Sartre claims that things like pleasure or grief or repugnance or etc. are the being of non-positional consciousness. He compares them to Heidegger's "the how" of being. That is, pleasure is how a non-positional consciousness can exist. Non-positional consciousness is always the flip side to positional consciousness: I have positional consciousness of a movie I like and in return there is non-positional pleasure consciousness that refers back to consciousness itself.

Where does this pleasure come from? Sartre claims that consciousness is non-substantial, completely empty, but at the same time, non-positional consciousnesses like pleasure consciousness are not determined in there material structure, that is, the movie does not provide the pleasure, for consciousness is self determining. However, if pleasure is not found in positional consciousness, how is it that an empty consciousness constitutes itself as non-positional pleasure consciousness? Is that not a contradiction? If it is empty and pleasure is not something intended towards, where is this pleasure coming from?