Today, I lost connectivity
To the different parts of me that I need to be me
The facebook notifications, the twitter tweets
The tumblr stumbleupons and the last last.fm song
That I’ll ever hear on Pandora.
Me: Hi, your statement has the incorrect values.
Person: So does that mean I need to fix this?
(Fuck all you hoes) Get a grip motherfucker.
Okay, so let’s start this off really fucking slow
Let me tell a couple things you might need to know
Hi, your statement has incorrect values.
So does that mean I need to fix this?
Last September, I was invited to visit an actual shoe heaven
Tits and bras, ménage a trois, sex in expensive cars
There is a chicken in your hallway
Stricken by some fowl disease
Last night, it ran in circles
Trident footprints tied in knots
Around the dirt mounds in your backyard
Croaking at an unseen death to leave
Somebody’s gotta die nobody got to know
Stolen from your grandmother’s garden
Talon-like nails sharpened on stone
Blood for ink written on laundered linen
Make it longer, write more, get more of my deep love for staplers, zoom out and back in
More images, more sounds to describe stapling, godlike fetish love for staplers, MORE
Ode to “you”, talk to the office stapler like a “you”
All office staplers – the one, you
Taking away – traumatizing loss of stapler
Ode to “an” or “my”
In high school I baked oatmeal raisin cookies
for my American history teacher Mr. Kennedy,
George Kennedy, the man is a god. No, seriously.
If not some a regular kind of god, then some kind of
East Meets West New Age Fusion kind of God. The kind of
Thing that fanatic Japanese cult followers believer in –
Anyway, the point is that I baked oatmeal raisin cookies for a god.
But here’s the other thing: I fucking hate these cookies.
Like, seriously.
Scarlet crusader of organizational justice
A Not Ode to Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
Oatmeal raisin cookies are just fucking terrible.
I mean, I just – how can – like, who in their right mind
would want damn raisins and oatmeal in their cookie?
I mean, cookie dough – serious fucking cookie dough – is
a sugary, luscious, succulent, dense, velvet,
mouth taste bud tongue orgasm of cosmic proportions
exploding in my sweet-toothed, possibly, non-existent ghost.
And don’t even get me started on the chocolate chips.
You know how, like, in that movie with bowling lanes
and a lot of screaming about drinking
milkshakes and the guy who goes around drilling for oil?
That’s what chocolate chips are like in a cookie,
like finding oil in the middle of a brown sugar dessert
and you bite into that gooey, oozing, melting cacao essence
and you feel like you, like, just won thirty lotteries – in a row.
But fucking oatmeal raisin cookies hurt my soul.
You get these chunks of fruity weirdness, wet but dried
things shriveled up like little old ladies in frocks walking around
with walkers. And the oats, a constant interruption
Of fucking oats stuck in my teeth and the corners of my mouth
That my tongue can’t ever reach. Oats are like disruptive children
they malign the perfect harmony of the winds and the waters,
that feng shui stuff that guides the careful dissemination
of ingredients across all cookie dough ever made,
across the vast expanse of uncharted, unmixed batter and butter
still lying in your fridge. Yeah, oatmeal raisin cookies ruin,
just simply fucking ruin, all that.
Oatmeal Raisin Tirade
Oatmeal raisin cookies are just fucking terrible.
I mean, I just – how can – like, who in their right mind
would want damn raisins and oatmeal in their cookie?
I mean, cookie dough – serious fucking cookie dough – is
a sugary, luscious, succulent, dense, velvet,
mouth taste bud tongue orgasm of cosmic proportions
exploding in my sweet-toothed, possibly non-existent ghost.
And don’t even get me started on the chocolate chips.
You know how, like, in that movie with bowling lanes
and a lot of screaming about drinking
milkshakes and the guy who goes around drilling for oil?
That’s what chocolate chips are like in a cookie,
like finding oil in the middle of a brown sugar dessert
and you bite into that gooey, oozing, melting cacao essence
and you feel like you, like, just won thirty lotteries – in a row.
But fucking oatmeal raisin cookies hurt my soul.
You get these chunks of fruity weirdness, wet but dried
things shriveled up like little old ladies in frocks walking around
with walkers. And the oats, a constant interruption
Of fucking oats stuck in my teeth and the corners of my mouth
That my tongue can’t ever reach. Oats are like disruptive children.
They malign the perfect harmony of the winds and the waters,
that feng shui stuff that guides the careful dissemination
of ingredients across all cookie dough ever made,
across the vast expanse of uncharted, unmixed batter and butter
still lying in your fridge. Yeah, oatmeal raisin cookies ruin,
just simply fucking ruin, all that.
1. Me
a. Individual identity
i. Chinese, Chinese American
ii. Female
iii. Raised by grandparents, single mother, absent father, replacement father figure
iv. Single child
v. Immigrant
vi. First generation with computers and technological innovation
b. Educational experiences
i. Went to public elementary school in Hell’s Kitchen (P.S. #?)
ii. Went to public elementary school in Queens (P.S. 66)
iii. Went to public elementary school in Upper East Side (P.S. 59)
iv. Went to public middle school in Chelsea (Lab)
v. Went to public high school (Stuyvesant)
vi. Went to private university (New York University)
c. Occupation trajectories
i. Mother’s influence and education
ii. Father’s influence and education
2. Dalton Conley
a. Individual identity
i. Male
ii. Raised by two parents
iii. Had sister
iv. Grew up in the 60s-70s? Urban renewal
b. Educational experiences
i. Went to public elementary school in his neighborhood (P.S. 4)
1. The Mini School
a. Three classes, black, Puerto Rican and Chinese
b. Treated differently because he is white and didn’t receive punishment
2. Learned about race here
ii. Went to public elementary school in Greenwich Village (P.S. 41)
1. Lied about his address because his parents had friends who lived in a better neighborhood because of where his parents came from, social capital (parents matter)
2. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society made it so that the good neighborhood schools didn’t care about the ghetto kids lying since they brought funds to the schools. Local schools lost out. (Laws matter, Berger and social control)
3. The Donuts – the schoolyard is a microcosm of the larger world where donuts and freebies win out in favor of honesty and promises.
4. Class –
iii. Went to public middle school (I.S. 70)
1.
iv. Went to public high school (Bronx Science)
v. Went to public high school (Stuyvesant High School)
c. Occupation trajectories
3. I moved to America when I seven. I had been taking English lessons for nearly half a year but it never crossed my mind that my mother planned to bring our entire family overseas. I got on a domestic flight from Harbin to Shanghai with my grandmother in the fall of 1999, leaving behind my father, my best friends at the time and a small orange teddy bear. As my father tells it, I wept rivers in the back of the taxi as it pulled away from our fourth floor apartment with the red leather couches, the frosted glass pane doors and the morning glories my deceased grandfather had so meticulously cultivated. In Shanghai, we boarded an international flight to New York. I spent most of the flight watching Will Smith in “Wild Wild West” and sleeping.
4. I tried really hard to have friends in middle school. I had friends in elementary school but I bounced between schools so frequently, it was difficult to keep in touch with old friends and even more difficult to make new ones halfway through the school year. Middle school was yet another place to start over from but this time, my family having secured an apartment in the Upper East Side, I was deter
5. My Chinese name, as displayed in alphabetized pinyin, “___”, appears genderless to the average American. My mother also liked cropping my thick hair so short that in t-shirt and jeans, I looked like a boy. As a kid, I found neither of these two things, taken separately or together, to be especially troubling aspects of my gender identity.
(Gender) My middle school years also brought about a new sense of identity that was previously unknown to me: I was suddenly no longer the only smart kid in my class at Lab. In fact, classes at Lab were predominantly populated by Asian, mostly Chinese, students from P.S. 124, the same elementary school Conley’s sister attended. Whereas Conley, having grown up white in a predominantly Hispanic and black neighborhood, had “started getting the message [about race] as early as age two” (Conley 37), I only became aware of race in seventh grade. My mother, who had finally settled in a good neighbor and sent me off to a good school, was still not quite content with the quality of education I was receiving even at Lab. I was sent off to weekend preparatory classes in Flushing, the burgeoning Chinese community in Queens based on the recommendation of a coworker. Soon after I started my weekend classes, I realized my mother’s excessive and almost fanatical dedication to my education was just another hallmark of growing up as a Chinese American and not seemingly unique to my childhood. Many of my Chinese classmates at Lab also attended the same prep course in Flushing.
After middle school, my location in the New York City public school system again converged with Conley’s. Even though we both finish our public education careers with Stuyvesant High School diplomas, the paths we took to the most selective of the city’s three specialized high schools were radically different. Stuyvesant High School was my mother’s first and only choice. She added summer classes to my usual weekend classes and brought me more test books than I ever needed. While Conley and his friends spent their middle school days evading their parents, forging signatures on report cards and playing for the highest video game scores, my friends and I spent ours vying for the highest marks on practice Stuyvesant entrance exam in over air-conditioned classrooms at Mega Academy. The day I received me Stuyvesant acceptance letter in the mail, my phone rang constantly as my friends and I congratulated each other on the good news. I scored nearly 30 points above the highest score cutoff and was safely guaranteed admission to Stuyvesant High School. On the other hand, Conley, who had initially missed the Stuyvesant score cutoff on the exam by one point, was later admitted to Stuyvesant after taking a remedial summer class because he came from a low-income neighborhood. While I got into Stuyvesant precisely because my mother had, even in America, managed to support my weekend and summer prep courses for the exam, Conley was admitted because his parents could not.
My mother’s class position and the decisions she was able to because of that position, even more so than her singular dedication to her belief in education as the source of better life outcomes, served as the biggest distinguishing factor between my life-course trajectories and identity and that of Dalton Conley’s. I believe Peter Berger’s presentation of social stratification best explicates this initial difference in our lives and other divergences in our life trajectories and educational experiences.
Berger defines social stratification as levels in society “that relate to each other in terms of superordination and subordination be it power, privilege or prestige” (Berger 78). While he notes that different societies assign individuals to different levels within the system based on different criteria, Berger also states “the most important type of stratification in contemporary Western society is the class system” (Berger 79). He then borrows Weber’s aforementioned definition of class in terms of life chances to make the case that “each class milieu forms the personality of its constituency by innumerable influences beginning at birth” and that “in trying to understand the weight of class, then, we are not only looking at another aspect of social control but are beginning to catch a glimpse of the way in which society penetrates the insides of our consciousness” (Berger 82).
