"Sartre, « The Transcendance of the Ego »" (article in The Literary Encyclopedia)
- ️https://uclouvain.academia.edu/YoannMalinge
Related papers
2004
First published in France in 1937 as a journal article, The Transcendence of the Ego was one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications. When it appeared, Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in provincial France and struggling to find a publisher for his most famous fictional work, Nausea. The Transcendence of the Ego is the outcome of Sartre's intense engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Here, as in many subsequent writings, Sartre embraces Husserl's vision of phenomenology as the proper method for philosophy. But he argues that Husserl's conception of the self as an inner entity, 'behind' conscious experience is mistaken and phenomenologically unfounded. The Transcendence of the Ego offers a brilliant diagnosis of where Husserl went wrong, and a radical alternative account of the self as a product of consciousness, situated in the world. This essay introduces many of the themes central to Sartre's major work, Being and Nothingness: the nature of consciousness, the problem of selfknowledge, other minds, anguish. It demonstrates their presence and importance in Sartre's thinking from the very outset of his career. This fresh translation makes this classic work available again to students of Sartre, phenomenology, existentialism, and twentieth century philosophy. It includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context.
Sartre and the virtual: A deleuzian interpretation of The transcendence of the ego
Philosophy today, 2006
Based on a close reading of Sartre’s essay, The Transcendence of the Ego, this paper shows the importance of Sartre’s arguments against the transcendental ego for the Deleuzian project of restructuring the transcendental field. Sartre formulates four propositions which he takes to be the implications of the rejection of the transcendental ego as found in Kant and Husserl. The paper attempts to show how these propositions are derived, and furthermore how they become reinterpreted by Deleuze into nascent forms of transcendental empiricist notions such as the virtual, and auto-synthesis. I then conclude by showing why Deleuze believes that Sartre’s own work needs to be surpassed, and why this movement beyond Sartre in fact undercuts the very arguments which generate the four conditions Deleuze takes to be necessary for transcendental empiricism.
Untrue to One's Own Self: Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego
In this paper, I elicit a number of ways in which, according to the Sartre of The Transcendence of the Ego, we can miss the truth about our own self or, more simply, about ourselves. In order to do that, I consider what I call “statements about one's own self,” that is, statements of the form “I ...” where the predicate of the statement is meant to express things that are true of what is evidently given in reflection. I argue that, although statements about one's own self can, according to Sartre, be true on final philosophical analysis, there are at least three senses in which statements about one's own self can or do miss the truth, even when they are (by hypothesis) true. How they miss the truth depends on the different level of philosophical analysis at which we take Sartre to be working
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Consciousness and The Self
The following philosophical work aims to address Jean-Paul Sartre´s reflections on consciousness and the self. The article will mainly cover the work The Transcendence of The Ego and others when necessary.
Pre-reflective consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, 2016
According to the dominant interpretation of "The Transcendence of the Ego," Sartre's main aim in the article is to show that self-awareness is a necessary condition of consciousness. I show that such an interpretation of the essay comes at an impossibly high exegetical cost. Sartre’s view is in fact the opposite, that consciousness does not necessarily involve self-awareness. I further argue that the correctness of Sartre’s view, according to which self-awareness is a cognitive achievement rather than a necessary condition of consciousness, implies the inadequacy of any account of higher forms of self-awareness that takes as its starting point the assumption of a primitive capacity for self-awareness that would be common to all conscious creatures by virtue of their being conscious.
The transcendental dimension of Sartre's philosophy
Routledge eBooks, 2010
The thought that I will explore in this paper is that the Sartre of B&N and the earlier writings is in certain fundamental respects a transcendental thinker, and that viewing him in this light makes a positive, favourable difference to how we understand and assess his ideas, arguments, and position as a whole. The use of such plastic and open-textured categories in the history of philosophy is, of course, notoriously treacherous, and 'transcendental philosophy' is probably in no better shape than most. Consequently there will be some interpretations of the claim that Sartre is a transcendental thinker which make it (pretty much) trivially true, and others that make it (pretty much) plainly false. If transcendental means simply lying in an open-ended line of descent from Kant, then of course Sartre is a transcendentalist, along with almost every other modern European philosopher. If, on the other hand, a philosophical position qualifies as transcendental only if it pursues the very same agenda as that of Kant's first Critique, then drastic reconstructive surgery would be required to show Sartre to be a transcendental philosopher. The task, therefore, is to come up with an interpretation of the claim for Sartre's transcendentalism that is sufficiently strong to be interesting, but not so strong as to lack plausibility. Rather than attempt to fix the meaning of transcendental at the outsetwhich would lead off into thickets from which it would be hard to find an exit-I am going to work through half a dozen headings which will, I think, be accepted as denoting characteristic features of transcendental philosophy. These include transcendental argumentation and transcendental idealism, the hallmarks of transcendentalism. So if under each of the headings enough of a case can be made for their centrality to Sartre's concernsif it can be shown not merely that Sartre says certain things which can be squeezed under those headings, but that he is deeply engaged with the relevant issuethen the cumulative effect, I hope, will be to vindicate the historical claim, and, much more importantly, to give an idea of why it matters.
The European Legacy, 2016
Sartre’s early works on phenomenology reveal the complexity of his relationship to Husserl. Deeply indebted to phenomenology’s method as well as its substance, Sartre nonetheless confronted Husserl’s transcendental turn from Ideas onward. Although numerous studies have focused on Sartre’s points of contention with Husserl, drawing attention to his departure from Husserlian phenomenology, scholars have rarely examined the way in which Sartre engaged and responded to the early Husserl, particularly to his discussions of intentionality, consciousness, and self in Logical Investigations. This essay focuses on Sartre’s critical response to Logical Investigations, arguing that Husserl’s understanding of these three notions shapes and informs Sartre’s own approach to them in The Transcendence of the Ego (1936-37), “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology” (1939), and Being and Nothingness (1943). By carefully reading Sartre side by side with Husserl, this essay articulates the ways in which Sartre allowed himself to think along with, and not against, Husserl.