Human Consciousness In Sartre's Existentialism

Sartre was part of a group of philosophers called the ‘Existentialist’. He was also an aggressive Atheist who didn’t mind speaking his mind. Most of Sartre’s philosophy is in opposition to other well-known philosophers and their ideas. In particular he argues against Kant’s distinction between things we appear to see despite what the reality actually was and the sense data we gained from events as our mode of understanding. Also, even though he had claimed to be a phenomenologist, Sartre was openly in disagreement on several topics with Husserl, the father of phenomenology himself. He criticized Husserl (and ultimately Freud as well) for his idea of a transcendental ego stating that this idea wasn’t a part of the phenomenological agenda. This …show more content…
I don’t really believe him to be extremely clear on his analysis of subjectivity and the idea of self-recognition since he tends to contradict himself a lot and has a few obscure discussions of the construct of human consciousness. It seems to me he refers to a variety of different consciousness’s in his work which leads me to believe he was making a lot this up to sound smarter than other people. I can’t tell if he is referring to two types of consciousness or one conscious that has two modes that can be sorted as either the pre-reflective or the reflective consciousness. Although it does appear clear to me that he does distinguish the difference between the being conscious and being self-conscious in his example of counting cigarettes. In any case, Sartre uses “I” in the reflective sense to connect our previous experiences to what we know and who we are now. He uses this idea of an absolute, impersonal consciousness as prove our existence (in which the “me” and the external world are …show more content…
Granted these are both similar and require some level of self-reference which are both intentional acts of consciousness. It’s kind of weird how it words it, but basically he says that when consciousness is aware of itself, then it is conscious of an object (itself) for itself, but the consciousness can’t be an object, so is it really aware of itself or something else? He is very insist that there’s some level of self-awareness for both by stating that it is non-positional therefore it can’t be make itself an object or at least not intentionally. Although that would have to mean that the consciousness is always self-aware which means it has to be a characteristic of the pre-reflective consciousness which wouldn’t agree with his previous statement of ‘we’re not aware of ourselves or the experience we had until reflecting upon it’. Sartre goes to ultimately say the self cannot known by us and that self-knowledge only exists by the stories we tell about ourselves to others. Therefore “I think” cannot be linked to with “I” or “I am”. He believes the only mediator we have between these two consciousness’ is from the perspective of an outsider. That is why the image we have of ourselves is often different from how other perceive us to be. This is also how we learn to better reflect within