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p Any attempt to understand the specific features of knowledge is bound to take into account the fundamental facts—that the empirical subject is necessarily included or incorporated in the world of material objects existing independently of it and of its consciousness, and that the other subjects are not less real than myself, and cannot be regarded as products of my experience only.

p There is a conception in modern Western philosophy which endeavours to take these fundamental facts into account within the scope of an originally interpreted phenomenology and at the same time to link up the fundamental traits of knowledge and of the cognitive relation with the specific characteristics of the individual empirical subject. This attempt is undertaken by Jean-Paul Sartre, a prominent modern French phenomenologist and existentialist, in his main philosophical work Being and Nothingness. ° ^^4^^

p Let us point out from the beginning that epistemological problems, the question of substantiation of knowledge, are not the focal points of Sartre’s analysis, although he offers his solution of these questions. The relation between subject and object is considered in his works within the framework of a definite conception of consciousness and man. But Sartre’s interpretation of the relation between consciousness and knowledge is of interest for our discussion.

p The starting point of his cogitations is recognition of the existence of two realities: of the objective material 96 being which he refers to as Being In-Itself, and consciousness, or Being For-Itself. The former exists by itself and does not need the latter. The latter is, however, impossible without the former, for it has no content at all, is absolutely empty, transparent, open both to the external world and to itself, is, in a word, a “nothingness”, a “hole” in Being In-Itself, a hole which has no density at all and continually needs to be filled. However, precisely because consciousness is a kind of “gap” in material being, it is excluded, as it were, from the action of all the substantive connections and dependences, and is absolutely free. Consciousness is thus not just emptiness filled with content given from the outside but a being of a special kind, a centre of free activity.

p The content provided by Being In-Itself does not determine the activity of consciousness but merely serves as a kind of pretext for it, a bridgehead for its unfolding. However, since this activity is not determined by content given from the outside and is at the same time devoid of its own inner content, it is essentially a negation of any sort of dependence. It is in negation that the freedom of consciousness is expressed, according to Sartre.

p At the same time Sartre states that consciousness does not exist outside the material world, outside Being InItself. In his view, consciousness cannot be similar to Kant’s or Husserl’s Transcendental Subject, first, because it is included, as it were, ia the world of material objects, though not being an object itself (Sartre criticises in this connection Husserl’s doctrine of transcendental reduction, of epochs), and second, because it factually, empirically exists in definite concrete situations and is connected with the body of a given empirical subject.

p Moreover, in a certain sense consciousness, Being ForItself, coincides with the body of the empirical subject and is indistinguishable from it. The reference here is to that aspect which, in Sartre’s view, specifically characterises the basic, original perception by the individual of his own body and which is fundamentally different from the way I and my body are perceived by another subject. In the primary, original experience, Sartre argues, I do not perceive myself as an object. The eye does not see itself. I do not see my face. I cannot conceive of myself as an object among other objects. Objects are something that exists outside myself and belongs to the material world, to Being In-Itself. However, I must receive certain sense perceptions from the movements of my own body. At any rate, that is what psychology says. The assertions of scientific psychology, Sartre says, proceed from the existence 97 of my body as a material object among other objects, connecting my definite experiences with processes in my body understood in this way. But the essence of the matter is, according to Sartre, that the individual’s body is not given him in the basic primary experience as an object, and he therefore cannot in principle connect any processes in his consciousness with his body understood as an object (he cannot in principle localise any sense perceptions, e.g., the sensation of pain; he cannot associate his experiences with his own physical state, etc.). At the outset, the individual is given only the world of external material objects and himself as different from these objects, as consciousness, as Being For-Itself. To the extent in which experiences have a certain “density”, they pertain to external objects. For instance, if I sense resistance in acting upon an external object, the resistance itself is not perceived as connected with the action of my hand characterising my subjective experience, one that is "in me”, but as pertaining to the objective properties of the external objects and expressing their traits, in this case the measure of their resistance. Pain is not something localised in me either, but that which expresses the properties of some objects under definite circumstances. As for my body, in its primary and basic sense it, first, determines the factuality of my consciousness, that is, the concrete objective situation in which I find myself (in particular, it determines “where” exactly I am), and second, it functions as the possibility and the mode of the activity of my consciousness, of Being For-Itself, essentially coinciding with the latter.^^85^^

p Thus Sartre has an original conception of consciousness which does not coincide with the widely accepted one. Consciousness or Being For-Itself, writes Sartre, is not the same as the psyche or the subjective world characterised by certain processes, connections, dependences, complicated mechanisms, special types of relations between conscious and unconscious phenomena etc., a world that is the subject-matter of special studies in scientific psychology. Consciousness, Being For-Itself, is in principle apsychological. The emergence of a special subjective world is, according to Sartre, a consequence of objectification of consciousness and expresses a distorted conception of the basic and primary characteristics of Being For-Itself and at the same time the ontological fact of the degradation of consciousness itself.

