterity of death, but of the alterity of an other that the
subject can receive at the heart of its own presence. The other puts a face
on the absolute alterity of the future. It is not the future that defines the
other, but the absolute alterity of the other that defines the future in its
exteriority. But what future are we talking about? The understanding of
death as impossibility implies two conceptions of the future. The solip-
sistic future, which is the horizon of the possibility of the subject, is just
an encroachment of the present on the future. On this point, Levinas
dismisses Bergson just as much as Sartre and Heidegger, all of whom only
came to terms with the “present of the future” (TO, 76), its anticipation in
a present under the form of the possible. Even the Bergsonian definition
of duration as creation, the efflorescence of unpredictable novelty, sup-
ports, in Levinas’s view, a power of the present that never ceases in its élan
to encroach upon the future. The “authentic future,” thought as future
and not as a prolongation of the present, is “what is not grasped, what be-
falls us and lays hold of us,” what is “absolutely surprising” (TO, 76– 77). A
pure future, really other and new, because it dismantles in advance all our
anticipations and projects, and makes of time a new birth. This future is
situated beyond the possibilities of the subject and of its being-for-death.
It arises “there where all possibilities are impossible” (TO, 88). This impos-
sibility obviously does not have a logical sense, since it designates what is
no longer within the power of the subject.
Death is situated at the frontier between these two forms of the
future: on this side, a ramification of possibilities which are at the dis-
posal of the subject— I prefer this term to the “swarming of indistinguish-
able possibles” employed by Levinas to criticize Heidegger (TI, 283); on
the other side, an absolutely unpredictable domain, the “im-possible,”10
opened up by the alterity of the other. As much as the future before my
death, my future, is finite, so much is the future beyond my death, the
future of the other, unlimited, infinite. The distinction of the two figures
of the future introduces the thesis of the originary infinitude of time.
Thus “the time in which being ad infinitum is produced goes beyond the possible”
(TI, 281); “It is not the finitude of being that constitutes the essence of
time, as Heidegger thinks, but its infinity” (TI, 284). Without the rela-
tion to the other, time would be reduced to the repetition of a present,
resistant to any future. The finite future itself, stretched out between my
present and my death, is then conditioned by an unlimited future rooted
in the alterity of the other. For this reason, the infinity of time might be
called first and originary. Is this not what was claimed by Kant’s postulate
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of the immortality of the soul, in which we found a trace of the positive

infinity of time, the capacity of the moral subject to act beyond, and in
spite of, its own mortality? Even though he often accuses him of having
only thought of the negative infinity of an ought-to-be, of a Sollen, mas-
tered through the negation of finitude, Levinas on at least one occasion
admits that Kant had the merit of have glimpsed the infinitude of time:
“Kant certainly does not think that we must think of an extension of time
beyond limited time; he does not want a ‘prolongation of life.’ But there
is a hope, a world accessible to a hope. . . . This hope cannot have a theo-
retical response, but it is a motivation proper. This hope occurs in time
and, in time, goes beyond time.”11
Breaking-Up of Time
The other of time is not eternity but the time of the other, the time (for)
given by the other to the subject. The temptation of eternity in no way
intervenes to short-circuit the analysis: “The otherwise than being cannot
be situated in any eternal order extracted from time that would somehow
command the temporal series” (OB, 9). Eternity is not the ultimate goal
of the subject, but the dreadful repetition (ressassement) of the “there is,”
precisely what the subject has to free itself from. Its only positive signifi-
cation would be the infinity of time beyond death and my possibilities,
the unlimited future. This “break-up of time” (OB, 89) is provoked by the
transcendence of the other, which “unhinges it” and suppresses the limits
within which the subject tries to constrain it. Levinas tries to describe this
“deformalization of time” (Entre nous, 175) with the help of the opposi-
tion between “synchrony” and “diachrony.” It is a matter of liberating time
from the synthetic unity of transcendental apperception, of the Kantian
“I think” by means of which the subject drags every event into the constel-
lation of its re-presentations, with a view to showing that this synchronic
time has its source in a more originary diachronic time, stretched between
a past which has never been and a future that never will be present.
The question that interests us concerns more particularly the rela-
tion of the subject to the infinite future of diachrony. How is this relation
to be characterized? The first answer consists in the notion of responsibil-
ity, expounded most notably in Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being or Beyond
Essence. The face of the other calls my freedom in question, by confront-
ing the freedom of my will with the ethical impossibility of killing. This
obligation is not just a limitation of my freedom but, above all, an exten-
sion of the latter under the form of an infinite responsibility towards the
240
other: “But the relationship with a past that is on the hither side of every
present and every re-presentable— because not belonging to the order
of presence— is included in the extraordinary and everyday event of my
responsibility for the faults or the misfortune of others, in my responsi-
bility that answer for the freedom of another” (OB, 10). In Existence and
Existents, freedom was responsibility for self, weighing on the subject and
shutting it up in the instant. Understood as responsibility for the other,
it becomes deliverance, emergence from the present and an entrance
into diachrony. To the infinity of time there corresponds the infinity of
responsibility, whose debt increases in proportion as it is redeemed. The
more I assume, the more responsible I become. This conception of re-
sponsibility is summed up in words taken from Alyosha, often cited by
Levinas: “Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more
than the others” (OB, 146).12 A responsibility of this kind does not stem
from any decision; it has never been chosen or agreed to but remains
prior to freedom, which can only admit its irrefutable reality in the face
of the other. This is why Levinas insists that it stems from an immemo-
rial past: an archaic and anarchic past which has never been present,
which resists any re-presentation, retention, memory or reminiscence, “a
deep yore, never remote enough.”13 But surely responsibility must also
involve a relation to an un-representable future? No doubt, but in Other-
wise Than Being, Levinas is primarily concerned to stress the rootedness
of responsibility in the immemorial past of diachrony, in a past which is
more ancient than any present.14 The future has lost the preponderant
role it played in the lectures on Time and the Other. Why? Levinas explains
this point in On God Who Comes to Mind, recognizing along the way that
he had never sufficiently developed the theme of the future: “The an-
ticipation of the future is very short. There is virtually no anticipation.
The future is blocked from the outset; it is unknown from the outset
and, consequently, toward it time is always diachrony. For the past, there
exists a whole sphere that is representable; there where the memory does
not reach, history, or prehistory, reaches” (1998c, 96). The past is a do-
main invested by re-presentation— an immense palace of memory— and
seems to be much more at the disposal of the subject than the future.
So it becomes that much more necessary to show that even on the side
of the past, time is diachronic, encompassing the immemorial, the non-
synchronizable aspect of responsibility.
In an article appearing in 1985 (“Diachrony and Representation”),
Levinas endeavors to reduce the disequilibrium between his detailed
analysis of the past and his minimal analysis of the future. After having
stressed yet again that the responsibility for the other refers back to an
immemorial past, he introduces the notion of the “pure future” to name
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the transcendent future implied in responsibility, “a future contrasting

