Temporality (Sartrean)
ELI5
Sartre is saying that time isn't just a clock ticking outside you — it's what you are: you exist by constantly escaping your past and reaching toward your future, never fully landing in the present, because if you ever stood still and became a fixed thing, you'd stop being a conscious person at all.
Definition
Sartrean temporality is not a sequence of "nows" laid out along a neutral timeline but the ontological structure of the For-itself itself. Because the For-itself is constitutively not the In-itself—it is a nihilating nothingness, a being whose being is always at a distance from itself—it exists only as a perpetual ekstatic dispersion across three dimensions: a Past it has been, a Present that is its flight from co-present being, and a Future toward which it surges. None of these three is a self-enclosed mode; each is intelligible only in relation to the others, which is why Sartre speaks of "ekstatic" temporality: the For-itself "stands outside" itself in each dimension simultaneously. The Present, far from being a moment of self-coincidence, is precisely the site of the For-itself's non-being—its negation of the In-itself—and it is this structure of negation that first introduces co-presence, pastness, and futurity into the world. Temporality, on this account, is not an empirical feature of things but the very mode of being of consciousness as ontological lack.
This ekstatic structure is inseparable from freedom and situation. Because the For-itself is always at a temporal distance from itself, it can never be fully determined by its past: its past is real but is carried forward only as what it freely surpasses toward a project. Deliberation and voluntary acts are therefore secondary—they retrospectively announce a decision already taken at the level of the For-itself's original temporalizing spontaneity. Freedom and temporalization are coextensive: to temporalize is to negate the given toward a future, and to negate the given toward a future is to be free. Equally, the "situation" as an irreducible ontological structure arises precisely from this temporalizing surpassing of facticity: the For-itself is nothing other than its situation, which means it is nothing other than the ongoing temporal movement of making itself rather than simply being.
Place in the corpus
This concept appears exclusively in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological and functions as one of the architectonic pillars of Sartre's phenomenological ontology. It is most directly an extension and radicalization of the canonical concept of Negation: where Negation names the structural operation by which something is defined through absence or refusal, Sartrean temporality is the lived enactment of that negation — the For-itself's perpetual not-being-the-In-itself played out across the three ekstatic dimensions. Temporality is, in this sense, negation given its full ontological shape. It also bears on the canonical concept of Consciousness: Sartre's For-itself is identical with consciousness, and by grounding temporality in the For-itself's nihilating structure, Sartre makes consciousness fundamentally temporal and non-self-identical, in stark contrast to the Lacanian corpus's treatment of consciousness as secondary, decentred, and structurally deceived. Where Lacan locates the subject's constitutive split in the signifying chain, Sartre locates it in the ekstatic dispersion of temporality itself.
The concept also articulates the relationship between Facticity and freedom that runs throughout the Sartrean portions of the corpus. Facticity (the brute givenness of past, body, situation) is what the For-itself temporalizes by surpassing — it is the residue of In-itself contingency that temporalization takes up and transforms without ever fully dissolving. Temporality is thus the dynamic form through which the paradox "there is freedom only in a situation, and a situation only through freedom" is lived. Within Phenomenology as a tradition, Sartre's account represents the most systematic attempt to ontologize time from within the first-person structure of consciousness — a move the Lacanian corpus critiques precisely for privileging the continuity of sense (and the self-transparency of the For-itself) over the rupture introduced by the signifier and the unconscious.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (page unknown)
The For-itself is a temporalization. This means that it is not but that it 'makes itself.' It is the situation which must account for that substantial permanence which we readily recognize in people
The phrase "it is not but that it 'makes itself'" is theoretically loaded because it condenses the entire ontological claim: the For-itself has no substantial being (it "is not"), only the ongoing activity of temporal self-constitution ("makes itself"), and it is this activity — not any fixed nature — that must explain what ordinarily looks like stable personal identity ("substantial permanence"). The shift from "is" to "makes itself" is precisely the move from In-itself ontology to the ekstatic, temporalizing structure of consciousness.