Minän ulkoisuus

by Jean-Paul Sartre

First published in France in 1937, this important essay marked a turning point in Sartre’s philosophical development. Before writing it, he'd been closely allied with phenomenologists such as Husserl & Heidegger. Here, however, Sartre attacked Husserl’s notion of a transcendental ego. The break with Husserl, in turn, facilitated Sartre’s transition from phenomenology to the existentialist doctrines of his masterwork, Being & Nothingness, which was completed a few years later while the he was a prisoner of war.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, France, French Literature, Theory, School

124 pages

Published January 1, 2004

About the author

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

With this Essay, Sartre thus inaugurates the work of exploration, which will lead to Being and Nothingness. Moreover, the chronology confirms the incontestable unity of his philosophical preoccupations of this period: we can say that all his works were if not written, at least conceived simultaneously. First, the Essay on the Transcendence of the Ego was written in 1934, partly during Sartre's stay in Berlin to study Husserl's phenomenology. Then, from 1935 to 1936, he wrote both L'Imagination and L'Imaginaire (published respectively in 1936 and 1940), then in 1937-1938, La Psyché, which he already had the idea of in 1934.
In the first part, Sartre, through the phenomenological description, analyzes the Ego in its dual component of an I and a Self.
In the second part of his work, after making the genealogy, he examines the constitution of the Ego.

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though it comes from cynical Sartre, this is one mighty fine book. And its argument also applies to current religion!

We cannot transcend our egos. Yet Pop Christianity dreams it's doing just that.

Does it make that dream come true?

As Mallarme wrote, the result of that kinda ingenuousness is a "sur chatiment" - a certain come-uppance.

Yet, to do like Sartre did, diss the world and flirt with despair is wrong too. For life is meant to be workable.

So what then can we DO that works?

I have a good friend who's an engineer. His attitude is life is doable from a practical POV.

Yet as Sartre shows, theoria and praxis are often at odds. Certainly my old friend and I have seen the truth of that in our lives, broken as they are by hard knocks.

But to my friend and me, God is the Prime Mover (and perhaps also the Archetypal Engineer). So Jesus loved the Marthas as well as the Marys.

If the truth is that we can never quite truly transcend our selfish egos through works - because disappointment will continually dog our steps - the Divine act of creation shows us God can.

For when He Created the world, He saw it was Good:

It was workable.

It was doable, for Folks of Good Will.

So if we align our wills with God's will, pleasant or unpleasant -

Life is Good - in a very Practical Sense - anytime:

For True Transcendence is a down-to-earth crash course in the Critique of Practical Reason.

[T · Rating 3 out of 5]

"anguish ... imposes itself on us"

Don't let the length of this book trick you, it's anything but a light read or overview or Sartre's philosophy (unlike Existentialism is a Humanism for example). I vividly remember spending about an hour on 5-7 pages of this work, only really taking in a minor dose of information in that stretch of time.
The main crux of this book is Sartre's rejection of the then dominant psychology, Freud's ego psychology, which sought to split the mind or the 'Unconscious' into parts (the famous ID, Ego and Superego). In response, Sartre, building on Descartes, Heidegger and Husserl (even making reference to Proust and La Rochefoucauld) uses phenomenology to fight against this erroneous idea. Sartre takes on from Husserl's work, focusing specifically on his 'Cartesian Meditations', adapting this revolutionary phenomenological method, but rejecting Husserl's implication that the I is a formal structure of consciousness.
Simply put, for Sartre, consciousness simply is. It is not a mystical, idealist spirit, but simply a negation. It is how we see the world, and the thing through which we live.

To understand Sartre, this probably isn't the best place.

Introduction - Sarah Richmond introduces the text by situating this text within Sartre's 'early work', wherein Sartre 'exhausts' Heidegger and Husserl, developing, critiquing and deepening their phenomenology. Richmond also explains the two separate sections of Sartre's essay, with the first section 1)engaging with Husserlian thought, and section 2)offering a simplified alternative to Husserl's phenomenology.

Husserl's Phenomenology - Sartre provides an exposition of Husserl, depicting Husserl as a continuation of Kant's effort to make philosophy proceed as a "rigorous science". Husserl therefore continues from Descartes' cogito, parenthesising unproved beliefs, to narrow pheonomenology down to the indubitable consciousness. This indubitable consciousness is the epoche. However, whilst Husserl explains the epoche, he also adds a 'transcendental I' above it, an ego of sorts, which Sartre sees as superfluous.

