(To appear in Topoi, December 2011)

Untimely Reviews:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (Paris:

Gallimard 1943). First English translation, 1956, trans. Hazel Barnes, Philosophical Library, Inc.
Page numbers cited in this review refer to the Washington Square edition, 1992.

1.

In Being and Nothingness (henceforth B&N), Jean-Paul Sartre frequently characterizes human
beings in terms of the idea of nothingness. Humans introduce nothingness into being, they
secrete little pockets of nothingness – négatités – and these form the basis of our ability to
negate, and also of other abilities in which this ability is implicated (for example, the ability to
individuate objects). Humans, Sartre argues, can do this only because they are constituted by
nothingness:

It follows therefore that there must exist a Being (this cannot be the In-itself) of which
the property is to nihilate Nothingness, to support it in its being, to sustain it perpetually
in its very existence, a being by which nothingness comes to things. (57, emphasis his)

The Being by which Nothingness arrives in the world is a Being such that in its Being, the
nothingness of its Being is in question. The Being by which Nothingness comes to the
world must be its own Nothingness. (57-8, emphasis his)

To nihilate nothingness is to produce and sustain nothingness. Humans can do this because
nothingness is part of what they are.

Superficially, this all seems to be metaphysical theorizing in the grand style. However, in
fact, nothing could be further from the truth. These ostensibly strange claims are all, Sartre
thinks, straightforward implications of a mundane claim that has provided the starting point for
the phenomenological tradition. Indeed, all of the central themes of B&N can be regarded as
entailments of a short, but crucial, passage that occurs early in the introduction (‘The Pursuit of
Being’). He writes:

All consciousness, Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This means that
there is no consciousness that is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer,
that consciousness has no ‘content’ (11)

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The claim that consciousness has no content is, of course, striking enough. But what is truly
remarkable about this passage is that Sartre presents this claim as an obvious implication of the
intentionality of consciousness. If you accept that consciousness is intentional then, he claims,
you must also accept that it has no content. Consciousness is, thus, a form of nothingness.
Indeed, so obvious is this implication, that Sartre does not feel it necessary to provide it with
any supporting argument.

The first step is to clarify exactly what Sartre means by saying that consciousness has no
content. First:

(NC) The no-content thesis: consciousness has no content in the sense that any object of
consciousness is not part of consciousness.

We might think of NC as supplying a challenge: try to point to the contents of consciousness. As

you say ‘Here is one!’ – mentally pointing to a thought, experience, feeling or sensation, for
example – this becomes an object of your consciousness and so is, if Sartre is correct, precisely
not a part of your consciousness. To identify the contents of consciousness, we have to make
them into objects of consciousness, and therefore, if Sartre is correct, this makes them
transcendent objects – objects that exist outside consciousness. Therefore, Sartre is led to the
claim that:

Consciousness has nothing substantial; it is pure appearance in the sense that it exists
only to the degree to which it appears. But it is precisely because consciousness is pure
appearance, because it is total emptiness (since the entire world is outside it) – it is
because of this identity of appearance and existence within it that it can be considered
the absolute (17, emphasis mine)

If we think of the world as a collection of actual or potential objects of consciousness, then the
entire world is outside consciousness. Thus, NC entails what we might call the emptiness thesis:

Emptiness thesis: consciousness is empty in the sense that it exists only as a

directedness towards the world.

I am going to argue that Sartre is correct in these claims: not only are NC and the emptiness
thesis true, they are, in addition, an almost banal implication of the intentionality of
consciousness. It is puzzling why this has been recognized by hardly anyone else.

We might reconstruct Sartre’s thinking as follows:

1. Consciousness is intentional
2. No object of consciousness is intentional
3. Therefore, no object of consciousness can be part of consciousness

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Necessarily, any object of consciousness is (what Sartre calls) a transcendent thing. That is, any
object of consciousness is necessarily outside of consciousness.

Of course, to make the argument work, a little tidying up is required. First, we should
distinguish derived and non-derived or original intentionality. Derived intentionality is, roughly,
intentionality that derives either from the minds or from the social conventions of intentional
agents. Non-derived, or original, intentionality is intentionality that does not so derive. The
Brentanian thesis, taken on and developed by Husserl, is that consciousness is intentional in an
original, or non-derived, sense. Therefore, we should amend Sartre’s argument to the
following:

4. Consciousness is intentional in an original sense

5. No object of consciousness is intentional in an original sense
6. Therefore, no object of consciousness can be part of consciousness.