My mother’s decision to America predetermined many of my life chances and in this way, I am no different from Conley whose parents gave him a distinct set of life chances by choosing to life in the projects. However, my mother’s stable income and occupation as a scientific researcher placed her in a different class than that of Conley’s parents. My mother’sConley grew up in a tough neighborhood where his mother constantly feared for her family’s safety. I, on the other hand, grew up in a safer and more affluent neighborhood thanks to my mother’s relative economic wealth. Due to lack of their economic means
While Conley’s parents struggled to place in him a better educational environment by exploiting loopholes in the public education system, my mother, was able to literally acquire a new address and grant me access to a significantly higher level of education. Moreover, not only did my mother shift my life-course trajectories by moving to a safer, more affluent neighborhood so I could attend Lab Middle School, but her choice of schools helped crystalize my identity. At Lab, I formed social affiliations with other Asian American kids who were raised on the same virtues of education by immigrant parents largely in the same economic class as my mother. These affiliations helped reinforce the identity as a hardworking student because we, as Berger notes, desired “just that which society expects of us” (Berger 93).
6.
In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl introduces the “phenomenological epoche” as a method of philosophical reflection. He distinguishes the phenomenological epoche from our natural attitude towards the existence of the world. Through the phenomenological epoche, we set aside our questions about the existence of world and, instead, focus only on our experience of the world.
In the “natural and non-reflective” attitude we typically occupy on a day-to-day basis, we take the fact that the world exists independently of ourselves for granted. Husserl posits that all of our “processes of meaning” in this natural attitude such as our judgments or valuations presuppose the belief in the existence of the world. However, since we do not have apodictically certain knowledge, knowledge that is beyond all doubt, of the world’s existence through our experiences, we must remove the presupposition of its existence we hold in our natural attitude.
We do so by adopting the transcendental, “philosophically reflective” attitude Husserl calls the phenomenological epoche. We suspend our natural belief of the world’s existence and take our experience of the world to be merely acceptance phenomenon. The world is what we experience as being there, “anything belonging to the world, any spatiotemporal being, exists for me – that is to say, accepted by me – in that I experience it” (21).
In this passage, Husserl points out that, while we abstain from our taken-for-granted belief in the world when we assume the position of phenomenological epoche, it does not mean our experience in the natural attitude ceases or disappears. In adopting the phenomenological epoche, we become observers of our continued experience of the world in the natural attitude but without our confidence in the world’s existence. We hold the world experienced in the natural attitude to be “‘mere phenomenon’”. By adopting the phenomenological epoche,
When we assume the position of the phenomenological epoche, we step back from the first person perspective of our natural attitude to assume a third person perspective. We act as observers in this third person perspective of our first person perspective experiences. We set aside any presuppositions of the existence of the objective world and we, instead, accept the world as being there. We abstain from taking an positions with regard to whether the world truly exists or not and in doing so we become observers of what goes on it.
However, as Husserl points out in this passage, by assuming the position of the phenomenological epoche we are not positing that our worldly experiences disappear. Instead,
the only change that occurs in adopting the transcendental attitude is that we “no longer keep in effect (no longer accept)
My experience of the truck while crossing the street serves as an experience in the transcendental attitude, regardless of whether or not the truck exists.
The transcendental attitude provides a different perspective on our belief in the existence of the world. Instead,
in the small quiet moment before he touches her
she is afraid
nerves prick her flesh like needles
the legs of a thousand millipedes crawling up her spine
sinister, insectile, alien
the way he trails his fingers up her body
skin barely touching skin
as if he is groping some raw nakedness
beyond her epithelial carapace
in the small quiet moment before he touches her
warm blood pours into cold silence
she wants to run
there is more, she wants to tell him
much more but
she never makes it there in time
her gasping pants like ghosts escaping through the ether
was there ever anything so sad?
There are tons of things she wanted to say to him before he left. But she never made it there in time. Was there ever anything so sad?
Her gasping pants, each breath of air bit her lungs like sand, as her sneakers splashing in pools of dark water by sidewalk gutters as she pummels ahead through the night. Across the bridge and over the murky canals, her footsteps stalking a dead town.
Theories and Concepts
Social capital
Cultural Capital
Concerted Cultivation
Accomplishment of Natural Growth
Presentation of Self
Status Attainment
Social Location
Class situation
Academically Adrift
Accordion Family
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s study, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” uses powerful statistics gathered from undergraduate at two dozen college and universities across the United States to show that a student’s college experience is shaped, firstly, by what each student brings to college through their own “social background, high school context and, academic preparation” (61) and secondly, by the “distinct peer cultures and institutional climates” (61) each student encounters at colleges and universities. Arum and Roksa’s findings reveal that higher education – far from being society’s “great equalizer” as Horace Mann once purported it to be – actually preserves “initially inequalities” between advantaged and disadvantaged students and those inequalities, “in the case of African-American students, are exacerbated” (Arum and Roksa 40).
Unfortunately, I would not have received such information from public school college counselors for students like Jayden and even Samantha. While colleges and universities send admissions officers across the country to form working relationships with high school college counselors, Stevens observes that the entire process is an “elite exercise” (2007:85). Officers will certainly travel to renowned private schools like Exeter but not necessarily to public schools in urban neighborhoods like Jayden’s school. Students like Jayden do not get the chance to meet with college admissions officers or receive information about colleges’ requirements and programs. Thus, the established relationship between colleges and prominent high schools in the country already provides Bryn with more resources than his peers. (Use this about how Jayden might not be prepared for College??)
Given these things about Bryn, if he were admitted, I believe Bryn would be academically adrift in college. He would probably go and live at home after college, float through a whole bunch of jobs and his parents would be okay with it because they’d have the means of supporting him and they want to encourage him to find something he likes to do and so on. Academically adrift boomerang child.
Bryn also has greater access to social capital because he attends Exeter. Bryn is able to use his relationships with classmates at Exeter to bolster his application. For example, he participates in a volunteer reconstruction project in Haiti because he has a personal relationship with the relief mission’s organizer – his girlfriend and fellow “Exonian.” This reflects the social capital that Bryn receives by attending Exeter, social capital Jayden and Samantha do not necessarily have.
His application is compliment by neither social capital nor cultural capital. Unlike Bryn whose alumnus father might become a potential donor, Jayden will most likely require financial aid to pay for his tuition given his socioeconomic background. Jayden gains from his parents and high school and his interaction with the Redwood admissions office during the application process not have the same resources available to Bryn, I am only able to construct Jayden’s narrative based on the few pieces of information in his file. Stevens notes, “By the time upper-middle-class seventeen-year-olds sit down to write their applications, most of the race to the colleges has already been run and they already enjoy comfortable leads” (2007:15).
This level of faculty interaction is rarely seen in his working-class peers like Jayden, who are less likely to engage their professors because of their sense of restraint in institutional settings (Arum). Students with highly educated parents, like Bryn whose father is a college graduate, are more likely to “have positive assessments of their professors” than students with less educated parents, like Jadyen whose mother might not have attended college.
Like students surveyed by Arum and Roksa, Bryn will most likely spend, on average, no more than “12 hours per week studying” and completing homework for his courses (69). In an effort to minimize academic work, Bryn will also most likely aim to take courses which his peers recommend as “easy” because those courses have fewer reading or writing requirements. Fifty percent of Arum and Roksa’s student sample do the same when choosing courses (71).
Ironically, Redwood’s institutional context might also help to promote Bryn’s status as an academically adrift student. As Arum and Roksa briefly note in Chapter 3 of their study, many elite colleges and universities systematically inflate grades (77).
Lynne A. Haney, in her ethnography, “Offending Women: Power, Punishment and the Regulation of Desire,” depicts Visions, a community-based therapeutic prison, as an unsuccessful system that tried to rid young incarcerated mothers of their internal “dangerous desires” (Haney 2010:4) but ultimately denied prisoners “education and job training” (Haney 2010:190) needed to support themselves after release.
If Bryn were to be accepted at Redwood, he would bring with him nearly two decades’ worth of concerted cultivation which has more than prepared him to approach and negotiate with professors about grades and coursework.
This method is pertinent given that the College featured in Steven’s book and Redwood College are both small elite liberal arts colleges and might have similar requirements in their respective admissions processes.
Furthermore, Bryn’s guidance counselor at Exeter also acts as an important form of social capital. Because of the relatively low student to faculty ratio at Philips Exeter Academy, a prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, Bryn receives individualized attention from his college counselor with whom he is able to form a valuable relationship. Bryn’s college counselor personally contacted Redwood’s admissions office to relay positive information about Bryn’s interest in attending Redwood College, providing admissions officers with personal insight about Bryn’s character that is missing about Jayden and Samantha.
In fact, the established relationship between colleges and prominent high schools in the country already puts Jayden at a disadvantage compared to Bryn and Samantha during the college admissions process. While colleges and universities send admissions officers across the country to form working relationships with high school college counselors, Stevens observes that the entire process is an “elite exercise” (2007:85). Officers will certainly travel to renowned private schools like Exeter but not necessarily to public schools in urban neighborhoods like Jayden’s school. As a result, working-class students Jayden do not get the chance to meet with college admissions officers or receive information about colleges’ requirements and programs.
The same sociological factors I use in crafting my admission recommendations will also play a significant role in explaining the applicants’ potentially divergent pathways through college as well as differences in their hypothesized post-college lives.
An admissions officer’s ability to structure these narratives is intrinsically linked to the “raw materials from which the story is made” (Stevens 2007:200) which differ from applicant to applicant because of varying sociological factors.
Additionally, middle-class parents are able to pass on more cultural capital to their children than working-class parents can. Through concerted cultivation, middle-class children are endowed with cultural capital that benefits them both at school and in the work place. Shaking hands, being well dressed and groomed, making eye contact and being assertive are all aspects of cultural capital that working-class parents do not necessarily pass on to their children (Lareau 2003). Instead, working-class children mirror their parent’s uncomfortable and restrained behavior when confronted by authority. Thus, Jayden did not come for the recommended on-campus interview, resisting contact with the academic institution all together during the application process.
Despite his lack of social and cultural capital, Jayden’s application provides a telling personal essay about his mother’s struggle to overcome financial difficulties after being incarcerated, balancing two jobs to provide him with the necessary tools to succeed academically.
Middle-class parents are able to use their social and cultural capital to shape the course of their children’s education with the end goal of a college degree in mind from an early age (Stevens 164). Through concerted cultivation, middle-class children are endowed with cultural capital that benefits them both at school and in the work place. Shaking hands, making eye contact and being assertive, taking trips to the museum or the ballet are just a few of the aspects of cultural capital that working-class parents do not necessarily pass on to their children (Lareau 2003).