The Ego and the Epoche - Sartre replaces the epoche with a Pure Ego. This Pure Ego self objectifies itself and comes to see itself as part of the world. Personhood is the result of this anonymous constitution for Sartre. This is a worldy ego also, not some transcendental idealistic 'I' as Husserl would hold.

The Transparency of Consciousness - Sartre explains the purity of consciousness, with the transcendental I being superfluous as this would in effect rule over the Ego, making the Ego
useless. This makes seeing the Transcendental I as the source as Ego, "nothing except consciousness can be a source of consciousness".

The Non-Transparency of Reflection - Descartes and Husserl were correct in personalising the cogito, yet they also misinterpret the encounter with a self that had always been there. The reflecting attitude, rather than discovering the self, creates it. There is no 'inner life', or division in the mind.

Phenomenology without Reflection - Sartre explains unreflective consciousness, wherein we remember things without reflecting on them, for example reading a book and recalling the characters without actively contemplating them.

The Constitution of the Ego - The ego is a 'transcendent pole of synthetic unity' consisting of 1)Qualities, 2)States and 3)Actions. The relation between me and my mind is beyond normal causal relations, it is a mystical and magical thing.

Phenomenology Existentialised - The epoche is driven not by reason, but by the experience of anguish. Sartre rejects the idea that this notion leads to idealism, instead situating himself within a historical materialist framework and referring to Spinoza's idea of substance.

[Turbulent_Architect · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hannah Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers that “Camus is probably not as talented as Sartre but much more important, because he is much more serious and honest.” Here as almost everywhere else, she is right. Most of Sartre’s academic work, public statements and private life from L’Être et le Néant (1943) onward are so sensationalistic, so frivolous, and so appallingly wrong-headed that it is easy to forget that he was ever a serious philosopher. No wonder that the general attitude within academic philosophy is to regard him, as the Guardian once put it, as being “more risible than lisible.”

Say what you will about Sartre’s later Existentialism, but La Transcendance de l’Ego (1936) stands as a testament the seriousness of his early work. His very first philosophical treatise, Transcendanceis the product of his engagement with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl while studying in Berlin in the 1930s. To this day, one of Husserl’s most celebrated insights is that consciousness is intentional, i.e., that it is always consciousness of something. In other words, if we pay attention to our conscious experience, we find that it is always directed to some object that is outside of it.

Sartre’s project consists in a radicalizing this Husserlian insight: Given that consciousness must be of something, it must itself be empty of all content, and notably of a self or ego. Descartes claimed that, in the act of introspection, we grasped a pre-existing “I” who thinks. According to Sartre, however, this “I” only appears in the act of introspection itself, i.e., when consciousness takes itself as its object. In contrast, our pre-reflexive conscious experience is impersonal through and through. Hence his radical thesis: the self or ego is a post-hoc construction that stands outside consciousness—i.e., that transcends it—just as much as external objects do.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the controversy around Existentialism propelled Sartre into superstardom, and with it, all the ideological excesses of the Left Bank intellectual scene. So many of his most memorable slogans can be traced to this period: “Existence precedes essence,” “Man is condemned to be free,” “Hell is other people,” etc. La Transcendance de l’Ego is notable for providing an admirably clear and surprisingly cogent philosophical foundation for several of these later claims. It also important for the welcome glimpse it provides at Sartre the philosopher before he became Sartre the Existentialist.

[Devrim · Rating 5 out of 5]

From a phenomenological point of view this is by far, the most original work of Sartre.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sartre's take on the consciousness as purely spontaneous and without any trace of I or I-concept is suspiciously similar to some of the Buddhist rendering of consciousness: the ego as the transcendent unity of all psychic states and actions "constructed" by the reflecting consciousness and located only in the reflected consciousness; sth outside the pure spontaneous autonomic consciousness.
Nevertheless, Sartre's theory of the ego is one step further than Husserl's transcendental ego and the forceful unity of reflecting and reflected consciousness. At least, in Sartre's rendering, ego is no long part of consciousness, nor owner of consciousness, but merely an transcendent object of the reflecting consciousness. Buddha will be happy about Sartre's insight. As for me, personally, I prefer to wait for more psychological studies, in the meanwhile I remain agnostic.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sartre is best digested by high school students who think everyone but Holden Caulfield is a phony and who feel alienated in the world because their own selfishness is best enabled by pretending freedom is an end for itself.

