ABSTRACT
The Bodily Nature of Consciousness, Kathleen Wider lucidly argues that Sartre's accounts of pre-reflective self-consciousness, and pure reflection are fundamentally problematic. On the one hand, pre-reflective self-consciousness is supposed to be a "non-positional" type of self-awareness essentially different from the objectifying and distancing consciousness involved in perception, imagination, emotion, and conceptual thought, which are all "positional" in that through them consciousness is present to transcendent objects that are given as not being the very consciousness taking up the position on them. On the other hand, Sartre argues that this sort of distancing applies at the level of pre-reflective self-consciousness. This means that the chapter knows what acquaintance is in the sense that one can attend to the relevant phenomena, that they seem to us to have certain relations to other phenomena, and that everyone can espy certain structures involving the relation.
