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The Failure of Self-Consciousness in Sartre's Being and Nothingness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Kathleen Wider
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Dearborn

Extract

The central tenet in the ontology Sartre describes and seeks to defend in Being and Nothingness is that being divides into the for-itself and the in-itself. Self-consciousness characterizes being-for-itself and distinguishes it from being-in-itself. What it means for a being to exist for itself is that it is self-conscious. How Sartre characterizes self-consciousness in Being and Nothingness is, however, a question that remains to be asked. There is no simple answer to this question. For Sartre, there are really several levels of self-consciousness: the self-consciousness of consciousness at the pre-reflective level, at the level of reflection (both pure and impure) and at the level of being-for-others. There is a profound difference between the self-consciousness of being-for-others and impure reflection, on the one hand, and the self-consciousness of reflection and pre-reflective consciousness, on the other. With being-for-others and impure reflection, self-consciousness involves the attempt to grasp the self as an object for consciousness. Although the nature of this attempt and the reasons for its ultimate failure differ at each level, these levels are bound together by a common sense of self-consciousness as a consciousness of the self as an object.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1993

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References

Notes

1 Our consciousness that there exists a dimension of our being which exists for others but escapes us could perhaps be considered a kind of minimal or degraded form of self-consciousness at the level of our being-for-others. Yet since we cannot apprehend the self that is created by the look of the other, substantive self-consciousness at this level is beyond our reach.

2 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, translated by Barnes, Hazel E. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 261.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 241.

5 Ibid., p. 263.

6 Ibid., p. 268.

7 Ibid., p. 273. Sartre reiterates these same views when he discusses, later in Being and Nothingness, the two aspects of the body's existence: its existence for itself and its existence for others. It is through the body's existence for others that I discover my body as an object. That is indeed a revelation of its being Sartre admits. However, when I am present to my body as a being-for-others, as an object, “I am present to it without its being me and without my being it” (p. 304).

8 Although my experience of the look of the other creates a kind of self-consciousness which escapes me, it is also true for Sartre that pre-reflective self-consciousness is what frees me from the captivity of the other's look. See Being and Nothingness, p. 287.

9 Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Transcendence of the Ego, translated by Williams, Forrest and Kirkpatrick, Robert (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), p. 62.Google Scholar

10 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 153.

12 Ibid., p. 150.

13 Ibid., p. 151.

15 Ibid., p. 159.

16 Ibid., p. 160.

17 Ibid., p. 161. This attempt by the self to recover the self is really the desire to be God surfacing as reflection: a desire to be a conscious being, a for-itself, a witness to the world and oneself, while at the same time being the foundation of one's own being and as such coinciding with what one is. This desire, Sartre claims, is a useless passion, since the notion of God is self-contradictory.

18 Ibid., p. 162.

19 Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 63.

20 Ibid., p. 70.

21 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 155.

22 Ibid., p. 153.

23 Ibid., pp. 155–156.

24 Ibid., p. 156.

25 Ibid., p. 159.

26 Ibid., p. 155.

27 Ibid., pp. 150–151.

28 Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 32. First emphasis mine.

29 Ibid., p. 83.

30 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 155.

32 Ibid., p. 156.

33 Ibid., p. 162.

34 Ibid., p. 155.

37 One might think the catharsis-like moment of recognition that can be achieved through existential psychoanalysis might be the catharsis Sartre is referring to here; but Sartre distinguishes the self-knowledge obtained from psychoanalysis from pure reflection, which it may help clarify, but to which it is not identical. Every for-itself is capable of the catharsis of pure reflection without the aid of analysis and, consequently, the catharsis-like moment in analysis cannot be equated with the catharsis by which the quasi-knowledge of reflection is won.

38 Ibid., p. 161.

39 Ibid., p. 570.

40 I am grateful to an article by Catalano, Joseph S., “Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1 (June 1990): 673–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for making clear to me the use Sartre makes of conceptualization to distinguish consciousness from knowledge in his discussion of existential psychoanalysis.