Premise 4 is an assumption that provides the starting point for philosophy in the Brentanian –
hence phenomenological – tradition. It remains to defend premise 5.

When the object of consciousness is a non-mental one, it is pretty clear that premise 5 is
on solid ground. Rocks, clouds, trees, even bodies do not possess original intentionality. There
are, of course, obvious circumstances in which we use one object of consciousness to stand in
for another. To take the most obvious example, words are used to stand in for objects. But this
intentionality is derived. The hard work in defending premise 5 begins when the object is a
mental one. Consider, for example, something that, prima facie, seems a very good candidate
for object of consciousness with original intentionality: a mental image. Suppose I stare at a
dog. Then close my eyes and picture it. I form a mental image of the dog. I am aware of this
image. Therefore, it is an object of my consciousness. It is also about the dog. Therefore it
certainly seems to have an original intentional status.

However, we can use an argument, generally associated with Wittgenstein rather than
Sartre, to show why this is not, in fact, the case. The image is, logically, just a symbol. In itself, it
can mean many things, perhaps anything. It might mean – stand in for, be about – this
particular dog or dogs in general. It might mean ‘furry thing’, ‘thing with four legs’, ‘thing with
tail’, ‘thing with cold nose’, ‘mammal’, and so on. In itself, the image can mean perhaps
anything. To have specific meaning – to be about one thing rather than other things – it must
be interpreted. And this, on the Sartrean scheme, is what consciousness does. More accurately,
it is what consciousness is. Consciousness, in this context, is the interpretation of the image as
being about one thing rather than others – in the mode, as Sartre would say, of not being it.
The expression ‘in the mode of not being it’ signifies that it is not possible to assert that
consciousness is interpreting activity. If the interpreting activity of my consciousness were, for

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example, to become an object of my consciousness, then it would no longer be part of my
consciousness. The activity would be transcendent.

This conclusion might be thought peculiar to the choice of image as object of

consciousness. But, as Wittgenstein has shown, essentially the same argument can be applied
to any object of consciousness: thoughts, beliefs, and so on. We are tempted 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 set of rules which specify how they are to be
applied. However, this approach is a victim of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox: any course
of action can be said to be in accord with a rule. So, there can be neither accord nor conflict
here.

Any object of consciousness has the logical status of a symbol. Therefore, it does not
possess original intentionality. This is not, by itself, to deny that thoughts, beliefs, mental
images have original intentionality. Rather, it is to claim that when they occur as objects of
consciousness they do not have original intentionality. A thought, belief, image, etc can be
something with which I am aware, or something of which I am aware. Typically, it functions in
the first way: I am aware of the world in virtue of having thoughts, beliefs, images, etc about it.
However, I can also become aware of these thoughts, beliefs, and images. When I do so,
Sartre’s claim is that these are no longer parts of consciousness: they are now transcendent
objects.

Therefore, this surprising inference – from the intentionality of consciousness to NC and

the emptiness thesis – has sound logical credentials. In fact, I strongly suspect Sartre is correct
in making this inference. If this is correct, many of the guiding presuppositions of philosophical
and scientific approaches to the mind the years since 1943 have been mistaken. Take, for
example, the so-called ’hard problem’ of consciousness that until recently dominated the
preoccupations of many philosophers of mind. How can this, we say to ourselves, thinking of a
state with phenomenal content, be produced by this, we say thinking of electrical activity in
grey matter. But the first ‘this’ denotes an object of our consciousness, and therefore a
transcendent object. We may or may not have a hard problem here. But what we do not have,
if Sartre is correct, is a problem of explaining consciousness. Rather, it is a problem of
understanding how one sort of transcendent object – a state with phenomenal content – can
be explained in terms of another sort of transcendent object, a brain state or process.

2.

Not only is the inference from intentionality to NC important in the context of wider
philosophical issues, it also plays a crucial role in shaping the arguments and positions of B&N.
If the emptiness thesis, an entailment of NC, is correct, then consciousness is, as Sartre puts it, a

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form of nothingness. Consciousness is a pure directedness to the world and exists only as such.
Anything that it takes as an object is, necessarily, a transcendent thing that exists outside
consciousness. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that B&N is nothing more
than to work out the implications of this ‘obvious’ consequence of the Brentanian conception
of consciousness as essentially intentional.

