Realism and illusionism about consciousness in the introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness

Abstract

Abstract This paper reconstructs and defends Jean-Paul Sartre’s realism about consciousness as articulated in the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, situating his position within contemporary debates on illusionism and anti-realism in the philosophy of mind. While Sartre’s descriptions of consciousness as “nothingness” and his emphasis on the contingency of the subject–world relation may appear to support an illusionist reading, the paper argues that Sartre offers a systematic rejection of the view that consciousness merely seems to exist. The analysis focuses on two interconnected argumentative strategies implicit in Sartre’s text. The first, described as an ontological argument, challenges the coherence of drawing a constitutive distinction between the appearance and reality of consciousness. The second, a cosmological regress argument, shows that attempts to replace consciousness with successively weaker “consciousness-like” states generate an infinite and explanatorily vicious regress. Together, these strategies aim to establish that consciousness cannot be globally non-veridical without undermining the very notion of illusion. The paper further argues that Sartre’s position does not rely on claims of infallible introspection or a reified metaphysics of qualia. Instead, it articulates a minimal, non-separatist realism according to which phenomenal consciousness is inseparable from intentionality. Read against contemporary illusionist theories, Sartre emerges as a philosopher who anticipates central worries about appearance–reality distinctions and higher-order models of consciousness.