p As we see, far from relying on the assertions of scientific psychology, Sartre endeavours to prove the dubiety of some of its basic abstractions and assumptions. Like 98 Husserl, he insists that phenomenological description does not imply any scientific results, and that it is science that has to reckon with the results of phenomenological analysis rather than vice versa. (Among other things, Sartre’s understanding of the world of material Being In-Itself does not coincide with the natural-scientific doctrine of matter, as we have had occasion to see above.)

p Let us now consider the following important point of Sartre’s reasoning. That relation between Being In-Itself and Being For-Itself of which we spoke above is, for him, not only the basic and primary point but also an expression of the true essence of their relations, the essence which is under usual circumstances fenced off, put away, hidden, distorted by various circumstances. For this reason, for instance, when the subject is capable of localising the feeling of pain in some part of his body, when he scrutinises the world of his experiences and correlates them with the past and present events of his life, when he follows the development of his own thought and controls this process, in all these cases, says Sartre, the genuine characteristics of consciousness, of Being For-Itself, are distorted.

p Consciousness as “nothingness” does not coincide with the psychical life of the empirical ego but underlies the latter, being hidden in its depth. (It is important to note that from Sartre’s standpoint the situation where consciousness proves to be something lying deeply in the foundation of the individual ego, of his psychical life, reveals the ontological fact of distorted expression of the true nature of consciousness. It is a question of the situation as it is, rather than of our distorted understanding, for consciousness has neither depth nor essence of any kind.) On the one hand, consciousness determines the entire course of the psychical life of the ego, the whole of the individual subjective biography, while on the other hand, it is not only different from that biography but is also distorted by it. At the same time consciousness, according to Sartre, is not the Transcendental Ego in the sense of Husserl, either: first, because it is factual and not transcendental, coinciding as it does with the subject’s body understood in a certain manner; second, any ego, including the Transcendental Ego, has a certain inner definiteness, density, certain content. Consciousness is entirely devoid of such content, it is absolutely empty. Therefore it is not the ego, concludes Sartre.

p Ordinary subjective life necessarily assumes reflexion. Reflexion is only possible on condition that its object exists and catches the subject’s inner eye. True 99 consciousness, Being For-Itself, Sartre believes, is absolutely transparent, it is a complete vacuum which the inner eye pierces without stopping anywhere or being reflected by anything. Therefore self-consciousness, the relation of the subject to itself which is characteristic of consciousness (and this relation is continually realised, Sartre believes, for consciousness clearly distinguishes itself from the outset from the world of things-in-themselves) is not reflexion. Consciousness is in principle pre-reflexive, in Sartre’s view.

p Reflexion emerges together with its object, the ego, and in a certain sense produces the object itself. Sartre points out the important fact which also played a fundamental role in the philosophical system of Fichte and which we shall later analyse on the positive plane. The fact is .that individual reflexion aimed at consciousness does not simply find before itself a ready-made object in the shape of the ego and its states but, being an activity of a certain kind, acts on its object, changes it, reconstructs and in a certain sense creates it.

For Fichte, this positing of oneself as the Absolute Subject in the form of one’s own object was the kind of determination of the indeterminate which was not only involved in the shaping of the ego and the contrapositing of ego to non-ego but which also revealed the inner essence of the Absolute Subject. For Sartre, the positing of the ego as the object of reflexion and the coming of the latter on the scene does not in any way reveal the nature of consciousness. Moreover, Sartre believes that at the stage of reflexion the purity of consciousness is distorted and consciousness itself degraded. At the same time, according to Sartre (and here there is another difference between him and Fichte), there is no Transcendental or Absolute Ego, the ego can only be empirical, expressing as it does the unique traits of the given individual person distinguishing him from all the other egos. Let us note that consciousness, Being For-Itself, is, according to Sartre, also individual in a sense, so that different empirical subjects have different consciousnesses. However; if the ego expresses a certain density, a unity of an individual biography, and the subject’s personal traits, consciousness or Being For-Itself is in itself empty and impersonal. Therefore different consciousnesses differ from each other merely as different centres of free activity, as structureless points of activity included in different factual situations. Of course, in our experience we distinguish between consciousnesses on the basis of their connections with different individual egos. But this differentiation does not characterise the metaphysical distinctions between consciousnesses, so to speak.

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p Thus, according to Sartre, the ego as an expression of the unity of the subject’s psychical life does not express the essence of consciousness and even distorts it, to a certain extent. The ego may be said to be “invented” by the subject—with the essential reservation that this “ invention” is realised in constant contacts and communication with other subjects. The positing of the ego is an attempt to introduce determinateness into the fundamentally indeterminate life of consciousness, to lend consciousness density and substantionality, making it its own object.