strongly with the synchronizable time of re-presentation”: “Behold, in
the other, a meaning and an obligation that oblige me beyond my death!
The futuration of the future does not reach me as a to-come [à venir],
as the horizon of my anticipations or pro-tentions” (Entre nous, 172– 73).
By comparison with the “to-come” through which the subject’s possibili-
ties are developed, the pure future is extra-ordinary, unencompassable,
unanticipatable. How does the subject relate to it? Through an infinite
responsibility toward the other, which commits beyond death, that is,
after and despite my death. What is the meaning of this responsibility?
That of an asymmetric relation between two freedoms. Ethical obliga-
tion, however unmodifiable it might be, does not prevent disobedience.
It “leaves time— which is to say, freedom, alone” (Entre nous, 175). The
ethical impossibility of killing coexists with the ontological, and sadly
banal, possibility of murder. My responsibility for the other invests my
freedom without suppressing it. It is a “responsibility for the freedom
of the others” (OB, 109). This notion poses a difficulty. I am responsible
for myself in the face of the other. But how can I be responsible for the
other in itself, for its own freedom? I cannot decide for the other nor take
responsibility for its acts in its place. This would simply be to do violence
to its freedom. The substitution of one for the other— “Ich bin du, wenn
ich ich bin”15 — would represent an eviction. In this sense, responsibility
can never become, through an impossible duplication, responsibility for
responsibility. So what is Levinas trying to say? Let’s attempt the follow-
ing answer. I am responsible for the freedom of the other to the extent
that I must do everything to guarantee it, to preserve it, to help it grow,
even if this freedom is situated well beyond the lapse of time which would
make it possible for me to be present at the fruits of my labors. I am the
guardian not of my brother but of his freedom. Being free means, for the
subject, freeing the freedom of other subjects.
The Gift of the Possible
Is the infinite responsibility for the other the only possible relation of the
subject to the infinite future? In no way. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas
describes two other ways in which the subject can stand in relation to the
future: love and fecundity.
In distinction from that responsibility which mobilizes the two ex-
tremes of diachrony—the immemorial past and the unimaginable future—
love and fecundity only refer to the future. Love puts the subject in rela-
242
tion to the pure future. It goes beyond the “face” in the direction of a “fu-
ture never future enough, more remote than the possible” (TI, 254– 55).
The phenomenology of Eros describes the movement of a subject who,
instead of trying to find itself in its other, projects itself into a “future
situated beyond the future wherein possibles scintillate” (TI, 261). Love
makes it possible for the subject to get free of the indefinite rehearsal
of the instant and to transcend its possibilities, thereby bringing about a
resurrection of the present through the future. As Schelling noted, “it is
only thanks to love that the past is abandoned” (AW 1811, 85).16
In the eyes of Levinas, love is always ambiguous. On the one hand,
it is a movement towards the transcendence of the other, of Otherness;
on the other hand, it runs the risk of being inverted into love of the love
I am receiving, and so of falling back into an egoistic partnership. This
return to immanence is not possible with fecundity, which posits an ir-
reversible relation to the future:
This future is neither the Aristotelian germ (less than being, a lesser
being) nor the Heideggerian possibility which constitutes being itself,
but transforms the relation with the future into a power of the subject.
Both my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility
of the other, of the Beloved, my future does not enter into the logical
essence of the possible. The relation with such a future, irreducible to
the power over possible, we shall call fecundity. (TI, 267)
Levinas gets back here to the Heideggerian thesis concerning the pri-
macy of the possible over the real, without making of the possible a power
of the subject. The future opened up by the other is beyond the branch-
ing of possibilities. It is the im-possible over which the subject has no
control. At the same time, what is im-possible for me is precisely pos-
sible for others. In this way, the concept of fecundity makes it possible
to rehabilitate the notion of possibility, by giving it an intersubjective
dimension. Fecundity names the subject’s capacity to create possibilities
for others, possibilities which are, at one and the same time, its own pos-
sibilities (since they are created by it) and alien to it, because they are the
possibilities of the other, over which it has no more control, and which,
for this reason, cannot be taken back. Far from being inverted into the
domination of the future by the subject, the possibility so engendered is a
gift of the possible to the other by the subject, who cannot go back upon
it. It is inscribed in an absolute future, an infinite time. For this reason,
fecundity frees the subject from its monotone temporality, equivalent
to aging (sénescence) and boredom. For “in power the indetermination
of the possible does not exclude the reiteration of the I, which in ventur-
243
ing toward this indeterminate future falls back on its feet, and, riveted
to himself, acknowledges its transcendence to be merely illusory and its
freedom to delineate but a fate” (TI, 268). The indeterminateness of
freely created possibilities implies an indeterminateness of the future.
Levinas never calls in question this essential point, the remote legacy of
the debate on future contingents. It should also be remembered that this
was the position of Bergson, Heidegger, and Sartre. But in his view, the
indeterminateness of the future does not suffice to found transcendence,
for the subject’s power of anticipation continually upholds the novelty
of the future relative to the déjà vu of re-presentation. The possibility at
the disposal of the subject is only an encroachment of the present upon
the future, which does not really exist as future. Fecundity brings to an
end the “tedium of repetition” (TI, 268), and this by rejecting the logic
of synchrony. It breaks the circle of temporality of the subject not in the
direction of eternity but in that of the pure future. The latter is doubly
indeterminate, both as a result of the sovereign power of the subject to
choose and, more radically still, by virtue of the liberty of others, which
cannot be anticipated. The critique of the Heideggerian conception of
possibility leads, in the end, to reinforcing the thesis of the indetermi-
nateness of the future.
Just like responsibility, fecundity is an asymmetric relation between
two freedoms. Levinas illustrates this with the relation of paternity, a dual-
ity of the identical, an identity that engenders difference. The child is at
once my child, the child of my flesh, a being in whom I find myself, who
concerns me, for whom I am responsible, and a stranger, a being who
is not my creature, who escapes my control and is destined to leave me.
The future of the child is beyond my possibilities, beyond my projects.
In the preface to Time and the Other, written in 1979 on the occasion of a
new edition of the text, Levinas clarifies the idea of fecundity with which
the work ends along the following lines: “The possibility offered to the
son and placed beyond what is assumable by the father still remains the
father’s in a certain sense. Precisely in the sense of kinship. The father’s
or non-indifferent— is a possibility that another assumes: through the
son there occurs a possibility beyond the possible!” (TO, 36). Paternity is
the possibility offered to the son (or to the daughter, one might add)—
the gift of the possible. The birth of a child presupposes an encounter
with the other. The possibility of the child is a possibility of the other, in
addition to being the possibility of a loved one. The idea of being a par-
ent, which encompasses that of being both father and mother, names
the relation of identity between the child and its parents. But the possi-
bility of the child is not that of its parents, to the extent that it will be
assumed by someone else, more exactly by the child. The future opened
244
up by fecundity is a possibility beyond the possible, an im-possible possi-

bility, a possibility for the other and so out of the control of the subject.
In the relation initiated by fecundity, the difference irremediably takes
precedence over any identity. A difference which is the very transcen-
dence of time, and preserves the freedom of the son. Fecundity is the
“paradox of a created freedom” (TI, 278). To understand it, certain of
Schelling’s analyses should be held in mind, analyses Levinas seems to
have taken over for himself. In the treatise of 1809, Schelling emphasizes
that the creation of human freedom by divine freedom— of the Son by
the Father— must not be conceived as a relation of causality but of foun-
dation (Grund). Contrary to causality, which determines its effect and
then disappears immediately, the foundation continues to found what
it founds, even while retaining its autonomy. In the dependence of Man
vis-à-vis God, “dependence does not abolish independence, it does not
even abolish freedom” (PI, 7: 346). The son remains all through his life
the son of his father, but he is more than just that; for he is also a man in
his own right, free in the same way as his father. Levinas notes also that
“creation contradicts the freedom of the creature only when creation is
confused with causality” (TI, 279). Without appealing to the concept of
foundation, it also emphasizes that the father is his child, that he subsists
in it, even while remaining unavoidably external to it: “The father does
not simply cause the son. To be one’s son means to be I in one’s son, to be
substantially in him, yet without being maintained there in identity” (TI,
278– 79). The creation that followed from fecundity is an interweaving of
Self and Other for the benefit of the Other.
Does fecundity have to be limited to paternity? Certainly not. In
the mind of Levinas, fecundity is an “ontological category” (TI, 277), one
which goes beyond its simple biological sense. What are the concrete
implications of all this? We shall distinguish four (biological, aesthetic,
ethical, and practical), which are just so many ways in which the subject
enters into relation with the pure future.
Even if it cannot be reduced to the latter, the notion of fecundity
includes its biological form. The “conception of the child” is the “gift of
the power of giving” (TI, 269). Conceiving a child is not only creating new
possibilities attached to another being, but, even more fundamentally,
creating a power capable of creating possibilities, engendering another free-
dom, which in its turn is capable of creating possibilities. The subject does
not extend its ramifications of possibilities still further through the child,
it tends rather to restrict them, if it is true that having a child brings to
an end, at least for the time being, numerous possibilities entertained by
its parents. It creates a being who will become, like a seed of freedom, a
new ramification of possibilities. My tree of possibilities is inscribed in an
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infinitely vaster tree encompassing generations. The infinity of time also

means, for Levinas, the succession of generations, a discontinuous history
punctuated by the phenomenon, both banal and extraordinary, of birth.
What could the non-biological forms of fecundity amount to? A
fecundity that does not engender a child but which remains creation is a
fecundity that brings works into being. In this connection one might bear
in mind Rilke’s words. The “fruitfulness” is “but one, whether it seems
spiritual or physical; for spiritual creation too springs from the physical,
is of one nature with it and only like a gentler, more ecstatic and more
everlasting repetition of physical delight.”17 The work of art repeats, at a
higher degree of intensity, the creative act of giving life, with this single
difference, that its life does not come to an end, in distinction from our
own which goes by. For all that, Levinas does not follow this hypothesis of
an aesthetic fecundity in any very vigorous way. For, according to him, ar-
tistic beauty simply converts the transcendence of the face into an image.
In other words, “the beautiful of art inverts the beauty of the feminine
face. It substitutes an image for the troubling depth of the future, of
the ‘less than nothing’ (and not the depths of a world) announced and
concealed by the feminine beauty” (TI, 263). The concept of the work
is associated, in Totality and Infinity, with that of Pygmalion, who symbol-
izes the appropriation and the mastery of the creature by its creator, the
reabsorption of the Other into the Same.18
If fecundity is to be endowed with a non-biological meaning, it can
only be the ethical. As Ludwig Wenzler (1984) suggests, I am fundamen-
tally the father of any other for whom I take responsibility. In that my
responsibility for others assumes the purely ethical form of fecundity, it
has however to engender something of an order other than the child.
What could that be? Levinas opens up an approach in a study published
three years after Totality and Infinity and entitled “Meaning and Sense,”
where he confers a positive value on the notion of work, which he dis-
tinguishes from the work of art by the use of capitals (“Oeuvre”): “A work
conceived radically is a movement of the Same towards the Other which never
returns to the Same” (1998a, 91). The Work is the incarnation of sense,
designating the movement, free and irreversible, of the Same toward the
Other, of the subject toward the other. In consequence, it is a noteworthy
relation of the subject to the pure future, situated beyond its possibilities.
For the gratuitousness of the Work requires that the subject act without
thought for its death, that, pushed to the limit, it “renounces being the
contemporary of its outcome” (1998a, 92). The Work signifies acting
“without entering into the Promised Land,” acting for a “time without me,”
for a time after my time, over and beyond the celebrated “being for the
death,” it is a “being-for-beyond-my-death” (1998a, 92). Acting for the
246
time of the other, for a time beyond and in spite of my death, acting in
view of an in-finite future— what I have called “practical immortality”19—
that is the practical meaning of fecundity. The Work engendered thereby
is not made of marble, of paper, of flesh, but of actions creating possibili-
ties, whose most remote instances will only become visible for eyes which
have not yet been born. In its practical sense, fecundity coincides with
responsibility, it is a response to the infinite obligation of the “face,” a
responsibility to uphold and support the freedom of others. The future
of others concerns me. I have to work for it, do everything to ensure that
it be preserved. But, one might ask, does this Work really have a practi-
cal sense? By way of a reply, Levinas offers the example of Léon Blum
imprisoned in 1941:
A man in prison continues to believe in a nonrevealed future and in-

vites men to work in the present for the most remote things, for which
the present is an irrecusable negation. There is a vulgarity and a base-
ness in an action that is conceived only for the immediate, that is, in the
last analysis, for our life. And there is a very great nobility in the energy
liberated from the hold of the present. To act for far-off things at the
moment in which Hitlerism triumphed, in the deaf hours of this night
without hours— independently of every evaluation of the “forces in
presence”— is, no doubt, the summit of nobility. (1998a, 93)
Fecundity is Work, and the Work is action. We have to act in the present
but not for the present. The circle of temporality circumscribed by free-
dom, and which goes from the future to the present while passing over
the past, can never be closed down on the present of the subject. It keeps
on taking off in the direction of the future, in an infinite spiral. With the
notion of the Work, conceived in this way, Levinas is able to offer a non-
biological sense, indeed a practical sense, to the fecundity of time.
Freedom and Time
Diachrony responds to a double movement. From the Other towards the

