This paper reconstructs Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of pre-reflective self-consciousness and explores its significance for contemporary debates in phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Sartre’s conception of self-consciousness as a non-positional awareness intrinsic to every conscious act occupies a distinctive position between influential contemporary accounts, particularly those of Dan Zahavi and Manfred Frank. While sharing their rejection of higher-order theories of self-conscio…
Read moreThis paper reconstructs Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of pre-reflective self-consciousness and explores its significance for contemporary debates in phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Sartre’s conception of self-consciousness as a non-positional awareness intrinsic to every conscious act occupies a distinctive position between influential contemporary accounts, particularly those of Dan Zahavi and Manfred Frank. While sharing their rejection of higher-order theories of self-consciousness, Sartre understands pre-reflective selfhood not as a formal structure or anonymous self-luminosity alone, but as an embodied, world-directed spontaneity. It examines convergences between Sartre’s phenomenology and recent work on embodied subjectivity, enactivism and predictive processing. The paper concludes that Sartre’s account of pre-reflective self-consciousness provides a valuable conceptual resource for integrating first-person phenomenology with Tom Froese’s recent enactivist theory of irruption and situates this approach within the broader consciousness naturalization project.