Through accomplishment of natural of growth, children of working-class families are generally left to organize their own time between watching television, socializing with relatives and playing in pickup games of basketball or football with neighborhood friends (Lareau 2003).
The discrepancies in the quality of the final narrative I construct for each applicant in this process can be accounted for, in part, by discrepancies between the applicants’ social and cultural capital.
While Bryn will most likely be distracted by student life at Redwood such as clubs and Greek life, given Samantha’s dedication to her extracurricular activities and volunteer work and that she has already expressed
In short, Samantha succeeds where the Bryn and Jayden fall short. Like Bryn, Samantha’s inputs provide her with an enormous academic and social advantage when she begins her college education. However, unlike Bryn, Samantha will most likely use these advantages to do well academically in college. Whereas Bryn might have
She is the child of a middle-class family who grew up through concerted cultivation. Not only did she attend an academically rigorous public high school but she excelled at
He is trying to find, like Descartes, an indubitable foundation for all inquiry. The world is just acceptance phenomenon. He is the transcendental ego looking in at his worldly ego and everything that happens is just acceptance phenomena.
But, in the epoche, he does not accept what is happening in the world as something that is in fact actually happening but merely phenomena to be reflected upon. The natural existence, natural state, is one of believing what happens in the world as actually happening. But, by adopting the epoche, one suspends that kind of acceptance and approach what happens are mere phenomena.
We are looking for that apodictic thing to ground our scientific inquiries. He agrees with Descartes that the ego cogito is that one thing. However, he thinks that Descartes did not fully understand the power of his discovery. Descartes places the ego in the world and uses that to prove the existence of God and the external world and so force. Husserl, on the other hand believes that the phenomenon, his experience of the world – real or not real – is indeed something. Even if he abstains from believing in his sensuous experience, the abstaining exists. And as a reflective ego, he chooses to abstain from believing in his sensuous experience. And in doing so, it is not the world experienced disappears or does not exist, it goes on as experienced by him and the only difference is that he is no longer in his natural state of accepting the believing of its existence in his experience. The believing still happens, he just no longer takes that for granted. He applies this to other processes of meaning such as judging and valuing. These position-takings presuppose the existence of the world so while they still do keep happening, he keeps believing and judging, he abstains from accepting or positing these processes and what is meant by them as anything but mere phenomenon. In this way, Husserl believes we arrive at the core of our living, what he calls pure living, we experience things purely as what is meant in them in the universe of phenomena. In this way, Husserl knows himself purely as ego in which the world exists entirely as phenomena as experienced by his ego.
In Cartesian Meditations, Edmund Husserl introduces the “phenomenological epoche” as a method of philosophical reflection. To find
In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl introduces the “phenomenological epoche” as a method of philosophical reflection. He makes the distinction between one’s natural attitude towards the existence of the world and one’s transcendental attitude towards the same. In the “natural and non-reflective” attitude we typically occupy on a day-to-day basis, we take for granted the fact that the world exists independently of ourselves. All of our “processes of meaning” such as experiences, judgments and valuations, in this natural attitude, presuppose belief in the existence of the world.
Since we do not have apodictically certain knowledge, knowledge that is beyond all doubt, of the world’s existence through our experiences, we must remove these presuppositions of its existence we hold in our natural attitude. In adopting the transcendental, “philosophically reflective” attitude Husserl calls the phenomenological epoche, we suspend our natural belief of the world’s existence and take our experiences of the world to be acceptance phenomenon. The world is simply what we take to be there, “anything belonging to the world, any spatiotemporal being, exists for me – that is to say, accepted by me – in that I experience it” (21).
While we abstain from all “position-takings” with respect to the experienced world when we assume the position of phenomenological epoche, we continue to have the same experiences in this “reflectively grasped life” as we do in our natural attitude. In this passage, Husserl points out that the only change that occurs in adopting the transcendental attitude is that we “no longer keep in effect (no longer accept)
Because we do not have apodictic knowledge, knowledge that is beyond doubt, of the existence of the real world, Husserl believes the world is merely acceptance phenomenon.
He calls the latter transcendental position the phenomenological epoche. The phenomenological epoche is the act of no longer accepting positions and judgments about the objective world. In our natural position, we take the existence of the real world for granted and
Husserl makes the distinction between two attitudes towards the world.
and the transcendental position in which you suspend this belief. Husserl believes that one’s “position-takings” or judgments, feelings, in this natural state
In doing so, Husserl believes we gain possession of our “pure living” (20).
Husserl uses Descartes’ “principle of absolute indubitability” (16) as a point of departure for his own series of meditations and, like Descartes, believes the ego cogito is “the ultimate and apodictically certain basis for judgments, the basis on which any radical philosophy must be grounded” (17), where to be apodictically certain is for something’s non-being to be inconceivable.
If the ego cogito is the apodictically certain foundation for all “genuine science” (16), Husserl believes everything in the world, “the whole concrete surrounding life-world” (19) becomes phenomena. Whether this world as phenomena is real or illusory, whether it exists or not, such phenomena is
Existentialism and Phenomenology
Interpretive Writing Assignment 1
In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl introduces the “phenomenological epoche” as a method of philosophical reflection. Husserl distinguishes between our “natural and non-reflective” attitude and our transcendental, “philosophically reflective” attitude towards the world’s existence. I shall refer the former as our ‘natural attitude’ and the latter as our ‘transcendental attitude’. Through the phenomenological epoche, we set aside our questions about the existence of world, which we take for granted in the natural attitude, and focus on the world as simply acceptance phenomenon.
In the natural attitude, which we occupy on a day-to-day basis, we take the fact that the world exists independently of ourselves for granted. For example, when I see a trucking moving towards me as I cross the street, I move out of the truck’s way because I take for granted the fact that there is, indeed, a truck driving down the street. Husserl posits that all of our “processes of meaning” in this natural attitude such as our judgments or valuations presuppose the same belief in the existence of the world. However, since we do not have apodictically certain knowledge, knowledge that is beyond all doubt, of the world’s existence through our experiences, we must remove the presupposition of its existence we hold in our natural attitude.
We do so by adopting the transcendental, “philosophically reflective” attitude Husserl calls the phenomenological epoche. We suspend our natural belief of the world’s existence and take our experience of the world to be merely what we experience as being there, “anything belonging to the world, any spatiotemporal being, exists for me – that is to say, accepted by me – in that I experience it” (21). My crossing the street and seeing the truck in the previous example serves as an experience whether or not a truck is really there.
Husserl points out that, while we abstain from our taken-for-granted belief in the world when we assume the position of phenomenological epoche, it does not mean our experience in the natural attitude ceases or disappears. Everything I do in my natural attitude is grasped by what Husserl calls my “noticing regard” in the transcendental attitude. In adopting the phenomenological epoche, we become observers of our continued experience of the world in the natural attitude only without our confidence in the world’s existence. Husserl thus describes the world experienced in the natural attitude, when considered in the transcendental attitude, as “‘mere phenomenon’”.
1. Primary disagreement between Jackson and Lewis
a. Both agree that there physical things in the world
b. But, they disagree about the existence of non-physical things in the world
i. Jackson believes there are non-physical things in the world
ii. Lewis believes there are no non-physical things in the world has to say why Jackson is wrong
2. Jackson (Knowledge Argument)
a. Imagine the Mary example to show that there are non-physical things in the world
b. Mary is a brilliant scientist that lives in a black and white room, learning about the world and everything physical about the world in black and white. When she steps out of the room, does she gain any new information if she already knows all the physical information?
c. Jackson believes she does. Mary, when she steps out of the black and white room, gains knowledge of which the subject matter is non-physical. She gains non-physical knowledge about the experience of seeing a color. Therefore, physicalism is wrong in saying that only physical things exist. Obviously, if she knew all of the physical information while she was in the room, then, if she learns any information when she comes out of the room, the information cannot be physical.
d. The Knowledge Argument
i. When you have an experience, you gain information about non-physical things in the world
ii. Mary has all the physical information about human color (the world) when she is in the room before the release
iii. There is information about human color (the world) that she does not have before she is released from the room and when she first has an experience
iv. Not all information is physical information
v. There are non-physical subject matter of information
3. Lewis (Ability Hypothesis)
a. Needs to refute Jackson’s argument
i. Lewis is a physicalist who believes brain states are mental states. He needs to refute Jackson’s non-physical objects argument.
b. There are no non-physical things in the world
c. When Mary steps out of the room, she does not learn any information that can rule out other physical possibilities, she gains an ability to recognize, memorize experiences
d. There are odd things about the non-physical information
i. Information is incommunicable and you cannot write down any information, physical or non-physical, that can communicate to Mary what it is like to see a color
ii. What is the content of this information?
e. Refute the intuition that there is something non-physical
f. Ability Hypothesis
4. My assessment of Jackson and Lewis
a. Instinctively, I lean towards Jackson’s argument that there are non-physical things which form the subject matter of what we learn about the world when we feel, see, or hear
b. Lewis’ argument, on the other hand, is convincing but I do not believe experience translates to ability
• Primary Disagreement
o Are the non-physical things in the world?
o Jackson believes there are non-physical things in the world while Lewis, who believes there are only physical things, needs to refute Jackson’s knowledge argument.
o Jackson introduces the example of Mary the brilliant scientist to argue that there are non-physical things in the world.
o Lewis argues that Jackson’s example is wrong and Mary does not gain any new information. He argues that Mary only gains new abilities when she steps out of the room. Mary gains the ability to imagine, remember, and recognize experiences.
• The Knowledge Argument
o Jackson wants to argue that there are non-physical things in the world which we can gain new propositional knowledge from when we have experiences.
o Mary is a brilliant scientist who lives in a black and white room and learns all that there is to know, physically, about human vision and color. Jackson wants to argue that even though Mary knows all of the physical information, she does not know what the experience of seeing color is actually like. When Mary is released from her black and white room, Jackson believes she gains non-physical information about what it is like to see color.
o Physicalism is the view that there are only physical things in the world. Since there are only physical things in the world, the view that Jackson holds is incorrect because it supposes the existence of non-physical things that form the subject matter of Mary’s new knowledge when she walks out of the room. Because these two views are incompatible, Jackson believes physicalism is false.
o His argument relies on the intuition that there must be something non-physical happening when we see a color or hear a sound. But his argument goes to show why we have this intuition. If all the physical information in the world cannot tell Mary what it is like to see a color, and if she gains any new information when she steps out of the room, she must be gaining some non-physical information because she knows all of the physical information when she was in the room.
