Abstract

The following is a study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology of conscious awareness. Ontology, for Sartre, consists in the delineation of the constituent elements, structures and dimensions of Being as well as the way in which such constituent features interact within the ekstatic dynamics of the lived experience of the being for whom such ontological features are capable of becoming phenomena of possible awareness. Sartre’s methodology, then, is manifold. The ontological project which Sartre undertakes to develop is at once transcendental, phenomenological and dialectical. It is transcendental inasmuch as it is a theory of the way in which phenomena become experientially possible for a being whose primary existential mode of conscious awareness is as an act of immanent self-relation, as pure auto-affection, and is capable of divesting itself of its modality of active self-affective immanence in constituting for itself a particular phenomenon transcendent to itself. This is to say that what Sartre refers to as pure or transcendental consciousness is capable of dissolving its primordial mode of autoaffective immanent self-awareness in the intentional (or, attentional) act whereby a choice is made to privilege a given phenomenon from amongst the otherwise undifferentiated multiplicity of the conscious existent’s (auto-)affective conscious awareness in order to become conscious of something which is not itself and from which the act of consciousness differentiates itself as not being, whether this privileged phenomenon is ekstatic or extensive, whether it is chosen from the otherwise undifferentiated virtual multiplicity of this conscious existent’s own psychic pastness (or possible future) or from the indifferent multiplicity of worldly actuality. In either case, whether the privileged phenomenon of intentional awareness is egological or material, of the psyche or of the world, the noematic correlate of conscious attention (the explicit or thetic phenomenon of intentional awareness) is transcendent to transcendental consciousness. It is in the investigation of such phenomena that Sartre’s ontology manifests itself as phenomenological. However, for Sartre, such awareness is by no means static, and it is through the ekstatic dynamization of the constituent features of conscious awareness that the transcendental and phenomenological methodologies of Sartre’s ontology of lived experience ultimately prove to be dialectical. Every moment of conscious awareness must, for Sartre, be both surpassed and preserved. Every moment of awareness, with its transcendent dimensions of virtuality and actuality and the auto-affective immanence upon which they depend, reveal themselves as intimately related, then, to memorial dynamics, dynamics which Sartre did little to explicitly develop but upon which an adequate understanding of his ontology depends and which will ultimately ground any investigation of what we might call an existential epistemology