A key step towards the derivation of the for-itself and in-itself as categories is the collapse of any kind of appearance/reality or phenomenon/noumenon style distinction: “the dualism of being and appearance is no longer entitled to any legal status within philosophy”.49 Rejecting this distinction immediately leads to the idea that phenomena can be revelatory, rather than always looking past them toward some hidden truth. When we talk about appearances and reality colloquially we assume that for something to appear implies doubt or uncertainty – for instance, if I am looking far out to sea and someone asks me what I can see, I might reply “there appears to be a ship on the horizon” by way of expressing the potential confusion with a cloud or a fog-bank. If the ship is only forty feet away, I could say “there is a ship in the bay”, giving up talk of appearances because of my certainty. In the first case, I am trying to track something about reality – the presence of the ship – but because there is reasonable doubt about that perception I speak of an appearance; if there is instead a cloud against the horizon, I will not be tracking the object that underlies what I see. In the second case, forty feet of clear air offers me no such doubts about perceiving an object as large as a tanker, hence when I say of my experience “I see a ship” I am confident I am tracking the thing underpinning that experience, i.e., the vessel. If this kind of distinction does not really work,50 we have to ask where we end up if we reject it. This is what Sartre is asking here: “If the essence of the appearance is an “appearing” which is no longer opposed to any being, there arises a legitimate problem concerning the being of this appearing.”51 After this, his moves become very quick, to the point of being unclear.
Rather than a distinction between appearance and reality, he proposes a distinction between the infinite and the finite aspect of appearances that are given to us, those that are given immediately and completely to us (finite) and those that always have further aspects hidden behind the one(s) given to us, like the potentially infinite aspects of the tree mentioned above. Any one given
appearance of the tree is finite and singular, it is just that appearing of a tree in profile at half three on a lazy afternoon walk, and yet it depends on the infinite series of ways the tree could appear to us – the tree itself as that which can appear is the unity of an infinite series of possible experiences
49 BN, p.1.
50 Although the initial argument is so short as to make it feel like a premise we just have to accept.
51 Ibid., p.4.
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of the tree. Because the tree appears to a subject which is itself undergoing constant change52, then the tree as something that can reappear to us must be constituted by an (infinite) series of
appearances. A similar point is made evocatively in the short story “Funes, the Memorious” by Borges53 where the title character suffers from a perfect memory that leads him to see the world through instantaneous glimpses: “it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the front) should have the same name as the dog seen at three fifteen (from the side)”. Clearly those of us with a normal relation to the world would see through both of these one dog which we are seeing through different aspects as time passes, yet Funes sees, or is starting to see, each finite appearance as being a full object, which can appear only once and never again. Through the course of the story we see how he progresses towards a kind of madness through this tendency, considering the invention of a language in which every single finite experience has its own name or referent and sinking into melancholia when he realises that autobiography is impossible because each successful act of categorisation adds another item that needs to be categorised. The appearance of the same dog at three fourteen and at three fifteen makes no sense to him because he is losing his ability to grasp appearances as going beyond the immediately given; to someone with normal faculties, there are always innumerable other profiles or aspects to the same dog that are not currently visible, and for the dog at three fifteen one of these is the dog at three fourteen and vice versa. This is why Sartre calls such experiences transcendent – there are infinitely many ways to go
beyond/’dépasser’/’transcend’ a given appearance towards the total set of which it is a member, towards the (transcendent) object of Funes’s dog or the genius of Proust or whatever else.
It is in this context that he introduces the secondary/derivative distinction between “the being of the phenomenon” and “the phenomenon of being”,54 and as a first rough pass we can understand the distinction as being between the singular access to something that appears, the “phenomenon of being” and the ground on which this appearance is possible, “the being of the phenomenon”. The account of the “phenomenon of being” is what leads us to our account of what consciousness is;
consciousness is that to which the phenomenon, the appearing, appears. Insofar as we take the thesis of intentionality to heart, we posit that “all consciousness is consciousness of something”, which we can turn on its head and say that all consciousness/awareness of something is
consciousness/awareness. Put more simply: because there is an appearance, there has to be
something it appears to. This is where the discussion of the conditions of self-awareness comes in. If we are to avoid the reflection theory and the problems it has, we have to account for a
52 What kind of change this is and why constant change necessarily implies infinitude is not argued for in IHP, but this remark is shored up by Sartre’s theory of presence from BN on.
53 In Borges, Jorge, Labyrinths. Ed. D.A. Yates and J.E. Irby. Penguin: New York, 1970.
54 BN, p. 4.
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awareness grounding any consciousness; if we want to posit awareness, it turns out we need to posit awareness, and moreover we need to posit a non-positional or pre-reflective self-awareness. One way of reframing this is that every appearance is necessarily self-aware as being that appearance, that there is a meaningful sense in which appearances must always appear to themselves: “self-consciousness … is the only mode of consciousness which is possible for a consciousness of something”.55 Because its grounds is its appearing to itself, the claim is that consciousness only ever exists insofar as it appears; consciousness just is its appearance to itself.
Thus the “phenomenon of being” is constituted by appearing to itself, and nothing more, although it has to be dependent on something outside of itself to satisfy the condition that something appears through an appearance; there must be a grounding condition for these appearances. This is what I take Sartre to mean by the “being of the phenomenon”, although before getting into more specifics it is necessary to look into the scope of Sartre’s project. This should go some way to showing why, independent of his arguments above, he has methodological concerns that militate against
describing consciousness as some kind of machine that would be capable of incorporating properly mental objects.
55 Ibid., p.10.
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