ABSTRACT
In saying that pre-reflective self-consciousness is non-positional or non-thetic, J. P. Sartre is saying that it is not a matter of experiencing an object via some mode of consciousness or taking an attitude toward it. Since Sartre rejects Edmund Husserl’s hyletic sensory data, his characterization of the noetic side focuses on the spontaneous posting/animating activities involved in various types of conscious experiences, since this is all that is left once these putative “inhabitants” of consciousness have been evicted. Sartre can be reasonably interpreted as regarding pre-reflective self-consciousness to be a kind of direct, non-positing, non-representational, non-conceptual self-acquaintance. One way to make sense of what Sartre is saying is by considering that Sartre often speaks of pre-reflective self-consciousness in terms of the “reflection-reflecting” or the “phantom dyad”. Sartre insists that there is a “bond of being” between the pre-reflective and the reflective experiences such that they make but one unified whole.