• The Ability Hypothesis
o Lewis believes that when Mary steps out of the room, she only gains new abilities. She does not gain any new propositional information the subject matter of which is non-physical things. If she does not gain any new information, there are no non-physical things in the world.
o She gains something new, but this something is not knowledge. Rather, she gains a certain set of abilities. She gains the ability to recognize, remember, and imagine some experience.
1. The primary disagreement
a. Are there physical objects?
i. The primary disagreement between Jackson and Lewis is whether or not there are any
b. Physicalism
c. Jackson’s argument against physicalism
i. Mary example
ii. Knowledge Argument
1. When Mary steps out of the room, she gains new information that is about non-physical things
d. Lewis’s rejection of Jackson’s argument
i. Ability Hypothesis
1. Peculiar about knowledge
a. No amount of information can tell Mary what its like
2. Intuition that it is knowledge
a. Mary gains only abilities
2. My assessment
a.
• Consciousness
o Nihilating withdrawal
Absolute freedom comes from our ability to take this backwards step and withdrawal ourselves from the content of our consciousness. We remove ourselves from the being-in-itself that just is.
o Pre-reflective cogito
• Being-in-itself
• Being-for-itself
• Facticity
• Transcendence
Present and evaluate Sartre’s argument (in ‘The Origin of Nothingness’) that our consciousness involves an absolute freedom. How is this claim consistent with Sartre’s insistence on our facticity? [Perhaps: pick some cases in which it might seem we are not free, and show-and-evaluate how Sartre might try to handle them.]
Here we get a sense of how Sartre begins with a Husserlian phenomenology but then wants to. Begins with that consciousness is always intentional, always directed upon an object. Object has to be understood as in the world in the way that Heidegger characterized. Pg 11 “All consciousness is consciousness of something….” Sartre’s claim is that consciousness exhausts it itself in this directness, it is not of anything other than its object. Consciousness is also in some other sense always conscious of itself, too. All consciousness is self-conscious. Pg 11 “necessary and sufficient condition…conscious of itself…” Consciousness then is always of an object but consciousness also has to be in some sense of itself. However, he says this self consciousness cannot be an explicit awareness or knowing because if it were that would begin and infinite regress. In order to be conscious of myself, I would need to be conscious of being conscious of myself and so on…Sartre’s claim that all intentionality presupposes consciousness of self but he can’t treat that consciousness of self as its own intentionality because it would start an infinite regress. To avoid regress, we have to suppose and underlying and pre-reflective self consciousness but this pre-reflective self consciousness is not …from the consciousness of the object as he says this Pg 15 top “self conscious….meaning of self consciousness…” Sartre thinks that it is in this pre reflective consciousness that we are given the being of consciousness that is always transphenomenal, it is always something that goes beyond or independent of phenomena itself. Phenomena is what intentionality is directed upon, this self consciousness must be outside or beyond our intentionality…directed upon something is not a phenomenon. Now and this is going to get him part way towards where he wants to be which is where the being of consciousness is a peculiar emptiness or transparency given to us not by an intentional directedness upon but given as if it were between our backs (?) It is a directedness upon something which has no content, something that is not phenomenon but it is only by this directedness that it is possible for us to view consciousness at all.
Part I
The book becomes more concrete. Sartre starts out in a way which might be compared to beginning of Being and Time. He starts out by posing a question and then bringing out features of that question itself, features of our activity of question to pose certain questions. So we’re trying to figure the relation between the BFI and the BII and trying to find out a relationship which avoids either dualism or idealism and in order to carry our investigator to study this relationship between BFI and BII and we have settle things, Heidegger settles on Dasein, the instance Sartre settles on the conduct we are engaged in, in inquiring or questioning. This is now on Pg 24 bottom of the page “now this very inquiry furnishes with the desired conduct…” He then tries to show that this question, the questioning, Sartre then says we examine this attitude of question and what is involved there, this attitude of questioning involves various kinds of negations. There’s the possibility that we’ll decide there are no relations, we’re questioning because we are in the state of not knowing. If we do get an answer to this question, the answer will be that the relation between them will be viewed this way and not other ways. Questioning itself involves negation, reference to none being. Takes the problem of negation of non-being as his first problem. By examining non-being or negation he can figure out the relation.
Jumping ahead to the first part of the book I asked you to read. The origin of nothingness. Crucial section because here Sartre explains nothingness in consciousness that permits nothingness. So we turn then to the activity of questioning and Sartre involves this a double negation. On one hand, this questioning negates the thing questioned by holding it between being and non-being. We’re interested in the relation between these, questioning what that relation is and somehow suspend it between being and non-being. This suspension and negation of the thing we are question is possible only by way of a nihilation, the questioner’s nihilating withdrawal from the question. On its own, being-in-itself is fully positive in its existence, its BII a network of causes and effects and any thing in that series has to be what it is in order to play its role in that system of causes and effects. Sartre’s idea is that only consciousness withdrawing or detaching itself from this casual nexus which is being in itself, that consciousness is able to introduce any negation into the positivity of being-in-itself. Pg 58 “From the very…”
45:03
“…universal determinism…question is determined…”
This in a very few words is Sartre’s argument that consciousness must involve a freedom from universal determinism. It seems to me a very sketchy argument in various senses but it is an argument that Sartre claims, he claims what is distinctive of consciousness, consciousness is a consciusness of something other than itself in order to be a consciousness of something it has to withdrawal and pull itself back from that which it is of “nihilating withdrawal” claims this nihilating withdrawal that allows consciousness to be of its objects can’t itself be explained as one more cause or effect in the causal order. His claim then is that the very logic of consciousness as a consciousness of something, consciousness must be free, this is the being of human beings, this nothingness which is also our freedom. Pg 60 half way down “human freedom precedes…” So, existence precedes essence, existence for Sartre means ..its only on the basis of that withdrawal that its possible then for us to attribute any particular content to ourselves, any essence.
Examples: this is about looking for Pierre, we’re looking for Pierre in his room and Sartre says that, asks what is involved in an experience of absence? And he says that this experience of absence, a negativity can’t be produced. I’m looking around P’s room and see his possessions and none of these appearances of his possessions, Sartre claims, can produce the experience of Pierre’s absence. His possessions would refer only to one another standing in relation only to one another, refer to each other things, this argument that is sketched before, to produce the experience of Peirre’s absence I have to make a break in this chain of causes and I also have to make a break in my own past and present states so this is now on page 63. “I am of necessity to produce…which no prior state can effect or motivate…succession of my states of consciousness of effect from cause…nihilating process…”
The very way I diagrammed it and the distinction of BIT and BFI there is a dualist position here, I think, so, part of his answer I think is to try to show that, as it were, neither BFI nor BIT is independent or can be independent of the other, not that there could be BFI and then by its directing itself on objects there is BIT and also not that BIT and independently BFI directing itself on objects. Of course, he also doesn’t want to be an idealism either, he avoids idealism by not turning consciousness to the mind. And that’s what this strategy of identifying consciousness as a nothingness is supposed to do. Idealism there are these mind substances and then there thoughts and ideas which are contents of those things, radically different features Sartre thinks which makes consciousness a thing, a withdrawal…
Sartre claims that consciousness experiences this absolute freedom that it possesses not just occasionally when it produces negativity but all the time: Pg 64 “freedom is the….human being putting his past out of play by secreting his own nothingness” Here’s another way to think of it, so let’s say that I’m conscious of a particular condition of myself, now by being conscious of it I’ve made that backwards step which distinguishes me from what I am conscious of, consciousness is always capable of that backward step, that movement of withdrawal which is to be conscious of something, that movement is pre-reflectively aware of itself as other than and different from what it is conscious of. Let’s say that I believe that the election will de decided by midnight, let’s say I believe a lectern here. Sartre’s claim is that by being able to be consciousness of believing there is a lectern there, I’ve withdrawn from that belief and I am something different from that belief by virtue of always being capable of being conscious of the things we already believe, we are capable of withdrawing from those beliefs, free from holding those beliefs to overturn those beliefs.
The general issue in the introduction is the relationship between consciousness, thought or experience and the real things that consciousness is of, intends or is directed upon. He has a large scale ambition to answer this question while avoiding the two standard options for addressing these issues: realism (dualism of appearance and reality like Descartes), or some form of realism (treats real things as contents of minds, contents of consciousness, Barkley takes). Sartre is trying to find some middle ground, some way of avoiding both of these answers and what he is trying to do is refer to consciousness as being-for-itself and to the real things that consciousness if of being-in-itself. Introduction sets up the problem of understanding the relationship between these two things that avoids realism and idealism.
Part I – Sartre takes a very surprising starting point and the starting point is our experience of lack, negativity in the world. He is going to raise the puzzle of how it is possible for us to experience the absence of things and going to argue that these experiences of negativity are only possible because of a more fundamental nothingness that belongs to the nature of consciousness (BFI). So there is a nothingness to consciousness, clarifies the tension between being (BII) and on the other hand nothingness of BFI. One of the things that we are going to get a grip on is in what sense is consciousness supposed to be a nothingness. It is only because that cosnciousness is a nothingness that phenomeona can appear to us at all. The most important consequence of consciousness as a nothingness is that we are absolutely free.
Part II – Sartre uses the idea of consciousness as a nothingness to explain the basic structures of consciousness. Part has a lot of interesting relationships to Chapter 5 of BT.
The pre-reflective cogito
We get a sense of how Sartre begins with a Husserlian pheonomenology but then wants to abandon it. He agrees with Husserl that consciousness is always intentional, meaning by that it is always directed upon some object and this object as in the world in the way that we saw H say it. Pg 9. So, consciousness is an intentional directedness upon objects which transcends beings in the world. Now, Sartre’s claim is that consciousness exhausts itself in this directedness, it is not of anything other than its object. Consciousness must also in some other sense always be conscious of itself too. All consciousness he says is self-consciousness. Pg 11 bottom. So, consciousness then is always of an object but consciousness also has to be in some sense of itself. However, he says, this self-consciousness can’t itself be intentional, cannot be an explicit awareness or knowing of consciousness. Because if it were It would begin an infinite refress. In order to be conscious of myself, I would need to be conscious of myself and so on and so forth. Idea is that: Sartre claims that all intentionality presupposes consciousness of self. But then we can’t treat that consciousness of self as a form of intentionality because it leads to infinite regress. Now, to avoid this regress Sartre says we have to suppose an underlying and pre-reflective self-consciousness and this pre-reflective self-consciousness is not separate (?) from the consciousness of the object. Pg 15 he says it in a metaphorical way “self-consciousness…” Now it is in this pre-reflective self-consciousness that we are given the being of consciousness and this being is always therefore transphenomenal. It is always something that goes beyond or is independent of the phenomenon itself. Here is a phenomenon, what intentionality is directed upon, this self-consciousness must be somehow outside or beyond our intentionality. It is must be directed upon something that is not any phenomenon and this going to get him part way towards where he wants to be, the conclusion that being of consciousness is a peculiar emptiness or transparency given to us not by an intentional directedness upon it but as it were behind our backs so to speak, directedness on something that has no content and is not phenomenon. And it is only by this directedness that ourselves that it is possible for us to be conscious of phenomenon at all.
