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Sartre, consciousness, and intentionality

Mark Rowlands

Published online: 4 August 2013# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Keywords Adverbialism . Consciousness . Content . Intentionality . Sartre

1 Introduction

There are two conjoined sentences to be found in section III of the Introduction toBeing and Nothingness.1 The first is mundane. The second is rather startling. Buteven more startling is that Sartre seems to take the second to be an obviousimplication of the first. Here are the sentences:

All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. Thismeans that there is no consciousness that is not a positing of a transcendentobject, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no ‘content’.2

The first, mundane, claim is that all consciousness is intentional. The claim is, ofcourse, not utterly mundane: doubted by some, it nevertheless provides the startingpoint for philosophy in the Brentanian—hence phenomenological—tradition, and isalso widely accepted outside that tradition. Let us call this the Intentionality Thesis(IT). The second claim is far less mundane. Consciousness has no ‘content’. Let uscall this the No Content Thesis (NCT). This claim seems prima facie implausible. Ifconsciousness has no content then, it seems, there is nothing in it. If this is correct,where, one might think, are we to locate the familiar candidates for denizens ofconsciousness: thoughts, feelings, images, emotions, and so on? If they are not inconsciousness, then where, exactly, are they? However, what is really striking aboutthis short passage is that Sartre seems to regard NCT as a straightforward implicationof IT. Indeed, so obvious does he think this entailment is, he seems to feel little needto support it with any (non question-begging) argument. That NCT is an implicationof IT is, Sartre appears to assume, too obvious to require supporting argument.

Phenom Cogn Sci (2013) 12:521–536DOI 10.1007/s11097-013-9333-z

1Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Paris: Gallimard 1943, trans. Hazel Barnes, New York:Philosophical Library, Inc. All page numbers refer to the 1992, Washington Square edition, 1992.2Being and Nothingness, p. 11.

M. Rowlands (*)Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USAe-mail: [email protected]

These two sentences, I shall argue, are absolutely central to Sartre’s arguments andposition in Being and Nothingness. Indeed, it would not be too much of an exaggerationto say that Being and Nothingness is, in large part, merely an attempt to work out theimplications of these sentences, and the assumed connection between them. In thispaper, I shall argue that Sartre was right. NCT is, in fact, a (relatively) straightforwardimplication of IT. If we assume that all consciousness is intentional, then consciousnessis, indeed, a form of nothingness. This claim is as important as Sartre thinks it is.

2 Consciousness as nothingness: the no content thesis

In this section, I shall identify, with a little more precision, the content of NCT. In thenext section, I shall try to supply the thesis with (independent) supporting argument.The two tasks are not entirely independent of each other. Thus, for reasons that willnot become fully clear until the supporting argument has been supplied, NCT shouldbe understood as a thesis that applies to objects of consciousness. No object ofconsciousness can be part of consciousness. That is:

(NCT) Necessarily, any object of consciousness is outside consciousness.

Sartre uses the term “transcendent” to refer to items that are outside consciousness.Thus, according to NCT, any object of consciousness is, necessarily, a transcendent thing.

To properly understand what NCT does and does not entail, we need, first, toobserve the familiar distinction between acts and objects of consciousness. Thisdistinction, in Sartre’s work, corresponds to the distinction between two types ofbeing: being-for-itself and being-in-itself respectively. This distinction is foundationalto Sartre’s view. However, in any actual conscious experience, the two regions ofbeing are always indissolubly bound up. That is, in any conscious experience, act andobject can be distinguished but not separated.

Acts of consciousness include things such as seeing (and perceiving more gener-ally), thinking, remembering, desiring, imagining, emoting, anticipating, dreading,and so on. An object of consciousness is that of which I am aware when I engage inan act of consciousness. Suppose I am thinking about an object: a shiny, red tomatothat sits on the table in front of me. That is, I am thinking that this tomato is red andshiny. On the one hand there is the object of my thought: the tomato. This is atranscendent object. But I am also thinking about the tomato in a certain way, asfalling under a given mode of presentation: as being red and shiny. Assuming mythought is true, the content of my thought—that the tomato is red and shiny—is whatwe might regard as a state-of-affairs. I can be aware of objects and aware of states-of-affairs. Typically, a subject’s awareness of objects is via his or her awareness ofstates-of-affairs.3 Both of these things—object and state-of-affairs—are not part ofmy consciousness. They are, as Sartre puts it, transcendent items. This claim isunremarkable. Suppose now, however, that I close my eyes and mentally picturethe tomato. I attend to the mental image I have formed.4 This image is now an object

3 Some might reject this claim of dependency, but the claim is not important for my purposes.4 As we shall see, Sartre would reject this account of what is going on when I visualize the tomato. Herejects the idea that there are mental intermediaries. I use this example for expository purposes only.

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of my consciousness—an object of the act of mentally imaging—and if NCT is true,is therefore also a transcendent object, something that lies outside my consciousness.This claim is slightly less unremarkable.

