ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Sartre hopes to present his consciousness in his story of consciousness. Sartre's next move is the source of considerable complication and, perhaps, of some of the obscurity in his philosophy. Sartre will come to reject any notion of a centralizing, integrating or continuity-ensuring or identity-making self. Sartre distinguishes 'positional' consciousness, in which something is regarded from some position and some kind of distance is made from the object, from the pre-reflective, non-positional stage of consciousness. Sartre says, 'Everything happens as if, in order to free the affirmation of self from the heart of being, there is necessary a decompression of being'. Sartre's view is that the consciousness 'of' a conscious state is one and the same with the conscious state. It is the very same existence, but, unhappily, the translator adopts the device of eliminating the 'of' by the phrase 'self-consciousness'.