This essay (it’s really not a book) is not difficult reading and Sartre is flushing out his soon to be thoughts that will go into his mostly vacuous ‘Being and Nothing’.

In this book Sartre does beat down Husserl and phenomenology. Husserl had previously turned against phenomenology himself and had moved away from it before he died in 1938; the year this book was published. Husserl’s book ‘Ideas’ is probably the best overall intro to the topic of phenomenology and even if one can beat it down one can still enjoy it. When I read it and got confused by it, I would think of the opposite of what Heidegger was saying in ‘Being and Time’ and reorient my bearings thusly. Husserl will exclude the world and think only of the object under consideration, Heidegger will include the world and exclude the object.

In this book, Sartre will argue against the ‘transcendental ego’ (or in Kantian terms ‘transcendental consciousnesses’) and not make the consciousness about anything rather than itself and return the ‘I’ (or ‘ego’) back to within the consciousness itself and not out of it and tries to negate the concept of the unconsciousness.

In this book, Sartre will still have it in for Pierre as he did in ‘B&N’. Though this time it will be about his imaginary hate or anger towards Pierre and how that it is not about the intentional states he possesses against Pierre and he’ll also have Pierre (or was it Paul?) run after a trolley, or think about having read a book. He’ll further expand those same tropes within ‘B&N’, so these examples are probably familiar to most readers of Sartre.

Sartre does not mention Hegel in this book. It is not until ‘B&N’ that Hegel takes a starring role for Sartre. In this book, Sartre will briefly mention Balzac and Proust but in ‘B&N’ he’ll expound on them at length as being illustrative of his philosophy. He really is laying a foundation in this essay for what he expounds on for 500 or so mostly incoherent rambling pages later in ‘B&N’. (I don’t like Sartre as a philosopher. I’ll use his logic ‘Pierre is not a waiter he is only acting at being a waiter’, well Sartre is not a philosopher he is only acting at being a philosopher). Sartre will use Hegel in ‘B&N’ to get at the crux of what he wants to elaborate and he will illustrate that in his short play ‘No Exit’.

There is some intentionality and non-intentionality that Sartre plays at with in this book which will later morph into existence and non-existence or ‘being and nothing’. His ontological foundation for truth is absolute freedom of the individual, and for him freedom will be justified as an end in and for itself. Now, he doesn’t explicitly say that in this book but the way he’s framing the self, the ego, the cogito makes it obvious what he’s getting at.

I’m currently reading Heidegger’s ‘Basic Problems in Phenomenology’. There is definitely an overlap between these two books’ subject matter. Heidegger writes and thinks like an astute philosopher and Sartre is mostly grasping at straws. Some of Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ comes through in this book, but none of what Heidegger more intelligently says from his ‘Basic Problems’ seems to lurk in Sartre’s book. It is possible Sartre had not read Heidegger’s ‘Basic Problems’ since he doesn’t mention it in this book. Sartre will even cite Heidegger slightly after I thought to myself that’s exactly what Heidegger said in ‘Being and Time’. Though, to be clear, Heidegger strikes me as a real philosopher and Sartre not too much.

Though, it’s easy to dismiss Husserl and his phenomenology, I still find him and Gadamer (the last of the great phenomenologist) well worth reading despite some of their pratfalls, and overall I don’t think Sartre adds much new to the conversation except for diehard fans who think Holden Caulfield is not the phony one or ‘B&N’ fans who think freedom for its own sake is a worthwhile goal as a meaning for life. Overall, I would recommend Heidegger’s ‘Basic Problems of Phenomenology’ over this book.

[Karl Hallbjörnsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This text surprised me with its philosophical originality and clarity of argument. It is not a particularly easy read, but not that difficult either. I found it quite well written and convincing on many accounts.

[May Ling · Rating 3 out of 5]

I promised a friend I would read Satre's works... so here is the first...I'll give the book 3 because even translated he's a far better writer than I am, but otherwise, I am not a fan and I don't understand how others aren't finding it a little annoying....