As a first approximation, one might think of NCT as supplying a challenge: try topoint to the contents of consciousness. As you say ‘Here is one!’—mentally pointingto a thought, experience, feeling or sensation, for example—this becomes an object ofyour consciousness and so is, if NCT is correct, precisely not a part of yourconsciousness. To identify the contents of consciousness, we must make them intoobjects of consciousness, and therefore, if Sartre is correct, this makes them transcendentobjects—objects that exist outside consciousness. Conversely, if consciousness existsonly as acts of consciousness, then it is a pure directedness towards the world, andnothing more:

All consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach anobject, and it exhausts itself in this same positing. All that there is of intention inmy actual consciousness is directed toward the outside, toward the table; all myjudgments or practical activities, all my present inclinations transcend them-selves: they aim at the table and are absorbed in it.5

If we think of the world as a collection of actual or potential objects of conscious-ness, then, as Sartre puts it, the entire world is outside consciousness.6 Consciousnessis, in this sense, empty.

3 Supporting NCT

Sartre supplies very little in the way of non question-begging argument in favor ofNCT, seeming to regard it as an obvious implication of IT. By way of support, we canfind little more than this passage:

A table is not in consciousness, not even in the capacity of a representation. Atable is in space, beside the window, etc. The existence of the table in fact is acenter of opacity for consciousness; it would require an infinite process toinventory the total contents of a thing. To introduce this opacity into conscious-ness would be to refer to infinity the inventory which it can make of itself, tomake consciousness a thing, and to deny the cogito. The first procedure of aphilosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness, to know thatconsciousness is a positional consciousness of the world.7

This passage alludes to his earlier rehearsal of Husserl’s position that objects canbe regarded as structured series of appearances.8 There is, Sartre argued, no finitenumber of appearances that could exhaust any given object. And even hallucinations

5 Being and Nothingness, p. 11.6 Being and Nothingness, p. 17.7 Being and Nothingness, p. 11. Emphasis is mine.8 The concept of an appearance, for Sartre, is not a mentalistic one. Appearances are not mentalentities (ideas, images, and the like). Appearances are objects of awareness and, as such, are beings-in-themselves. This, he think, distinguishes his position from that of Husserl. It is not clear, however, thatthis is really the case.

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need not be given all at once in their entirety. Thus, to locate objects in consciousnesswould entail that, at any given time, there are parts of consciousness that areinaccessible to consciousness. Consciousness would, in this sense, be opaque. Sartrethinks this conclusion is nonsensical. However, this can scarcely be regarded as anargument for NCT. The question of whether consciousness is or is not opaque depends,in part, on the question of whether it has contents. If, contrary to Sartre’s claim,consciousness does have contents, then these contents may both fail to be given all atonce. Indeed, the grasping of a given content at a given time may preclude the grasping ofanother content at that time.9

That Sartre thought it unnecessary to provide much in the way of argument forNCT is a result of his regarding it as such an obvious implication of IT. Others maynot regard this as an obvious implication of IT at all. Indeed, given that IT is endorsedby so many and NCT by so few, the latter can scarcely be regarded as an obviousimplication of the former. In this section, I shall argue that Sartre was right: even if itis not as obvious as Sartre seems to think, NCT is an implication of IT.

NCT is perfectly compatible with consciousness being populated by consciousacts: acts of thinking, imagining, remembering, and the like. This is compatible withNCT because, as Sartre puts it, such acts ‘exhaust’ themselves in their positing of anobject: they are a pure directedness towards objects and nothing more. The population ofconsciousness with acts is compatible with the emptiness of consciousness becausethese acts are themselves empty. NCT precludes only objects of consciousness—itemsof which a subject is aware when he or she engages in conscious acts—qualifying ascontents of consciousness. Given that NCT is supposed to be an implication of IT, therejection of intentional objects as contents of consciousness must, it seems, be groundedin an argument of the following sort:

1. Consciousness is intentional2. No object of consciousness can be intentional3. Therefore, no object of consciousness can be part of consciousness

Claim 3 is, of course, NCT. Necessarily, any object of consciousness is outside ofconsciousness—a transcendent thing.

For the argument to work, a little tidying up is required. First, we should distin-guish derived and non-derived or original intentionality. Derived intentionality is,roughly, intentionality that derives either from the minds or from the social conven-tions of intentional agents. Non-derived, or original, intentionality is intentionalitythat does not so derive. The Brentanian thesis, expressed as premise 1, is thatconsciousness is intentional in an original, or non-derived, sense. Moreover, theinclusion of derived intentionality would clearly make premise 2 false. We can, andoften do, use symbols to stand in, or go proxy, for other things. Therefore, we shouldamend the argument to the following:

1* Consciousness is intentional in an original sense2* No object of consciousness can be intentional in an original sense3* Therefore, no object of consciousness can be part of consciousness.

9 The implicated imagery here is, perhaps, questionable. I cannot access one of the contents of my consciousnessbecause it is occluded—hidden by—another. I shall dwell no further on this, because my purpose here is not toendorse Sartre’s argument but reject it.

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Premise 1* is IT—which, for the purposes of this paper, I shall assume is true. 3*is NCT which is where I want to get. It remains to defend premise 2*.

When the object of consciousness is a non-mental one, it is pretty clear that premise 5 ison solid ground. Rocks, clouds, trees, even bodies do not possess original intentionality.10

There are, of course, obvious circumstances in which we use one object of consciousnessto stand in for another. To take the most obvious example, words are used to stand in forobjects. But this intentionality is derived. The hard work in defending premise 2* beginswhen the object is a mental one. Consider, for example, something that, prima facie, seemsa very good candidate for object of consciousness with original intentionality: a mentalimage. Suppose I stare at a dog. Then closemy eyes and picture it. I form amental image ofthe dog. I am aware of this image. Therefore, it is an object of my consciousness. It is alsoabout the dog. Therefore it certainly seems to have an original intentional status.

