Ishousei

Intentionality names the outward-directed structure of consciousness: consciousness is always consciousness of something, and in reaching its object it is not a container filled with mental contents. Sartre makes this principle a claim about being, not merely about how knowledge works. Consciousness reveals a world that is not itself, and the object’s existence cannot be derived from subjective impressions or from consciousness alone.

Consciousness Directed Beyond Itself

Sartre takes from Edmund Husserl the principle that all consciousness is consciousness of something, but draws out its implications for the relation between consciousness and the world. Consciousness posits a transcendent object; it does not first receive a neutral inner content that must later be interpreted as either mental or worldly. A table, for example, is not inside consciousness even as a representation. It is in space, beside a window, while consciousness is directed toward it.

The table’s inexhaustible existence makes the contrast especially clear. No inventory could capture all that the thing is: its opacity would require an infinite process of description. To install that plenitude inside consciousness would make consciousness thing-like, as though it too contained an inexhaustible stock of contents, and would undermine the cogito. Sartre’s first philosophical task is therefore to expel things from consciousness and restore the connection in which consciousness reaches a world beyond itself.

Positing and Self-Awareness

Consciousness exhausts itself in its positing of the object. In an encounter with a table, the intentions of consciousness—judgments, practical activities, and present inclinations—are directed outward and absorbed in the table. This does not mean every consciousness is knowledge: affective consciousness need not be knowing consciousness. But whenever consciousness knows, it knows its object, not an inner content standing in for that object.

Knowing consciousness must also be conscious of itself as knowing. Without this self-awareness, consciousness would be directed toward the table without any awareness of being so directed, an unconsciousness Sartre regards as incoherent. The awareness need not take the form of a second act that turns the original consciousness into an object of reflection. It is enough for consciousness to be conscious of being consciousness of the table: that makes the table present for consciousness, though it does not by itself prove that the table exists in itself.

This distinction prevents self-awareness from being mistaken for another item of knowledge. If consciousness of consciousness were a reflective act directed at consciousness as an object, it would reproduce the outward structure of ordinary knowledge and leave the original consciousness unexplained. Sartre instead distinguishes being aware of an act of consciousness from making that act the object of a further act of reflection.

Intentionality and Transcendent Being

Sartre calls the ontological proof the claim that consciousness, because it is necessarily consciousness of something, is born supported by a being other than itself. The point is not that a subjective demand somehow guarantees its own satisfaction. Rather, consciousness can only be what it is by revealing something transcendent; without a revealed being, the notion of an absolute, initially self-contained subjectivity collapses. Immanence can be identified only in the disclosure of what exceeds it.

This argument concerns being rather than an inference from inner experience to external objects. Sartre contrasts it with a proof that would try to establish spatial things from the phenomena of inner sense. Consciousness does not first constitute an objective world out of itself: subjectivity is powerless to constitute the objective in that sense. To say that consciousness is consciousness of something is instead to say that it produces itself as the revealing of a being that is not it and is already there when revealed.

The Object Is Not Made by Appearance

Sartre’s objection to a subjectivist account of the object sharpens the force of intentionality. An absent or hoped-for object may acquire a kind of transcendence within experience, but that does not take experience outside the subjective. Nor does the fact that things appear in profiles make each appearance a mere fragment of subjective material. Each appearance already has transcendent being: it is a plenitude, not a lack, and a presence, not an absence. The objective cannot be made to emerge from subjective fullness, nor being from non-being.

Sartre accepts Husserl’s discovery that consciousness is transcendence, yet argues that Husserl is unfaithful to that discovery when the noema is treated as unreal, with its being reduced to being perceived. In Sartre’s view, consciousness implies a non-conscious, transphenomenal being. The being of the appearing object is not a hidden noumenon behind appearances, but the being of the thing that appears—the table, a package of tobacco, a lamp, and, more generally, the world. What appears need not exist only insofar as it appears to consciousness.

Philosophical Significance

Intentionality thus carries both a negative and a positive force. Negatively, it rejects the picture of consciousness as a receptacle, a self-enclosed subject, or a source capable of manufacturing the object from its own contents. Positively, it describes consciousness as a revealing relation whose very being entails a world beyond it. Sartre’s formulation turns a principle of phenomenological description into an ontological claim: consciousness is not alone, because its directedness is supported by the independent being it discloses.