Heldt, Caleb (2011) Dialectic and caesura : immanence and transcendence in Sartre's ontology. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

The following is a study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology of conscious awareness.
Ontology, for Sartre, consists in the delineation of the constituent elements, structures
and dimensions of Being as well as the way in which such constituent features interact
within the ekstatic dynamics of the lived experience of the being for whom such
ontological features are capable of becoming phenomena of possible awareness. Sartre’s
methodology, then, is manifold. The ontological project which Sartre undertakes to
develop is at once transcendental, phenomenological and dialectical. It is transcendental
inasmuch as it is a theory of the way in which phenomena become experientially possible
for a being whose primary existential mode of conscious awareness is as an act of
immanent self-relation, as pure auto-affection, and is capable of divesting itself of its
modality of active self-affective immanence in constituting for itself a particular
phenomenon transcendent to itself. This is to say that what Sartre refers to as pure or
transcendental consciousness is capable of dissolving its primordial mode of autoaffective
immanent self-awareness in the intentional (or, attentional) act whereby a
choice is made to privilege a given phenomenon from amongst the otherwise
undifferentiated multiplicity of the conscious existent’s (auto-)affective conscious
awareness in order to become conscious of something which is not itself and from which
the act of consciousness differentiates itself as not being, whether this privileged
phenomenon is ekstatic or extensive, whether it is chosen from the otherwise
undifferentiated virtual multiplicity of this conscious existent’s own psychic pastness (or
possible future) or from the indifferent multiplicity of worldly actuality. In either case,
whether the privileged phenomenon of intentional awareness is egological or material, of
the psyche or of the world, the noematic correlate of conscious attention (the explicit or
thetic phenomenon of intentional awareness) is transcendent to transcendental
consciousness. It is in the investigation of such phenomena that Sartre’s ontology
manifests itself as phenomenological. However, for Sartre, such awareness is by no
means static, and it is through the ekstatic dynamization of the constituent features of
conscious awareness that the transcendental and phenomenological methodologies of
Sartre’s ontology of lived experience ultimately prove to be dialectical. Every moment
of conscious awareness must, for Sartre, be both surpassed and preserved. Every
moment of awareness, with its transcendent dimensions of virtuality and actuality and the
auto-affective immanence upon which they depend, reveal themselves as intimately
related, then, to memorial dynamics, dynamics which Sartre did little to explicitly
develop but upon which an adequate understanding of his ontology depends and which
will ultimately ground any investigation of what we might call an existential
epistemology.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BD Speculative Philosophy
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980 -- Criticism and interpretation, Ontology, Consciousness
Official Date:	May 2011
Dates:	Date Event May 2011 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Philosophy
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Poellner, Peter ; Houlgate, Stephen
Sponsors:	University of Warwick
Extent:	lvi, 353 p.
Language:	eng

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