Sartre’s basic distinction between two realms of being – être pour-soi and être en-soi – is
not, as some have supposed, a distinction grounded in metaphysical intuition but, rather, is a
straightforward consequence of the no-content thesis. The intentionality of consciousness,
Sartre notes, has been understood in two ways:

All consciousness is consciousness of something. This definition of consciousness can be

taken in two very distinct senses: either we understand by this that consciousness is
constitutive of the being of its object, or it means that consciousness in its inmost
nature is a relation to a transcendent being. But the first interpretation destroys itself:
to be conscious of something is to be confronted with a concrete and full presence
which is not consciousness (21-2)

The first interpretation ‘destroys itself’ for the reasons set out in (4)-(6). Therefore, Sartre
concludes:

Consciousness is consciousness of something. This means that transcendence is the

constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, consciousness is born supported by a
being which is not itself. This is what we call the ontological proof (23).

In Sartre’s terminology: being for-itself requires and presupposes being-in-itself. In this sense,
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 and self-contained. NC,
therefore, in addition to entailing the basic distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-
itself also entails that idealism is false.

Moreover, many of what have come to be regarded as key existentialist concepts –

freedom, anguish, shame – are grounded in this no-content thesis. Sartre identifies nothingness
with freedom. Anguish is the consciousness of freedom. Shame is the consciousness of one’s
appearing as an object for the other. It would not be possible in a review of this length to detail
the connections between these various phenomena. But, to take just one example, consider
Sartre’s discussion of freedom, and the associated phenomenon of anguish.

Anguish in the face of the past … is that of the gambler who has freely and sincerely
decided not to gamble anymore and who, when he approaches the gamming table,
suddenly sees all his resolutions melt away … what the gambler apprehends at this

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 instant is again the permanent rupture in determinism; it is nothing which separates
himself from himself. (69)

The ‘nothing’ in question is consciousness conceived of simply as directedness towards objects

that are outside it.

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

The gambler’s resolution, as something of which the gambler is aware, is a transcendent object
and therefore has no meaning in itself. It has the logical status of a symbol. For it to be about
anything, and so possess efficacy vis-à-vis the gambler’s future behavior, it must be continually
interpreted anew by the animating consciousness. At any given time, consciousness is this
interpreting activity – in the mode of not being it.

3.

In this remainder of this review, however, I shall not be concerned with the derivation of the
central concepts of existentialism from the no-content thesis. Instead, I want to develop and try
to resolve a puzzle with which Sartre is presented but which he does not, I suspect, fully
appreciate.

According to the no-content thesis, any object of consciousness is necessarily

transcendent. This precludes any object of consciousness from counting as a content of
consciousness. However, in itself, this is compatible with items of which I am not aware – items
that are not objects of consciousness – being included among the contents of consciousness.
Thus, the no-content thesis is compatible with consciousness having content as long as this is
not an object of awareness. However, in a sense to be clarified shortly, Sartre is hostile to the
very idea of there being consciousness of which I am not aware. The key to understanding
Sartre’s position, here, lies in understanding the role played by pre-reflective consciousness –
the non-positional consciousness of consciousness.

Consciousness, Sartre, argues is pre-reflectively aware of itself. It has to be, in order to

be consciousness of objects:

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

However, given Sartre’s commitment to the no-content claim, this consciousness of

consciousness cannot be understood in the usual way. Any object of consciousness, Sartre
believes, is transcendent. Therefore, it is logically impossible for consciousness to make itself
into an object.

In addition to these reasons, which are internal to Sartre’s system, Sartre also identifies
various independent reasons for denying that the consciousness of consciousness (henceforth,
‘self-consciousness’) can be understood in the usual – object-positing – way. In particular, this,
he thinks, will lead to a regress:

The reduction of consciousness to knowledge in fact involves our introducing into

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 be necessary in order for the
knower to become known in turn, and we will be faced with this dilemma: Either we
stop at any one term of the series – the known, 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 bump up against a non-conscious reflection, and a final term. Or else
we affirm the necessity of an infinite regress … which is absurd. (12)

We are either committed to an infinite regress, or the existence of a final non-conscious term
forces us to accept that self-consciousness is not, in fact a necessary condition of
consciousness.

