Vol. 8 · No. 1 · 2002

Motivated Aversion
Non-Thetic Awareness in Bad Faith

Jonathan Webber

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Abstract

Exactly what does Jean-Paul Sartre mean when he describes some conscious awareness as 'non-thetic'? He does not explicitly say. Yet this phrase, sprinkled liberally throughout his early philosophical works, is germane to some of the distinctive and fundamental theories of Sartrean existentialism. My aim in this paper is to examine the concept in terms of the role that Sartre claims it plays in bad faith (mauvaise foi), the deliberate and motivated project of refusing to face or consider the consequences of some fact or facts. I will argue that non-thetic awareness could play the role Sartre ascribes to it in bad faith only if it is understood as being equivalent to the nonconceptual representational content currently discussed in anglophone philosophy of mind.