Intentionality is central to Sartre’s view of consciousness. Sartre adopted Husserl’s phenomenological stance on the intentionality of consciousness, i.e. that all consciousness exhibits intentionality. All consciousness is therefore about or directed to an intentional object. Sartre’s unique explanation of this intentionality was that consciousness is its intentional object as other than consciousness such that consciousness ‘is what it is not and not what it is’. Consciousness thereby determined as ‘being-for-itself’ is distinguished from but inexorably connected to ‘being-in-itself’, or brute, undifferentiated being that is purely what it is. Being-in-itself is its intentional object. This characterisation is problematic, but it is not the concern of this post.
Sartre’s being-for-itself is necessarily engaged with being-in-itself in order to rule out substance dualism. The problem for Sartre is to find a way to combine the purity of intentional directedness with the theses that the intentional object of being-for-itself is being-in-itself and yet being-for-itself never fails to be engaged with being-in-itself. This is a problem because it should be possible for intentional objects not to exist. To solve this problem, Sartre suggests that it is certain determinations of being-in-itself that fail to exist when an intentional object fails to exist, and it is being-for-itself that gives determinacy to being-in-itself in the first place. So, being-in-itself never fails to exist though it may fail to be the intentional object that being-for-itself determines it to be.
The determinations of being-in-itself brought about by the negative activity of being-for-itself include the appearance of individual entities differentiated from the plenum of being-in-itself, relations between entities, quantities such as distance and even the individuation of the qualities of the entities apparent to consciousness. For example, Sartre thought that a lemon as a being-in-itself is an interpenetration or synthetic unity of its qualities such as its taste, scent, colour, shapes from distinct perspectives, texture and so on. That the lemon can be present to consciousness in a single aspect alone is an instance of a kind of negation manifest as a differentiation of such an aspect from other qualities which otherwise remain an undifferentiated ground. It effectively replaces the role of the noema – the content or ideal object – of the conscious act in Husserl’s phenomenology. The ideal or abstract nature of such content and abstractions in general is, for Sartre, not a mediate nature distinct from a represented intentional object but the intentional object with all but an aspect of its full being differentiated from it. Thus, Sartre is able to keep the simple ‘act>>object’ model of intentionality whilst getting a kind of noema for free. The ultimate manifestation of this determination of being-in-itself by being-for-itself is the unique perspective each being-for-itself takes upon the world: its situation. Being-for-itself determines itself as this perspective upon the world by differentiating as background all other perspectives. Thus, all consciousness is perspectival. All consciousness is situated.
What Sartre is proposing is for being-for-itself to negatively modify being-in-itself without altering its positive properties. He would say that all the positive properties of being-in-itself are there prior to the engagement of the being-for-itself with it, but as an undifferentiated mass. In this regard, Sartre’s being-for-itself must be distinguished from Kant’s constitutive consciousness imposing categories upon representations of a hidden noumenal reality. Sartre wants to be able to claim that the synthesis of the being of the world and the negating activity of consciousness does not produce anything more than is there prior. A synthesis that creates a mediate form is the kind of intentional content that epistemologically cuts consciousness off from the world in the very manner that led Kant into idealism. So, undifferentiated being-in-itself as the intentional object of consciousness never fails to exist even as the specific, differentiated intentional objects of consciousness such as pens, chairs and cigarettes may. In this way, Sartre harmonises his claims that being-in-itself is the intentional object of being-for-itself, intentional objects (plural, particular) need not exist and being-for-itself is necessarily engaged with being-in-itself.
Yet, this negative modification of being-in-itself may involve a fallacy of treating the subject of a negative existential judgment as a sui generis existing entity. Ayer commented on this tendency of Sartre to reify non-being with particular regard to Sartre’s argument that the self-consciousness of being-for-itself is an indication of its separation from itself, and that the thing that separated it from itself was precisely nothing. Yet, ‘nothing’ is not the name of a thing. To say that being-for-itself is separated from itself by nothing is therefore to say only that being-for-itself is not separated from itself. It is only by virtue of the grammatical form Sartre’s use of the word ‘nothing’ shares with a genuine reference to an entity that Sartre is capable of suggesting otherwise. Similarly, Sartre is simply exploiting a grammatical ambiguity between reification and literal negation when he first claims that the being-for-itself adds nothing (does not add anything) to being-in-itself then proceeds as though the addition of nothing modifies being-in-itself to give rise to our everyday experience. There can be no negative modification of being-in-itself that does not also imply a positive modification. So, Sartre’s attempt to avoid dualism, as described above, must fail. To be fair to Sartre, ‘nothing’ is not a direct translation of the concept of nothingness that he is describing. Therefore, Ayer’s criticism may knock down a mere straw man. Yet, it remains that negative modification of an intentional object without any corresponding positive modification simply implies the contradiction of being-in-itself both being and not being the intentional object of being-for-itself.
Sartre, J-P., ‘Being and Nothingness: a Phenomenological Essay on Ontology’ Barnes, H. E. trans. (1956) Washington Square Press: New York; London inter alia.
Mohanty, J. N., ‘The Concept of Intentionality’ (1972) Warren H Green Inc: St Louis p. 134
Manser, A., ‘Sartre: a Philosophic Study’ (1966) Athlone Press: London p. 71
Ayer, A. J., ‘Novelist Philosophers V – Jean-Paul Sartre’ (1945) Vol XII No 67 Horizon pp. 12-26 at pp. 18-9
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