JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

152Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsThe cogito as reflective consciousnessThe Kantian I Think is a condition of possibility. The Cogito of Descartes and ofHusserl is an apprehension of fact. We have heard of the “factual necessity” of theCogito, and this phrase seems to me most apt. Also, it is undeniable that the Cogito ispersonal. In the I Think there is an I who thinks. We attain here the I in its purity, andit is indeed from the Cogito that an “Egology” must take its point of departure. Thefact that can serve for a start is, then, this one: each time we apprehend our thought,whether by an immediate intuition or by an intuition based on memory, we apprehendan I which is the I of the apprehended thought, and which is given, in addition, astranscending this thought and all other possible thoughts. If, for example, I want toremember a certain landscape perceived yesterday from the train, it is possible for meto bring back the memory of that landscape as such. But I can also recollect that I wasseeing that landscape. This is what Husserl calls, in Vorlesungen Zur PhänomenologieDes Inneren Zeitbewusstseins, the possibility of reflecting in memory. In other words,I can always perform any recollection whatsoever in the personal mode, and at oncethe I appears. Such is the factual guarantee of the Kantian claim concerning validity.Thus it seems that there is not one of my consciousnesses which I do not apprehendas provided with an I.But it must be remembered that all the writers who have described the Cogito havedealt with it as a reflective operation, that is to say, as an operation of the seconddegree. Such a Cogito is performed by a consciousness directed upon consciousness,a consciousness which takes consciousness as an object. Let us agree: the certitude ofthe Cogito is absolute, for, as Husserl said, there is an indissoluble unity of thereflecting consciousness and the reflected consciousness (to the point that the reflectingconsciousness could not exist without the reflected consciousness). But the factremains that we are in the presence of a synthesis of two consciousnesses, one ofwhich is consciousness of the other. Thus the essential principle of phenomenology,“all consciousness is consciousness of something,” is preserved. Now, my reflectingconsciousness does not take itself for an object when I effect the Cogito. What itaffirms concerns the reflected consciousness. Insofar as my reflecting consciousnessis consciousness of itself, it is non-positional consciousness. It becomes positionalonly by directing itself upon the reflected consciousness which itself was not apositional consciousness of itself before being reflected. Thus the consciousnesswhich says I Think is precisely not the consciousness which thinks. Or rather it is notits own thought which it posits by this thetic act. We are then justified in askingourselves if the I which thinks is common to the two superimposed consciousnesses,