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CONSCIOUSNESS
Sartre’s existentialism rests upon a theoretical view of consciousness that is crucial to understand. “Human subjectivity is our starting point,” says Sartre, and this subjectivity is to be conceived in a way that differs from classical rationalist views such as Descartes’. Where Descartes uncovered his first truth via the experience of the cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” Sartre digs further down in the depths of subjectivity and uncovers a multi-layered consciousness for which the cogito is just one facet. An important factor that led Sartre on this path was his discovery of the German phenomenological movement.
In this chapter, we will examine how Sartre adopted phenomenology, and how he devised his views about consciousness. We will examine in detail how Sartre explains the nature of consciousness and self-consciousness, and see how his views in this regard entail a rejection of the unconscious. We will also consider how one of Sartre’s literary characters, Antoine Roquentin, suffers from nausea, and what it means for him as an existing individual.
PHENOMENOLOGY
Returning from a study year at the Institut Français de Berlin, Raymond Aron explained to Sartre how he could obtain funds to study there. He also suggested to Sartre that he study the work of German phenomenologists. Dissatisfied with traditional philosophical systems and their overly rationalistic and idealistic stances, Sartre was enthusiastic to discover that there existed a type of philosophy that allowed him to talk about concrete things—about the things themselves. This is what attracted him to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. At the end of his year’s stay in Berlin, and after investing much effort in studying phenomenology, Sartre wrote the essay The Transcendence of the Ego, in which he explores the inner workings of consciousness for the first time.
Husserl’s aim was to investigate what remains when one takes the external world away from consciousness and the activity of reflecting, the cogitare. He was interested in the sphere of “absolute consciousness,” and wanted to uncover what meaning this world has when we see it as it actually exists. For Husserl, phenomenology is the science of essential being. By “bracketing off” certain things from consciousness, he hoped to arrive at the essence of things. If consciousness is always conscious of something, then when one takes away the world, one is left with a pure conscious life that is antecedent to the natural being of the world. This is what Husserl called “bracketing,” or Epoché. It is the method by which one suspends one’s judgments about the natural world in order to access things as they really are. When one is conscious of something, i.e. of the world, one finds intentionality. Using bracketing, Husserl was trying to uncover the nature of pure consciousness, i.e. pure intentionality.
Intentionality is the fundamental property of consciousness. It is consciousness that is conscious of something, consciousness as a cogito. Husserl saw that this intentionality is a movement by which consciousness moves out of itself, however. It throws itself out into the world by being conscious of something. Interestingly, that is what set Husserl apart from Descartes, who was also much concerned with the cogito. Descartes thought that the world is not necessary for the cogito to go on thinking. Husserl, on the contrary, considered that a world is needed to have a cogito, because consciousness, by its very nature, is that flow of intentionality. Both Descartes and Husserl, however, conceived of the ego as the ground that unifies consciousness. Consciousness has experiences, is conscious of, and thereby fills itself, existing as this stream of experiences. Descartes and Husserl agree that the ego is an entity that ties these experiences together, that provides a unity of experience. Sartre dismisses this idea and denies that this role belongs to the ego. Consciousness is that stream and nothing unifies it but itself; the ego is only a worldly by-product of conscious activity. He says:
“THERE IS CONSCIOUSNESS”
In the Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre explains how he revises the traditional rationalistic conception of the human being. He also critically reappropriates Husserl. As Hazel Barnes puts it, this revision is extremely important because his rejection of Descartes and his fundamental claim about the pre-reflective cogito form the “original point of departure” for his thought. (See her discussion of the essay The Transcendence of the Ego in Barnes, Hazel, “Translator’s Introduction,” Being and Nothingness, x–xv.) In this essay, Sartre engages in a process of introspection wherein he describes the three steps to one’s self-discovery: there is 1. consciousness (as consciousness of something); 2. the non-consciousness (the world as being what consciousness is conscious of); and 3. the body, the self (what is not the world).