Same: the phenomenology of the existent, grasped in its connection with
existence, shows that the transcendence of the other frees the subject from
the weight of the present and makes possible its relation to the genuine
future, a future that cannot be reduced to a simple prolongation of the
present. The other breaks the synchrony of the subject by giving it time.
From the Same towards the Other: through fecundity— biological, ethi-
247
cal, practical— the subject accomplishes the inverse movement of granting

time to the other, in the sense in which it generates possibilities for a future
which will never finally be its own. The other frees me from time (the in-
stant), and I grant time to the other (the future). A gratuitous gift which
awaits no reward, an infinite gift that will never cover the debt.
Do Levinas’s analyses call in question the preceding results? In what
concerns the relation of freedom to time, they bring rather a new con-
firmation of the central thesis. More than ever, time appears as the con-
dition of human freedom. Under the figure of the pure future, it frees
existence from the weight of the present, a snare in which freedom gets
caught up. As pardon, it purifies the present from the weight of the past
and makes it possible for the subject to begin again. Even as a future
undetermined by the power of the subject, stretched between its present
and its death, time is still a condition of the possibility of freedom: “It is
time that gives a meaning to the notion of finite freedom. Time is pre-
cisely the fact that the whole existence of the mortal being— exposed to
violence— is not being for death but the ‘not yet’ which is a way of being
against death, a retreat before death in the very midst of its inexorable ap-
proach” (TI, 224). The freedom of the subject implies the postponement
of death by time, by offering it a certain leeway— the future. Being free
means having time ahead of oneself, despite the certain and indefinite
threat of death. Time makes freedom possible by granting it the future:
on this side of death, as the projection of possibilities, on the other side,
as the pure future, the im-possible possibilities of the others. Unless it
would be better to say that in truth it is the other who plays this role of
deliverance20 from the finite freedom of the subject. As Rudolf Bernet has
pointed out, the link between temporality and alterity, as it is established
by Levinas, is equivocal: “Is time the initial horizon that presides over all
appearance of alterity or is it not rather, on the contrary, only the out-
come of an alterity, or of an alteration, that makes it possible for time to
appear?” (Bernet 2000, 161– 62). Does the transcendence of time stem
from time itself or does it originate in the transcendence of the other?
An eminently difficult question. It seems that Levinas leans more in the
second direction. The formal structure of time, constituted by infinity
and by discontinuity, “presupposes the relation of the I with the Other”
(TI, 284). But just as one cannot pretend, along with Sartre, that the sub-
ject, rebaptized the “For-itself,” is the source of temporalization, so it is
also not possible to claim that the other might be the true origin of time.
The transcendence of the other engenders a mode of temporality—
diachrony— and not time in itself, which latter belongs to no subjectivity
whatsoever. In its plasticity, time is capable of accommodating the infinity
of ethical time, without being entirely reducible to the latter.
248
These three capacities of the subject— to create, to receive, and

to confer possibilities— make it possible to extend the ramifications of
possibilities beyond death, which thereby becomes a peak and not an
end. Fecundity consists in creating a source of possibilities (the child,
the Work), which will in turn engender new ramifications of the pos-
sible. From this point of view, death is not so much a pure impossibility
as a limit-possibility, a Janus head situated at the intersection of finite
and infinite time. Looked at from the point of view of what lies before
it, death looks towards the subject. It is what possibilizes its possibilities
and in so doing, inaugurates, as Heidegger insisted, its finite freedom.
Levinas himself is not able to overlook this phenomenon entirely, just
as soon as he admits the power of the subject over its possibilities— the
power to be able— which presupposes being for death understood as its
ownmost possibility. Heidegger’s mistake from this point of view would be
to have only taken into account this one facet of death, the facet oriented
toward my existence. Looked at from the point of view of what follows
after, death gets inverted into im-possibility, the powerlessness of the sub-
ject. It looks in the direction of an absolute alterity— the infinite future
of the other. An im-possibility all the more extensive for coexisting with
my ownmost possibility. Death can only be the im-possibility of the subject
because it is, first and foremost, its ownmost possibility.
Just as it calls for a modification of the concept of possibility, so the
thinking of Levinas invites us to come back to the notion of the instant.21
The instant is not situated at the crossroads of time and eternity but of
time and freedom. As the hypostasis for the present, the instant is the
beginning of freedom, in the double sense of a beginning provoked by
freedom and marking the birth of freedom. But Levinas thinks it impor-
tant to show up the illusory character of this freedom, which gets weighed
down by itself and fails to gain access to the future. Far from being “the
lightning flash of freedom” (Schelling), the instant is a prison with invis-
ible and very narrow partitions. Does one have to abandon henceforward
any link between the instant and freedom, the instant and decision, a link
constantly proposed throughout the length of this book? Does one have
to give up everything that has been said on the role of decision as that
modality through which the individual, in the instant, gets hold of his
freedom rather than simply being subjected to it? I don’t think so. The
instant or moment of decision is a concept that remains indispensable for
understanding the temporality of freedom, whether it is finite or infinite.
The Work of which Levinas speaks, action undertaken for remote things,
for instance, does it not presuppose just such a decision on the part of
the subject, all the more impressive for resisting all the temptations of the
present? On the other hand, it is certainly true that the instant of deci-
249
sion does not exhaust all the modalities of the instant. The other frees
me from the instant of repetition and boredom, frees me from synchrony,
which is a monochrony. One might ask whether it does not do so in favor
of another form of the instant Levinas tends to overlook: the instant of
resurrection, which takes hold of the individual and transforms it, inde-
pendently of any decision, and even sometimes against its will. Is this not
the kind of instant that characterizes the end of Crime and Punishment?
Thrown in jail for the crime of murdering the moneylender and her sis-
ter, a crime he eventually admits, Raskolnikov receives the visit of Sonia
who has accompanied him:
How it happened he did not know. But all at once something seemed to
seize him and fling him at her feet. He wept and threw his arms round
her knees. For the first instant she was terribly frightened and she
turned pale. She jumped up and looked at him trembling. But at the
same moment she understood, and a light of infinite happiness came
into her eyes. She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond
everything and that at last the moment had come.
They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They
were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the
dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were
renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the
heart of the other.22
In his description of instants of freedom, Sartre evokes the precise mo-

ment when Raskolnikov decides to give himself up.23 In fact, this instant
of decision only opens the way, in the story, to the truly liberating instant,
that in which Raskolnikov finally rejects his former pride and comes to
terms with his infinite love for Sonia. Dostoyevsky compares this moment
to a resurrection. Resurrection in time and not after time, the resurrec-
tion of time itself, through which the past is abandoned to allow the dawn
of the future to glimmer.
Conclusion
Let us recapitulate the results reached in the course of our inquiry.
1. It is legitimate to claim that there can be no causality without time, in

the sense that the cause is necessarily anterior to its effect. But the reverse
is not true. The time of human existence is not subject to the mechani-
cal causality of nature, at least not in the sense of a pre-determinism re-
quiring that any future action be necessarily predetermined by present
and past causes, therefore predictable in principle.1 In the domain of
human actions, the future remains contingent and undetermined. A future
event related to human actions is a conditional future contingent. It is
conditional, since it depends on specific conditions: such an event could
happen, if certain circumstances were given and certain choices were
made. It is contingent, since its opposite is also really possible, with which
it forms a ramification on the tree of possibilities. It is undetermined, the
future possible actions not being related to the present by any causal law;
so that propositions bearing on future contingents are indeterminate
with regard to their truth value, which remains in suspense until the
action has taken place. This book therefore fully agrees with the posi-
tion defended by Aristotle in chapter 9 of On Interpretation, all of whose
consequences it tried to draw. The thesis of the indeterminateness of the
future, shared by other authors as various as Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre,
and Levinas, makes sense as much from a logical as from a practical point
of view.
2. Human temporality is plastic, to the extent that it can be modified, as-

sume different forms, exist according to different modalities. Freedom
does not create time, any more than the sculptor creates the marble with
which he makes his statue. Freedom creates its own form of temporality,
by opening and realizing possibilities whose ramifications will delimit the
future. For human freedom, time is like an immaterial material, invisible,
silent but omnipresent, an element from which freedom has to draw its
251
252
C O NC L US I ON
projects and its actions. The plasticity of time implies the plurality of the
modes of time, which vary as a function of human freedom.
3. The plasticity of time is limited by the unpredictability of the future and

the irreversibility of the past. But far from being obstacles to freedom,
these determinations are, on the contrary, the conditions of its exercise
as a power to choose between possibilities. The unpredictability of the
future stems from its undetermined character, without which freedom
would be nothing but a subjective illusion. As for irreversibility, it makes
the choice of possibilities a real choice and not just a game in which free-
dom is free to realize every possibility. The impossibility of repeating the
past is the condition of the novelty of the possibilities created by the will.
For all these reasons (1, 2, and 3), I claim that, in its very plasticity, time is
the condition of the possibility of human freedom.
4. Human freedom is intrinsically temporal. The experience of freedom is