However, we can use an argument, generally associated with Wittgenstein ratherthan Sartre, to show why this is not, in fact, the case. The image is, logically, just asymbol. In itself, it can mean many things, perhaps anything. It might mean—stand infor, be about—this particular dog or about dogs in general. It might mean ‘furrything’, ‘thing with four legs’, ‘thing with tail’, ‘thing with cold nose’, ‘mammal’, andso on. In itself, the image can meanmany things. To have specific meaning—to be aboutone thing rather than other things—it must be interpreted. And this, on the Sartreanscheme, is what consciousness—as act—does. More accurately, it is what conscious-ness, as act, is. Consciousness, in this context, is the interpretation of the image as beingabout one thing rather than others—in the mode, as Sartre would say, of not being it. Theexpression ‘in the mode of not being it’ signifies that it is not possible to assert thatconsciousness is interpreting activity. If the interpreting activity of my consciousnesswere, for example, to become an object of my consciousness, then it would no longer bepart of my consciousness. The activity would be transcendent.

This conclusion might be thought peculiar to the choice of image as object ofconsciousness. But, as Wittgenstein has shown, essentially the same argument can beapplied to any object of consciousness: image, icon, sentence, rule and so on. We aretempted to suppose, for example, that we can understand the intentionality of content-bearing states such as thoughts and beliefs (or ‘signs’more generally) in terms of a setof rules that specify how they are to be applied. The question, then, however, is whatform this understanding of rules might take. If the rules are items that come before themind, then they two have the logical status of symbols. In themselves they mightmean anything. Therefore, in themselves, they mean nothing. This is the basis ofWittgenstein’s rule-following paradox: any course of action can be said to be inaccord with a rule. So, there can be neither accord nor conflict here.

Wittgenstein’s insight, in essence, was that any object of consciousness—anythingthat comes ‘before the mind’—has the logical status of a symbol. Therefore, it does notpossess original intentionality. This is the insight that motivates Sartre’s adoption of NCT.NCT does not, by itself, deny that thoughts, beliefs, mental images have originalintentionality—or, to say that it does would be, at the very least, misleading. Thoughts,beliefs, images exist fundamentally as acts: acts of thinking, of believing, of imaging, andso on. In this form, as acts of consciousness directed towards the world, then clearly they

10 These things might carry natural information, but the problems with trying to construct intentionalitypurely ourt of natural information are well known.


possess all the original intentionality one could reasonably require: they are specificinstances of intentional directedness. We can attempt to attend to these things—to makethem into objects of consciousness. But what we end up attending to, or apprehending, issomething very different: not the original act at all, but a transcendent object. In this form,as the items to which we have succeeded in attending, they do not have originalintentionality. Acts of thinking, believing, imaging, and the like, are things with whichI am aware. The items of which I am aware—let us call them thoughts*, beliefs*,images*—are very different. They are, if Sartre is correct, transcendent items: thingsthat exist outside consciousness. This non-identity of acts and objects of consciousness isvery important for Sartre’s overall view.

To seewhy, consider this objection. The image of a dog does have original intentionality,but suddenly loses it as soon as I attend to it. Why would attending to something make itlose a property it has?After all, when I attend to the dog itself, it doesn’t suddenly stop beingbrown.11 Sartre, however, would reject the assumption that there is one and the same thinghere: an image that is either attended to or not. It is not that we have one and the same itemthatmysteriously loses a property whenwe attend to it. There are, in fact, two quite differentthings. In consciousness, there is an act of imaging. The object of that act is transcendent. Sowe cannot identify the act with the object in the way envisaged by this objection.

With regard to the object of the act, we have seen that Sartre claims that ‘a table is not inconsciousness, not even in the capacity of a representation.’ There are two distinct claimshere. First, there is a radical transparency thesis of the sort expressed in the claim that‘consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and itexhausts itself in this same positing.’ I can think about the table, have beliefs about, anddesires with respect to, the table. I can mentally picture. But the object in all these cases isthe table and not somemental intermediary such as an image.My acts of consciousness donot stop short of the table. Even if I mentally picture the table, the object of my picturing isthe table, and I stand to this table in the relation of picturing. Second, there is the idea thateven if there were some sort of intermediary standing between my consciousness and thetable it would not be mental. Any such intermediary would be a transcendent item that liesoutside consciousness. Consciousness, necessarily, does not stop short of what istranscendent—even if we might disagree with what, precisely, this transcendent item is.

If the foregoing argument is correct, the prima facie surprising inference from IT toNCT has sound logical credentials. Suppose we are tempted to think of consciousness aspopulated with, or composed of, items ofwhich we are aware: thoughts, beliefs, imagesand the like, all conceived of as objects of awareness. As items of which we areaware—as items that come ‘before the mind’—they do not, if Sartre is correct, possessoriginal intentionality, and therefore are not parts of consciousness. Therefore, con-sciousness cannot be populated with items of which we are aware. Nothing of which weare aware can be a part of consciousness. If this is correct, this has important implica-tions, both with regard to understanding Sartre’s views, and also with regard to widerissues in the philosophy of mind. I shall not, in this paper, discuss the latter.12 Withregard to Sartre’s views, there are two issues that are worthy of discussion. First, there is the

11 I am grateful to Uriah Kriegel for this objection.12 See my The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Massachusetts,MA: MIT Press, 2010) for what is, essentially, a defense of neo-Sartrean account of cognitive processes andapplication of this account to the issue of embodied and extended cognition.

