JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

90Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsconsciousness purely. Sartre regards these positions as confused. Even ifan object is fictional or abstract or imaginary, it exists. It is rather than is not.In failing to see this, Husserl misunderstood intentionality’s essentialcharacter.Husserl also fails to see the impossibility of the epoché orphenomenological reduction. No object can be reduced to the consciousnessof it, not even to an infinity of acts of consciousness of it, becauseconsciousness cannot be that of which it is conscious. The object, in somenon-spatial sense of ‘outside’, is always irreducibly ‘outside’ consciousness.If the objects of consciousness are not ‘in’ consciousness as Brentanoand Husserl supposed then where are they? As we have seen, Sartre thinksour fundamental mode of being is truly captured by the Heidegerian notionof being-in-the-world. If our being is being-in-the-world then it is impossiblethat we might persist in abstraction from the world of objects and subjectsthat surrounds us. The objects of our consciousness are in the world so,essentially, consciousness is consciousness of something outside itself.Nevertheless, consciousness is a consciousness of consciousness, aconsciousness of itself ‘in the face of being’. The implicit consciousness ofitself called ‘pre-reflexive consciousness’ and the overt self-consciousnesscalled ‘reflexive consciousness’ are possible only because consciousnessis directed towards objects outside itself. Although I am a consciousness ofbeing, nothing separates me from being.Sartre is a realist about the objects of consciousness. Idealism, thedoctrine that only consciousness and its mental contents exist, is incoherent.Husserl thought that consciousness constitutes its objects; it makes thembe what they are. It was his quasi-Kantian view that, although Berkeleyanidealism is false because objects do not depend on consciousness fortheir existence, nevertheless what objects are to us is largely due to ourtranscendental constitution.Sartre treads a careful path between naive realism and Husserl’s neo-Kantianism. He is concerned to resolve the apparent paradox that eventhough an object enters my visual perception as complete, I neverthelesssee it only one side (or profile) at a time. When I see a physical object I seeit only from a certain angle. For example if I am looking at a cube I can see amaximum of three sides simultaneously. Nevertheless, there is a real sensein which I perceive the whole physical object. Sartre should have put thepoint this way: I see the whole physical object but I do not see the whole ofthe physical object.