inseparable from that of time and so invites us to get over the nostalgic
desire for eternity. We feel and know by experience that we are tem-
poral. It is a waste of time to hope to find in time a way of getting out
of time, whether that way assumes the form of an intelligible character,
the eternal Will, or the suspended instant— as if we could escape from
the labyrinth of temporality! Human freedom is not a vain attempt to
surpass time, in the direction of eternity; but, as finite, it can only be
deployed temporally. For all that, it does have the power to invert the
sense of time, that is, to change the orientation of the temporal pro-
cess of action from the past to the future. Human freedom can also be
more exactly defined as an alternative between different modes of tem-
porality, which can be reduced to two principal forms: a time oriented
toward the past, the time of the past, in which the present only reproduces
a past by which it is held prisoner, and a time of the present, characterized
by an opening on the future under the figure of new possibilities. Why
call “time of the present” a time primarily oriented toward the future?
Precisely because its objective is not so much the future as the present,
where decision and action take place. The time of the present can be
compared to a circle running from the future to the present by way of
the past. The capacity of freedom to get projected into the future is deci-
sion, which cuts the Gordian knot of possibilities and makes it possible
to break with the past. The condition of the possibility of decision is
the “moment,” the source both of anguish and of joy, faced with burgeon-
ing possibilities.
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C O NC L US I O N
5. The possibility that is at work in the process of freedom is not limited to

the possible in the logical sense, that is non-contradiction, nor to the kind
of retrospective possibility Bergson talks about. It is a mode of existence
that flows from the power of freedom, its ability to be. In the practical
sense, what is possible is what can be realized by us.2 Practical possibility
consists in being able to do. Its being so includes a properly temporal sig-
nification, which is, precisely, the future. From a practical point of view,
possibility is always prospective. It is not a matter of describing the future
on the basis of possibility, but of describing possibility out of the future,
which latter figures as the condition of the former. The future is that
through which human freedom stands in relation to its possibilities.
6. Prospective possibility is the figure human freedom confers upon the

future. What form does it assume? That of a ramification. For each indi-
vidual, the future temporalizes itself as a complex totality of possibilities,
which ramify out of each other according to an indefinite process that
comes to an end with death, which latter figures as the ultimate summit
of the tree of possibilities. In a practical sense, the possible is always situ-
ated on the tree of possibilities of a given individual. There are at least
three ways of envisaging the ramifications of possibilities:
a. The first, inspired by Leibniz, holds that the tree of possibili-
ties exists from all eternity in the mind of God, and that the individual’s
course of life is predetermined, as a result of the tree being rooted in the
principle of sufficient reason. Just one course of life in an infinity of pos-
sible worlds. From this point of view, the tree assumes a fork structure:
the branches do not ramify but run parallel to one another, to the extent
that any possibilities different from those actualized by the individual are
in fact out of reach for him.3 To choose them would mean the individual
would no longer be himself, which is impossible.
b. According to the second conception, which can be connected
with Molina’s doctrine, the whole tree of possibilities is predetermined
and constitutes the object of God’s “middle knowledge.” As such, it is
given with the individual. But the individual’s course of life within his
tree of possibilities is in itself undetermined, for it depends upon his free
will, which in turn orders the switching between each branch. Possibilities
do not run parallel to each other, and without communicating with each
other; rather, they ramify according to the choice of the individual, which
can be described as a matter of conditional propositions: if such and such
an individual finds itself in such and such a situation, then he decides A
rather than B. If the individual chooses A, then he will do C rather than
D, and so on. At each branching, symbolized by a given instant, the will
254
C O NC L US I ON
has the power to choose one possibility or its contrary. Understood in this
way, free will implies a radical conception of contingency, not simply as
that whose contrary is possible, but as that which is not determined by a
cause. It is free will and not the principle of sufficient reason which lies
at the root of the tree of possibilities.
c. The third conception, which seems the most reasonable to me,
holds that the tree of possibilities, just like the course of life of the indi-
vidual, has to be understood in a temporal manner. That means that it is
not given once and for all, as if it could grow all at once. Possibilities do
not preexist the individual, they are engendered with his freedom, and
grow in proportion as the course of his life unfolds. The will creates pos-
sibilities in the form of projects, and has to decide between ramifications,
to determine which possible outcomes will be actualized, as a function of
a hierarchic ordering. As Schelling pointed out quite boldly, each deci-
sion is a sort of replica, a repetition of the act of divine creation. In fact,
it consists of bringing into being a possible world. The possibilities that
have been realized become present and then past, and for some, include
the domain of memory. Those which have been rejected become past
futures, that is, obsolete possibilities which, on account of the irrevers-
ibility of time, can no longer be actualized. On the tree of possibilities,
future possibilities, for the most part, become past, without ever having
been present. If numerous possibilities do not get realized, this is because
the root of the tree of possibilities is finite human freedom, the power to
choose and reject possibilities (see figures 5, 6, and 7).
Figure 5. Bifurcation between two branches of possibilities at t1.

255
C O NC L US I O N
Figure 6. At t2, the right branch has been chosen and the left branch is abandoned.
Figure 7. At t3, two new possibilities emerge on the top of the right branch.
7. The intervention of human freedom in the world transforms the prin-

ciple of sufficient reason into a principle of insufficient reason. This for-
mulation is not a profession of faith in favor of irrationalism. It simply
designates the following phenomenon: on the whole, there exist reasons
for actions (motives, intentions, social contexts, and so on), which make
it possible to understand our acts, but these reasons never suffice to ex-
256
C O NC L US I ON
plain why this act has effectively been carried out, nor to eliminate the
possibility that, in spite of everything, it might never have been carried
out. For in order to explain the act completely, one has to appeal to a
supplementary element, freedom, which transforms the relation between
the reasons for acting and the act accomplished into a contingent relation.
8. There exists an interconnection between freedom and time, which makes

it possible to redefine the principle of individuation. Narrative iden-
tity (Ricoeur) presupposes a practical identity— man is the series of his
acts— which in turn refers back to a temporal identity. The individual is
the unity of his past, of his present and of his future, a unity that has to
be reconfigured on the occasion of each decision. Freedom, in the form
of the project, is not limited to anticipating the future and forging possi-
bilities in accordance with some personal configuration; it also acts retro-
spectively on the past, in the sense that the individual can free itself from
the past, if need be, or assume it and repeat it. Neither time by itself, nor
freedom taken in isolation, can explain individuation. For individuation
is a chiasm between time and freedom. The individual is defined by the
unique configuration he confers upon his time, and this in and through a
creation of the self by itself, which happens to coincide with his freedom.
9. In the light of the relation of time to freedom, that is, of the tree of pos-
sibilities, human existence acquires a protean form, almost monstrously so.
But this form remains invisible, what we see being restricted to the punc-
tual and well-circumscribed presence of the body. Not only are we aware of
just a small part of our own tree of possibilities, but that of others is, for the
most part, completely concealed from us. The tree of possibilities is that
much more invisible in that it is, initially and for the most part, covered
over in daily life. What Heidegger calls “falling” consists in fleeing from our
being-possible and following the rut of the “One.” We give up in favor of
the time of the past, for fear of the indeterminateness of the future, and,
at bottom, of our own freedom as the power to choose ourselves. This phe-
nomenon finishes up by producing what we can call an atrophy of the tree of
possibilities, which gets reduced to just a few options played out in advance.4
10. In the light of the plasticity of time, the opposition between “objec-
tive” and “subjective” time loses something of its paradoxical character.
Time is, at one and the same time, “objective,” universal and common to
all men, available to all, and also “subjective,” to the extent that it can be
appropriated, configured by each individual inasmuch as it is the mate-
257
C O NC L US I O N
rial of his projects. The tree of possibilities is proper to each individual;

it amounts to a principium individuationis, but the realization of these
possibilities, no matter what they might be, takes place in the time of the
world, datable and public. A decision is always caught up in the world;
it brings to light the projected future, inserts it into the world under the
figure of the present, modifying our day-to-day experience. So it is action
that inserts the “subjective” time of individuals into the “objective” time
of the world. The story, which configures narrative identity, always only
arrives post festum to complete the process of action.
11. For man, the tree of life is therefore a tree of possibilities rooted
in human freedom. There are different types of possibility, at least
four. By being free, the individual creates its own possibilities, possibili-
ties that have never been thought of before (a). Creating possibilities?
This expression is obviously absurd for logical possibilities, whose non-
contradictory character is independent of any will. As Leibniz empha-
sizes, even God has no power to create (logical) possibilities, only the
power to realize them. On the other hand, a practical possibility is indeed
created by a freedom, in the sense that it is disclosed by a project without
which it would not be able to exist. For instance, one can learn philos-
ophy in order to be able to teach philosophy. All the same, this power to
create (practical) possibilities does not mean that man could ever be the
master and possessor of the whole domain of the possible. Sometimes
he encounters possibilities in situations he has not chosen (b). Certain
events (bereavement, meetings, illness, etc.) reconfigure our possibilities.
They submerge us under new possibilities we had not anticipated in our
projects, and take away from us others we thought we had definitively
acquired.5 Third possibility: the individual can benefit from possibilities
others have made available to him (c). And how many of our possibilities
have not in fact been offered to us by other people? Certainly! But we still
have to be worthy of these possibilities, even if only to make them our
own. In this sense, a possibility is still the possibility of an individual, one
that has to be grafted onto the tree of its possibilities. But there exists a
fourth form of the possible, one that is given to another individual (d).
In the process of self-actualization, possibilities become actions capable
of creating other possibilities for other freedoms. Here we are faced with
possibilities arising in the very reverse sense to that of being grafted on.
Instead of running from the other to me, they run from me to the other.
This last sense of the possible makes it possible to think the fecundity of
time (Levinas), which then extends the tree of possibilities beyond the
finite limit of death. Not that the individual can escape death, which
ineluctably limits the ramification of possibilities. But in that relation to
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C O NC L US I ON
the other known as responsibility, he stands in relation to an im-possible

future, one which will never be present for him. An im-possibility for the
individual, which, at the same time, represents a possibility for others. In
and through fecundity, freedom engenders possibilities beyond its own,
which latter will give birth to other ramifications of the possible. The re-
lation of freedom to time therefore implies both the finitude of the future,
the fact that our possibilities are limited by our mortality, and the infinity
of time, which features as a name for the fecundity of the tree of possibili-
ties, whose foliation is lost in a pure future beyond our own possibilities,
circumscribed as they are by birth and death, and whose roots plunge
down into an immemorial past which has never been present.
12. The tree of possibilities forms an almost impenetrably bushy