p At the same time, according to Sartre, consciousness is continually inclined towards substantivisation, precisely because it is void and needs to be filled. However, it endeavours to fill itself, to acquire content, in such a way, as not to lose its primary faculty, that of the activity of free negation, the activity of desubstantivisation. In other words, consciousness endeavours to turn itself into a kind of synthesis between Being In-Itself and Being For-Itself, which is impossible because of the mutually exclusive characteristics of the two. Therefore the reification of self by consciousness, acquiring features of a certain ego, is accompanied by continual attempts to sublate that reification. This sublation, however, is not expressed in reverting to the purity and “contentlessness” of true Being For-Itself but in constant positing of ever new definitenesses of consciousness as a succession of the characteristics of the ego inherent in it. Man’s personality is something subject to changes. The ego is not equal to itself, argues Sartre against the formula of Descartes, Kant, and Fichte.^^86^^ Inasmuch as consciousness cannot acquire any final objective image in the shape of a certain ego, one cannot say what it is. Consciousness is that which it is not, and it is not that which it is, asserts Sartre.

p Sartre therefore separates in principle the cognitive relation which implies the existence of the object, from the act of self-consciousness pertaining to being that is in principle unobjectifiable, Being For-Itself. We remember that Kant also separates cognition, the relation of the subject to the object, from self-consciousness, the relation of the Transcendental Subject to itself, insisting that the latter is not given in experience and therefore cannot be an object of knowledge. However, for Kant the Transcendental Subject exists as an otherworldly, transcendental entity, as a thing-in-itself, which, although it is not an object of knowledge, can still be conceived of. For Sartre, consciousness, Being For-Itself, does not know itself, cannot be the object of its own cognition precisely for the 101 reason that it has no essence and is devoid of any depth.

p For the present, we shall put off the analysis of Sartre’s understanding of the external world, concentrating now on Sartre’s interpretation of the process of self-cognition, of reflexion. Reflexion is, in Sartre’s view, to some extent fictitious, for it is incapable of grasping the true nature of consciousness. This fictitiousness does not mean, however, that it has no ’object of its own or that it does not express its specific features. Such an object is always present: that is the individual ego, and reflexion is adequate to that object (Sartre criticises in this connection the doctrine of the unconscious in its Freudian version).^^87^^ The point, however, is that the object (the ego and its states) emerges together with reflexion, is its result, and does not express the true nature of consciousness. (Sartre critically assesses both introspective psychology and Husserlian phenomenological psychology.)

p How does reflexion emerge? It appears as a result of a relation to another subject. The given individual consciousness by itself, outside a relation to other consciousnesses, is incapable of generating reflexion, insists Sartre in opposition to the philosophical tradition represented by Descartes, Kant, Fichte, and Husserl, and one has to admit that he is much closer to the truth at this point than the tradition.

p The other subject, Sartre believes, is just as real as myself, and cannot be regarded as simply the result of my constitutive activity, contrary to what Husserl thought. At the same time, according to Sartre, my conviction in the existence of another consciousness is by no means based on cognition (no cognitive procedures will ever convincingly prove the existence of somebody else’s consciousness, Sartre affirms), but is a kind of primary ontological givenness, of the same type as the givenness of the external objective world to our consciousness. However, what is directly given to me is the existence of somebody else’s consciousness itself but not the possibility of penetrating that consciousness. Different consciousnesses are in principle separated and cannot merge with one another. Besides, the other consciousness is given in my experience as connected with the body of another subject. This body appears as a material object localised in space and adjacent to and interacting with other material objects. Though cognition of external actions, the reactions of this other subject’s body conditioned by external stimuli, as well as of the nervous processes taking place in this body, does have some meaning, it does not at all characterise, Sartre believes, the free consciousness of the other subject 102 which actually underlies all its actions. (Sartre adds a critique of psychological behaviourism to the critique of introspective psychology.)

p Thus the body of another subject appears in my experience as an object of a special kind, as it does not appear to the other subject itself, just as my body is not originally an object for me, being merged with my own consciousness. It is precisely the fact that another consciousness appears in my experience as inseparably linked with an object of a special kind, the body of another subject, that compels me to treat the other subject generally as an object of a special kind, unique in its physical and psychological characteristics, and to “insert” the conscious processes “in” that body, that is, to constitute a special "world of the subjective life of consciousness”, a world of psychical processes existing in definite relations with the material corporeal processes. At the same time the relation to the other person compels me to recognise myself as “another” for that other subject (that recognition is attained in the process of communication with the latter) and to ascribe myself all the characteristics which the latter has in my experience. And that means that consciousness begins to treat itself in the same way as another treats it, that is, as a subject possessing a body in the shape of a material object localised in space and endowed with psychical experiences placed “within” that body. The subject comes to distinguish these experiences and their course from the course of the objective processes of the external world, positing the unity of its psychical life as a special object, the ego. The objectification, the reification of self as a person, as the ego, thus implies the other person’s view, a view of self from the outside, from the standpoint of the possible “another”. It is in this connection that reflexion emerges, being, according to Sartre, the product of communication with other subjects.

