Reciprocal Movement—The Carrier Of Symbol-Generating Free Thought

The Human Spirit’s Pursuit Of Liberation Continued

Identifying Sartre's philosophy as structuralism is, I am aware, pushing the envelope. However, an authority on structuralism has proposed this option
(without, I might add, elaborating on it.) "One might go as far as to say...that
structuralism is analogous to Sartre's view of consciousness -- it is what it is
not, and it is not what it is." [Jean-Marie Benoist, A Structural Revolution,
1975, p. 1] In Sartre's book Being And Nothingness, his chapter on
Being-For-Itself is subtitled "Immediate Structures of the For-Itself."
[Jean-Paul Sartre, Being And Nothingness, 1966, p. 119] Structure is not hidden
in Sartre; it's just that on the whole Sartre's book is a polemic against
reading structure as anything more than appearance.

In the representation of Sartre's thought as "consciousness is what it is not,
and it is not what it is," we find reciprocal movement, the same reciprocal
movement encountered, in one form or another, in all the structuralists I have
discussed heretofore in this paper. Specifically, Sartre defines the consciousness
of the transcending For-itself (our self-space) as: "Consciousness is a being
such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies
a being other than itself." [Being And Nothingness, p. 801] In an extrapolation from Sartre's definition of the consciousness, Benoist describes this relationship as: "it is what it is not, and it is not what it is," while I describe it as:
being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is. In both cases, however, we end up
with a definition for reciprocal movement.

This double movement is represented on many levels in Sartre's exegesis on
being and nothingness. This double movement becomes very specific in Sartre's
description of his pre-reflective Cogito. In so far as we find "nothingness" at
the center of Cogito, consciousness per se must be understood to be set apart
from itself, therefore, Sartre's pre-reflective Cogito will always form one pole
of our conscious experience while the "objects of consciousness” will take their
place at the other pole of conscious experience. In this way, Sartre is able to
dispense with Descartes' Cogito on the grounds that consciousness cannot be
separated from its object. This condition, where the pre-reflective Cogito
becomes a preexistent condition for the conscious awareness of objects,
establishes the double movement of conscious reflection—the object of
consciousness less the pre-reflective Cogito, and the pre-reflective Cogito less
the object of consciousness. Depending on where "you focus your concern,” the
content of consciousness is either pushed to the front of consciousness (the
unreflective consciousness), or, the object of consciousness is pushed into the
background, as the "negation of consciousness" is brought into the foreground
(the reflected upon object of consciousness).

Together, our pre-reflective Cogito and the object of consciousness form the
conscious experience of the knower-known dyad. In so far as this double movement
turns on the pivot point of pure negation, the known exists for the knower, but
the knower can never be fully known. As self-consciousness rises in consciousness, it is denied the possibility of becoming fully self-aware. This result, the incompleteness of self, brings us back to Sartre's original definition of consciousness (structure of consciousness), or, "consciousness is such that in its being its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself."

This movement, the symbol-generating movement of free thought—the movement that
makes thinking possible—emancipates language, myth, science, ethics/morality, i.e., civilization. In the absence of this movement, "thinking is restricted to the manipulation of signs”—mere sensual indicators, minus the symbols that carry the significance of those same indicators.