Pre-Husserlian philosophy modeled perception as absorbing the object into the self

Evidence

The philosophers of the past, he wrote, had been stuck in a ‘digestive’ model of consciousness: they thought that to perceive something was to draw it into our own substance, as a spider coats an insect in its own spittle to semi-dissolve it. Instead, with Husserl’s intentionality, to be conscious of something is to burst out - to wrest oneself from moist, gastric intimacy and fly out over there, beyond oneself, to what is not oneself. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 158

Categorization

• QUESTION: The paragraph cuts off mid-ellipsis; the full Sartrean image of bursting outward is incomplete here.