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peculiar centrality of NCT to those views. Secondly, there is Sartre’s attempt to reconcileNCTwith another thesis that is, for him, non-negotiable: the claim that non-positional self-consciousness is essentially implicated in every act of positional consciousness.

4 The centrality of NCT to Sartre’s views

Much of Being and Nothingness can plausibly be seen as an attempt to work out theimplications of NCT. I shall focus on three prominent themes.

Being-for-itself and being-in-itself Sartre’s basic distinction between two realms ofbeing—être pour-soi (being for-itself) and être en-soi (being in-itself)—is not a distinctiongrounded inmetaphysical intuition but, rather, is a straightforward consequence of the NCT.The distinction between the two types of being that an existent can possess is commonlyglossed as a distinction between those things that are conscious and those that are not.Conscious things possess being-for-itself. Non-conscious things possess being-in-itself.This characterization is not incorrect. However, Sartre also believes that intentionality isthe essence of consciousness. So, the distinction could equally be glossed as the distinctionbetween those things that have (original) intentionality, and those that do not. Moreimportantly, NCT underpins Sartre’s account of the relation between these two kinds ofbeing. The intentionality of consciousness, Sartre notes, has been understood in two ways:

All consciousness is consciousness of something. This definition of conscious-ness can be taken in two very distinct senses: either we understand by this thatconsciousness is constitutive of the being of its object, or it means that con-sciousness in its inmost nature is a relation to a transcendent being. But the firstinterpretation destroys itself: to be conscious of something is to be confrontedwith a concrete and full presence which is not consciousness.13

The first interpretation ‘destroys itself’, Sartre has argued in the preceding pages,for the reasons ultimately grounded in NCT. No object of consciousness can be partof consciousness since consciousness is intentional (in an original sense) and noobject of consciousness can be intentional (in an original sense). There is nothing inconsciousness, and therefore there are no resources from which the being of tran-scendent objects could be constructed.14 Therefore, Sartre concludes:

Consciousness is consciousness of something. This means that transcendence is theconstitutive structure of consciousness; that is, consciousness is born supported by abeing which is not itself. This is what we call the ontological proof (23).15

13 Being and Nothingness, pp. 21–2.14 This is a paraphrase of the rather tricky argument to be found in section IV of the Introduction, “TheBeing of the Percipi”. While the overall argument is less than perspicuous, the claim being defended is:“Let us recognize first of all that the being of the percipi can not be reduced to that of the percipiens—i.e. toconsciousness” (p. 18). Also relatively clear, at least in its general contours, is the argument Sartre uses tosupport this claim: “It is precisely because it is pure spontaneity, because nothing can get a grip on it, thatconsciousness cannot act on anything.” (p. 20)15 I am grateful to Galen Strawson for pointing out (in correspondence) that Barnes’s translation is questionablehere. She translates “portée sur” as “supported by”, when, in fact, “porter sur” has a quite specific meaning: “tobring to bear on”. This does not, of course, substantially impact on the argument of this section.


In Sartre’s terminology: being for-itself requires and presupposes being-in-itself.Being for-itself has no content. We might think of it as a hole in being-in-itself. Ahole cannot exist without its edges, but these edges are not part of the hole. Theexistence of a hole guarantees the existence of something outside it. In thissense, consciousness (the pour-soi) provides an ontological proof of being-in-itself(the en-soi). The converse dependence does not hold. Being-in-itself is complete andself-contained. NCT, therefore, in addition to entailing the basic distinction betweenbeing-in-itself and being-for-itself also entails that idealism is false: “To say thatconsciousness is consciousness of something is to say that it must produce itself as arevealed-revelation of a being which is not it and which gives itself as already existingwhen consciousness reveals it.”16 For this reason, Sartre characterizes his position as a“radical reversal of idealism”.

Nothingness and nihilation Consciousness secretes little pockets of nothingness—negatités—into the world (i.e. being-in-itself). This is a consequence of the fact that itexists only as acts directed towards the world. The term Sartre uses for this produc-tion of nothingness is nihilation. Our expectation, or hope, that Pierre will be in thecafé allows us, according to Sartre, to directly perceive his absence and not merelyinfer his absence from what we do experience. That is, we have what Sartre calls anintuition of Pierre’s absence. We do not merely judge that Pierre is absent.17

Expectation, or hope, can produce this experience of absence only because it is itselfempty—in the sense explained by NCT. Thus, Sartre argues:

It follows therefore that there must exist a Being (this cannot be the In-itself) ofwhich the property is to nihilate Nothingness, to support it in its being, tosustain it perpetually in its very existence, a being by which nothingness comesto things. It would be inconceivable that a Being which is full positivity shouldmaintain and create outside itself a Nothingness … The Being by whichNothingness arrives in the world is a being such that in its Being, the Nothing-ness of its Being is in question. The being by which Nothingness comes to theworld must be its own Nothingness.18

Something cannot come from nothing. Neither, Sartre thought, can nothing comefrom something. Nihilation—the ability to secrete negatités—is, therefore, a conse-quence of the fact that consciousness is empty.19 This claim, I have argued, is bestcaptured by way of NCT.

