No experience is ever purely subjective, being always object-directed.

Evidence

All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no “content.” We must renounce those neutral “givens” which, according to the system of reference chosen, find their place either “in the world” or “in the psyche.” A table is not in consciousness—not even in the capacity of a representation. A table is in space, beside the window, etc. The existence of the table in fact is a center of opacity for consciousness; it would require an infinite process to inventory the total contents of a thing. To introduce this opacity into consciousness would be to refer to infinity the inventory which it can make of itself, to make consciousness a thing, and to deny the cogito. The first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection with the world, to know that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world. All consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 129 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

What, then, is a cup of coffee? I might define it in terms of its chemistry and the botany of the coffee plant, and add a summary of how its beans are grown and exported, how they are ground, how hot water is pressed through the powder and then poured into a shaped receptacle to be presented to a member of the human species who orally ingests it. I could analyse the effect of caffeine on the body, or discuss the international coffee trade. I could fill an encyclopaedia with these facts, and I would still get no closer to saying what this particular cup of coffee in front of me is. On the other hand, if I went the other way and conjured up a set of purely personal, sentimental associations — as Marcel Proust does when he dunks his madeleine in his tea and goes on to write seven volumes about it — that would not allow me to understand this cup of coffee as an immediately given phenomenon either. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 139 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Consciousness has no content because it is always directed outward at objects — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 129; Neither objective facts nor subjective associations capture an object as it is experienced — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 139

Broader Connections

• Consciousness has no content because it is always directed outward at objects #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 129
• Neither objective facts nor subjective associations capture an object as it is experienced #qualifies (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 139