p The process of objectification of consciousness, of transforming it into the ego as the object of another consciousness, and later of the subject itself, goes through several stages. At one of them consciousness merely feels itself the object of another subject but does not fully know itself in this capacity. This happens when the given Being For-Itself feels itself the object of scrutiny on the part of another (the problem of “scrutiny” has an important ontological meaning in Sartre’s philosophy). Only as a result of communication with another can consciousness, through language, objectify itself to the end and generate reflexion. The individual subject, therefore, which sees itself in the mirror and is at the same time deprived of the 103 possibility of communication, cannot in principle recognise itself in the mirror image (this image merely appears to it as a strange play of external objects), for it does not exist for itself as an object outside of communication with others.

p For Sartre, objectification of consciousness through a relation to another is an indication of the ontological degradation of Being For-Itself.

p My ego does not express my true nature, Sartre believes. Although consciousness internally gravitates towards objectification, although it performs this objectification itself and is responsible for it, it appears as something imposed by the external relation to other consciousnesses, by the process of communication. The relation to another does not follow logically from the nature of Being For- Itself. That other consciousnesses apart from my own exist is a real and fundamental fact, but it is metaphysically accidental. A situation is conceivable in which my consciousness would exist in solitude, Sartre believes.^^88^^ I do not know myself, for my reflexion pertains only to the external integument of my consciousness, an integument existing as the ego. At the same time I have, in principle, an access to my consciousness and a capacity for directly grasping it in the form of a non-objectifying pre-reflective act of self-consciousness. As for the other, according to Sartre, I do not know his true depth, for I deal only with his external visage, but moreover, unlike in my own case, I have no possibility at all to penetrate his consciousness from the inside, for, to perform that feat, I must be in his place, whereas different consciousnesses are individual, they are metaphysically distinct. The other is given in my experience as an expression of a certain individual consciousness which is just as real as my own. At the same time I can grasp or comprehend the other only as a body, as a material object endowed with the psyche, Sartre insists; the conditions of the problem predetermine in this case the impossibility of solving it. Meanwhile, the tendency of Being For-Itself towards substantivisation, towards meaningful filling is also necessarily connected with the desire for merging or fusing with another consciousness. The impossibility of the latter predetermines the tragedy of individual existence.

p Now, what about the cognition of the external world, of Being In-Itself; how does Sartre solve the problem of substantiation of knowledge?

p The world of objective material things pertaining to Being In-Itself is given to consciousness directly, he believes. In terms of content, the cognitive or subject-object 104 relation is entirely determined by the external object, for consciousness by itself is empty. Only “nothingness” separates it from the world of external objectiveness. However, this distinction between cognition and the external world is at the same time fundamental for it means that consciousness, being a “nothingness”, can never simply merge with the world of objects or merely absorb their content. The cognitive relation of consciousness to material being necessarily includes the element of negation that is inherent in consciousness. This negative activity of consciousness coincides, according to Sartre, with the primary, basic characteristics of time. The objective spatial relations of material objects inherent in Being In-Itself necessarily appear in the cognitive process in the forms of time, so that time itself, which originally coincided with Being For-Itself, is “spacified” acquiring the characteristics of objectiveness. The interaction of the spatial and temporal features of experience produces various forms of the necessary structural organisation of knowledge (types of causal dependence, constancy of the objects of knowledge relative to the flow of time, etc.). It is these fundamental features of the cognitive relation that underlie any knowledge, including scientific knowledge. To find out the invariant characteristics of experience, science constructs a certain system of abstract or ideal objects. But these objects are, according to Sartre, essentially fictitious, being in themselves devoid of content and performing a purely pragmatic function. The meaning of scientific-theoretical knowledge is determined by the primary cognitive relation of consciousness to Being In-Itself, although science itself forgets about it, claiming to discover the hidden essence of things that is not immediately given in primary cognitive experience.^^89^^

p As we see, Sartre endeavours, in the final analysis, to deduce the fundamental properties of knowledge from the specific characteristics of individual consciousness and its relation to the world of objects.

p In Sartre’s view, however, scientific-theoretical cognition does not know the true properties of Being In-Itself, dealing merely with abstract invariant relations between objects.

p The primordial, pre-scientific and pre-theoretical relation of consciousness to Being In-Itself grasps the characteristics of the objects themselves, but no cognitive act may be directed at consciousness and its relations, including cognitive ones, since consciousness is in principle unobjectifiable. That means, according to Sartre, that the problem of substantiation of knowledge cannot be the 105 object of theoretical inquiry, that is to say, epistemology in the traditional sense of the term is impossible. The primary specific properties of knowledge are not found through cognitive research of a special kind of objects but comprehended through phenomenological non-objectifying insights into consciousness and its relations with Being InItself.