Freedom and Anguish To the extent that he is often interpreted as claiming that weare always free, in any circumstances, to act as we choose, Sartre’s conception offreedom has been widely misunderstood. Freedom, for Sartre, is freedom frommotives or reasons, but this sort of freedom is of a quite specific and restricted sort.The reason we are free is that these motives or reasons—understood as items of which

16 Being and Nothingness, p. 24.17 Being and Nothingness, pp. 40 ff.18 Being and Nothingness, pp. 57–8.19 The secretion of negatités, Sartre thought, is essential to thinking and all other intentional acts. To thinkthat there is a bottle on the table is to recognize that the bottle is not the table. Negatités, in other words, areessential to the individuation of objects in thought. See Being and Nothingness, p. 63.

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we are aware, as items that incline us to act in one way or another—cannot compel us.They cannot compel us because they are transcendent (i.e. outside consciousness),and therefore to guide us have to be, first, interpreted in a given way. Nothing cancompel this interpretation, and to this extent we are free. Consider, for example,Sartre’s introduction to his discussion of anguish:

Vertigo announces itself through fear. I am on a narrow path—without a guardrail—which goes along a precipice…I can slip on a stone and fall into the abyss;the crumbling earth of the path can giveway under my steps. Through these variousanticipations, I am given to myself as a thing … fear appears … which … is theapprehension of myself as a destructible transcendent in the midst of transcendents,as an object… I will pay attention to the stones in the road; I will keep myself as faras possible from the edge of the path… I project before myself a certain number offuture conducts destined to keep the threats of the world at a distance from me… Iescape fear by the very fact that I am placing myself on a plane where my ownpossibilities are substituted for the transcendent probabilities where human actionhad no place…But these conducts… not only is it not strictly certain that theywillbe effective; in particular it is not strictly certain that they will be adopted… I am inanguish precisely because any conduct on my part is only possible, and this meansthat while constituting a totality of motives for pushing away that situation, I at thesame moment apprehend these motives as not sufficiently effective. (66–8)

The motivation to stay on the path—indeed the intense desire to continue living—isnot sufficient to prevent me from stepping off into the abyss. My reasons or motives, inthis sense, can never compel me to adopt a given course of action. Anguish is therealization of the inefficacy of my motives. The question is: why should this be so? Theanswer is made clear in Sartre’s discussion of a particular type of anguish: anguish in theface of the past.

Anguish in the face of the past … is that of the gambler who has freely andsincerely decided not to gamble anymore andwho, when he approaches the gamingtable, suddenly sees all his resolutions melt away… what the gambler apprehendsat this instant is again the permanent rupture in determinism; it is nothing whichseparates himself from himself.20

The ‘nothing’ in question is consciousness conceived of simply as directednesstowards objects that are outside—transcendent to—it.

After having patiently built up barriers and walls, after enclosing myself in themagic circle of a resolution, I perceive with anguish that nothing prevents me fromgambling. The anguish is me since by the very fact of taking my position inexistence as consciousness of being, I make myself not to be the past of goodresolutions which I am … In short, as soon as we abandon the hypothesis of thecontents of consciousness, we must recognize that there is never a motive inconsciousness; motives are only for consciousness. (70–1)

The gambler’s resolution, as something of which the gambler is aware, is a transcen-dent object and therefore has no meaning in itself. It has the logical status of a symbol.

20 Being and Nothingness, p. 69.


For it to be about anything, and so possess efficacy vis-à-vis the gambler’s futurebehavior, it must be continually interpreted anew by the animating consciousness. Asan object of consciousness—and therefore transcendent—the motive is always a motivefor consciousness, in the sense that it must be interpreted by that consciousness. At anygiven time, consciousness is this interpreting activity—in the mode of not being it.Should the gambler interpret his resolution—the barriers and walls has built up—asbinding? Or are they merely the caprices of an earlier hour that should now bediscarded? Nothing can compel the gambler’s interpretation of his resolution, and tothis extent he is free. This, it should be clear, is far from the traditional voluntaristconception of freedom according to which (roughly) I assess options in the light of mypreferences and freely decide on a course of action on this basis. Sartre’s point is that if Iwere to do that, my decisions would always, and necessarily, fall short of compelling theaction. Indeed, that is precisely why I am in anguish.

5 The problem of pre-reflective consciousness

The idea that consciousness is nothingness might seem to be dubiously compatible withanother thesis upon which Sartre wants to insist. According to NCT, any object ofconsciousness is necessarily transcendent. This precludes any object of consciousnessfrom counting as a content of consciousness. However, in itself, this is compatible withitems of which I am not aware—items that are not objects of consciousness—beingincluded among the contents of consciousness. Thus, NCT is compatible with con-sciousness having content as long as this content is not an object of awareness. Thus,Sartre is quite happy to allow that an act of consciousness is part of consciousness—butonly because such an act is itself empty. That is, an act of consciousness is positing of atranscendent object and it exhausts itself in this positing. If a subject were to becomepositionally conscious of this act, it would become a transcendent object. Consciousnessof consciousness would, therefore, seem to be impossible. However, this is a claimthat Sartre denies. Indeed. Sartre insists that self-consciousness—consciousness ofconsciousness—is essentially involved in every conscious act.

