ABSTRACT
The notion of pre-reflective consciousness plays a central role in Sartre's account of being for-itself. Sartre is adamant that "every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself". Two preliminary distinctions are essential to proper framing of the interpretation. The first is between positional and non-positional consciousness. A positional act of consciousness is intentional. A non-positional act of consciousness is, accordingly, non-intentional. Understanding pre-reflective consciousness is, accordingly, a matter of understanding what the parenthesized "(of)" must mean for Sartre. There are two conjoined sentences to be found in section III of the Introduction to Being and Nothingness. The first is mundane. The second is rather startling. Sartre uses the term "transcendent" to refer to items that are outside consciousness. The No-Content Thesis (NCT) is compatible with the claim that consciousness is populated with conscious acts: of thinking, imagining, remembering, perceiving, and so on.