I can see why Satre has to come up in a world concerned w/ #AlternativeFacts. Of course you experience reality differently because each ID is self-contained. But to me, Philosophy itself is a major practice in #AlternativeFacts. Aside from the obvious, e.g. only old white dudes with beards get to participate meaningfully in the discipline, let's talk about how obnoxious it is for philosophy to draw convenient lines of separation from other disciplines that use to be a part of it and might therefore be relevant.

Satre is no exception here. He's got this bit in his conclusion section about a lady who is totally upset because her man leaves. Satre is like, yeah, she's scared of freedom because she hasn't experienced it.... its overwhelmingly new. Satre... seriously... How about bull sh*t?

How very convenient to be allowed to ignore the entire body of dialogue on Structuralism. Thank goodness it sits far away in the field Anthropology. It would be so inconvenient to have to address it. #alternativefacts

And that's not even the only spot in this book. #WhiteMalePrivledge. I mean, how wonderful it must be to be Satre. To be able to concern one's self with the ego and wax philosophy about how the internal is able to manifest in the external! Go Team Will to Power!!!! God forbid that happy little ego have to interact with reality or be effected by it. Thank goodness we've conveniently relegated structuralism to anthropology, political science or sociology.

But technically, if you are white, old, male, and fully tenured ....then structuralism can be ignored because, after all, you are the Man..... literally. You are the structure and reflexively... the Man is you! So yeah.... you can actually ignore structuralism.... because you are just experiencing yourself. Heck, even I and every other race and gender are experiencing you... #blacklivesmatter #timesup

Maybe this explains why philosophers get to sit in an ivory tower and dismiss all matters of reality to the lesser, more mundane disciplines. If you are the Man, you can let others figure out how to deal with the problems created by the Man. Brilliant! And yes... in this case, your ego manifests reality and we don't have to make an argument that justifies how reality reflexively then impacts, forms, modifies, or otherwise effects the ID... because as along as Philosophy remains primarily white and male, we can just apply the identity rule of logic x=x, ....

So yeah, under that paradigm that chica is totally overwhelmed not because this book is in 1930 where without a man she's fully exposed and unprotected from a world that both formally and informally is entirely sexist... but because of her entire lack of experience with this new reality of Freedom.... Full marks for a solidly substantiated argument...

I mean COME ON philosophy!! How is it that none of philosophy's child disciplines are allowed to ignore their findings in complimentary disciplines?? 🤮And how is it that everyone is comparing him to the Buddha when the dude takes the very best part of Buddhist, daoist, even hindi religion, i.e. we are our truth and the truth is we, and then somehow manifests this super bogus conclusion... it's not an accident that he uses this example... WAKE UP!! If Satre was the buddha then he would have been more like ... ergo... we can affect our reality and make it better... not women are afraid of freedom b/c they haven't experienced it... Goodness People!!! it was 1930, not 1530 when he wrote this!!!

I hope his other works are better..... really have to think twice when I make promises to people about reading stuff.....

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

151018: fun evidence of Satre’s complex rejection of husserl’s phenomenology, fun if you have read him before and after and have critically read husserl and have read much history of philosophy, not so much fun if you have not read philosophy before. but it is short...

more
Being and Nothingness
Existentialism is a Humanism
Nausea
The Wall and Other Stories
Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone De Beauvoir
Nothingness and Emptiness: A Buddhist Engagement with the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings

[Ahlam · Rating 2 out of 5]

في داخل كل نفس مغاور واتجاهات قد تشعر بها وقد تحدث في اللاشعور ، قد ترغب وقد تمتنع ، قد تعطي نفسك بتعالي لأنك موجود وقد تكسبها العدم بلا وعي .
هل الوعي متأمل تشعر به ، هل هو موجود في الذات أم في الفكر ..؟!
هل أنا مجرد رغبات تتمثل في الذات على شكل وجود ، أو على شكل فكره ، أوعلى شكل آخر ..؟!
صراع بين سارتر ونظرية هوسرل ، ونظرة فلسفية أعمق بكثير من شرحها بسهولة ..
كتاب يحتاج الكثير من التركيز ، ويعطيك فرصة للتأمل فيك .