Sartre attempts to reconcile these apparently conflicting claims by way of tworelated distinctions. The first is the distinction between positional and non-positionalconsciousness. The second is the distinction between reflective and pre-reflectiveconsciousness. Although sometimes conflated, these distinctions are not (quite)equivalent. Positional consciousness is consciousness of an object—consciousnessthat “posits” an object. Non-positional consciousness is consciousness that does notdo this.21 Reflective consciousness is the positional consciousness of consciousness.Pre-reflective consciousness is the non-positional consciousness of consciousness.For example, suppose I am thinking that the cat is on the mat. This is positionalconsciousness. The object “posited” is the fact that the cat is on the mat. Now, I attend

21 Aswe shall see, the idea of non-positional consciousness does not contradict the idea that all consciousness isconsciousness-of because Sartre does not think of non-positional consciousness as a separate form of consciousact but, rather, as something that is necessarily built into any positional (i.e. intentional) conscious act. Identifyingwhat, precisely, this means is the task of this section.

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not to the cat and the mat but to my thinking about this fact. That is, I am thinking thatI am thinking that the cat is on the mat. This higher-order thought is also an act ofpositional consciousness that is directed towards my original thought (or toward thefact that I am having this thought). In thinking about my thought, I am reflectivelyconscious of this thought. However, Sartre also argues that implicit in my originalthought—the thought about the cat on the mat—is a non-positional consciousness. Inhaving this thought, and before my (reflective) attention turns toward the thought, I amnon-positionally conscious of this thought, and therefore pre-reflectively aware of it.

Sartre argues that every act of positional consciousness involves non-positionalconsciousness of that act. This argument has two strands. First, there is the argumentthat any act of consciousness must, in some sense, involve consciousness of that act.Second, there is the argument that this latter consciousness cannot be positional.

Consciousness, Sartre argues, is non-positionally aware of itself. It has to be, inorder to be consciousness of objects:

[T]he necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing consciousness to beknowledge of its object is that it be consciousness of itself as being that knowl-edge. This is a necessary condition, for if my consciousness were not conscious-ness of being consciousness of the table, it would then be consciousness of thattable without consciousness of being so. In other words, it would be a conscious-ness ignorant of itself, an unconscious—which is absurd. This is a sufficientcondition, for my being conscious of being conscious of that table suffices in factfor me to be conscious of it (11).

One may certainly put pressure on the necessity claim. Why, exactly, is a “con-sciousness ignorant of itself” absurd? Sartre adds a further argument in support of theidea that “every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time non-positionalconsciousness of itself”.22 He imagines a situation in which he is (absent-mindedly, aswe might say), counting the cigarettes in his case:

If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, “What are you doing”, Ishould reply at once, “I am counting”. This reply aims not only at the instan-taneous consciousness which I can achieve by reflection but at those fleetingconsciousnesses which have passed without being reflected-on in my immedi-ate past. This reflection has no kind of primacy over the consciousnessreflected-on. It is not reflection which reveals consciousness reflected-on toitself. Quite the contrary, it is the non-reflective consciousness which rendersthe reflection possible; there is a pre-reflective cogito which is the condition ofthe Cartesian cogito.23

One can respond to the question immediately, only because one must have beenaware of what one was doing all along. More recently, this sort of case has featuredquite prominently in motivating higher-order perception and higher-order thoughtmodels of consciousness. However, what exactly it shows is a matter of interpreta-tion. Far from providing an example of consciousness of consciousness, it might,instead, be interpreted as a case of non-conscious processing to which the subject has

22 Being and Nothingness, p. 13.23 Being and Nothingness, p. 13.


access, and so of which the subject can become aware in the presence of certaineliciting conditions. This is not the place to adjudicate this issue. All I shall do issimply note that to those not already wedded to the idea that consciousness requiresself-consciousness, Sartre’s arguments may be less than convincing.

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that consciousness does require self-consciousness, then Sartre is, I think, on stronger ground in his denial that this self-consciousness can be positional:

The reduction of consciousness to knowledge in fact involves our introducinginto consciousness the subject-object dualism which is typical of knowledge.But if we accept the law of the knower-known dyad, then a third term will benecessary in order for the knower to become known in turn, and we will befaced with this dilemma: Either we stop at any one term of the series—theknown, the knower known, the knower known by the knower, etc. In this case,the totality of the phenomenon falls into the unknown; that is we always bumpup against a non-conscious reflection, and a final term. Or else we affirm thenecessity of an infinite regress … which is absurd. (12)

We are either committed to an infinite regress, or to the existence of a final non-conscious term. The former option is, as Sartre puts it, “absurd”. But the latter optionentails that there exists a conscious state (the state immediately preceding the “finalterm” that is (a) conscious, but of which there is (b) no consciousness). And this is togive up on the claim that all consciousness requires self-consciousness.

To reconcile the claim that consciousness requires self-consciousness, Sartredistinguishes between positional (i.e. object-positing) and non-positional senses ofconsciousness. Consciousness must be consciousness of itself without positing itselfas an object. That is, consciousness must be non-positional consciousness of itself:

We understand nowwhy the first consciousness of consciousness is not positional;it is because it is one with the consciousness of which it is consciousness. At onestroke, it determines itself as consciousness of perception and as perception. Thenecessity of syntax has compelled us hitherto to speak of the “non-positionalconsciousness of self”. But we can no longer use this expression in which the “ofself” still evokes the idea of knowledge. (Henceforth we shall put the “of” inparentheses to show that it merely satisfies a grammatical requirement).24

Consciousness must be non-positionally, or pre-reflectively, conscious of itself giventhat (i) consciousness must be conscious of itself, and (ii) this self-consciousness cannottake positional form.

