psychology that leads psychologists toward either materialism or
idealism. That strategy will be abundantly clear in his next book,The
Imaginary.
This concept of the unreflective/prereflective/conscience irre ́fle ́chie
remains a basic in Sartrean psychology and epistemology. We shall see
how it also permeates his ethics, especially in the famous concept of “bad
faith” developed inBeing and Nothingness.^38 Without appeal to the
unconscious, Sartre will underscore the unblinking eye of prereflective
consciousness to sustain his ascriptions of moral responsibility and self-
deception (bad faith) throughout his subsequent work. In fact, we shall
see him emphasizing “comprehension” in a function analogous to that of
prereflective awareness, as his thought turns from consciousness to
praxis as its explanatory vehicle in theCritique of Dialectical Reason
andThe Family Idiot.
Sartre makes some interesting observations about first-person and
second-person relations to the act of writing that could be expanded
into a broader theory of creativity. As I engage in writing, I am unre-
flectively (irre ́fle ́chie) aware of the words issuingex nihilo, as he puts it,
from my pen. I experience them asexigenciescalled for by the words that
preceded them. Sartre describes my attitude as “a special state of
attention, creative attention, for the next word” (STE 37 ). This does
seem also to capture the attitude of the individual who is improvising
on a musical instrument. The pianist or guitarist could be described as
someone “thinking with her fingers.” As Sartre explains: “The very way
I perceive [my words] through my creative activity constitutes them
as such; they appear as potentialitieshaving to be realized. Not having
to be realizedby me. TheIdoes not appear here at all. I simply sense the
traction which they exert. I feel their exigence objectively” (STE 37 – 38 ).
But the difference from our awareness of another’s improvising, Sartre
suggests, is the difference between the certitude of my intuitive percep-
tion of the flow of my words and the “probable evidence” of the sequence
of words at the hand of another. This distinction between the certain and
the probable, between the indubitable realm of the Cogitoand the
probably field of the empirical, which we have observed Sartre employ
elsewhere, will play a major role inThe Imaginary.
(^38) Actually, he introduces the term “bad faith” (mauvaise foi)inSTE( 30 ;F 61 ) in a manner
that anticipates his discussion of bad faith and the cynical lie inBN.
102 First triumph:The Imagination