entanglement— the mystery of the future. This phenomenon is not
linked to any subjective ignorance, which might be dissipated by a divine
intellect knowing all possibilities. The mystery of the future flows from
the very nature of possibility in its four modalities. The decision between
possibilities is unpredictable, and its realization itself includes an element
of unpredictable novelty. The possibilities arising out of events surpass
my projects. Those offered by others are even more unforeseeable, since
they flow from a decision whose results are all the more difficult to calcu-
late in advance in that they do not depend on us. Finally, the possibilities
opened up by the infinite relation to the other— the gift of the possible—
are not in my power at all, since they are situated beyond my possibilities
and, for this reason, make the future even more difficult to foresee.
With a view to making one last effort to describe the tree of human
existence, caught up as it is in the interweaving of freedom and time, let
us leave the last word to the poet:
Man stands erect, he alone, yet he lays himself down, stretched out
quietly for sleep, for love, for death— and it is also this threefold nature
of lying down that distinguishes him from all other creatures. Destined
to grow upright as long as man stands erect, the human soul reaches
out from the dark abyss where her roots are entwined in the humus
of existence and strives upward even unto the sun-drenched dome
of the stars, bearing upward her cloudy sources from the regions of
Poseidon and Vulcan, bringing downward her clarity of their Apollo-
nian goal, and the nearer she comes in this upward growth to being a
light-drenched form, the more shapely she becomes in her shadowing,
branching out and unfolding like a tree, the more is she enabled to
unify the darkness and the light in the shadowy leaves of her branches.6
Notes
introduction
1. The translation is that of Hardie and Gaye (Aristotle 1928b).

2. As noted by Romano (1999, 70).
3. See Dohrn-van Rossum (1996, 17– 28).
4. See Klein (2003, 62– 63).
5. The most fruitful development of the quantitative approach is the inter-
pretation of physics in the “philosophy of time” (especially relativity theory and
quantum mechanics). On this topic, which is beyond the scope of this book, see
Callender (2011, parts 4 and 5).
6. What Romano (1999, 90) calls “the subjectivisation of time,” which he
contrasts with an approach to the phenomenon of time based on the notion
of event.
7. Bergson’s criticisms of Kant will be presented in chapter 7.
8. See Bergson (Creative Evolution, 12): “Yet succession is an undeniable
fact, even in the material world.”
9. A symmetry that gets qualified in other manuscripts after these lectures
of 1905, which however still always make of protention a “reverse retention.” See
Schnell (2004, 127– 42).
10. For a more detailed analysis, see Bouton (2000, 2005a, and 2009).
11. Zeitlichkeit is translated as “temporality,” and Temporalität as “Temporality.”
12. On the question of deciding whether the last thinking of Heidegger
does manage to overcome this difficulty, see Dastur (2006).
13. Pascal (1995, 21): Pensée 79 (in Sellier edition), 47 (in Lafuma edi-
tion), 172 (in Brunschvicg edition).
14. I have borrowed the concept of “plasticity” from the work of Catherine
Malabou (2005, 2012).
Chapter 1
1. See Vuillemin (1996).

2. See Michon (2004).
3. See Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, part 1, art. 41, mentioned by Leib-
niz in his Theodicy (“Preliminary Dissertation,” art. 68, 111).
259
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NO TE S T O PAGE S 2 0 –3 6
4. See Leibniz (Necessary and Contingent Truths, 1973, 101): “and although
it is most true that the mind never chooses what at present appears the better;
for it can delay and suspend its judgment until a later deliberation, and turn the
mind aside to think of other things.”
5. See Leibniz, Theodicy, part 1, art. 35, art. 48, and art. 49.
6. See ibid., part 1, art. 44.
7. On the Omnipotence and Omniscience of God and the Freedom of Man (1671?),
in Leibniz (2005, 25). Leibniz wants to talk about the case of the town of Keilah,
an example frequently discussed by the Molinists. It is drawn from an episode
from the Old Testament relating the battle between Saul and David (1 Samuel
23). Having liberated the town of Keilah from the Philistines, David decides to
leave with his troops, because God informed him that the inhabitants would
hand him over to his rival, Saul, if he stayed.
8. Leibniz, Theodicy, part 1, art. 34 and 45.
9. Ibid., part 3, art. 277.
10. Ibid., part 2, art. 231, part 3, art. 369.
11. Ibid., “Preliminary Dissertation,” art. 20, and part 1, art. 37.
12. Ibid., “Preliminary Dissertation,” art. 2.
13. All these definitions are presented as early as Leibniz’s Confessio (2005,
53– 55).
14. We are making use of the commentary on chapter 9 of On Interpretation
by Vuillemin (1996, chapter 6).
15. The translation is that of Edghill (Aristotle 1928a).
16. See Leibniz, Theodicy, part 2, art. 169.
17. Quoted and translated in Freddoso (1988, 24– 25). The complete title
of Molina’s book is Liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia,
praedestinatione et reprobatione Concordia (1588) [The Compatibility of Free Choice with
the Gifts of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation].
18. In Leibniz, Theodicy, part 1, art. 40.
19. I am assuming the exposition of the problem by Michon (2004, 145– 64).
20. Well pointed out by Bouveresse (1994, 110).
21. This expression, borrowed from Kant (Religion, 6: 49), is applied here to
the Leibnizian thesis affirming the “predetermination” of all future contingents.
22. Necessary and Contingent Truths (1686) edited in Leibniz (1988, 16– 24),
translated into English in Leibniz (1973, 96– 105).
23. See on this point Liske (1993, 270– 72).
24. See Leibniz (1998b, 58): The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, Leibniz’s
fifth paper, §13.
25. See Leibniz (Confessio, 91).
26. See Frémont (2001, 198– 99).
27. On the distinction implicare/involvere, see Robinet (2004, 40– 45).
28. On these two objections, see Michon (2004, 193– 99).
29. See Bouveresse (1994, 118– 21).
30. See Leibniz, Theodicy, part 3, art. 360; and Leibniz, Monadology, art. 22.
31. In the first case, the term “future” is a noun; in the second, an adjective.
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32. These terms are used in a fragment written in 1689 (A VI, 4, page
1634– 35), translated and commented on by Robinet (2004, 30– 36).
33. See Robinet (2004, 37).
34. For Leibniz, if the predicate were not in the subject, it would be impos-
sible to see for what reason it is attributed to it.
Chapter 2
1. See Kant (1992b): New Elucidation [Nova Dilucidatio] of the First Principles
of Metaphysical Cognition.
2. See École (1990, 175– 233, 307– 11).
3. See Kant (1992a): “An Attempt at Some Reflections on Optimism.”
4. See Kant (2001c). On this question, which exceeds the bounds of our
inquiry, see Kaehler (1985) and Brachtendorf (2002).
5. The German word “Grund” can be translated as “reason” or “ground.”
6. See Crusius (1999): Entwurf der notwendigen Vernunftwahrheiten wie sie den
zufälligen entgegengesetzt werden (1745). His principal arguments are summed up
by Kant (New Elucidation, 1: 399– 400).
7. See Finster (1982, 270).
8. See Crusius (1987): De usu (§XLIV, 41), cited by Finster (1982, 270).
9. See Kant (New Elucidation, 1: 400).
10. On this Leibnizian argument, see Kant (New Elucidation, 1: 401, 406).
11. For a global vision of this question, see Ertl (1998).
12. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A 689/B 717).
13. See ibid. (A 426– 27/B 454– 55).
14. On the two forms of the principle of reason with Kant, the logical and the
transcendental, see Kant’s reply to Eberhard (8: 194– 95) and Puech (1990, 382).
15. Kant makes little use of the term causa in his New Elucidation, simply
identifying it as the ground for existence, by nature anterior to its effect (1: 394).
16. See Brandt (2002, 162– 63).
17. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A 554– 56/B 583– 84).
18. As Ertl tries to do (1998, 163– 64).
19. See Kant (1992c).
20. See Kant, The Only Possible Argument . . . , part 1, section 3 (2: 82).
21. See Baumgarten (1739, reprint 1982).
22. See Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics (29: 927): “Destiny is a blind necessity
without law.”
23. See Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, B 290).
24. See Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, A 459/B 487).
25. See Kant (29: 923– 27) and (1997b, 222– 25); as also Watkins (2001,
70– 89).
26. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A 538– 42/B 566– 70).
27. See ibid. (A 426/B 454).
28. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (5: 101– 3).
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NO TE S T O PAGE S 5 6 –8 3
29. “Phenomenon” and “appearance” are two possible translations of the

same word in German: Erscheinung.
30. See Huneman (2005).
31. See Kant (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 123).
32. See Kant (1986, 278– 79): manuscript of the Opus postumum, bundle IV/1,
page 3.
33. With regard to the second postulate, Ricoeur writes: “In this respect,
it is worth noting that Kant recognized this practical temporal dimension, for
his philosophy hardly leaves room for a conception of time beyond the time of
representation according to the Transcendental Aesthetic, that is, a time of the
world” (2007, 420).
34. See Philonenko (1970). In this paper, the author distinguishes four
orders of reality in Kant: Mechanism, Organization, Life, and Liberty. Liberty is
the most elevated order, that to which practical time belongs.
35. See Kant (2001b).
36. See Dastur (2007).
37. See Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, A 555/B 583): “the action is ascribed
to the agent’s intelligible character; in the moment when he utters the lie, the
guilt is entirely his.”
39. See Kant (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 58), where he explains that the
“moral possibility” of the action precedes the question of its “physical possibility.”
40. See Kant (1996c).
41. See Kant (2007).
42. See Kant (2001a).
43. See Kant (1996a): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (4: 446).
44. I am borrowing this formula from Musil, but using it in a very different
sense all the same. See The Man without Qualities (part 2, chapter 35).
Chapter 3
1. See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1, Appendix:

