SARTRE'S BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
what Sartre is claiming when he says that consciousness is self conscious: Sartre envisions this structure as the prior ground of the sUbject's knowledge of its own consciousness, as what makes self-knowledge possible. Sartre's argument for supposing that a self-relating of consciousness must be assumed begins with a reductio (xxviii/IS-19). Suppose we identify self-consciousness in gen eral with self-knowledge (as does, Sartre supposes, Spinoza: self-consciousness consists in 'knowing of a knowing', an 'idea of a idea'). The knowledge relation imports, however, Sartre observes, a distinction of subject (knower) and object (of knowledge), and this immediately generates, in the case of self-knowledge, the question: How does the subject of know ledge know its identity with the object of knowledge? More precisely: How does it know this identity in the requisite dis tinctive, infallible and immediate way? For we need to respect the obvious and fundamental differences between knowing that 1 am in pain or am seeing a pen, and knowing that the Evening Star is identical with and shares the properties of the Morning Star: consciousness of one's self as o nes elf is not in any way an ordinary case of coming to conclude that one thing is the same as another. Now it might be supposed that the traditional notion of an 'act of reflection', conceived as the mind's turning-back of atten tion on itself, answers this question. But as Sartre notes, appeal to reflection, la rej1exion, merely restates the puzzle: What allows the '!' of my reflection, or my consciousness of that 'I', to know itself to be the same as - to be identical with the subject of - the consciousness which is reflected on? It seems we are pushed to introduce a 'third term', which does know their iden tity; but then the relation of this third, 'super'-I to the previous two terms needs to be accounted for, and an infinite regress is set in motion. Any account which takes self-knowledge to be ungrounded runs, therefore, into insurmountable difficul · ties , the only solution to which is to suppose that, just as we accept in the case of knowledge of objects that there must be something prior on which it is grounded, viz. consciousness of objects, so in parallel fashion we should allow a pre-epistemic ground of self-knowledge.80 A primitive self-relatedness or self-inclusiveness of object-consciousness would explain the 46