ABSTRACT
As early as The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37, TE), Sartre makes a crucial distinction between pure and impure (“complicit” or “constituting”) reflection. Though he appeals to the distinction in other early texts (e.g., Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939, SE, pp. 61)), it is significantly articulated in TE (pp. 23–24) and then most fully developed in the “Reflection” subsection of the “Temporality” chapter of Being and Nothingness (1943, BN, II.2.iii, pp. 217–43). The distinction is also discussed, with special attention to its moral dimensions, in numerous places in the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics (NE, written mostly in the late 1940s) and touched upon or applied, implicitly or explicitly, in other texts as well, most importantly, in the 1948 lecture, “Self-Consciousness and Self-Knowledge” (SC&SK). Drawing mostly upon TE and BN, I offer a reconstruction of this distinction in terms (somewhat) more accessible to contemporary philosophers of mind, indicating some historico-philosophical context (esp. Bergson and Husserl; see Vaughan 1993) and responding to some objections to Sartre’s model (esp. Wider’s 1997, pp. 74ff.) along the way.