[Conrado · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sartre's philosophy, despite his bad writing and complex terminology, is quite fascinating: he tries to argue for a radical theory of the self (or ego, or I, if you prefer -- I'll use the words interchangeably) and all mental states as being all external to consciousness (having used Husserl's method of phemenological reduction against him in order to eliminate his transcendental I, and also accusing this conception of blatanly going against the transparent nature of phenomenal conscious states), thus rejecting any first-person epistemological authority we could have over them. As a consequence, introspective methods do not give us any kind of information about ourselves that constitutes certain knowledge: "Le moi nous reste inconnu".

Sartre proposes a conception of consciousness which has two crucial distinctions. One of them divides consciousness into positional (i.e., intentional, a conscious state directed at an intentional object that is posited as something distinct from consciousness) and non-positional consciousness (i.e., a consciousness that consciousness has of itself, not as a distinct object and is therefore related to itself in a noncognitive manner). The other divides consciousness into reflective consciousness (i.e., a conscious act that includes myself as an intentional object) and pre-reflective consciousness (i.e., a conscious act that does not include myself as an intentional object, but is wholly directed to something else) -- these are mutually exclusive.

Every conscious state is a non-positional conscious state: in every conscious state, consciousness presents itself for itself as being directed to something. It is not a higher-order conscious state; if it were, we would fall into a trap of infinite regress, since we would need to postulate another higher-order conscious state and so on in order for that first-order conscious state to occur -- rather, pre-reflective self-awareness is a intrinsic feature of that first-order conscious state. (For details, see the section on the pre-reflective cogito in L'être et le néant). What's important here is that, at the basic level of pre-reflective conscious states, no subject of experience or transcendental ego is revealed: everything that is revealed by Sartre's analysis is a transcendental impersonal field that is directed at objects, but is itself-aware as something that must not be these objects in order to be directed at them (therefore, consciousness is a "nothingness"). Therefore, one is not entitled to claim that a transcendental subject is given in intuition: phenomenology must do away with it. This is a radical departure from Husserl (at least the later Husserl of the Méditations Cartésiennes).

So how does the ego arise, what is its nature and why do we think that it underlies our every thought? The answer lies in Sartre's notion of reflection. Reflective acts can be pure, affirming only what is given in the moment of that experience, or impure, affirming what goes beyond such experience; i.e., positing objects in its reconstruction of that reflected conscious state. Sartre uses the case of hatred towards someone and the choleric experience that accompanies it -- I am purely reflecting on my consciousness when I recognize I only feel angry at someone at that moment, but impurely reflecting when I affirm on the basis of that experience that I hate her (because hatred implies continuous existence after and between such experiences).

Reflective consciousness, being fundamentally a reflective act, is also responsible for creating our empirical, worldly self through acts of impure reflection; not only that, but by impure reflection consciousness also traps itself in a sort of illusion in which it thinks that this created self was already there all along, "in the background" -- thus the impression that we have a transcendental ego underlying every mental act such as doubting. The ego has the function of being the ideal unity of all states, qualities and actions that constitute it. Sartre gives a complex description on the ways these entities are connected to consciousness and acts of impure reflection, and how the ego is related to them (in other words, an "egology"); e.g., hatred is a projected unity created by multiple spontaneous conscious moments of rage towards someone or something (through impure reflection); the psychological disposition to hate is created by multiple manifestations of hatred, so dispositions are the external substract of mental states, which are the external substract of conscious experiences by impure reflection. To Sartre, this empirical or "transcendent" (i.e., transphenomenal object that is not found in consciousness) or "psychic" (to use another of Sartre's terms) ego is the only one there is; not only that, but it's also the only one necessary to explain the phenomenon of the unity of our experiences: a trasncendental ego would be superfluous. This is not only a departure from Husserl, but also from Kant (I won't go into detail here; Morris's 1985 article on TE is a good introduction).

Sartre thinks that his rejection of the transcendental ego and its substitution for a impersonal self-consciousness helps us with a fundamental problem within philosophy: the problem of other minds; i.e., of knowing how other people are capable of conscious states like I am, how the possible world in which I am the only existing conscious thing is not the actual world I live in. The problem is pressing, since I can know with certainty about my self and its states, but no such knowledge is as certain when it comes to others. The most extreme conclusion (and the one Sartre is fundamentally arguing against) is solipsism: that all objects are projections from myself, and that only my ego exists (or is certain to be existing).

