Pre-Reflective Theosis

The Spirituality of St. Sophrony of Essex in Light of the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre

One of the first things Jean-Paul Sartre attempts to prove in his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, is that self-consciousness cannot simply be knowledge of knowing. One of his contemporaries had defined self-consciousness with the following formula: “To know is to know that one knows.” But Sartre took issue with this definition and argued that the very core of consciousness, the subject’s own self-identity, could not be reduced to knowledge for the precise reason that knowledge always implies a division between the knower and the known, or the subject and the object.