Part I
Sartre starts out in a way that is similar to the beginning of BT. He starts out by posing a question and then bringing out features of that questions itself and our activity of questioning to pose certain dilemmas. So we’re trying to figure out the relation of BFI and BII and we’re trying to find out a relationship which avoids dualism and idealism and in order to carry out our investigation, to study this relation, we have to settle on some instance. The instance that Sartre settles on is the conduct that we are engaged in in our questioning. Attitude of interrogation I ask is there any relation that can reveal to me about man and world but on the other hand the question is not simply the objective, in a world it is a hidden attitude. What does this attitude reveal to us? He then tries to show that this question, we’re questioning, we have consciousness, Sartre then says examining this attitude of questioning and what is involved. This attitude of questioning has various kinds of negations, there is the possibility that we’ll decide there is no relation negative answer, another negation is that we are in the state of not knowing,: if we do get an swer, the answer between these will be this way and no other ways. Questioning itself involves negation and reference to non-being and then takes the problem of negation and non-being as his first problem, hoping that by examining non-being and negation that he can figure out the relation.
Sartre explains nothingness in consciousness that permits experience of negativities. So, we turn then to the activity of question, Sartre says this involves a double negation: on one hand questioning negates thing question by holding it between being and non-being. We’re interested in the relation in these, questioning it and then we suspend this relation between being and non-being. This suspension of being of thing in question he says is only possible by way of a nihilation, the questioner’s nihilating withdrawal. Nihilating withdrawal from the question. The point here is something like this BII is fully positive in its existence, a network of causes and effects and any element in that series of causes and effects has to be what it is in order to play its role in that system of causes and effect. Sartre’s idea is that only by cosnciousness pulling back or withdrawing itself form this causal nexus of BII that consciousness is able to introduce any negation into the positivity of BII.
The relationship between consciousness and the things consciousness is of)
The origin of nothingness, a crucial section because it is here that S explains nothingness in consciousness that permits experience of negativities. So, “we return then to the activity of questions…” This involves a double negation, on the one hand this questioning negates the thing questioned by holding it between being and non-being. WE’re interested in the relation between these and we are questioning the relation between these and we suspend this relation between being and non-being/ This suspension is possible only by way of a kind of nihilation and this is what he calls the questioner’s nihilating withdrawal from the question. So, the point here is something like this: on its own BII is fully positive in its existence. BII is a network of causes and effects and any element in that series of causes and effects has to be what it is in order ot play its role in that system of causes and effects. S’s idea would be that it is only by consciousness pulling back, withdrawing or detaching itself from thi causal nexus that is BII, that consciousness is able to introduce any negation into the positivity of BII. Pg 58 “from the very fact…” this, in a very fw words, is S’s argument that consciousness must involve a freedom from the universal determinism. It seems to be a very sketchy argument. What is distinctive of consciousness, consciousness is a consciousness of something other than itself, in order to be a consciousness of something it has to pull itself back from that which it is of. That is what he means by a nihilating withdrawal, claim is that this withdrawal that allows consciousness to be of its objects can’t itself be explained as one more cause or one more effect in the causal order of things. His claim then is that by the very logic of consciousness as a consciousness of something, consciousness must be free. This is the being of human beings. This nothingness which is also our freedom. Pg 60 “Human freedom precedes essence….essence is suspended in freedom….freedom impossible…” So, existence precedes essence, existence for S being this …consciousness. It is only on the basis of this withdrawal that is possible for us to attribute any particular content to ourselves, any essence. Now, S goes on to give us one of his more famous examples, the example of looking for Pierre. We’re looking for Pierre and we’re looking for Pierre in his room. S asks the question what is involved in an experience of…and he says that this experience of absence which he calls a negativity phenomenon can’t be produce, so I’m looking around Pierre’s room, none of these appearances of his possessions S thinks can produce the experience of Pierre’s absence. These possessions which refer only to one another stand in constant relation only one another,
Also have to make a break in my own past and present psychic states so this now is on page 63 “in terms of my perceptions of the world…”
Sartre simply wills self-consciousness into
It is problematic how Sartre thinks he is escaping dualism by the very way I just diagrammed between BII and BFI and it seems like we have a dualist position. I think, so, part of his answer is to try to show that neither BFI nor BII is independent of each. It is not that there could be BFI and then by its directing itself on objects that there can be BII. Part of this strategy is to try to show that even though different they are bound up in each other. One way he avoids idealism is by not turning consciousness into a substance, a kind of mind, and that is what this strategy of identifying consciousness as nothingness is supposed to do. On the Barkleian version there are mind-substances and hten thoughts, ideas, contents. S has a radically differnet picture which makes consciousness really opaque but something like a withdrawal…
S claims that consciousness experiences this absolute freedom not just occasionally and not just that its producing negativity pg 64 “freedom is the….” So, here is another way to think of it: let’s say that I’m conscious of something, I’m conscious of a particular condition of myself. Now by being conscious of it I have made that backwards step that distinguishes me from what I am conscious of. Consciousness is always capable of that backwards step that movement of withdrawal which is involved in being conscious of something, that withdrawal is also pre-reflectively aware of itself as other than, as different from, what it is conscious of. So, for example, I believe that there is a lectern here. S’s claim is that being able to be conscious of believing that there is a lectern there, I have, as it were, withdrawn from that belief. I am now something different from that believing. By virtue of being always capable of being conscious of the things that we already believe we are capable of withdrawing from those beliefs, free from holding those beliefs, free to overturn those beliefs.
S tries to use this idea of consciousness as nothingness as a way of reinterpreting some of the existential themes we met in H and K. S thinks that beyond all of these experiences I have of negativities and absences in the world. Another example is destruction about a storm and how a storm destroys things. Cosnidered just in the well of the in-itself, that seeming destruction is a rearrangement of atoms, a reconfirguation of stuff is there. To be destruction experienced, it needs to be experienced as empty which is only possible through consciousness’ withdrawal. Besides these experiences of negations in the world. S thinks there is a special experience in which we confront our more basic nothingness, anguish which is S’s rewriting of Heidegger’s anxiety. Pg 65
S interprets our consciousness as involving this step back from the phenomenon which is its intended object and claims that this step back constitutes an absolute freedom for us. So, he describes it as a nihilating withdrawal, by being conscious, if you think of yourself as believing by the very act of conscious of that belief, you withdraw from that belief, pull back form that belief, in a way that gives you the capacity possibility of what, in away separates you from that belief, so that you are as it were you are no longer immersed I the belief, you are withdrawn from it, you have the possibility of rejecting the belief. One strong continuity with Husserl is S’s stress on consciousness. Husserl claims intentionality in this way as well. S’s idea is that this withdrawal that consciousness always involves is a separation from you yourself have been.
Something surprising about S’s claim and goes against what we ordinarily suppose, this freedom is deeply upsetting and disconcerting. S’s idea is that we would prefer to understand ourselves as determined and our discontent with our freedom is manifested in particular in the deep response of anguish. Talked last time about distinction between fear and anguish.
What we see is that this freedom that h wants to characterize as absolute is only one side one aspect to us. There are ways in which he takes back the absoluteness of this freedom as it goes on. Anguish plays a comparable role in S to anxiety in H so just as anxiety is this deeply troubling recognition of certain limits to our human condition, we avoid and flee into the condition of falling or inauthenticity and so far S anguish plays a similar a role and our response to that is not falling but bad faith. So, on pg 83 “reassuring myths….unity of the same conscious…flee in order not to know…flight of anguish is a mode of…” So, we are then at the same time both avoiding and the very notion of avoidance you are recognizing that which you are avoiding “flee it….bad faith”. Now, the next chapter of this part I is devoted to bad faith. And I want to turn to this section called patterns of bad fiath on page 96 and here we get
Remember He’s distinction between thrownness and projection and Sartre will use facticity and transcendence. So what now emerges, according to Sartre there are two fundamental aspects to us of our facticity is the extent to which we are fixed and determined, one of the ways S is trying to pull back from the absolute freedom. Facticity includes bodily characteristics, includes my past and what I have been and what I have not. Aspects of my facticity, aspects of me that are settled. Transcendence is freedom, ability to do and be something different form my path, becoming something more. Sartre’s claim now is ithat I have a contradictory and paradoxical structure as both of these. He uses the term BFI for human beings, each of us are BFI and we are distinct then from BII which is what things are. So, the way he wants to put is is that BII simply is what it is but BFI, by virte of being facticity and transcendence, has this contradictory structure which he says involves our being what we are not and not being what we are. It is this contradictory structure he thinks that makes bad fiath possible for us.
Idea is like this: we of course want to be consciousnesses, we want to be BFI but we also want to also have a kind of unitary and non-contradictory structure such as being in itself has. We want to be an in-itself being for-itself or a for-itself being in-itself. Somehow fuse our being consciousness and our having the self identity and unity that mere things have. And bad faith is going to involve trying to find ourselves as unitary and non-contradictory either in our facticity or in our transcendence. And, as it were, ignoring the other one so that we can just be our facticity or just our transcendence.
• Consciousness
o For Sartre, consciousness is always intentional and is always directed upon an object. Consciousness is consciousness of something and because it is always directed upon an object, consciousness is not of anything other than its object.
o Pre-reflective cogito
o At the same time, consciousness is also conscious of itself. All consciousness is self-conscious. However, this self-consciousness cannot be an explicit awareness of knowing because it would lead to an infinite regress. To be self-conscious or conscious of myself, I would need to be conscious of being conscious of myself and so on. To avoid this problem of infinite regress, Sartre claims that all of consciousness’ intentionality presupposed consciousness of the self but this presupposed consciousness is an underlying, pre-reflective self-consciousness that is always beyond the phenomenon that consciousness is directed upon. Phenomena is the what intentionality is directed upon. Self-consciousness must be outside and beyond this intentionality and be directed upon something that is not phenomenon. Thus, Sartre concludes, the being of consciousness is an emptiness, a directedness upon something which has no content. It is by this directedness that it is possible for us to see consciousness at all.
o Example: I am conscious of this table. I am conscious of myself as conscious of this table and thus, I am conscious of myself, because of my consciousness of this table, as something different from this table.
o Being-in-itself – Being-in-itself simply is. It is
o Being-for-itself
o Consciousness as nothingness
According to Sartre, the activity of questioning involves a double negation. On one hand this questioning negates the object in question by holding it between being and non-being. Given that by questioning we are interested in the relation between BII and BFI, our questioning of this relation suspends the relation between being and non-being. This suspension or negation of the relation we are questioning is possible only by way of what Sartre terms a nihilation. The question’s “nihilating withdrawal” from the question makes the negation of the thing in question possible.