This combination of internal and independent reasons leads Sartre to distinguish

between positional (i.e. object-positing) and non-positional senses of consciousness.
Consciousness must be consciousness of itself without positing itself as an object. That is,
consciousness must be non-positional consciousness of itself. This non-positional consciousness
that consciousness has of itself is what Sartre refers to as pre-reflective consciousness. Thus:

We understand now why the first consciousness of consciousness is not positional; it is

because it is one with the consciousness of which it is consciousness. At one stroke, it
determines itself as consciousness of perception and as perception. The necessity of
syntax has compelled us hitherto to speak of the “non-positional consciousness of self”.
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 But we can no longer use this expression in which the “of self” still evokes the idea of
knowledge. (Henceforth we shall put the “of” in parentheses to show that it merely
satisfies a grammatical requirement). (13-4)

This is a transcendental argument for non-positional self-consciousness. Consciousness must be

non-positionally, or pre-reflectively, conscious of itself give that (i) consciousness must be
conscious of itself, and (ii) this self-consciousness cannot take positional form. In other words, if
we need self-consciousness, but cannot understand this positionally, then it will have to take
non-positional form. This argument, however, supposes that we need self-consciousness: it
presupposes that consciousness must be consciousness of itself. The case for non-positional, or
pre-reflective, self-consciousness is only as strong as this assumption.

The introduction of pre-reflective consciousness, the non-positional consciousness that

consciousness has of itself, engenders a puzzle. For it looks like we are now committed to the
claim that consciousness does have content after all: this content consists 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 there must be something there for consciousness
to be non-positionally aware of. This move would, I think, rob the Sartrean no-content thesis of
much of its boldness and originality. Perhaps more importantly, it is incompatible with his
frequent descriptions of consciousness as ‘nothingness’ and a ‘total emptiness’. How do we
resolve this puzzle?

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, at least to his
satisfaction, its existence. To describe pre-reflective consciousness – to outline 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 transcendent object and so not the sort of thing
we are trying to understand. Sartre is well aware of the problem. For example:

But as soon as we wish to grasp this being, it slips between our fingers, and we find
ourselves faced with a pattern of duality, with a game of reflections. For consciousness
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 the reflection (122).

While Sartre is aware of the problem, he does not appear to be aware of any way of resolving
it. The upshot seems to be that the ‘immediate, non-cognitive relation of the self to itself’ is
basic. This is where explanation stops. Thus, while Sartre is very clear on the sorts of things pre-
reflective consciousness is supposed to do he is less than clear on how it does these things. For
example, it is all very well to say things like, ‘it is the non-reflective consciousness which
renders the reflection possible; there is a pre-reflective cogito which is the condition of the

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Cartesian cogito.’ (13) But in the absence of any positive characterization of this pre-reflective I
think, we do not in any way understand how it makes reflection possible.

These twin problems might be amenable to a unified resolution. If we can say a little
more about what pre-reflective consciousness is then we might be able to understand how this
form of consciousness does not vitiate the no-content thesis. But how do we do this without
objectifying pre-reflective consciousness? The answer is: we continue in transcendental mode.
We work out the sort of thing pre-reflective consciousness must be if it is to satisfy the
constraints Sartre places on it.

4.

The temptation to be avoided at all costs is that of thinking about pre-reflective consciousness
on analogy with reflective consciousness. Reflective self-consciousness introduces what we
might think of as a gap between the reflecting consciousness and the consciousness reflected
upon, and this gap allows the former to be of the latter. If we thought of pre-reflective
consciousness on analogy with this, we might be tempted to suppose that the gap it introduces
between the pre-reflecting consciousness and the consciousness pre-reflected upon (Sartre
would presumably also urge us to parenthesize the ‘upon’ in contexts such as this) is somewhat
less than in the case of reflective consciousness. The consciousness pre-reflected (upon) is,
somehow, less independent of the pre-reflecting consciousness than the consciousness
reflected upon is independent of the reflecting consciousness. So, in understanding pre-
reflective consciousness in this analogical way, we take the basic structure of reflective
consciousness and modify it in certain ways.

This way of understanding pre-reflective consciousness simply returns us to the puzzle.