“Criticism of Kantian Philosophy,” 506– 7.
2. See Schopenhauer (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
§20, note 15, 139– 40).
3. The capital is used in this sentence to distinguish the world as Will from
the purely individual will (volition).
4. See Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation 1, §55, 306).
5. Schopenhauer, “On Human Nature,” in Essays from the Parerga and Para-
lipomena (1951, 48).
6. See Rosset (1989, 96).
7. Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, 95, no. 3 (Paris: Vrin, 2001), 25.
8. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, book 2, chapter 27, §3,
trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), n.p.
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Chapter 4
1. See Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxx): “I have therefore found it neces-
sary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”
2. “Wesen” is translated as “being” or “essence” according to the context,
and “Sein” is translated as “Being.”
3. See Bouton (2005b).
4. See Sturma (1995, 163).
5. See Jacobs (1995, 128).
6. System der Zeiten in German (Ages of the World 1811, 11 and 14, Ages of the
World 1813, 122). Schelling uses the plural because, as we shall see, the system of
times contains three different ages, which refer to three modes of temporality.
7. That is, actually, from a philosophical point of view.
8. See Schelling, Ages of the World 1815, 8: 234, where Schelling cites this
saying from Angelius Silesius (Der scherubinische Wandersmann, 1, 3): “The gentle
Godhead is a Nothing and beyond nothing / Who sees nothing in all things, be-
lieve me, sees this [Die zarte Gottheit ist da Nichts und Übernichts / Wer Nichts in allem
sieht, Mensch glaube, dieser sieht’s].”
9. “Lauterkeit” means also “limpidity,” “clarity.”
10. As Wieland notes (1956, 86).
11. See Brito (1987, 213).
12. See David (1992, 334).
13. See Wieland (1956, chapter 2). In chapter 6 of this work, we will see
that Heidegger too introduces degrees between originary temporality and the
ordinary conception of time.
14. See Schelling (Ages of the World Fr., 223; Ages of the World 1811, 92; Ages
of the World 1813, 119/120; Ages of the World 1815, 8: 259).
15. Cited by Wieland (1956, 98).
16. As Wieland emphasizes, “freedom and temporality are reciprocal con-
cepts [Wechselbegriffe], each of which is to be interpreted in the light of the other”
(1956, 39).
17. “Scheidung in sich” also means a decision (“Entscheidung”).
18. This German saying is an untranslatable play on words which means
“choice is torment.”
19. See Lanfranconi (1992, 161– 64). The word “de-cision” written with a
hyphen is reminiscent of the word “scission,” as in German “Entscheidung” re-
fers to “Scheidung.”
20. See Schelling (Philosophical Investigations, 7: 385): “Man is in the initial
creation, as shown, an undecided being— (which may be portrayed mythically as
a condition of innocence that precedes this life and as an initial blessedness)—
only man himself can decide. But this decision cannot occur within time; it
occurs outside of all time and, hence, together with the first creation (though as
a deed distinct from creation).”
21. See Schelling, Erlangen Lectures (9: 217).
22. On the ecstatical dimension of the moment, see Wieland (1956, 32 and
38), and David (1992, 337).
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23. See Courtine (1990, 243): “this primacy of the future, far from having
been abandoned by Schelling in his last philosophy, is taken up again there ever
more profoundly, across a meditation on freedom as the first principle of all tem-
poralization, and therefore of any position, or better, de-position of the past.”
25. As we will see in the next chapter.
26. In French in the text.
27. See Wieland (1956, 39): “freedom, as a fundamental structure of being
human, is the foundation of this possibility of creating a resolute present or of
remaining the prisoner of an ir-resolute past.”
28. See Schelling’s essay of 1795, Of the I as Principle of Philosophy, or On the
Unconditional in Human Knowledge (1: 199): “The supreme law for the finite being
is: Be absolutely identical with yourself.”
29. Meister Eckhart’s notion of “Gelassenheit” can also be translated by “re-
leasement,” “abandonment.”
30. Angelus Silesius, Der cherubinische Wandersmann, 1: 12: “Man muß sich
überschwenken / Mensch, wo du deinen Geist schwingst über Ort und Zeit, / So
kannst du jeden Blick sein in der Ewigkeit.”
31. The attempt by Wieland (1956, 46– 48) to find in the Ages of the World
an experience of finitude starting out from the anticipation of death does not
seem to me to have succeeded.
32. See Schelling (Ages of the World 1811, 82– 83): “it is in it alone [Spirit]
that the knowledge of things to come rests, it belongs to it alone to remove the
seal under which the future is cast.”
33. This idea of the “speechlessness of science” in the face of the future
could be one of the reasons for the failure to complete the Weltalter, as has been
suggested by Tilliette (1992, vol. 1, 635) and David (1992, 339).
Chapter 5
1. This Danish word is close to the German “Augenblick,” and also trans-
lated as “moment.”
2. See Schelling (Philosophical Investigations, 7: 381) and Wahl (1938, 220,
note 2).
3. Breve og Akstykker Vedrorende Soren Kierkegaard, vol. 1, published by Niels
Thulstrup (Copenhagen: Ejna Munskgaard, 1953), 109– 10, quoted by Colette
(1997, 21).
4. See the German translation of these notes by Eva Nordentoft-Schlechta
in Koktanek (1962, 98– 179).
5. On the history of the notion of exaiphnes from ancient philosophy to
Kierkegaard through Christianity, see Beierwaltes (1966–67).
6. See Deuser (1985, 113).
7. On the flexibility and the polyvalence of the moment, see Colette (1994,
157, 166).
8. See Kierkegaard (Either/Or 2: 177): “Just as an heir, even if he were heir
265
NO TE S TO PAGE S 1 3 6 –1 5 0
to the treasures of the whole world, does not possess them before he has come of
age, so the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself.”
9. Kierkegaard reproduces the Paulian formula from the Apostle to the
Galatians (4: 4).
10. In the sense that faith, in Protestantism, is the true freedom (see Lu-
ther’s treatise On the Freedom of a Christian).
11. See Brezis (1991, 240): “sometimes deploring the temptation to get
rid of the moment by taking refuge in time (in a temporalization where the
excessive intensity of the moment gets reduced or attenuated), sometimes, on
the contrary, deploring the temptation to take refuge in the moment to get rid
of time (of the endless indecision of an always uncompleted unfolding of the
temporal).”
12. A text whose importance was stressed by Brezis (1991, 82 and 148– 49).
13. On this point we agree with the analyses of Colette: Kierkegaard’s
project was to “think the temporality of human existence concretely without, for
all that, giving up the concept of eternity” (1994, 130).
Chapter 6
1. With the exception of the 1815 version of Ages of the World, which ap-
peared in 1861 in volume 8 of the Sämtliche Werke.
2. See Gethmann (1988, 140– 76).
3. See Nancy (1996).
4. The choice of one’s self characterizes, for Kierkegaard, the ethical stage
of existence (see our chapter 5). On “Heidegger and Kierkegaard,” see the pio-
neering study of Wahl, which appeared in 1933 in Recherches philosophiques (vol. 2,
1932– 33, 349– 70), reproduced in Wahl (1998).
5. See Heidegger (Essence of Human Freedom, 31: 158– 59).
6. See chapter 8.
7. “Befindlichkeit” can also be translated by “mood,” “attunement,” or “tem-
perament.”
8. Following Heidegger, the translators Macquarrie and Robinson use the
neutral form “it” (“es”) to characterize the Dasein. See on this point Heidegger
(Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 26: 172): “The peculiar neutrality of the term
‘Dasein’ is essential, because the interpretation of this being must be carried out
prior to every factual concretion. This neutrality also indicates that Dasein is nei-
ther of the two sexes.”
9. See Kearney (1999, 39): “Möglichkeit in Being and Time, represents a post-
metaphysical understanding of the possible that shatters the notion of being as
solid and substantial self-presence.”
10. Macquarrie and Robinson translate “Sein-können” as “potentiality-for-
being.” We prefer to use “ability-to-be.”
11. Macquarrie and Robinson translate “das Man” with “the ‘They.’” We
prefer to use “the ‘One,’” because “They” refers to “Sie” in German, which has a
different meaning than the impersonal pronoun “Man.”
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NO TE S T O PAGE S 1 5 4 –1 6 9
12. We find here the two forms of despair distinguished by Kierkegaard