• Absolute Freedom
o Bad faith as a vacillation between facticity and transcendence
o Facticity
o Transcendence
• Absolute freedom being consistent with facticity aspect of bad faith
o Facticity as the ways I am conscious of myself as being
o Situation in which we are not free??
• Consciousness
o Nihilating withdrawal
Absolute freedom comes from our ability to take this backwards step and withdrawal ourselves from the content of our consciousness. We remove ourselves from the being-in-itself that just is.
o Pre-reflective cogito
• Being-in-itself
• Being-for-itself
• Facticity
• Transcendence
Present and evaluate Sartre’s argument (in ‘The Origin of Nothingness’) that our consciousness involves an absolute freedom. How is this claim consistent with Sartre’s insistence on our facticity? [Perhaps: pick some cases in which it might seem we are not free, and show-and-evaluate how Sartre might try to handle them.]
Here we get a sense of how Sartre begins with a Husserlian phenomenology but then wants to. Begins with that consciousness is always intentional, always directed upon an object. Object has to be understood as in the world in the way that Heidegger characterized. Pg 11 “All consciousness is consciousness of something….” Sartre’s claim is that consciousness exhausts it itself in this directness, it is not of anything other than its object. Consciousness is also in some other sense always conscious of itself, too. All consciousness is self-conscious. Pg 11 “necessary and sufficient condition…conscious of itself…” Consciousness then is always of an object but consciousness also has to be in some sense of itself. However, he says this self consciousness cannot be an explicit awareness or knowing because if it were that would begin and infinite regress. In order to be conscious of myself, I would need to be conscious of being conscious of myself and so on…Sartre’s claim that all intentionality presupposes consciousness of self but he can’t treat that consciousness of self as its own intentionality because it would start an infinite regress. To avoid regress, we have to suppose and underlying and pre-reflective self consciousness but this pre-reflective self consciousness is not …from the consciousness of the object as he says this Pg 15 top “self conscious….meaning of self consciousness…” Sartre thinks that it is in this pre reflective consciousness that we are given the being of consciousness that is always transphenomenal, it is always something that goes beyond or independent of phenomena itself. Phenomena is what intentionality is directed upon, this self consciousness must be outside or beyond our intentionality…directed upon something is not a phenomenon. Now and this is going to get him part way towards where he wants to be which is where the being of consciousness is a peculiar emptiness or transparency given to us not by an intentional directedness upon but given as if it were between our backs (?) It is a directedness upon something which has no content, something that is not phenomenon but it is only by this directedness that it is possible for us to view consciousness at all.
Part I
The book becomes more concrete. Sartre starts out in a way which might be compared to beginning of Being and Time. He starts out by posing a question and then bringing out features of that question itself, features of our activity of question to pose certain questions. So we’re trying to figure the relation between the BFI and the BII and trying to find out a relationship which avoids either dualism or idealism and in order to carry our investigator to study this relationship between BFI and BII and we have settle things, Heidegger settles on Dasein, the instance Sartre settles on the conduct we are engaged in, in inquiring or questioning. This is now on Pg 24 bottom of the page “now this very inquiry furnishes with the desired conduct…” He then tries to show that this question, the questioning, Sartre then says we examine this attitude of question and what is involved there, this attitude of questioning involves various kinds of negations. There’s the possibility that we’ll decide there are no relations, we’re questioning because we are in the state of not knowing. If we do get an answer to this question, the answer will be that the relation between them will be viewed this way and not other ways. Questioning itself involves negation, reference to none being. Takes the problem of negation of non-being as his first problem. By examining non-being or negation he can figure out the relation.
Jumping ahead to the first part of the book I asked you to read. The origin of nothingness. Crucial section because here Sartre explains nothingness in consciousness that permits nothingness. So we turn then to the activity of questioning and Sartre involves this a double negation. On one hand, this questioning negates the thing questioned by holding it between being and non-being. We’re interested in the relation between these, questioning what that relation is and somehow suspend it between being and non-being. This suspension and negation of the thing we are question is possible only by way of a nihilation, the questioner’s nihilating withdrawal from the question. On its own, being-in-itself is fully positive in its existence, its BII a network of causes and effects and any thing in that series has to be what it is in order to play its role in that system of causes and effects. Sartre’s idea is that only consciousness withdrawing or detaching itself from this casual nexus which is being in itself, that consciousness is able to introduce any negation into the positivity of being-in-itself. Pg 58 “From the very…”
45:03
“…universal determinism…question is determined…”
This in a very few words is Sartre’s argument that consciousness must involve a freedom from universal determinism. It seems to me a very sketchy argument in various senses but it is an argument that Sartre claims, he claims what is distinctive of consciousness, consciousness is a consciusness of something other than itself in order to be a consciousness of something it has to withdrawal and pull itself back from that which it is of “nihilating withdrawal” claims this nihilating withdrawal that allows consciousness to be of its objects can’t itself be explained as one more cause or effect in the causal order. His claim then is that the very logic of consciousness as a consciousness of something, consciousness must be free, this is the being of human beings, this nothingness which is also our freedom. Pg 60 half way down “human freedom precedes…” So, existence precedes essence, existence for Sartre means ..its only on the basis of that withdrawal that its possible then for us to attribute any particular content to ourselves, any essence.
Examples: this is about looking for Pierre, we’re looking for Pierre in his room and Sartre says that, asks what is involved in an experience of absence? And he says that this experience of absence, a negativity can’t be produced. I’m looking around P’s room and see his possessions and none of these appearances of his possessions, Sartre claims, can produce the experience of Pierre’s absence. His possessions would refer only to one another standing in relation only to one another, refer to each other things, this argument that is sketched before, to produce the experience of Peirre’s absence I have to make a break in this chain of causes and I also have to make a break in my own past and present states so this is now on page 63. “I am of necessity to produce…which no prior state can effect or motivate…succession of my states of consciousness of effect from cause…nihilating process…”
The very way I diagrammed it and the distinction of BIT and BFI there is a dualist position here, I think, so, part of his answer I think is to try to show that, as it were, neither BFI nor BIT is independent or can be independent of the other, not that there could be BFI and then by its directing itself on objects there is BIT and also not that BIT and independently BFI directing itself on objects. Of course, he also doesn’t want to be an idealism either, he avoids idealism by not turning consciousness to the mind. And that’s what this strategy of identifying consciousness as a nothingness is supposed to do. Idealism there are these mind substances and then there thoughts and ideas which are contents of those things, radically different features Sartre thinks which makes consciousness a thing, a withdrawal…
Sartre claims that consciousness experiences this absolute freedom that it possesses not just occasionally when it produces negativity but all the time: Pg 64 “freedom is the….human being putting his past out of play by secreting his own nothingness” Here’s another way to think of it, so let’s say that I’m conscious of a particular condition of myself, now by being conscious of it I’ve made that backwards step which distinguishes me from what I am conscious of, consciousness is always capable of that backward step, that movement of withdrawal which is to be conscious of something, that movement is pre-reflectively aware of itself as other than and different from what it is conscious of. Let’s say that I believe that the election will de decided by midnight, let’s say I believe a lectern here. Sartre’s claim is that by being able to be consciousness of believing there is a lectern there, I’ve withdrawn from that belief and I am something different from that belief by virtue of always being capable of being conscious of the things we already believe, we are capable of withdrawing from those beliefs, free from holding those beliefs to overturn those beliefs.
The general issue in the introduction is the relationship between consciousness, thought or experience and the real things that consciousness is of, intends or is directed upon. He has a large scale ambition to answer this question while avoiding the two standard options for addressing these issues: realism (dualism of appearance and reality like Descartes), or some form of realism (treats real things as contents of minds, contents of consciousness, Barkley takes). Sartre is trying to find some middle ground, some way of avoiding both of these answers and what he is trying to do is refer to consciousness as being-for-itself and to the real things that consciousness if of being-in-itself. Introduction sets up the problem of understanding the relationship between these two things that avoids realism and idealism.
Part I – Sartre takes a very surprising starting point and the starting point is our experience of lack, negativity in the world. He is going to raise the puzzle of how it is possible for us to experience the absence of things and going to argue that these experiences of negativity are only possible because of a more fundamental nothingness that belongs to the nature of consciousness (BFI). So there is a nothingness to consciousness, clarifies the tension between being (BII) and on the other hand nothingness of BFI. One of the things that we are going to get a grip on is in what sense is consciousness supposed to be a nothingness. It is only because that cosnciousness is a nothingness that phenomeona can appear to us at all. The most important consequence of consciousness as a nothingness is that we are absolutely free.
Part II – Sartre uses the idea of consciousness as a nothingness to explain the basic structures of consciousness. Part has a lot of interesting relationships to Chapter 5 of BT.
The pre-reflective cogito
We get a sense of how Sartre begins with a Husserlian pheonomenology but then wants to abandon it. He agrees with Husserl that consciousness is always intentional, meaning by that it is always directed upon some object and this object as in the world in the way that we saw H say it. Pg 9. So, consciousness is an intentional directedness upon objects which transcends beings in the world. Now, Sartre’s claim is that consciousness exhausts itself in this directedness, it is not of anything other than its object. Consciousness must also in some other sense always be conscious of itself too. All consciousness he says is self-consciousness. Pg 11 bottom. So, consciousness then is always of an object but consciousness also has to be in some sense of itself. However, he says, this self-consciousness can’t itself be intentional, cannot be an explicit awareness or knowing of consciousness. Because if it were It would begin an infinite refress. In order to be conscious of myself, I would need to be conscious of myself and so on and so forth. Idea is that: Sartre claims that all intentionality presupposes consciousness of self. But then we can’t treat that consciousness of self as a form of intentionality because it leads to infinite regress. Now, to avoid this regress Sartre says we have to suppose an underlying and pre-reflective self-consciousness and this pre-reflective self-consciousness is not separate (?) from the consciousness of the object. Pg 15 he says it in a metaphorical way “self-consciousness…” Now it is in this pre-reflective self-consciousness that we are given the being of consciousness and this being is always therefore transphenomenal. It is always something that goes beyond or is independent of the phenomenon itself. Here is a phenomenon, what intentionality is directed upon, this self-consciousness must be somehow outside or beyond our intentionality. It is must be directed upon something that is not any phenomenon and this going to get him part way towards where he wants to be, the conclusion that being of consciousness is a peculiar emptiness or transparency given to us not by an intentional directedness upon it but as it were behind our backs so to speak, directedness on something that has no content and is not phenomenon. And it is only by this directedness that ourselves that it is possible for us to be conscious of phenomenon at all.
