UNREFLECTED consciousness is the consciousness of everyday life. I walk down the street heading for the street-car stop. I notice that the spring leaves are starting to come out on the trees; I see some attractive pedestrians; I gaze in the shop windows; I see a necktie that I like. Here the objects of my consciousness are the trees, the people, and the tie. Sartre says there is no “I” in this unreflected consciousness.

As I turn the corner, I am shocked to see that I have missed the street-car, which is disappearing down the tracks. I look at my watch and realize that I have forgotten to wind it AGAIN! I become angry with myself and thinking of my own stupidity. Now I am thinking about my own thinking. These thoughts about myself Sartre calls REFLECTED consciousness.

ere, the SELF can be found in consciousness, but only here, and only so long as I remain in reflected consciousness. The moment I am distracted again and I am back in unreflected consciousness, I am no longer aware of my self.

The point of this distinction is to show that Descartes was wrong, as was Husserl after him. The “I am” does not follow from the “I think.” There is no self in thought except in reflected consciousness. But reflected consciousness is actually more rare than unreflected consciousness. Perhaps Descartes should have said, “I think, therefore there are thoughts.”

ather than finding an “absolute ego” in consciousness, as Husserl had done, Sartre finds an absent self. Consciousness, he says, is “an impersonal spontaneity,” created ex nihilo (out of nothing), a tireless creation that overflows the self.

The self cannot cope with this “monstrous spontaneity,“ and searches for something like the Freudian unconscious to blame it on. But we do not need to invent an unconscious to explain these disruptions. They are parts of consciousness—but parts that we try to disguise from ourselves because they terrify us.

“In fact,” suggests Sartre,

if this is so, it will prove to be very difficult for Sartre to characterize a truly authentic self - a self in “good faith” as he will call it.

o illuminate this feature of consciousness, Sartre tells us about a patient of the psychologist Pierre-Marie Janet: “A young bride was in terror, when her husband left her alone, of sitting at the window and summoning the passers-by like a prostitute.” This young woman, perhaps angry at her new husband’s inattention, may have thought to herself, “I can have any man I want simply by beckoning him from my window.” She is terrified by the possibility that has just entered her mind—terrified that she might act on that possibility.

This “psychasthenic ailment,” Sartre calls it, is actually only an exaggeration of the normal condition of the mind, because consciousness is a vertigo of possibility,” demonstrating that we are “monstrously free.”

Think of the time you were driving at night in the rain on a narrow, dangerous road facing occasional oncoming traffic. One car coming at you has on its high beams. You “flash” your beams, but the other driver doesn’t lower his. You are nearly blinded by his lights, and you are furious. As he approaches you, you think, “I could drive right into the .” As you think this suicidal thought you suddenly grip the steering wheel hard. WHY? To prevent yourself from driving into him! You are experiencing “the vertigo of possibility”—your own “monstrous freedom” and you are terrified by it.

ierkegaard imagines Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Even though he is innocent and happy, there is a slight shadow cast over his contentment. But he cannot detect the source of his disquietude. At last everything comes to a head when God commands Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Perhaps it had not even crossed Adam’s mind to do so, but once God prohibits him from doing it, Adam knows he can do it (that is, he is free to do it); and once he knows he can do it, he knows he MAY do it, and in fact that he probably WILL do it. So, for Kierkegaard “original sin” is simply the dread or anxiety of Adam when he confronts his own freedom—a dread each of us must experience when we confront our freedom.