The way I understand it is that Sartre tries to dissolve the problem by eliminating the idea of this transcendental subject whose knowledge we're certain of, thus rendering the thesis "Only I exist as an absolute entity" or "The world is created by me" completely baseless: my ego is just as external and therefore capable of being dubitable as any other ego; therefore, there's no opposition between me, something that can be apprehended with certain knowledge, and the other, whose existence cannot be established with certainity. So there's no problem to be solved -- what we have is a pseudoproblem based on a false pressuposition. Without the authority of the I, the possibility of solipsism can finally be rejected.

Now this is all very interesting. But how tenable is the case Sartre makes for it?

One can wonder whether his thesis of our lack of certain knowledge about our mental states and the empirical self also extends into a skepticism about knowledge from pure reflection. It seems that this is the only kind of reflection that can give us actual certain knowledge -- its evidence is not open to doubt. But, as Sarah Richmond (2004) points out, this intantaneous moment might be just a vanishing point; if this is the case, then there is no reflective act that captures the instantaneous moment of conscious experience without exceeding it, resulting in impure reflection. Moreover, since every reflective act posits myself in it, this will also apply to acts of pure reflection. Therefore, every attempt at describing the self-conscious character of impersonal consciousness will inevitably involve myself in it, already destroying it in the process. So knowledge about this basic level of consciousness seems impossible from the start, and this seems to undermine the whole methodological advantage of phenomenological reduction. This is quite a radical and sceptical conclusion; personally, I'm quite interested in this sceptical side of Sartre's philosophy (even though it might not be accurate to attribute such a label to him).

One can also point out that his dissolution of the problem of other minds fails, for it merely displaces the problem: now, since Sartre postulates in his affirmation of other minds the existence of other instances of the same type of impersonal transcendental consciousness, he needs to prove their existence; Sartre thinks the only proof available to him is to show that his own consciousness is "affected" by these other types of consciousness. So solipisism has not really been refuted at this point. Sartre acknowledged this weakness, and I believe he tried to correct this in L'être et le néant, but I haven't read that whole book yet, so I can't know for sure.

One could say that Sartre's conception of consciousness is wrong by arguing that, in reality, conscious states require the occurence of nonconscious states in order to be instantiated (and I'm not talking about accepting Freudianism or anything here -- it doesn't have to be a Freudian unconscious); unlike the higher-order conscious state view, this does not seem to suffer from the regress problem. But one obvious problem Sartre has with this is that it seems to undermine his belief in absolute freedom, since every conscious act would've been determined by an underlying cause. (Rocco Gennaro (2002) suggests that Sartre could've accepted this thesis while affirming that freedom only enters at the level of conscious activity; I'll refrain from evaluating this maneuver).

Finally, setting aside all objections, what do we make of Sartre's ontology? If the ego and all mental states are objects external to consciousness, what kind of objects are they, and how are they known? Sartre says their existence is pretty different from that of tables and chairs, even though they're nonetheless just as real; he also says of us having a special intuition of the ego and its mental states but, honestly, I find his statements pretty vague. Some kind of explanation for these processes must be given in order to give his account of the self and mental states a more robust plausibility, I think.

Overall, this is a very interesting book. But what keeps me from giving this a higher score might be Sartre's methodological sloppiness, its confusing terminology (which, by the way, is still better than the Hegel-inspired terminology of L'être et le néant) and his extremely perplexing conception of self-consciousness (which I honestly find sometimes to be almost incomprehensible). Nevertheless, I think it's quite an interesting book if you're looking for radical externalist positions on mental content, phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness, or if you're just looking for a little bit of history of the development of the phenomenology movement.