41 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 571.

42 Ibid., p. 570. Emphasis mine.

43 Ibid., p. 569.

44 This distinction might serve as a basis for understanding at least one sense of the distinction Sartre draws between non-thetic, thetic and thematic consciousness. Non-thetic consciousness would be a consciousness which does not involve the use of concepts such as the non-thetic self-consciousness of pre-reflective consciousness. Thetic consciousness would involve the use of concepts but only as applied to a specific act or behaviour. An example of such consciousness would be the self-consciousness of prereflective consciousness made thetic at the level of pure reflection. Thematic consciousness would involve the use of concepts as applied to the for-itself as a totality, applied to the fundamental project. Thematic consciousness is what impure reflection aims at, perhaps, but it succeeds in reaching only the unity of the ego and not the deeper unity that one's fundamental project confers on all that one is.

45 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 570.

46 What concepts would the for-itself apply to itself that would not amount to its attempting, in bad faith, to transcend itself—an attempt which Sartre says necessarily fails? See Being and Nothingness, p. 298.

47 Ibid., p. 571.

48 Sartre does make comments that imply reflection in general (and hence both pure and impure reflection) fail. However, the reason he gives for the failure of reflection—that it is an abortive attempt on the part of the for-itself to make itself an object and identify itself with that object—seems to apply only to his account of impure reflection.

49 Sartre refers to this level of consciousness as non-reflective or unreflective consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego, while in Being and Nothingness he favours the term «pre-reflective consciousness». For the sake of simplicity and because the latter terminology reflects more accurately Sartre's more developed view of consciousness in Being and Nothingness, I will refer to this level as «pre-reflective» throughout the paper.

50 Sartre does say later in The Transcendence of the Ego that the “I” does appear at the pre-reflective level, but only as an empty I-concept. Sartre also says in Being and Nothingness that consciousness at this level is personal; but what makes it personal is not an ego or “I” within consciousness, but the fact that consciousness is always present to itself, i.e., self-conscious (p. 103).

51 Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 38.

52 Ibid., p. 40.

53 Sartre argues that if self-consciousness at the pre-reflective level involved one consciousness taking another as its object, an infinite regress would follow because the consciousness which takes the other as its object would, since it too is self-conscious, require another consciousness of which it is the object, and so on to infinity. The only way out of this regress is to allow that there can be a consciousness which is not self-conscious. This would be a rejection of Sartre's initial claim that all consciousness is self-consciousness.

54 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. lii–liii.

55 Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 83.

56 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. liv.

59 Ibid., p. 69.

60 See my article Through the Looking Glass: Sartre on Knowledge and the Pre-reflective Cogito,” Man and World, 22 (1989): 329–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 69, emphasis mine.

63 As I pointed out in my article “Through the Looking Glass,” the ambiguity of Sartre's analysis of the self-consciousness of pre-reflective consciousness confuses some of his critics. Grene, Marjorie, for example, in Sartre (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973)Google Scholar attacks Sartre's defence of the claim that all consciousness must be self-consciousness. She reads Sartre as separating consciousness of self from consciousness of the world at the pre-reflective level. It may be that Sartre's illegitimate introduction of epistemological elements in his discussion of pre-reflective consciousness, in the sections on bad faith and the immediate structures of the for-itself, is responsible for her misreading of Sartre.

64 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 77.

65 Ibid., p. 172.

66 Ibid. Sartre's use of a line in the phrase “presence to —” reflects his belief in the intentionality of consciousness. For Sartre consciousness cannot exist without an object.

67 Ibid., p. 174.

68 Ibid., p. 173.

69 Although, for Sartre, the body as it is for itself is part of the structure of non-thetic self-consciousness, I have avoided discussing this dimension of pre-reflective self-consciousness because Sartre claims it cannot be identified with non-thetic self-consciousness, and because of limitations of space. See Being and Nothingness, p. 330.