Although the first thing we encounter in this introspective inquiry is consciousness itself, Sartre dissociates himself from traditional idealism. Indeed, he is not claiming that reality has its foundation in consciousness, as idealism holds; rather, he says that the first thing we encounter is consciousness, but it is not consciousness that creates and sustains the world. Consciousness depends on the necessary pre-existence of the world in order to exist. Because it exists as conscious of something, this something must already be there for consciousness to be conscious of it. Sartre explains that “consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself” (BN 23). Again, the discovery that consciousness undergoes unfolds in the following manner: consciousness is conscious of something; this something is the world; the world in turn informs consciousness that it is not the world. This is an epistemological process, i.e. it speaks of the order of acquisition of knowledge, and its results are not of an ontological nature, since it does not say anything about the order of appearances of things as things that exist. It does not say that there is first consciousness, then the world. The world is primary: it is there to be grasped by consciousness. Consciousness does not create the world ex nihilo, i.e. from nothing, but rather creates what is already there by interpreting it.
Sartre proposes that consciousness is always also self-consciousness. When I am conscious, my consciousness is conscious of itself as being conscious of something. “Thus by nature all consciousness is self-consciousness” (Barnes xiv). This pre-reflective consciousness is without an ego. It is not personal, it is simply consciousness that is conscious of. It is consciousness as an act: the act of being conscious, of grasping the world as opposed to consciousness as an object, like a mind or concrete brain. Sartre will therefore want to transform the classical Cartesian formula, “I think, therefore I am,” and change it to “There is consciousness, therefore I am.” The first “truth” that one uncovers via introspection is the fact of consciousness which is not yet an “I.” Again, it is important to stress how much this position differs from that of Descartes or Husserl.
TOPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Sartre presents us with a complex view of consciousness as he explains that there are three levels of consciousness in the human being. The first level is that of pre-reflective consciousness, which is consciousness of something (consciousness as act). It is the rawest level of consciousness. The second level is that of reflective consciousness, and the third is that of self-reflective consciousness, where consciousness becomes its own object. Sartre illustrates the differences between them with two examples. Let us examine the example of reading. There he explains that when you are engaged in the act of reading, you are also conscious of the room you are in, the temperature of the room, the chair on which you sit, etc., all on a pre-reflective level. But you are also actively engaged in the reading, which is a reflective activity that requires the second level of consciousness. As a reflective consciousness, you are using reflection to be conscious of something in a different way. You read this book: you decipher the signs on the page, you make sense of them, you think about them. These are all reflective ways to be conscious. At the same time, you can also think of yourself as reading, which is self-reflective consciousness. As you are reflectively conscious of reading, i.e. actively thinking about your reading, you are conscious of yourself as a reading-self. You can reflect upon yourself as engaged reflectively in the activity of reading. This is the topology of consciousness that Sartre puts forth. According to him, this is how consciousness functions. Although he presents these levels of consciousness in a sequence, they should not be thought to “happen” one after the other. These are contemporaneous moments of consciousness.
Sartre concludes this analysis with a statement that comes pretty close to Merleau-Ponty’s view of the body-subject. He explains that, when I am engaged in any action, as in the act of reading, “I am then plunged into the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousnesses [ … ] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level.” (TE 49). Objects in the world constitute consciousness. There is a unity of consciousness, and the unifying thread is intentionality, i.e. consciousness as conscious of something. This all happens without an ego being in charge; there is no rational, personal process at work in this. There is consciousness as conscious of something in the three different modes indicated above, pre-reflective, reflective, and self-reflective.
What then is the ego, and how is it formed? The “I” is transcendent, it is in the world and as vulnerable as other objects in the world. Sartre explains: “Instead of expressing itself in effect as ‘I alone exist as absolute,’ it must assert that ‘absolute consciousness alone exists as absolute,’ which is obviously a truism. My I, ineffect, is no more certain for consciousness than the I of other men. It is only more intimate” (TE 104). The I and the world are objects f...