[Rick-Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems appropriate to write my review by beginning with conclusions, which are intriguing. Yet, I think it wiser to initiate with some general remarks of the essay before proceeding. I agreed with someone on Goodreads that Sartre does not write like a normal philosopher. He is certainly not an analytic philosopher like Husserl, nor is he as clear as Soren Kierkegaard (referring to some of his minor essays like the Difference between a Genius and Apostle) where there is a clear progression of themes that are called out early. The challenge in this essay is not just the back-knowledge of phenomenology, but more immediately trying to pick out the progression of thought within itself. Although, I found this challenge to be most difficult at two points: section 2.d and the overall essay. I suspect a day spent re-reading would provide the connections in Sartre's movements. Despite this critique, I enjoy Sartre's writing style and his use of examples, which tend to be rather poetic with a pathos and kairos that may get in the way for some readers, but I find undistracting.
Next, this is not Sartre as psychologist but as phenomeologist and existentialist. Phenomenologist in his method & subject of criticism, but existentialist in his purpose for criticism and movement toward the ego as object and consciousness as active yet impersonal. His conclusions make this latter interest clear, however, I believe he states in the beginning that his rejection of the transcendental ego and its implications does move the inquiry out of phenomenology and to existentialism. hence Being and Nothingness' subsequent inquiry. But, Sartre is not here taking a scientific approach to the psychic; his stakes and purpose are not the scientific inquiry of the psychic. He broaches psychology only for their accounts of the psychic, which Sartre then turns toward consciousness and supporting his argument's purview. This is all to say that whether or not you consider him a psychologist, Sartre does not consider himself a psychologist during this essay. While Jung and Freud are scientists, Sartre is not. In fact, his argument for impersonality has some rather weighty consequences for a psychology that affirms a personal relationship between consciousness and psychic.
Lastly, after reading this essay, I am inclined to read Husserl either after a second re-read or before a third read. Either way, this essay is not impenetrable, but it is indeed time-consuming despite a fairly short binding of leafs. I do recommend this essay for those interested in Sartre because it opens up some aspects of this thought that remark with profundity upon being human in a manner that is challenging and critical.

Now, let's talk conclusions, or spoilers if you are so inclined. Let me be clear, I am using this space to try and develop my understanding of Sartre's conclusions. This review is me trying to speak Sartre as I am not yet ready for critique.

Sartre's conclusions are comprised of 3 remarks; the first remark receives the most development. This egology liberates the transcendental field and its purification. Although this remark sounds warming, the implication transports us to the beginnings of the existential trope: angst. Without a transcendental ego, the field is a kind of nothing as all objects, truths, values are now exterior. The ego is not connected to this field nor the me. Objects and ego removed, the transcendental field loses opacity and becomes transparent. Sartre quickly moves to recognize this kind of nothing as an all, or a totality because it is a consciousness of all objects. Notice the separation? Consciousness is not outside of the field of objects; objects are exterior to consciousness and can be found with the transparent nothing of the transcendental field. Quite literally expressed as: no thing occupies the transcendental field. Reflection therefore makes one quite aware of a world whose alterity is as clear as its impersonal nature; this world includes the ego, which is an object. Asking what am I becomes rather dis-satisfactory as this question cannot broach the opacity of the ego or its impersonal and fugitive nature, nor can it apprehend that pure consciousness, which is the active: the reference point of the I. Sartre has argued no object can be an object and partake of the intimacy of consciousness, which is part of the importance of his diagram and the I-concept before unreflected consciousness. The result is rather like the glass breaking in Eliot's "The Hollow Men": what one is tempted to believe is themselves is a performance before consciousness; our self is impersonal: the contrary conception Husserl wished to preserve is shattered. I would here suggest that phenomenology falls into this angst because of a sort of fetish with objectivity, which is like that danger with science. We see it is not limited to the scientific discipline, and Sartre has argued it is part of being human and having consciousness. Of course, one can still worry about how they perform for themselves with moral interest and self-development, but the word character may shift meaning in this context. The ego is psychic and the me psycho-physical, which are before consciousness as objects. Character may be the peculiar intuiting of self as concrete here, and as the receptacle of consciousness' active relays toward ego and state with a different psychic and psycho-physical aspect of, respectively, the I and the me.
What's more, these objects -- ego, me, states, emotions -- are no longer univocal objects for people. You and I can discuss the same chair with our respective conscious' intuiting, but not intuit each other consciousnesses. Your anger is something I cannot apprehend fully because your anger is not an object before my consciousness; I apprehend with analogy. Actually, this idea does not seem far off from psychoanalysis' classic approach of asking someone to talk it out and a dialogue of interpretations for which the patient will have to agree rather than the doctor. Now, Sartre makes it clear that I can intuit another's me as can the other, but we will both have inadequate estimation owing to my lack of intimacy and the other's intimacy with the me. A consciousness is limited by an inability to conceive other consciousness. Sartre notes that psychology is useful for tackling this problem by providing external observation and introspective method whereas phenomenology can investigate a pure transcendental sphere. This mutually beneficial relationship will let psychologists grasp consciousness' use of the transcendental, which is not quite a mirror by an interpretative frame from what I can tell that allows the distinguishing of the noematic and noetic, or consciousness' movement and relationship to objects being intuited. Sartre moves to explain that discussing consciousness' spontaneity is possible by the emptiness of the accusative consciousness, or a consciousness-concept. The cogito is a passivity that has past and does not reveal spontaneity but indicates the absence of a spontaneity and therefore consciousness.