How do we reconcile this interpretation with Sartre’s frequent characterizations of
consciousness as ‘nothingness’, ‘emptiness’, etc. If the structure of pre-reflective consciousness
is understood by analogical extension from reflective consciousness, then consciousness must
be something for pre-reflective consciousness to be consciousness (of) it. If consciousness is
really to be ‘nothingness’, then pre-reflective consciousness must have an entirely different
nature. This passage is, I think, key:

To say that consciousness is consciousness of something means that for consciousness

there is no being outside of that precise obligation to be a revealing intuition of
something – i.e. of a transcendent being (23)

Pre-reflective consciousness must be built into consciousness as revealing intuition in a way

that cannot be explained on analogy with reflective consciousness. This takes us to the heart of
the distinction between positional and non-positional consciousness.

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 To be positionally conscious is to be aware of objects. ‘Objects’, here, should be
understood broadly, and includes items such as modes of presentation of objects. I can be
aware of the tomato, but also of the way in which it presented to me – its redness, its shininess,
etc. Indeed, the latter might be ways in which I am aware of the tomato. Object, here, thus
means intentional object – an object of my awareness. Reflective self-consciousness is the
positional consciousness of itself – or, rather, not of itself, since the object of my awareness is
now transcendent. Nevertheless, When I am reflectively aware of what it is I am thinking, then
my thought (and/or its properties) is an object of my awareness. This thought, these properties,
are now, of course, transcendent of, rather than immanent to, my consciousness.

If this is what positional consciousness is, then what is it to be non-positionally aware of

something? I can think of only one option consistent with the idea that consciousness has no
being except its obligation to be a revealing intuition of transcendent objects. To be non-
positionally aware of an object is to be aware of the object in a certain way. But, crucially, we
must not equate this being aware of an object in a certain way with being aware of a mode of
presentation of the object. Non-positional consciousness is identical with a mode or manner of
being aware of objects. It is not the same as being aware of a mode of presentation of an
‘object’, for in the sense of ‘object’ at issue here, a mode of presentation just is an object of
consciousness. Therefore, ‘in a certain way’ must qualify or modify the act, and not supply a
description of the object 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 my own mental states
(understood as transcendent items), without reducing this to awareness of a mode of
presentation of those states.

The only way to guarantee that ‘in a certain way’ qualifies the act rather than describes
the object of the act is to go adverbial. Suppose I am positionally conscious of an object. This is,
of course, itself an adverbial characterization. ‘Positionally’ is an adverbial modifier that
characterizes my relation to an object. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does cloud the
adverbial function of non-positional consciousness. So, to make what is going on clearer, let us
recast positional consciousness in non-adverbial terms: I have positional consciousness of an
object. Then, the adverbial construal of pre-reflective consciousness becomes clear. I have
positional consciousness of an object, and I have this positional consciousness non-positionally.
‘Non-positionally’ is an adverbial modifier that modifies my positional awareness. Pre-reflective
consciousness, therefore, amounts to this: pre-reflective consciousness is the non-positional
having of positional consciousness.

The advantage of this adverbial construal of pre-reflective consciousness is that it

preserves the central Sartrean insight that consciousness is nothingness, a total emptiness with
the entire world outside it. Non-positional consciousness modifies or qualifies my directedness

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to the world; but does nothing more than that. In particular, it carries no commitment to the
idea – an idea which Sartre must reject – that when I am pre-reflectively aware, my
consciousness is directed towards my consciousness in any more substantial sense. Pre-
reflective conscious characterizes my directedness to the world. It does not indicate a
substantial form of directedness towards my own consciousness over and above modifying my
directedness towards the world.

5.

Common sense tells us that consciousness can be something with which I am aware and also
something of which I am aware. In the first context, consciousness is exhausted in its
directedness towards the world: it is simply a revealing intuition of a transcendent being, and
pre-reflective consciousness is a modification of this revealing. In the second context,
consciousness is a transcendent thing, hence not consciousness at all. Either way consciousness
is a pure directedness towards the world, nothing more.

These remarks contained in this review are not intended as critical. At most they
provide a constructive revision of Sartre’s view. But they may, in fact, amount to nothing more
than an interpretation of what is going on in the often difficult pages of B&N. I think what
Sartre actually says in these pages is not sufficient to distinguish between the interpretation
and constructive revision accounts. One thing that, in my opinion at least, is clear: Being and
Nothingness is one of the great works of twentieth century philosophy. In fact, I would almost
certainly place it in the top three most important books of philosophy written in that century.
Among philosophers at least, it seems to have fallen out of fashion in recent years, as has much
of the rest of Sartre’s work. If this is true, this says a lot more about fashion than the quality of
Sartre’s work.

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