p Speaking more precisely, however, the establishment of the dependence of the fundamental characteristics of cognition and knowledge on the features of consciousness does not, according to Sartre, solve the problem of substantiation even if this solution is to be sought for on the path of phenomenological insight and not of cognitive research. Indeed, in his view consciousness is devoid of essence or depth. It therefore has no foundation and cannot serve as a foundation for anything whatever. In general, the problem of substantiation of anything ( knowledge, values, norms of activity, etc.), Sartre insists, only emerges at the level of "human reality”, expressing the vain tendency of Being For-Itself to "take root" in something, to acquire density, substantiality, self-confidence. This problem is insoluble, Sartre believes, because of the fundamental properties of Being For-Itself. For this reason, the fundamental structural characteristics of knowledge do not express substantiation of knowledge by something but rather "absence of its substantiation”, that is, the important fact that, being conditioned in its content by the world of external objects, knowledge is at the same time a relation of consciousness, that is, it is " suspended from nothingness”, as it were, hanging in a vacuum. The necessary connections of cognitive experience always express, in one way or another, the temporal flow of events, while time directly characterises consciousness and its intrinsic negativeness.

p The fact that Sartre rejects the problem of substantiation of knowledge and, in general, epistemological inquiry in its traditional form, does not mean that he regards theoretical analysis of cognition as impossible. On the contrary, his conception does not exclude such an analysis ( directed, e.g., at establishing the logical structure of knowledge, the mechanisms of its origin, various methods of theoretical investigation, the modes of verification of knowledge, etc.). Sartre merely insists on the impossibility of theoretical, cognitive investigation of the very essence of the cognitive relation, of the fundamental meaningful characteristics of knowledge, of the problem of substantiation of knowledge, that is, of those problems which have always been the concern of epistemology as a 106 philosophical discipline. Those problems of cognition and knowledge which are not philosophical in nature can be, according to Sartre, the subject-matter of specialised scientific investigation.

p Let us now consider more closely Sartre’s conception of the interrelations between subject and object.

p Sartre proceeds from the immediate givenness of consciousness to itself in the act of non-objectifying self- consciousness. Even before it reifies itself as the ego, before it is included in relations with other consciousnesses, before the act of elementary reflexion emerges, consciousness already distinguishes itself from the world of external objects, elementary cognitive experience being expressed in the intentional orientation at the latter. As this starting point of Sartre’s analysis lacks substantiation, his conception as a whole proves to be basically defective.

p We have no grounds for distinguishing self- consciousness pertaining to “pure”, non-objectified consciousness, from ordinary reflexion aimed at the individual ego as an object. In any case, the experience of the consciousness of an adult gives no grounds for this differentiation. (The facts of the development of the child’s psyche will be discussed somewhat later.) Moreover, the very emergence of consciousness as a unified centre of psychic life, as a certain individuality distinguishing it from other consciousnesses, implies that its states are related to the activity of a certain object that is my body (though not identified with this activity). The very differentiation between consciousnesses, the possibility of their individuation, assumes their correlation with the bodies of different subjects included in objective relations with other things.

p Sartre agrees that distinguishing myself as the ego from the others implies a relation to myself as an object of a special kind connected with other material objects and other egos appearing before me as other objects. In his view, however, the true individuality of my consciousness is not expressed in the ego but in the very fact of the existence of a pure structureless point—Being For-Itself.

p But pure consciousness as something absolutely empty and contentless indeed proves to be “nothingness”, though not in the sense of Sartre, who not only ascribes absolute emptiness to consciousness but interprets it at the same time as a special kind of being, as a metaphysical reality, as a centre of activity: it proves to be “nothingness” in the sense of absolute fiction. Structureless and contentless consciousness devoid of any properties or qualities cannot in principle be individualised. Consciousnesses interpreted as “nothingness” must merge, they must be "glued 107 together”. But in this case Sartre’s fundamental philosophical premise falls—the assumption of uniqueness of separate consciousnesses, of the impossibility of one consciousness penetrating another.

p Let us consider in this connection the development of child psychology, which provides additional arguments for a critical evaluation of Sartre’s conception.

p As we have seen, consciousness distinguishing itself from the external world is, according to Sartre, the starting point of experience which does not assume a relation of consciousness to other persons and their consciousnesses. But there are grounds to believe (and psychological data confirm this opinion) that the individual who does not treat himself as an object of a special kind included, on the one hand, in the world of material objects and, on the other, in the world of interpersonal relations, does not possess consciousness and self-consciousness, that is, simply does not distinguish himself from the rest of reality. But that means also that cognitive experience itself is not in this case fully endowed with the features of unity and continuity which Kant believed, with every justification, to be indications of its objectiveness.

p Indeed, objectiveness of experience implies that the subject is at least capable of distinguishing those of its features which are produced by the action of the external objects themselves from those which are caused by the subject, that is, those which are conditioned, on the one hand, by changes of its position relative to certain objects (its movement, changes in viewpoint, the perspective of perception, etc.), and on the other hand, by changes in the states of consciousness. But the existence of this faculty in the subject means that he can conceive of himself as a special object possessing consciousness, that is, he can perform an act of elementary self-cognition. It also means that to the extent in which self-consciousness and self-cognition are absent in the subject (and there are no grounds for distinguishing between them, as we have endeavoured to show), cognitive experience cannot retain its unity and continuity, that is, it cannot be viewed as fully objective.

