Jean-Paul Sartre

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

Sartre started his philsophical career as a follower of the daddy of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. When he discovered phenomenology he picked up his glass of wine and, looking at it, he said, "Phenomenology will allow me to philosophize about this glass of wine". This has gone down in history as the most incredibly French sentence ever uttered.

He split from Husserl in his work The Transcendence of The Ego. Sartre's disagreement with Husserl here is identical to the Buddha's disagreement with Hinduism. Husserl, like the Hindus, had argued that all consciousness is an external object being perceived by an internal something, which Hindus call atman and Husserl calls the transcendental ego. So consciousness was viewed as a sort of arrow connecting one thing to another. Sartre, like the Buddha, argued that consciousness was not a relation between the ego and the perceived object, but is a self-sufficient being directed at the object. Can you dig that? When I perceive how beautifully purple your hair is, there is only the experience of purple hair, not an "I" perceiving purple hair. I can later reflect and say that it was "I" who had that perception, but in unreflected consciousness there is no "I", only the experience itself directed towards its object. The ego exists only as a concept, an intellectual category, not as part of the structure of consciousness.

So what is it that points at the objects? Here Sartre converges with mystic philsophies like Qabbalah, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and all the others. The nature of consciousness is Nothingness. Sartre describes consciousness creating itself from the void at every instant. The nature of conscious existence includes a void, while the nature of inert matter has no void. Sartre calls the inert, material being 'Being in itself'; conscious being is 'Being for itself'. Consciousness therefore is always incomplete, always striving, always seeking to be or have something beyond itself. This desire can never be fulfilled, as it is inherent in consciousness. Sartre summarized it thus: "Man is a useless passion". This is not too different from Austin Osman Spare's doctrine of self-love.