Abstract

One of the prevailing modes of consciousness, magical consciousness is first described by Sartre in his early work Transcendence of the Ego, as a paradoxical and dysfunctional union of activity and passivity. It is by "magic" that consciousness transforms the meaning of undesirable situations into alternative intentions, by which it becomes spellbound. The fictive "ego" is such a magical union of the activity of consciousness reified into a passive object. The ability to transform the meaning---rather than the actual state of affairs itself---is the first stage of a full-blown existential conduct Sartre later identifies as "bad faith," and details in the major work of his philosophical maturity, Being and Nothingness. This dissertation traces the origins of magical consciousness through Sartre's early works on the emotions and the imagination, in which it is argued that the duplicitous engagement of consciousness in simultaneously active and passive modalities is a function of the bifurcation within consciousness itself. The "split" within Sartre's cogito, as positional consciousness of objects, and a non-positional self-awareness, forces explicit self-awareness into perpetual dislocation. As consciousness may have knowledge only of objects, and never knowledge of its acts save reflectively, it exists in an unstable condition of self-detachment. This bifurcation is further expressed in Sartre's phenomenological ontology of human consciousness as transcendence, expressed by imagination, and facticity, expressed by our spatio-temporal situation. This unstable dis-unity is Sartre's ontological statement of his early phenomenological discovery of the magical strategies of consciousness. Finally, this dissertation explores several possible paths, suggested but ultimately neglected by Sartre, toward authentic human conduct, in play, in effective instances of magical behavior and in pursuit of artistic creativity