p Jean Piaget, whose works on the psychology of intellectual development and genetic epistemology were discussed in the first chapter, singles out different stages in the development of the child’s cognitive structure on the basis of the results of experimental studies. At the beginning, at the stage of the so-called sensori-motor intellect, the child is absolutely unconscious of itself as an object and, consequently, as a subject. For this reason the objects 108 surrounding him do not retain in his experience their constant relation to one another and their own constant characteristics independent of the flow of experience itself (such as size, volume, weight, etc.).

p The object disappearing from the perception field (e.g., when the child looks away or when one object obstructs the view of another) does not exist for the child, it " disappears absolutely”, as it were. Cognitive experience is thus discontinuous. Grown-ups are perceived by the child as merely particularly active objects, sources of pleasure and punishment.^^90^^

p This stage in the development of cognitive structures recorded in Piaget’s studies has, as we see, certain similarities with the initial experience of which Sartre writes. The latter also stresses that initially consciousness does not realise itself as an object, neither is it aware of its body as an object and cannot therefore constitute a special subjective world of consciousness distinct from the objective connections between objects given in experience: it cannot, for instance, localise the sensations coming from the various parts of its own body but merges as it were with the latter. However, there is a fundamental difference between the views of Piaget and Sartre in the interpretation of that experience. As opposed to Sartre, Piaget insists that at the first stages of intellectual development the subject is incapable of perceiving himself reflexively, so that his consciousness does not exist either objectively or subjectively. That means that not only the difference between the subject’s consciousness and his body is non-existent for the subject (that fact is also recognised by Sartre), but neither is its difference from the world of external objects (which Sartre does not recognise). At the first stages of intellectual development, the subject merges, as it were, with the world of external objects in his own experience. It is for this reason that the objects of experience do not appear here as things yet, that is, as something different from the subject (whereas for Sartre Being In-Itself is immediately given to consciousness as the world of objects).

p Another important circumstance should be noted. For Sartre, the initial cognitive experience underlies the entire subsequent development of cognition determining the content and meaning of all the types, kinds, and structures of knowledge including scientific-theoretical knowledge. But Piaget shows that the development of cognition in individual psychical evolution implies complete restructuring of the intellectual mechanisms which took shape at the first stages; thus it absolutely cannot be understood from the latter alone.

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p At the same time it would be quite wrong to interpret the characteristics of the initial stages of intellectual development established by Piaget as a kind of " experimental confirmation" of the proposition of philosophical subjectivism that what is given to the subject initially is the subject himself and the states of his consciousness, and not the world of objective things. The subject is from the very beginning of the development of the psyche objectively included in definite relations with external objects and other men. Although subjectively these things do not initially appear before him as objects, and other persons as subjects, only a knowledge of the development mechanisms of these objective relations, in which man is included immediately after birth, enables one to explain the development of consciousness. As for the form in which the subject perceives the objective relations indicated here, its knowledge cannot by itself explain the nature of the successive changes of the cognitive structures. On the contrary, the subjective form itself can and must be explained from the system of objective relations. Finally let us point out that at the initial stages of intellectual development the subject is not given either the world of objects or the subject himself, the states of his consciousness. Therefore that picture of the initial cognitive relation which philosophical subjectivism outlines is completely at variance with the actual data of cognitive experience.

p Piaget shows that the development of cognitive structures from non-reversible to reversible intellectual operations (see Chapter 1) includes a change in the child’s psychological relations with adults. At the initial stage these structures are “centred”, that is, they offer no possibility for distinguishing between the immediately given standpoint and the objective relations of things. “Centring” necessarily implies also that imitation of the adult, who appears as an absolute authority, is the main mechanism of the child’s involvement in socio-cultural experience. The stages of cognitive development characterise the phases of consecutive “de-centring” of the intellectual structures, that is, achieving the view of oneself from the outside, as it were. But simultaneously that means a change towards complete reversibility of relations with adults. In other words, the child begins to treat the adult as in principle his equal, as another subject. The adult’s authoritarian pressure gives way to intellectual exchange and cognitive cooperation. It therefore becomes possible for the child to treat himself fully as an ego, that is, a being like any other.

p Thus what Piaget calls complete reversibility of intellectual operations necessarily includes the subject’s reflexive 110 relation to himself.

p The fundamental features of the emergence of individual reflexion were formulated on the philosophical plane by Marx: "In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom T am I’ is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.”^^91^^

p Thus the subject’s relation to himself as the ego is necessarily mediated by his relation to another. Reflexion is not born as a result of the inner needs of “pure”, isolated consciousness, as Descartes, Fichte, and Husserl believed, but in interpersonal relations, as a complex product pf the development of a system of communications. At the same time it would be wrong to interpret the words of Marx quoted above in the sense that the individual first recognises the other as a subject, another ego, and only after that begins to treat himself as a subject, on the analogy of that other. In actual fact there is mediation of dual kind: the individual not only perceives himself on the analogy with the other—he perceives, at the same time, the other on the analogy with himself. In other words, the ego and another ego emerge simultaneously and necessarily presuppose one another. This fact is, by the way, clearly recorded in Piaget’s studies.