Part I
Sartre starts out in a way that is similar to the beginning of BT. He starts out by posing a question and then bringing out features of that questions itself and our activity of questioning to pose certain dilemmas. So we’re trying to figure out the relation of BFI and BII and we’re trying to find out a relationship which avoids dualism and idealism and in order to carry out our investigation, to study this relation, we have to settle on some instance. The instance that Sartre settles on is the conduct that we are engaged in in our questioning. Attitude of interrogation I ask is there any relation that can reveal to me about man and world but on the other hand the question is not simply the objective, in a world it is a hidden attitude. What does this attitude reveal to us? He then tries to show that this question, we’re questioning, we have consciousness, Sartre then says examining this attitude of questioning and what is involved. This attitude of questioning has various kinds of negations, there is the possibility that we’ll decide there is no relation negative answer, another negation is that we are in the state of not knowing,: if we do get an swer, the answer between these will be this way and no other ways. Questioning itself involves negation and reference to non-being and then takes the problem of negation and non-being as his first problem, hoping that by examining non-being and negation that he can figure out the relation.
Sartre explains nothingness in consciousness that permits experience of negativities. So, we turn then to the activity of question, Sartre says this involves a double negation: on one hand questioning negates thing question by holding it between being and non-being. We’re interested in the relation in these, questioning it and then we suspend this relation between being and non-being. This suspension of being of thing in question he says is only possible by way of a nihilation, the questioner’s nihilating withdrawal. Nihilating withdrawal from the question. The point here is something like this BII is fully positive in its existence, a network of causes and effects and any element in that series of causes and effects has to be what it is in order to play its role in that system of causes and effect. Sartre’s idea is that only by cosnciousness pulling back or withdrawing itself form this causal nexus of BII that consciousness is able to introduce any negation into the positivity of BII.
The relationship between consciousness and the things consciousness is of)
The origin of nothingness, a crucial section because it is here that S explains nothingness in consciousness that permits experience of negativities. So, “we return then to the activity of questions…” This involves a double negation, on the one hand this questioning negates the thing questioned by holding it between being and non-being. WE’re interested in the relation between these and we are questioning the relation between these and we suspend this relation between being and non-being/ This suspension is possible only by way of a kind of nihilation and this is what he calls the questioner’s nihilating withdrawal from the question. So, the point here is something like this: on its own BII is fully positive in its existence. BII is a network of causes and effects and any element in that series of causes and effects has to be what it is in order ot play its role in that system of causes and effects. S’s idea would be that it is only by consciousness pulling back, withdrawing or detaching itself from thi causal nexus that is BII, that consciousness is able to introduce any negation into the positivity of BII. Pg 58 “from the very fact…” this, in a very fw words, is S’s argument that consciousness must involve a freedom from the universal determinism. It seems to be a very sketchy argument. What is distinctive of consciousness, consciousness is a consciousness of something other than itself, in order to be a consciousness of something it has to pull itself back from that which it is of. That is what he means by a nihilating withdrawal, claim is that this withdrawal that allows consciousness to be of its objects can’t itself be explained as one more cause or one more effect in the causal order of things. His claim then is that by the very logic of consciousness as a consciousness of something, consciousness must be free. This is the being of human beings. This nothingness which is also our freedom. Pg 60 “Human freedom precedes essence….essence is suspended in freedom….freedom impossible…” So, existence precedes essence, existence for S being this …consciousness. It is only on the basis of this withdrawal that is possible for us to attribute any particular content to ourselves, any essence. Now, S goes on to give us one of his more famous examples, the example of looking for Pierre. We’re looking for Pierre and we’re looking for Pierre in his room. S asks the question what is involved in an experience of…and he says that this experience of absence which he calls a negativity phenomenon can’t be produce, so I’m looking around Pierre’s room, none of these appearances of his possessions S thinks can produce the experience of Pierre’s absence. These possessions which refer only to one another stand in constant relation only one another,
Also have to make a break in my own past and present psychic states so this now is on page 63 “in terms of my perceptions of the world…”
Sartre simply wills self-consciousness into
It is problematic how Sartre thinks he is escaping dualism by the very way I just diagrammed between BII and BFI and it seems like we have a dualist position. I think, so, part of his answer is to try to show that neither BFI nor BII is independent of each. It is not that there could be BFI and then by its directing itself on objects that there can be BII. Part of this strategy is to try to show that even though different they are bound up in each other. One way he avoids idealism is by not turning consciousness into a substance, a kind of mind, and that is what this strategy of identifying consciousness as nothingness is supposed to do. On the Barkleian version there are mind-substances and hten thoughts, ideas, contents. S has a radically differnet picture which makes consciousness really opaque but something like a withdrawal…
S claims that consciousness experiences this absolute freedom not just occasionally and not just that its producing negativity pg 64 “freedom is the….” So, here is another way to think of it: let’s say that I’m conscious of something, I’m conscious of a particular condition of myself. Now by being conscious of it I have made that backwards step that distinguishes me from what I am conscious of. Consciousness is always capable of that backwards step that movement of withdrawal which is involved in being conscious of something, that withdrawal is also pre-reflectively aware of itself as other than, as different from, what it is conscious of. So, for example, I believe that there is a lectern here. S’s claim is that being able to be conscious of believing that there is a lectern there, I have, as it were, withdrawn from that belief. I am now something different from that believing. By virtue of being always capable of being conscious of the things that we already believe we are capable of withdrawing from those beliefs, free from holding those beliefs, free to overturn those beliefs.
S tries to use this idea of consciousness as nothingness as a way of reinterpreting some of the existential themes we met in H and K. S thinks that beyond all of these experiences I have of negativities and absences in the world. Another example is destruction about a storm and how a storm destroys things. Cosnidered just in the well of the in-itself, that seeming destruction is a rearrangement of atoms, a reconfirguation of stuff is there. To be destruction experienced, it needs to be experienced as empty which is only possible through consciousness’ withdrawal. Besides these experiences of negations in the world. S thinks there is a special experience in which we confront our more basic nothingness, anguish which is S’s rewriting of Heidegger’s anxiety. Pg 65
S interprets our consciousness as involving this step back from the phenomenon which is its intended object and claims that this step back constitutes an absolute freedom for us. So, he describes it as a nihilating withdrawal, by being conscious, if you think of yourself as believing by the very act of conscious of that belief, you withdraw from that belief, pull back form that belief, in a way that gives you the capacity possibility of what, in away separates you from that belief, so that you are as it were you are no longer immersed I the belief, you are withdrawn from it, you have the possibility of rejecting the belief. One strong continuity with Husserl is S’s stress on consciousness. Husserl claims intentionality in this way as well. S’s idea is that this withdrawal that consciousness always involves is a separation from you yourself have been.
Something surprising about S’s claim and goes against what we ordinarily suppose, this freedom is deeply upsetting and disconcerting. S’s idea is that we would prefer to understand ourselves as determined and our discontent with our freedom is manifested in particular in the deep response of anguish. Talked last time about distinction between fear and anguish.
What we see is that this freedom that h wants to characterize as absolute is only one side one aspect to us. There are ways in which he takes back the absoluteness of this freedom as it goes on. Anguish plays a comparable role in S to anxiety in H so just as anxiety is this deeply troubling recognition of certain limits to our human condition, we avoid and flee into the condition of falling or inauthenticity and so far S anguish plays a similar a role and our response to that is not falling but bad faith. So, on pg 83 “reassuring myths….unity of the same conscious…flee in order not to know…flight of anguish is a mode of…” So, we are then at the same time both avoiding and the very notion of avoidance you are recognizing that which you are avoiding “flee it….bad faith”. Now, the next chapter of this part I is devoted to bad faith. And I want to turn to this section called patterns of bad fiath on page 96 and here we get
Remember He’s distinction between thrownness and projection and Sartre will use facticity and transcendence. So what now emerges, according to Sartre there are two fundamental aspects to us of our facticity is the extent to which we are fixed and determined, one of the ways S is trying to pull back from the absolute freedom. Facticity includes bodily characteristics, includes my past and what I have been and what I have not. Aspects of my facticity, aspects of me that are settled. Transcendence is freedom, ability to do and be something different form my path, becoming something more. Sartre’s claim now is ithat I have a contradictory and paradoxical structure as both of these. He uses the term BFI for human beings, each of us are BFI and we are distinct then from BII which is what things are. So, the way he wants to put is is that BII simply is what it is but BFI, by virte of being facticity and transcendence, has this contradictory structure which he says involves our being what we are not and not being what we are. It is this contradictory structure he thinks that makes bad fiath possible for us.
Idea is like this: we of course want to be consciousnesses, we want to be BFI but we also want to also have a kind of unitary and non-contradictory structure such as being in itself has. We want to be an in-itself being for-itself or a for-itself being in-itself. Somehow fuse our being consciousness and our having the self identity and unity that mere things have. And bad faith is going to involve trying to find ourselves as unitary and non-contradictory either in our facticity or in our transcendence. And, as it were, ignoring the other one so that we can just be our facticity or just our transcendence.