in The Sickness unto Death: the despair of necessity (the “nothing is possible” of
the fatalist or the “cage of the probable” so dear to “philistine-bourgeois” man),
and the despair of possibility (the “all is possible” of the dreamer) (see our
chapter 5).
13. This point will be explained in more detail in the next chapter.
14. See “Le possible et l’événement,” in Romano (2003, 71).
15. See ibid., 73.
16. Where does this theme of passion, hardly present in the rest of Being
and Time, come from? Perhaps it is drawn from Kierkegaard for whom “existing,
if this is not to be understood as just any sort of existing, cannot be done without
passion” (Postscript, 311).
17. This triad seems to me more relevant than that proposed by Ricoeur
(1988, 60– 96), who distinguishes “Temporality, Historicality and Within-Time-
Ness.” On this point I rejoin Schnell (2005, 98), who distinguishes “primordial
temporality,” the time of concern (die besorgte Zeit) and “ordinary temporality,”
without however sufficiently emphasizing, in my view, the dichotomy between
primordial time and authentic time.
18. See Aristotle, Physics 4.13.222b.
19. See Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, 421): “The world-time which is ‘sighted’
in this manner in the use of clocks, we call the ‘now-time.’”
20. See Haar (1994, 75).
21. Malabou (2012) has studied the plasticity or the transformability of Da-
sein, of being and of time in the thinking of Heidegger. She concentrates her re-
flection on the originary plasticity of being as Ereignis. In the wake of her work, I
am going to analyze in greater detail the plasticity of time itself in Being and Time
and the lectures from that period.
22. Sich-vorweg-schon-sein in (einer Welt) als Sein-bei (innerweltich begegnendem
Seienden).
23. See Heidegger (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 24: 378– 79).
24. On this point, I rejoin Janicaud’s analysis (1997, 95).
25. This way of writing “ek-sistence” comes after Being and Time. One finds
it, for example, in the Letter on Humanism. However, in the lectures of 1927, Hei-
degger already sets ekstatikon in relation to existence (Basic Problems of Phenomenol-
ogy, 24: 377).
26. As was emphasized by Haar (1994, 79– 80).
27. In his paper “Temporalité ‘originaire’ et temps ‘vulgaire,’” Haar writes:
“Dasein is not in time but at the source of time” (1994, 73).
28. See Heidegger (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 29/30: 226, trans.
modified): “The temporal entrancement can be ruptured only through time
itself, through that which is of the proper essence of time and which, following
Kierkegaard, we call the moment [Augenblick].”
29. Heidegger criticizes Kierkegaard on this point: “It is the reason why
the phenomenon of the moment cannot be understood from the now, as Kierke-
gaard tries to do. To be sure, he understands the moment quite well in its real
contents, but he does not succeed in expounding the specific temporality of the
267
moment. Instead, he identifies the moment with the now of time in the common
sense. Starting from here, he constructs the paradoxical relationships of the now
to eternity” (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 24: 408, trans. modified).
30. See Caron (2005, 955): “The moment is in fact, and in accordance with
the German, a view, an orientation toward a horizon, an inseparable unification,
in the moment, of future and past, without which it could not be what it is.”
31. See above, chapter 4.
32. See also Heidegger (Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 26: 270/209):
“We would have to show how facticity and individuation are grounded in tempo-
rality, which, as temporalization [Zeitigung], unifies itself in itself and individu-
ates in the metaphysical sense, as principium individuationis.”
33. See Pascal (1995, 14): Pensée 58 (in Sellier edition), 24 (in Lafuma edi-
tion), 127 (in Brunschvicg edition).
34. The metaphor of light comes from Plato’s Republic (509b) and is taken
up in the lectures of 1931 (Essence of Human Freedom, 31: 114): “Within the illumi-
nation which allows being to be understood as constant presence, the light which
expends this illumination itself becomes visible. This light is time itself.”
35. See Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, §57 and §58).
36. See Heidegger (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 29/30: 139 and on).
37. See ibid. (492): freedom is the condition of the Logos, of “being true
and being false, truth or falsity.”
Chapter 7
1. Bergson is cited by Heidegger as figuring among the great thinkers of

time, alongside Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and
Husserl. See Heidegger (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 24: 329): “Bergson’s in-
vestigations are valuable because they manifest a philosophical effort to surpass
the traditional concept of time.” See also Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 26:
256, where Heidegger mentions, among the classical texts on the problem of
time, “Bergson (all his writings).”
2. Introduction to Metaphysics: The Creative Mind is the translation of Berg-
son’s book La pensée et le mouvant: Essais et conférences (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1934).
3. See Bergson (Time and Free Will, 98– 102).
4. See ibid., 227. In “Bergson métaphysicien et critique de la métaphy-
sique,” Romano suggests thinking of the spatialization of time not as a pure
and simple identification of time with space, which would make it impossible
to understand objective movement, but as an analogy: the measurable time of
science is figured intellectually with the help of space, as an indefinite line, etc.
(Romano 2003, 120).
5. See chapter 2.
6. On Bergson’s criticism of the “tree of decision,” see Picavet (2007).
7. This retrospective presentation of the problem of freedom, as it was
posed in Time and Free Will, is also to be found in Matter and Memory (243).
268
NO TE S T O PAGE S 1 9 5 –2 2 4
8. See also (Time and Free Will, 164): “We estimate the talent of a novelist
by the power with which he lifts out of the common domain, to which language
had thus brought them down, feelings and ideas to which he strives to restore, by
adding detail to detail, their original and living individuality.”
9. See on this point Barthélémy-Madaule (1966, 125– 28).
10. See Worms (2004a).
11. On the importance of the notion of force in the dynamic conception
of the ego, see Worms (2004b, 75– 88).
12. On this question, see Saint-Sernin (1997, 60– 62).
13. This impression is reinforced by the famous definition of duration:
“Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes
when our ego lets itself live” (Time and Free Will, 100).
14. See Vieillard-Baron (1993, 46).
15. As Worms emphasizes in his paper “La conception bergsonienne du
temps” (1997, 81).
16. See Bergson (Matter and Memory, 188): “actual consciousness accepts at
each moment the useful, and rejects in the same breath the superfluous. Ever bent
upon action, it can only materialize those of our former perceptions which can
ally themselves with the present perception to take a share in the final decision.”
17. See Bergson (Matter and Memory, 220): memories “take a more com-
mon form when memory shrinks most, more personal when it widens out.”
18. See Vieillard-Baron (1995, 28– 30).
19. On these properties, see Vieillard-Baron (2004, 58– 62).
20. See also Bergson (Creative Evolution, 7): “duration is the continuous
progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”
21. See Bergson (CM, 21, 102).
22. See Čapek (2004, 251).
Chapter 8
1. See Bergson (The Creative Mind, 9) and the previous chapter.

2. See Kant (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 99) and our chapter 2.
3. I follow the Barnes translation, but I remind the reader that Sartre takes
up Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s notion, which was translated as “anxiety” in
the previous chapters.
4. See Sartre (Being and Nothingness, 29– 32).
5. See chapter 5. Sartre takes up Kierkegaard’s notion of anxiety, ridding it
of its theological context, as Colette notes (1994, 162– 63).
6. See Schelling (Philosophical Investigations, 7: 385) and chapter 4 of this book.
7. See chapter 2 of this book.
8. See Schelling (Ages of the World 1811, 41) and (Ages of the World 1815, 8:
336). See also chapter 4.
9. I follow Barnes, who translated the French word “instant” by the same
word in English: “instant.” Sartre takes up Kierkegaard’s “øjeblik” and Heidegger’s
“Augenblick,” which were both translated as “instant” in French, and as “moment”
269
in the previous chapters. Thus, these two words “moment” and “instant,” as used
in this book, are more or less synonymous.
10. See Romano, “La liberté sartrienne ou le rêve d’Adam” (2003, 143–
47). This does not, in our view, give him the right to make of Sartre a “Megarian”
(ibid., 165), since Sartre clearly defends the thesis of the indeterminateness of
the future.
11. See “The Time of the World” (Being and Nothingness, 204– 16): “Univer-
sal time comes into the world through the For-itself. The In-itself is not adapted
to temporality precisely because it is in-itself and because temporality is the mode
of unitary being in a being which is perpetually at a distance from itself for itself.”
(Being and Nothingness, 204). See also Seel (1971), who shows that the thesis con-
cerning the atemporality of the In-itself is not tenable.
12. See Sartre (Being and Nothingness, 208).
Chapter 9
1. See the conclusion of Bergson’s paper: “The Perception of Change”

(The Creative Mind, 158): “And the more we immerse ourselves in it, the more we
set ourselves back in the direction of the principle, though it be transcendent,
in which We participate, and whose eternity is not one of immutability, but an
eternity of life: how, otherwise, could we live and move in it? In ea vivimus et move-
mur et sumus.”
2. See chapter 2 of this book, section “Solution 2: Noumenal Duration.”
3. Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, 427n): “The fact that the traditional concep-
tion of ‘eternity’ as signifying the ‘standing now’ (nunc stans), has been drawn
from the ordinary way of understanding time and has been defined with an ori-
entation towards the idea of ‘constant’ presence-at-hand, does not need to be
discussed in detail. If God’s eternity can be ‘construed’ philosophically, then
it may be understood only as a more primordial temporality which is ‘infinite.’
Whether the way afforded by the via negationis et eminentiae is a possible one, re-
mains to be seen.”
4. See Levinas (1934– 35), quoted in Rolland (2000, 297).
5. For what we have to say on this example, see chapter 8.
6. See Existence and Existents (73) and Rolland (2000, 304).
7. See Levinas, “The Fatigue and the Instant” (Existence and Existents, 29– 36).
8. See Levinas (Totality and Infinity, 48– 52, 209– 12), and the conclusion of
his analysis: “God is the Other” (Totality and Infinity, 221).
9. See Existence and Existents (91– 92): “Is not the future above all the resur-
rection of the present?”
10. As written by Romano (2009, 91).
11. “The Radical Question: Kant against Heidegger,” in Levinas (2000, 61).
See also Levinas (2000, 63): This is “the great force of Kant’s practical philos-
ophy: the possibility of thinking a beyond of time by way of hope, but obviously
not a beyond that would prolong time, not a beyond that is (and would be)”
(2000, 63).
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NO TE S T O PAGE S 2 4 0 –2 5 8
12. See Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Kamarazov, book 4, chapter 1, where Alyosha
relates the words of Father Zosima.
13. Levinas (Otherwise Than Being, 106) takes up a verse from Paul Valéry:
“C’est un profond jadis, Jadis jamais assez!” (Cantique des colonnes).
14. See Levinas (Otherwise Than Being, 19, 24, 38, 97, 144).
15. “I am you when I am myself.” A verse from Paul Celan cited in the be-
ginning of the chapter on “Substitution” (Otherwise Than Being, 99).
16. See our chapter 4.
17. Rainer Maria Rilke (1962, 37, trans. modified): Letters to a Young Poet
(letter of July 16, 1903).
18. See Levinas (Totality and Infinity, 267).
19. See chapter 2, page 62.
20. Deliverance in the double sense of that which frees and that which gives.
21. Like Sartre, Levinas uses the French word “instant.”
22. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment [“Epilogue,” 2] (1938, 625– 26).
23. See Sartre (Being and Nothingness, 476) and chapter 8 of this book.
Conclusion
1. I cannot deal here with the tricky problem of causation. I would just like
to mention, as an interesting starting point for such an inquiry, a book by Keil
(2000), who claims that the counterfactual conception of causation fits better
with freedom than the nomological notion of causation, which was defended by
Kant as the basis of his determinism.
2. Aristotle’s definition comes to mind (Nichomachean Ethics, 3.5.1112b,
26– 28).
3. See figure 2 at the end of chapter 1.
4. The atrophy of the tree of possibilities can have other causes—
sociological, economic, political— that need to be brought out in detail. See
Bouton (2013, 148– 51).
5. This second form of possibility, as possibilization through an event, has
been remarkably brought to light by Romano (1999 and 2009).
6. Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1945), 79.
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index
Aristotle, 3–4, 9, 12, 22–25, 27, 44, 159, Eckhart, Meister, 97, 117, 264n29
160, 173, 206, 251, 267n1, 270n2 École, Jean, 261n2
Augustine, Saint, 3, 5, 7, 12, 267n1 Ertl, Wolfgang, 261n11, 261n18
Barthélémy-Madaule, Madeleine, 268n9 Finster, Reinhard, 261nn7–8

