Sartre’s Pre-reflective Consciousness as For-Itself

Philosopher and public intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre held that consciousness is not a thing, a container of contents, or a self behind experience, but a wholly intentional, self-transcending activity—always consciousness of some transcendent object—that is at the same time implicitly and in a non-objectifying way aware of itself in a non-positional or pre-reflective mode. On this phenomenological view, the felt, first-person character of experience is secured not by a further inner act of introspection or a hidden ego but by consciousness's immediate transparency to itself. Moreover, consciousness is fundamentally a nothingness (the for-itself) that has no contents of its own and exists only as the disclosure of a being wholly other than itself (Sartre, 1943; Gardner, 2009).

In other words, Sartre’s theory of phenomenal consciousness holds that consciousness is an intentional, non-substantial, pre-reflectively self-aware “for-itself” that exists only as directed beyond itself toward the world, while its lived field is structured by negation, freedom, embodiment, affect, imagination, and exposure to the look of others (Sartre, 1936/1957, 1940/2004, 1943/1956; Gardner, 2009; Zahavi, 1999). Sartre is obviously not offering a scientific theory of consciousness. He is giving a phenomenological ontology: an account of the mode of being of consciousness as lived, world-directed, self-aware, and irreducible to thinghood. SEP describes Sartre’s mature project in Being and Nothingness as organized around the distinction between being-for-itself, consciousness, and being-in-itself, the essential being of objects.

Intentionality and the Emptiness of Consciousness

Sartre inherits from Husserl the thesis that consciousness is always consciousness of something, but radicalizes it: Because consciousness is exhaustively directed at objects, it contains nothing—no images, sensations, or mental contents lodged inside it (Sartre, 1943; Wider, 1997). Consciousness has no interior substance; it is a directed openness onto objects, persons, possibilities, absences, values, and imaginary contents (Sartre, 1936/1957). SEP Everything of which one is aware stands outside consciousness as a transcendent object; consciousness itself is a pure, translucent directedness, an "emptiness" that is nothing apart from its relation to the world. This distinguishes Sartre's view sharply from representationalist and container models of the mind: phenomenal experience is not the having of inner qualia-laden items but the revealing of worldly objects to an activity that is itself contentless. Phenomenal consciousness, then, is not a private theater behind the world; it is the mode in which the world appears from a situated point of view.

Pre-reflective Self-consciousness

Sartre's most influential contribution to the theory of consciousness is his account of self-awareness. Every conscious state, he argues, is aware of itself, but not by taking itself as an object. When I am absorbed in counting cigarettes or reading, I am not reflecting on my counting or reading, yet I am non-thetically [tacitly, in the background], non-positionally conscious (of) doing it—Sartre's parentheses marking that this self-awareness is not a further object-directed act (Sartre, 1943). This pre-reflective cogito is the immediate, implicit self-presence that belongs to consciousness as such; reflection, in which consciousness makes itself its own object, is a secondary and derivative operation that presupposes it. The account anticipates and grounds the contemporary thesis that phenomenal consciousness carries an intrinsic for-me-ness or subjective self-givenness, a position defended in current philosophy of mind against higher-order theories, which hold that a state becomes conscious only by being the object of a further representation (Zahavi, 2005).

The Non-Egological Theory and the For-itself as Nothingness

Because self-awareness is pre-reflective and objectless, Sartre denies that there is any ego or self within consciousness—rejecting Husserl's transcendental ego. The "I" is not the owner or source of experience but a transcendent object that consciousness constitutes only in reflection; consciousness itself is impersonal and spontaneous (Sartre, 1936/1957). This non-egologicalview makes consciousness (the for-itself, être-pour-soi) radically different from the dense, self-identical being-in-itself (être-en-soi) of mere things: the for-itself is a nothingness, a perpetual self-transcendence that is never coincident with itself and is therefore condemned to freedom. The felt structure of experience—its openness, its lack, its inability to rest as a fixed thing—follows from this ontological characterization rather than from any positive content.

Significance, Difficulties, Distinctions

Sartre's phenomenology of consciousness is a principal source of the phenomenological tradition's treatment of phenomenal consciousness in terms of first-person givenness rather than qualia or higher-order monitoring, and his pre-reflective cogito descends from Fichte's "original insight" and feeds directly into contemporary self-representational and phenomenological accounts of subjectivity (Zahavi, 2005; Gardner, 2009).

Two difficulties are commonly cited. First, the doctrine that consciousness is fully transparent to itself—that it "sees" all of itself at once—sits uneasily with evidence of unconscious or opaque mental processes and has been challenged as phenomenologically overstated. Second, critics question whether non-positional self-awareness can be coherently characterized without either collapsing into a reflective, object-directed relation (thereby regenerating the regress Sartre sought to avoid) or becoming too thin to do the explanatory work assigned to it. These tensions notwithstanding, Sartre's insistence that experience is intrinsically self-manifesting, egoless, and contentless remains a distinctive and actively discussed alternative within consciousness studies.

Because Sartre's explicit concern is the structure of first-person conscious experience, "phenomenal consciousness" fits better than it does for other phenomenologists. Yes, Sartre theorizes the self-manifesting/subjective-givenness structure of experience (for-me-ness), not qualia in the sensory sense — indeed his "emptiness thesis" denies that consciousness contains qualia-like inner items, pushing all phenomenal character out onto transcendent objects. So, he sits on the "subjectivity/self-givenness" side of the phenomenal-consciousness debate, not the "qualia/felt-quality" side, and his framework tends to dissolve rather than address the hard problem by relocating phenomenal content to the world.

References

Gardner, S. (2009). Sartre's Being and Nothingness: A Reader's Guide. Continuum.

Sartre, J.-P. (1936/1957). The Transcendence of the Ego (F. Williams & R. Kirkpatrick, Trans.). Noonday Press. (Original work published 1936.)

Sartre, J.-P. (1943). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (L'Être et le néant). Paris: Gallimard.

Wider, K. V. (1997). The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. Cornell University Press.

Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. MIT Press.