p Let us emphasise that we use in this context only experimental facts obtained by Piaget, and certain concrete psychological generalisations. As for the general epistemological and psychological conception of that author, according to which the development of intellectual operational structures is determined by inner, “spontaneous” maturing of the subject’s schemes of activity, its substantive critique was given in the first chapter.

p Let us also note that the theory of gradual “de-centring” of the cognitive structures developed in Piaget’s latest works must not be confused with his early propositions concerning the overcoming of the child’s initial intellectual “egocentrism” in the course of development. We know that the thesis about “egocentrism” was sharply criticised by the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky.^^92^^ He correctly reproached Piaget for choosing wrongly the starting point pf the investigation: the individual only gradually becomes involved in the system of social relations, essentially modifying his cognitive instruments in the process. Vygotsky 111 insisted that no such independence of the individual in his original state from society and his subsequent socialisation existed at all.

p Piaget now recognises the correctness of much of Vygotsky’s criticism.^^93^^ All three stages in intellectual development, Piaget insists, are stages in the process of socialisation: "..Human intelligence is affected by the action of social life on all levels of development, from the first day of life to the last".^^94^^ The whole point, however, is, Piaget believes, that the influence of society varies at different stages of intellectual development. The stages in the process of “de-centring” characterise only the phases in the gradual sublation of the primacy of the direct viewpoint incapable of changing the given cognitive perspective. The early stages in intellectual development are better referred to as “centrism” rather than “egocentrism”, Piaget points out. This change in Piaget’s position on a number of questions, although it makes his conception more sophisticated, permitting a more precise description of some facts, particularly those which interest us most of all in this section, does not of course signify any radical reorientation of his philosophical and psychological theory as a whole.

p Mutual assimilation apparently begins with identification of the subjects’ actions. In insisting that the attitude to self as an object is alien to the very nature of consciousness, Sartre, as we remember, pointed out that in the initial cognitive experience man does not perceive even his own body as an object: the eye does not see itself, man cannot look at his own face, etc. But Sartre fails to see that there are parts of the body which are simultaneously perceived both "from within" as something belonging to the given being, and "from without" as objects incorporated in the world of material objects. These are the organs with which I perform actions with things and which enable me to move in the object world—my hands and my legs. Outwardly, they look just as the corresponding parts of another man’s body. In the course of joint activity of one person with others (in the first place, of an adult and child), the actions of different individuals are apparently identified and then individuals as wholes are mutually likened, that is, the ego and another ego take shape simultaneously.

p What we have said here about the mutual mediation of my attitude to myself and to the other does not entail my self-consciousness and my cognition of another person being in principle identical. Indeed, individual reflexion implies the view of oneself from the standpoint of another, as it were. At the same time I always know something 112 about myself which is not directly accessible to the other: I have perceptions, experiences, memories that are only given to the act of my reflexion and can be concealed from everybody else (I can, for instance, even conceal pain). Thus I have direct "inner access" to the states of my consciousness. This important real fact was recorded and philosophically interpreted by the adherents of subjectivist and transcendentalist philosophical conceptions. Indeed, I can only judge of the subjective states of another in an indirect way—either by observing his actions or receiving his own information about himself. In either case the possibility of error or deceit is not ruled out. It is important to note, however, that the very nature of self- consciousness, of individual reflexion, is such that its emergence necessarily implies a fundamental likeness between what I perceive in myself "from within" and that which is or may be perceived by another subject within himself. Of course, that other may conceal from me certain states of his consciousness, just as I can do with my consciousness. That does not, however, exclude the fundamental identity of the mechanisms of our psychical life, while the actual process of communication assumes as a premise of its success the attainment of mutual understanding in most cases. My subjective states are directly given me in the act of self-consciousness, in a way in which they cannot be given to another, but I realise them in forms which are not my personal property but are inter-individual in nature. In other words, the act of subjective reflexion presupposes, on the one hand, an object which is directly accessible to me only (my subjective states), and on the other, such instruments of cognitive fixation of this object which subsume "any other" person (i.e., that which would be realised by that other if he had a direct access to the states of my consciousness).

p Thus Sartre’s proposition that there is no access to the consciousness of another subject is at variance with the actual data of interpersonal communication, expressing, in fact, the thesis of "pluralistic individualism": according to Sartre, a multitude of consciousnesses exists, each of them closed in itself and incapable in principle of penetrating the others.

p Thus cognitive experience which has the characteristics of objectiveness, that is, experience assuming the subject’s conscious relation to the world of objects, necessarily includes the subject’s reflective relation to himself and distinguishing his own body from all the other objects, as well as differentiation between changes in the state of consciousness and the objective changes in the world of things. 113 The subjective experience expressed in the act of self- consciousness and self-cognition is different from the objective experience pertaining to the world of external objects. But these are not simply two series of experience existing independently from; each other and following parallel paths, as it were. As we have tried to show, both of these series presuppose and mediate one another. Subjective experience only becomes possible as a result of a relation to oneself as an object included in the network of objective relations with things and other persons. In their turn, the external things emerge before the subject as a world of objects independent of him and of his consciousness only when the first elementary act of self-consciousness appears.

