Principle of intentionality

The Principle of intentionality is the claim that every consciousness is consciousness of something. Sartre makes it the hinge between consciousness and the world: consciousness is not a container of representations, but an intentional movement toward objects that exist beyond it. From this structure he derives an ontological proof that consciousness is supported by being it does not constitute.

Consciousness Is Directed Outward

Sartre begins from the principle associated with Edmund Husserl, but stresses its implications for the nature of consciousness. A table is not held inside consciousness as a representation or a neutral inner datum; it exists in space, beside the window. Consciousness reaches toward it, and its judgments, practical activities, and present inclinations are directed outward and absorbed in their object. Even though not every consciousness is knowledge—affective consciousness is one counterexample—knowing consciousness can know only its object.

This outward direction also marks a limit. The table’s being is opaque: no finite inspection could exhaust its contents, and an inventory of it would require an infinite process. If that opacity were placed inside consciousness, consciousness would itself become a thing, and the cogito would be denied. Sartre therefore rejects the idea that objects are contents of a mental interior. The philosophical task is instead to restore consciousness’s connection with the world and understand it as positional: it transcends itself toward an object and is absorbed in positing it.

Self-Awareness and Knowledge

Intentionality does not mean that consciousness is unaware of its own activity. For a consciousness to know the table, it must also be conscious of itself as knowing it. Otherwise, it would be consciousness of the table without any awareness of being so—an unconsciousness Sartre regards as absurd. This self-awareness is not a second object placed inside the mind; it accompanies the consciousness directed toward the table.

That condition is sufficient for consciousness of the table, but it does not establish that the table exists in itself. It establishes that the table exists for consciousness. This distinction prevents the principle from collapsing into a claim that knowing something creates its independent reality. Intentionality describes consciousness’s relation to its object; it does not turn the object into a product of that relation.

The Ontological Proof

In his discussion of the ontological proof, Sartre distinguishes two readings of the claim that consciousness is consciousness of something. On one reading, consciousness constitutes the being of its object. On the other, consciousness is, in its innermost nature, a relation to a transcendent being. Sartre rejects the first: being conscious of an object involves confronting a concrete presence that is not consciousness. An absence may be conscious, but it appears against the prior condition of presence; it cannot supply the object’s being.

The alternative, Sartre argues, cannot be rescued by treating the object as a lack within consciousness. A series of appearances is never wholly present at once: the object is encountered in successive profiles, while other possible appearances remain absent. Yet those absent profiles cannot ground objectivity. Each appearance is already a transcendent being, a presence rather than a subjective impression or a lack. The object’s reality cannot be derived from subjective plenitude and then secured by what is missing from it; being does not emerge from non-being, or transcendence from immanence.

Sartre also uses this argument to challenge what he sees as a tension in Husserl’s account. Husserl’s discovery is that consciousness is transcendence, but Sartre argues that this principle is compromised if the noema is treated as unreal, as a correlate of noesis whose being consists in being perceived. In that case, the account makes the object depend on consciousness even while describing consciousness as directed beyond itself.

Consciousness Depends on Transcendent Being

Sartre’s ontological proof follows from intentionality understood as a condition of existence, not merely a description of knowledge. Consciousness is born supported by a being that is not itself. It cannot first exist as a self-sufficient, pure subject and then manufacture an objective world: detached from what it reveals, such pure subjectivity disappears. Consciousness is intelligible only as consciousness of consciousness qualified as revealing intuition; revealing, in turn, necessarily implies something revealed.

The conclusion is not that consciousness constitutes its object, but that its very being requires a non-conscious, transphenomenal being. Subjectivity can be established only in the face of what it reveals, and immanence can be defined only in apprehending transcendence. Intentionality thus carries Sartre from the outward movement of consciousness to a claim about reality: consciousness reveals being as already existing, and depends on what it does not create.