The introduction of pre-reflective consciousness, the non-positional consciousnessthat consciousness has of itself, engenders a puzzle. For it looks like we are nowcommitted to the claim that consciousness does have content after all: this contentconsists in items (of) which consciousness is non-positionally aware. After all, if pre-reflective consciousness is the non-positional consciousness has of its self then, it seems,there must be something there for consciousness to be non-positionally aware of. It is allvery well to claim that this is a case of consciousness “(of)” rather than consciousness“of”. But this still does not tell us how there can be consciousness “(of)” if there is

24 Being and Nothingness, pp. 13–14.

532 M. Rowlands

nothing for it to be “(of)”. Conversely, if there something for this consciousness to be“(of)”, then how can we reconcile this with NCT?

The introduction of pre-reflective consciousness is problematic on another count.It is difficult to see how Sartre can say very much about it once he has established, atleast to his satisfaction, its existence. To describe pre-reflective consciousness—tooutline its essential structures, etc.—would require us to make this pre-reflective self-consciousness into an object of scrutiny. But once we do so, it becomes a transcen-dent object and so not the sort of thing we are trying to understand. Sartre is wellaware of the problem. For example:

But as soon as we wish to grasp this being, it slips between our fingers, and wefind ourselves faced with a pattern of duality, with a game of reflections. Forconsciousness is a reflection, but qua reflection it is exactly the one reflecting,and if we attempt to grasp it as reflecting, it vanishes and we fall back on thereflection.25

While Sartre is aware of the problem, he does not appear to be aware of any way ofresolving it. The upshot seems to be that the “immediate, non-cognitive relation of theself to itself” is basic. This is where explanation stops. Thus, while Sartre is very clearon the sorts of things pre-reflective consciousness is supposed to do he is less thanclear on how it does these things. For example, it is one thing to say that, “[I]t is thenon-reflective consciousness which renders the reflection possible; there is a pre-reflective cogito which is the condition of the Cartesian cogito.”26 But in the absenceof any positive characterization of this pre-reflective cogito, we do not in any wayunderstand how it makes reflection possible.

These twin problems might be amenable to a unified resolution. If we can say alittle more about what pre-reflective consciousness is then we might be able tounderstand how this form of consciousness does not vitiate NCT. But how do wedo this without objectifying pre-reflective consciousness? The answer is: we operatein transcendental mode. We work out the sort of thing pre-reflective consciousnessmust be if it is to satisfy the constraints Sartre places on it.

6 The adverbial interpretation of pre-reflective consciousness

The temptation to be avoided at all costs is that of thinking about pre-reflectiveconsciousness on analogy with reflective consciousness. Reflective self-consciousnessintroduces what wemight think of as a gap between the reflecting consciousness and theconsciousness reflected upon, and this gap allows the former to be of the latter. If wethought of pre-reflective consciousness on analogy with this, we might be tempted tosuppose that the gap it introduces between the pre-reflecting consciousness and theconsciousness pre-reflected upon (or “(upon)” Sartre would presumably also urge us toparenthesize the “upon” in contexts such as this) is somewhat smaller than in the case ofreflective consciousness. The consciousness pre-reflected (upon) is, somehow, lessindependent of the pre-reflecting consciousness than the consciousness reflected upon

25 Being and Nothingness, p. 122.26 Being and Nothingness, p. 13


is of the reflecting consciousness. So, in understanding pre-reflective consciousness inthis analogical way, we take the basic structure of reflective consciousness and modify itin certain ways.

This way of understanding pre-reflective consciousness simply returns us to thepuzzle. How do we reconcile this interpretation with NCT, and Sartre’s frequentcharacterizations of consciousness as “nothingness”, “emptiness”, etc.? If the structureof pre-reflective consciousness is understood by analogical extension from reflectiveconsciousness, then consciousness must be something for pre-reflective consciousnessto be consciousness (of) it. If consciousness is really to be “nothingness”, then pre-reflective consciousness must have an entirely different nature. The question, then, isprecisely what this nature must be.

To be positionally conscious is to be aware of objects. “Objects”, here, means inten-tional object—objects of awareness—and so should be understood broadly, to includemodes of presentation of objects. I can be aware of the tomato, but also of the way in whichit is presented to me—its redness, its shininess, etc. Indeed often, perhaps typically, I amaware of objects (in the usual sense) in virtue of being aware of the way in which they arepresented—that is, in virtue of being aware of their modes of presentation. When I amreflectively aware of what it is I am thinking, then my thought (and/or its properties) is anobject of my awareness, and its experienced properties provide it with a mode ofpresentation. This thought, these properties, are now, of course, transcendent of, ratherthan immanent to, my consciousness.

If this is what positional consciousness is, then what is it to be non-positionallyaware of something? I can think of only one option consistent with NCT—with theclaim that consciousness has “no being outside of that precise obligation to be arevealing intuition of something—i.e. a transcendent being.”27 To be non-positionallyaware of an object is to be aware of the object in a certain way. But, crucially, we mustnot equate this being conscious of an object in a certain way with being conscious ofa mode of presentation of the object. Away of being conscious of an object should bedistinguished from away in which that object is presented—for the latter is simply anotherobject of awareness. Non-positional consciousness is identical with a mode or manner ofbeing conscious of consciousness. In other words, the expression “a way of beingconscious of an object”must be understood to qualify the act of positional consciousnessrather than supplying a description of that act. To understand pre-reflective consciousness,therefore, the key is to understand this idea of a way or manner of being conscious of myown mental states (understood as transcendent items), without reducing this to awarenessof a mode of presentation of those states.