p The subject realises not only his inclusion in an objective network of relations but also the uniqueness of his own position in the world. The latter manifests itself, first, in his body occupying a place in the system of spatio- temporal connections which is not taken up by any other subject, and second, in the fact that only he has "inner access" to his own subjective states. The objective fact of the uniqueness of this position, just as the subjective realisation of this fact, is assumed by the very structure of experiential knowledge (any attempt to apply theoretical knowledge to the description of the data of experience also assumes this fact). As we have seen, however, this circumstance has nothing to do with “centring” the world around the individual subject, a thesis which Husserl endeavoured to substantiate in his later works.

p Let us note in this connection that some epistemological conceptions of the empiricist variety current in modern bourgeois philosophy, criticising the Cartesian thesis (“I exist" as the supreme substantiation of any knowledge), often deny any serious cognitive significance to the act of individual self-consciousness. Thus A. J. Ayer insists that the proposition "I exist" does not in fact say anything about me, being devoid of any content, it does not identify me with any object (Ayer stresses in this respect that this assertion is different from the statement that there exists a person of such and such a sort). The utterance "I exist”, the English empiricist believes, may be likened to simply pointing to an individual object without words. This pointing, as we know, does not carry any information. Besides, he believes that there can be knowledge that is not accompanied by self-consciousness.^^95^^

p But self-consciousness, as we have endeavoured to show, is impossible without reference to oneself as a definite object possessing specific unique characteristics and 114 ineluded in a network of objective relations. The act of individual self-consciousness itself can only emerge due to the existence of certain meaningful dependences of experience (subjectively one may not, of course, be immediately aware of all these dependences, but implicitly they are always present). The relation to oneself as the ego thus includes a whole system of connections of knowledge. Descartes, Fichte and Husserl were therefore right in asserting that the act of self-consciousness and reflexion implicitly assumes the fundamental characteristics of knowledge. Their error lay elsewhere: in the attempt to interpret the specificity of knowledge and of the cognitive process by analysing the act of reflexion, a “pure” self-conscious ego. The real dependence is directly the reverse: the emergence of the ego and of its self-consciousness and reflexion must be understood as a result i of the formation of cognitive experience, as a consequence of the development of definite objective relations of the given subject to the world of material objects and other persons.

p The fundamental error of transcendentalism and subjectivism lies in their assumption that knowledge of one’s own existence is more indubitable than knowledge of the existence of the external world. In reality, the most elementary act of self-consciousness always implies recognition of the world of external objects independent of consciousness and connected by stable relations.

p Thus the attempts to substantiate knowledge undertaken within the framework of philosophical subjectivism, and to interpret cognition as determined by the structure of individual consciousness, could not in principle be successful.

p That does not mean that the adherents of the conceptions considered in this chapter have not established any real facts about the cognitive relations of subject and object. In our critical analysis we have pointed to the most important of these facts. Summing up what has been said in this chapter, we can say that philosophical subjectivists exploit for their purposes, first, the specificity of the nature and functioning of the subject’s consciousness (the existence of direct "inner access" to the states of one’s consciousness, self-consciousness as the necessary feature of the objectiveness of experience, etc.) and, second, the normative characteristics existing in any knowledge.

p Idealistic juggling with these facts of cognition and with the real problems arising in epistemological research makes an adequate interpretation of the cognitive relation impossible. Philosophical subjectivists inevitably find themselves in blind alleys because of the very mode of specifying the 115 initial cognitive relation between subject and object. Understanding the fundamental properties of knowledge and cognition assumes an essentially different interpretation of the subject-object connections.

p We have not analysed here the conceptions of cognition developed in the framework of objective-idealistic systems. As is well known, the most thorough investigation of the problem of cognition in the spirit of objective idealism is to be found in the philosophy of Hegel, who succeeded in establishing a number of important aspects of the cognitive relation and in revealing many elements of the dialectics of the cognizing subject and the cognized object. At the same time Hegel, being an idealist, thoroughly mystified the essence of the matter. Hegelian philosophy does not view cognition as determined by the features of individual consciousness but as an expression of the specific mode of existence of the Absolute Spirit embodied, in particular, in the objective forms of human culture. Because of the nature of the real problems exploited by the Hegelian conception of cognition, we shall criticise the latter in the second part of the monograph, in direct connection with a positive analysis of the problem.

In our critical analysis of Sartre’s conception of consciousness and knowledge we came to recognise the important role played in the cognition of an external object by the relation of the individual subject to other persons and to culture created by them and embodied in objects. A solution to the problems with which we are concerned should be sought for in the framework of an interpretation of the subject and objects which can take these fundamental facts into account. Such a solution of this problem is possible in the framework of the Marxist- Leninist approach to cognition as the socially mediated and historically developing activity of reflexion.