Baudelaire, Charles, 234 Frémont, Christiane, 260n26
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 51
Beierwaltes, Werner, 264n5 Gethmann, Carl F, 265n2
Bergson, Henri, 5, 15, 141, 154, 160, 163, Granel, Gérard, 7
170, 189–208, 209, 210, 211, 217, 224, Greisch, Jean, 148
228, 229, 231, 238, 243, 251, 253,
259n8, 267n1 Haar, Michel, 266n20, 266nn26–27
Bernet, Rudolf, 247 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9–10, 99,
Borges, Jorges Luis, 3, 9 160, 219, 267n1
Bouton, Christophe, 259n10, 263n3, Heidegger, Martin, 6, 10–11, 13, 15, 60,
270n4 86, 93, 94, 95, 121, 122, 141–86, 189,
Bouveresse, Jacques, 260n20, 260n29 210, 217, 223, 224, 226, 231, 233,
Brachtendorf, Johannes, 261n4 235, 236, 237, 238, 243, 248, 251,
Brandt, Reinhard, 261n16 256, 259n12, 263n13, 267n1, 268n3,
Brezis, David, 137, 265nn11–12 268n9, 269n11
Brito, Emilio, 263n11 Huneman, Philippe, 262n30
Bruch, Jean-Louis, 61, 62 Husserl, Edmund, 6–8, 12, 165, 199, 210,
212, 218, 220, 224, 230, 235, 267n1
Callender, Craig, 259n5
Čapek, Jakub, 268n22 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 89–90, 93,
Caron, Maxence, 267n30 139
Char, René, 155, 237 Jacobs, Wilhelm G., 263n5
Colette, Jacques, 122, 264n3, 264n7, Janicaud, Dominique, 266n24
265n13, 268n5
Courtine, Jean-François, 106, 264n23 Kaehler, Klaus Erich, 261n4
Crusius, Christian August, 42–44, 54 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 9, 15, 34, 41–72, 73,
74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 85, 89, 90, 95,
Dastur, Françoise, 259n12, 262n36 98, 103, 104, 105, 109, 112, 114, 119,
David, Pascal, 263n12, 263n22, 123, 131, 141, 143, 144, 146, 150, 159,
264n33 170, 190, 192, 195, 196, 204, 205, 209,
Descartes, René, 20, 34, 229, 234, 235 211, 221, 222, 231, 233, 238, 239,
Deuser, Hermann, 264n6 260n21, 267n1, 269n11, 270n1
Dohrn-van Rossum, 259n3 Kearney, Richard, 265n9
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 249, 270n12 Keil, Geert, 270n1
281
282
I N DE X
Kierkegaard, Søren, 15, 112, 121–40, 141, Robinet, André, 260n27, 261nn32–33
142, 149, 153, 169, 170, 180, 213, 224, Rolland, Jacques, 269n4, 269n6
231, 266n29, 268n3, 268n5, 268n9 Romano, Claude, 155, 259n2, 259n6,
Klein, Etienne, 259n4 266nn14–15, 267n4, 269n10
Koktanek, Anto Mirko, 264n4 Rosset, Clément, 262n6
Lanfranconi, Aldo, 263n16 Saint-Sernin, Bertrand, 268n12

Lavelle, Louis, 209, 210, 232 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6, 15, 121, 141, 145, 146,
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 15, 19–40, 41, 154, 169, 171, 180, 189, 208, 209–30,
42–45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 231, 234, 238, 243, 247, 249, 251,
56, 57, 64, 66, 70, 71, 73, 74, 80, 83, 268n2, 270n21
84–85, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 131, 132, Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 15,
142, 146, 148, 149, 150, 155, 163, 168, 73, 89–120, 121, 122, 131, 137, 138,
191, 204, 205, 209, 215–16, 253, 257, 139, 141, 146, 150, 169, 170, 189, 190,
267n1 196, 216, 224, 227, 231, 233, 242, 244,
Levinas, Emmanuel, 15, 121, 189, 208, 248, 254, 264n28
231–49, 251, 257 Schnell, Alexander, 259n9, 266n17
Liske, Michael-Thomas, 260n23 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 15, 73–86, 89, 100,
114, 141, 170, 189, 190, 231
Malabou, Catherine, 259n14, 266n21 Seel, Gerhard, 269n11
Marty, François, 60 Silesius, Angelus, 97, 117, 197
Michon, Cyrille, 259n2, 260n19, 260n28 Spinoza, Baruch, 22, 78, 89, 90, 92, 103,
Molina, Luis de, 20, 25–30, 37, 38, 46, 253 126, 216
Moreau, Joseph, 31 Sturma, Dieter, 263n4
Musil, Robert, 262n44
Tilliette, Xavier, 96, 122, 264n33
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 157, 265n3
Vieillard-Baron, Jean-Louis, 268n14,
Pascal, Blaise, 14, 133, 135, 173, 174, 182 268nn18–19
Philonenko, Alexis, 59, 262n34 Vuillemin, Jules, 259n1, 260n14
Picavet, Emmanuel, 267n6
Plato, 12, 122, 139, 175–76 Wahl, Jean, 121, 265n4
Plotinus, 201, 202, 267n1 Watkins, Eric, 261n25
Puech, Michel, 54, 261n14 Wenzler, Ludwig, 245
Wieland, Wolfgang, 96, 105, 263n10,
Reverdy, Pierre, 139 263nn15–16, 263n22, 264n27,
Ricoeur, Paul, 8, 12–13, 61, 160, 256, 264n31
262n33, 266n17 Wolff, Christian, 42, 43, 45, 51, 74, 89
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 245 Worms, Frédéric, 268nn10–11, 268n15
Christophe Bouton is a professor of philosophy at l’Université Bordeaux
Montaigne. His most recent book is Faire l’histoire (2013). Time and Freedom
is his first book to be translated into English.
Christopher Macann’s most recent translation is of Alain Berthoz and

Jean-Luc Petit’s The Physiology and Phenomenology of Action (2008).

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Time and Freedom

General Editor Anthony J. Steinbock

Associate Editor John McCumber

Translated from the French by Christopher Macann

Northwestern University Press

English translation by Christopher Macann copyright © 2014 by Northwestern

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bouton, Christophe, author.

Preface to the American Edition ix

Note on Citations, Translations, and Abbreviations xi

Part 1. The Tree of Possibilities

1 Whether the Future is Necessary (Leibniz) 19

2 Three Kantian Solutions to the Problem of Pre-determinism 41

3 The Wheel of Time (Schopenhauer) 73

Part 2. The Plasticity of Time

4 The Time of decision (Schelling) 89

5 The Moment (Kierkegaard) 121

6 decision for Temporality (Heidegger) 141

Part 3. The mystery of the Future

7 Time as the Source of Freedom (Bergson) 189

8 Freedom at the root of Time (Sartre) 209

9 The Fecundity of Time (Levinas) 231

This book is the translation of a slightly modified version of my work

CE Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Modern

MM Matter and Memory, trans. W. Scott Palmer. London: George

BP The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter.

CPR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith. London:

CA The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte in

Confessio Confessio philosophi, Papers Concerning the Problem of Evil, 1671–

EE Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague:

Entre nous Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith

BN Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London:

AW Die Weltalter [The Ages of the World].

FR On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F.

1. The most basic is the quantitative approach, which consists in determin-

of its quantification. Nevertheless, a central place is certainly granted to

2. We can understand why the quantitative approach must have seemed

philosophical decision, which consists in defining time on the basis of

The transcendentally “absolute” which we have brought about by the

If the phenomenological reduction is to be complete, radical, it has to

flow of temporal objects, the third stratum of time. At the beginning of

The limit of the Husserlian phenomenology of time is not that of

3. The subjectivist approach no doubt throws some light on the time of

consciousness” (Philosophy of Nature, 1970, §258, 230). So does time arise

vision of the phenomena of temporality, which moreover are themselves

5. Despite the different approaches adopted to decipher the enigma,

to actions. Mimesis is the representation of an action, just as plot is the

6. In this book I propose to follow up this unexplored path, one that

tigate the conception of time which is involved in that notion of freedom.

and, in particular, on the status of the future, no matter how important

Whether the Future is Necessary

Is the future necessary? To this question, humans tend to answer in the

Three Possible Arguments in Favor

The question of the agreement of divine prescience with human free-

Divine foreknowledge, the necessity of causes, the truth of future contin-

1. In what way is divine foreknowledge compatible with human freedom?

For example, when Abiathar prophesied by divine inspiration to David

3. We are now in a position to examine the third objection bearing on

γὰρ ὁπότερ’ἔτυχεν] with regard to present or future events is that reality is

Leibniz and Molina: The Conditional Future

What is the nature of divine foreknowledge? On this question, Leibniz takes

with human freedom on the basis of a radical conception of free will as a

Finally, the third type is middle knowledge [media scientia], by which, in