Most certainly I should not review this book.
If you respect all that is right in this world, turn away.
I’m about to show I have no idea what I’m talking about…

And yet something about this one compels me to write.
Thinking this might be a small road sign to leave behind.
A missive from a traveling mind…

Right out of the gate I feel like this short work is something that would probably have gone right over my head if I currently wasn’t triangulating with Sartre’s other works and the various introductions to those works. But damn this is a stiff 105 pages! Like telling someone looking for a short fiction read, “Sure, go read Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, it’s just over 100 pages… no worries.” Lost many students and friends with that one.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre states, “The first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection with the world, to know that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world. All consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing.”

It seems to me that one of Sartre’s main goals is to strip everything away from bare naked existence to find what is left at the core, and what seems to be left for Sartre is the pre-reflective cogito, or positional consciousness-of a transcendental object, or perhaps also as he states, pure appearance, which to me all speaks of a razor thin transaction of information passing (as appearance) from an object to a subject. The core of being for humans is this “empty” pre-reflective consciousness. Pure information intake. No contents in that core. Pure processing. Which I believe is why he sometimes refers to it as impersonal. Because the you that is processing (i.e., being consciousness-of something) is only an empty processing activity. All the pieces of you that you identify with yourself, your ego for example, lies outside this processing/apprehending. And this pure processing, this ur-existing, comes before any of piece of you, anything that might be considered your essence, comes into being.

To exist is first to be a consciousness-of.

This is why the ego can’t be seen hiding behind the I of consciousness.
The ego is transcendental, outside of consciousness.
But first there must be an “I exist” and that is known by being a consciousness-of even before one can reflect on the fact that they are indeed conscious.
For Sartre, consciousness-of is translucent, unclouded by states and qualities which are part of the reflected-consciousness or ego which is transcendental and outside.

Or something like that...

Sartre argues against theorists like Freud who think we are controlled and affected by the desires of the unconscious. For consciousness to be translucent, there can be no hidden area of desires or states that affect or color its apprehensions.

While I know what Sartre is trying to prove I’m not completely sure I agree with him on this point. It’s hard to see it having to be true that even if we strip the I back to only the consciousness-of that means that it necessarily has to be translucent and unaffected. Biology, information theory and particle physics would lead us to believe that genetics or prior experience as it has remapped neurons might affect the very manner in which consciousness-of is conscious of objects. At the very least Sartre’s assumptions are problematic when viewed in this greater arena.

Or I might not know what I’m talking about at all…
So it goes... ( )