• Consciousness
o For Sartre, consciousness is always intentional and is always directed upon an object. Consciousness is consciousness of something and because it is always directed upon an object, consciousness is not of anything other than its object.
o Pre-reflective cogito
o At the same time, consciousness is also conscious of itself. All consciousness is self-conscious. However, this self-consciousness cannot be an explicit awareness of knowing because it would lead to an infinite regress. To be self-conscious or conscious of myself, I would need to be conscious of being conscious of myself and so on. To avoid this problem of infinite regress, Sartre claims that all of consciousness’ intentionality presupposed consciousness of the self but this presupposed consciousness is an underlying, pre-reflective self-consciousness that is always beyond the phenomenon that consciousness is directed upon. Phenomena is the what intentionality is directed upon. Self-consciousness must be outside and beyond this intentionality and be directed upon something that is not phenomenon. Thus, Sartre concludes, the being of consciousness is an emptiness, a directedness upon something which has no content. It is by this directedness that it is possible for us to see consciousness at all.
o Example: I am conscious of this table. I am conscious of myself as conscious of this table and thus, I am conscious of myself, because of my consciousness of this table, as something different from this table.
o Being-in-itself – Being-in-itself simply is. It is
o Being-for-itself
o Consciousness as nothingness
According to Sartre, the activity of questioning involves a double negation. On one hand this questioning negates the object in question by holding it between being and non-being. Given that by questioning we are interested in the relation between BII and BFI, our questioning of this relation suspends the relation between being and non-being. This suspension or negation of the relation we are questioning is possible only by way of what Sartre terms a nihilation. The question’s “nihilating withdrawal” from the question makes the negation of the thing in question possible.
• Absolute Freedom
o Bad faith as a vacillation between facticity and transcendence
o Facticity
o Transcendence
• Absolute freedom being consistent with facticity aspect of bad faith
o Facticity as the ways I am conscious of myself as being
o Situation in which we are not free??
Sartre’s Goal and the Pre-reflective Cogito
In “Being and Nothingness,” Jean-Paul Sartre discusses the relation between consciousness and the objects in the world which consciousness is directed upon. Sartre is interested in explicating the relation between our thoughts and experiences and the objects in the world those thoughts and experiences are directed upon. He refers to consciousness as “being-for-itself” and the objects of consciousness as “being-in-itself”. There are usually two standard philosophical interpretations of the relation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself. On one hand, realism claims that a dualism exists between consciousness and the real intended objects in the world. On the other, idealism treats the intended objects of consciousness as merely the contents of consciousness and not as real objects in the world. Sartre wants to avoid these two understandings of the relation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself in order to find a middle ground between realism and idealism.
Sartre approaches the relation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself by first examining our experience of negativity in the world. He makes the claim that we can only experience negativity because of the fundamental nothingness that belongs to the nature of consciousness. This nothingness that is inherent in consciousness as being-for-itself is in tension with being-in-itself. But it is only because of the nothingness of being-for-itself that being-in-itself as phenomena can appear to us at all. More importantly, according to Sartre, we experience absolute freedom because nothingness is fundamental to the nature of consciousness.
In order to make clear Sartre’s claim that nothingness is fundamental to the nature of consciousness, I will first present Sartre’s account of consciousness. Sartre writes, “All consciousness is…consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object” (11). In other words, consciousness is always intentional and always directed upon some object in the world. Consciousness exhausts itself in this intentional directedness and is of nothing more than its intended object. In fact, Sartre claims, there can never be consciousness that is not of its object in the world. Moreover, consciousness is also self-conscious or directed upon itself. While Sartre believes all intentionality presupposes self-consciousness, he does not believe self-consciousness can also be treated as intentional. To treat self-consciousness as such would be to create an infinite regress. For example, suppose I am conscious of a piggy bank on my desk in that I have experiences and thoughts of the piggy bank as an object in the world. According to Sartre, my consciousness of this piggy bank presupposes a self-consciousness: I am conscious of my being conscious of the piggy bank. But, because this self-consciousness is directed upon my consciousness of this piggy bank, its intentionality presupposes that I am also conscious of my self-consciousness. In order to be conscious of the piggy bank, I would need to be conscious of myself being conscious of myself being conscious of the piggy bank and so on. To avoid this infinite regress, Sartre posits an underlying, pre-reflective self-consciousness. This pre-reflective self-consciousness has no intentional objects and is, therefore, directed upon something outside and beyond the intended objects of consciousness. Finally, Sartre believes that the pre-reflective self-consciousness reveals the being of consciousness as something always outside and beyond the object of its intentionality. He concludes that consciousness
However, Sartre goes on to make the unintuitive claim that this absolute freedom is so deeply disconcerting that we would actually prefer not to have it. Our response to the disconcerting nature of absolute freedom is anguish. Anguish can be characterized as a constant vacillation between our facticity and our transcendence
The general issue in the introduction is the relationship between consciousness, thought or experience and the real things that consciousness is of, intends or is directed upon. He has a large scale ambition to answer this question while avoiding the two standard options for addressing these issues: realism (dualism of appearance and reality like Descartes), or some form of realism (treats real things as contents of minds, contents of consciousness, Barkley takes). Sartre is trying to find some middle ground, some way of avoiding both of these answers and what he is trying to do is refer to consciousness as being-for-itself and to the real things that consciousness if of being-in-itself. Introduction sets up the problem of understanding the relationship between these two things that avoids realism and idealism.
Part I – Sartre takes a very surprising starting point and the starting point is our experience of lack, negativity in the world. He is going to raise the puzzle of how it is possible for us to experience the absence of things and going to argue that these experiences of negativity are only possible because of a more fundamental nothingness that belongs to the nature of consciousness (BFI). So there is a nothingness to consciousness, clarifies the tension between being (BII) and on the other hand nothingness of BFI. One of the things that we are going to get a grip on is in what sense is consciousness supposed to be a nothingness. It is only because that cosnciousness is a nothingness that phenomeona can appear to us at all. The most important consequence of consciousness as a nothingness is that we are absolutely free.
We get a sense of how Sartre begins with a Husserlian pheonomenology but then wants to abandon it. He agrees with Husserl that consciousness is always intentional, meaning by that it is always directed upon some object and this object as in the world in the way that we saw H say it. Pg 9. So, consciousness is an intentional directedness upon objects which transcends beings in the world. Now, Sartre’s claim is that consciousness exhausts itself in this directedness, it is not of anything other than its object. Consciousness must also in some other sense always be conscious of itself too. All consciousness he says is self-consciousness. Pg 11 bottom. So, consciousness then is always of an object but consciousness also has to be in some sense of itself. However, he says, this self-consciousness can’t itself be intentional, cannot be an explicit awareness or knowing of consciousness. Because if it were It would begin an infinite refress. In order to be conscious of myself, I would need to be conscious of myself and so on and so forth. Idea is that: Sartre claims that all intentionality presupposes consciousness of self. But then we can’t treat that consciousness of self as a form of intentionality because it leads to infinite regress. Now, to avoid this regress Sartre says we have to suppose an underlying and pre-reflective self-consciousness and this pre-reflective self-consciousness is not separate (?) from the consciousness of the object. Pg 15 he says it in a metaphorical way “self-consciousness…” Now it is in this pre-reflective self-consciousness that we are given the being of consciousness and this being is always therefore transphenomenal. It is always something that goes beyond or is independent of the phenomenon itself. Here is a phenomenon, what intentionality is directed upon, this self-consciousness must be somehow outside or beyond our intentionality. It is must be directed upon something that is not any phenomenon and this going to get him part way towards where he wants to be, the conclusion that being of consciousness is a peculiar emptiness or transparency given to us not by an intentional directedness upon it but as it were behind our backs so to speak, directedness on something that has no content and is not phenomenon. And it is only by this directedness that ourselves that it is possible for us to be conscious of phenomenon at all.
This self-consciousness can’t itself be intentional, can’t be explicit knowing of the object. If it were, that would begin a infinite regress. In order to be conscious of my self, I would need to be conscious of myself, I would need …Sartre’s claiming that all intentionality presupposes consciousness of self but that means we can’t treat that consciousness of self as a form of intentionality. To avoid this regres, we have to suppose an underlying and pre-reflective self-consciousness and this pre-reflective self-consciousness is not very separate in a metaphorical way on page 15…Sartre thinks that it is in this prereflective self-consciousness that we are given the being of consciousness and this being is always therefore transphenomenomal, always something that goes beyond or is independent of the phenomenon itself, phenomenon is what intentionality is directed upon. This self-consciousness must be outside and beyond this intentionality, directed upon something that is not any phenomenon.
Sartre’s goal is to find a middle ground between idealism and realism in the relation between being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Being-for-itself is consciousness – talk about that more here, the pre-reflective cogito.
Consciousness as Nothingness
He begins addressing this relation by examining the very question of asking what it this relation is. He examines the attitude of this question and claims that this attitude involves the negation of the thing being questioned as well as the negation of the questioner’s relation to the thing being questioned. BII is fully positive and in order to introduce any negation, consciousness must step back from itself, make a nihilating withdrawal from the causal nexus of BII. By removing consciousness from the causal nexus, consciousness is absolutely free. Performing this nihilating withdrawal means that consciousness is able to step back from the object that it is conscious of but this nihilating withdrawal can’t itself be part of the cause and effect order of the being-in-itself. Thus, nothingness is absolute freedom. The origin of nothingness, a crucial section because it is here that S explains nothingness in consciousness that permits experience of negativities. So, “we return then to the activity of questions…” This involves a double negation, on the one hand this questioning negates the thing questioned by holding it between being and non-being. WE’re interested in the relation between these and we are questioning the relation between these and we suspend this relation between being and non-being/ This suspension is possible only by way of a kind of nihilation and this is what he calls the questioner’s nihilating withdrawal from the question. So, the point here is something like this: on its own BII is fully positive in its existence. BII is a network of causes and effects and any element in that series of causes and effects has to be what it is in order ot play its role in that system of causes and effects. S’s idea would be that it is only by consciousness pulling back, withdrawing or detaching itself from thi causal nexus that is BII, that consciousness is able to introduce any negation into the positivity of BII. Pg 58 “from the very fact…” this, in a very fw words, is S’s argument that consciousness must involve a freedom from the universal determinism. It seems to be a very sketchy argument. What is distinctive of consciousness, consciousness is a consciousness of something other than itself, in order to be a consciousness of something it has to pull itself back from that which it is of. That is what he means by a nihilating withdrawal, claim is that this withdrawal that allows consciousness to be of its objects can’t itself be explained as one more cause or one more effect in the causal order of things. His claim then is that by the very logic of consciousness as a consciousness of something, consciousness must be free. This is the being of human beings. This nothingness which is also our freedom. Pg 60 “Human freedom precedes essence….essence is suspended in freedom….freedom impossible…” So, existence precedes essence, existence for S being this …consciousness. It is only on the basis of this withdrawal that is possible for us to attribute any particular content to ourselves, any essence.
Absolute Freedom and Facticity
Our absolute freedom causes us to be in anguish and we respond to anguish by falling into bad faith. Bad faith is the vacillation between facticity and transcendence. This appears to be inconsistent with Sartre’s claim that we all have absolute freedom by virtue of the nothingness that is consciousness.