The only way to guarantee that “a way of being conscious of consciousness” qualifiesthe act rather than describes the object of the act is to go adverbial. Suppose I ampositionally conscious of an object. This is, of course, itself an adverbial characterization.“Positionally” is an adverbial modifier that characterizes my relation to an object. That is,it modifies my consciousness of the object. There is nothing wrong with this, but it doescloud the adverbial function of non-positional consciousness. So, to make what is goingon clearer, let us recast positional consciousness in non-adverbial terms: I have positionalconsciousness of an object. Then, the adverbial construal of pre-reflective consciousness

27 Being and Nothingness, p. 23.

534 M. Rowlands

becomes clear. I have positional consciousness of an object, and I have this positionalconsciousness non-positionally. “Non-positionally” is an adverbial modifier that modifiesmy positional awareness.28 For example, I have the positional thought that cat is on themat, and I have this positional thought non-positionally.

The advantage of this adverbial construal of pre-reflective consciousness is that itpreserves the central Sartrean insight of NCT—that consciousness is nothingness, atotal emptiness with the entire world outside it. Non-positional consciousness mod-ifies or qualifies my directedness to the world; but does nothing more than that. Inparticular, it carries no commitment to the idea—an idea that Sartre must reject—thatwhen I am pre-reflectively aware, my consciousness is directed towards my con-sciousness in any more substantial sense. Pre-reflective conscious characterizes mydirectedness to the world. It does not indicate a substantial form of directednesstowards my own consciousness over and above modifying my directedness towardsthe world.

This, of course, is only a skeletal account. But it is a skeleton on which many of themore traditional and concrete features of self-consciousness might be hung. For example,the experiences I have I take to bemine. Except, perhaps, in very unusual circumstances,it is not that I first have experiences and then have to work out to whom they belong. Myexperiences, perhaps not necessarily but typically, present themselves to me as mine.This mine-ness is what many people have in mind when they talk of self-consciousness.If we tried to explain this on the act-object model supplied by reflective consciousness,wemight look for an introspectively discernible feature of my experiences—the propertyof mine-ness or being mine—in virtue of which they present themselves to me in thisway. I introspectively encounter the mine-ness of my experiences, and this is why Iexperience them as mine. However, the same phenomenon can also be explained inadverbial terms. When I have experiences, I have them minely. Their mine-ness is anadverbial modification of the act rather than a property of an object of that act. And thisadverbial modification would be what the non-positional awareness of experiences asmine consists in. Since it does not make mine-ness a content of consciousness that Iencounter when I direct my introspective gaze in a certain direction, this account iscompatible with NCT. By way of this adverbial maneuver, I suspect, many of thefeatures commonly associated with self-consciousness can be rendered compatible withNCT. That however, is a story for another time.

7 Conclusion

In Being and Nothingness we find an intriguing view of conscious experience. Anyobject of consciousness is transcendent—something that is outside consciousness.Consciousness is empty because (i) any object of consciousness necessarily lies outsideit, and (ii) any positional act of consciousness (which might be thought of as a constituent

28 I defend this adverbialist line in a lot more depth in a series of writings, including The Nature ofConsciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); ‘Two dogmas of consciousness’, in A.Noe ed., Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion, special edition of the Journal of Consciousness Studies 9,2001, 158–80; ‘Consciousness: the transcendentalist manifesto’, Phenomenology and the CognitiveSciences 2, 2003, pp. 205–221.


of consciousness) is also empty—a directedness towards objects that are outside it andnothing more than this. Built into each act of positional consciousness is a non-positionalself-consciousness, understood as an adverbial modification of the positional act.

These claims are, for Sartre, straightforward implications of the intentionality ofconsciousness. But Sartre’s view of intentionality is likely to appear utterly alienwhen compared to contemporary discussions. These discussions typically begin withthe assumption that consciousness has some sort of content, and this content isresponsible for its intentionality. The reasons for this assumption are respectableand well known. If consciousness has no content, how are we to account for false(or empty) thoughts, experiences and other conscious acts? If consciousness hascontents, we can account for this, roughly, in terms of the idea that the contents ofconsciousness do not match up with the content of the world. This option will,presumably, be unavailable to Sartre. The worry is, of course, that if one denudesconsciousness of content in the way that Sartre appears to do, one will have to bulk upthe world accordingly. The emptiness of consciousness will, perhaps, have to becompensated for by an augmentation of the contents of the world. While such a viewis non-standard, it has attracted sufficient adherents for us to see how it might bedefended. A substitutional interpretation of the existential quantifier will, of course,do no harm. Nor will the idea that existence, pace Kant, is a property of states-of-affairs—a property that some have while others lack.29 I suspect that these sorts ofclaims would be compatible with Sartre’s ontological outlook. But that is also a storyfor another time.30

29 See my ‘Enactivism, intentionality and content’ forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly for anelaboration and defense of these ideas.30 I am grateful to Uriah Kriegel and Galen Strawson for helpful comments on an earlier version ofthis paper.

536 M. Rowlands

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