Then, Sartre gives a quick criticism of the unconscious as being the source of consciousness' spontaneity: Sartre finds consciousness to be the source of its own spontaneity or, perhaps more simply stated as its own moving of itself. Consciousness is active and not passive in this account, which means the unconscious may also be superfluous as it would at best and with liberal interpretative difference from Freud be what consciousness is no focusing on within the psychic and therefore not necessarily an unconsciousness proper since it is difficult to work into Sartre's model.

Leave it to Sartre to give a thesis statement at the end of the essay. "Transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity" (p. 98). For Sartre, what may be the seat of our being, or at least its active component, is not an object and a forlorn intimacy like the God of Job. Consciousness is accordingly not preceded by anything that consciousness can perceive and is the active creator ex nihilo. This part of Sartre's thought reminds me of Plato's demiurgos in the sense of fashioning the world. In the same manner, one is within a world that one is not creating, which for Sartre is existence: the condition of being without the personal relation to creation. Amusingly, Sartre finds the unconscious to be for some psychologists a source of succor that restores the personal. Yet, even will is an object and one paradoxicaly constituted since will must refer to bringing about something not yet present. "I will fall asleep" says an awake man. Of course, the spontaneity of sleep relies on consciousness, which is presently emanating a state of being awake.
Indeed, the angst continues with Sartre's claim that "consciousness is frightened by its own spontaneity because it senses this spontaneity as beyond freedom" (p. 100). Here Sartre uses an example of Janet's patient who finds the absence of her husband to provide an intense source of freedom whose spontaneity is a source of terror for her that leads her to a paradoxical interest of seducing a man in her husband's absence. This paradox may turn out to be a surface of being. If consciousness perceived its spontaneity and therefore its totality capable of a seemingly in-finite creation, consciousness would be met with an auto-vertigo; consciousness will likely not intuit itself and would rather imprison itself in the ego than turn itself toward itself, to face something not hyper-real, but to face the kernal of reality itself. Perhaps the only thing that is subjective and real at that, for the world is impersonal objects that includes the I, the psychic, and the me. States are emanation and not even personal. Yes, Sartre may out-do Cartesian doubt with not a fear of no-existence in face of doubt, but a fear of the conditions of existence itself. The ego is a prop to keep consciousness away from itself, even if it is only artifice. Sartre goes on"a phenomenological description of spontaneity would show, indeed, that spontaneity renders impossible any distinction between action and passion, or any conception of an autonomy of the will" (p. 101). Perhaps this is why Sartre discusses the irrational and the magical qualities of ego and consciousness, for like a genie's snapping fingers: the power of spontaneity qua creation is overwhelming yet immanent. One flows with a potentiality that is inescapable and leaves us like Leda fleeing Zeus and Zeus-the- swan.
While we wish to consider ourselves as subject and object, we do not have a volition here. Consciousness' absorption of itself into the ego places such primacy and seeming immanence to the ego that we are tempted to consider the ego as active creator. But it is passive creator and relay. While ego allows us to differentiate the potentialities that are immanent for consciousness (e.g. sleeping and waking), the ego is only a transcendent unity and concrete totality. Ego is outside of consciousness and its transcendental attribute appears to foil consciousness' flight from itself. Here, there is no distinction between the real and the possible as this would be pure consciousness, assuming ego is let be and pure consciousness is let be to perceive the absolute which is its spontaneous charge. I do not take Sartre to mean consciousness can make anything, but that consciousness wold be incapable of distinguishing anything from anything since it is actively creating without an I to ground itself and allow reflection. Cogito here discards the I as primary structure and considers the epoche so as to discover the contradictions before them. Consciousness can then reflect upon its fears and creations, while potentially broaching what I think might be the condition for fear of spontaneity: being or Sum. Sartre finds the epoche as a miracle because the adoption of Sartre's thesis leads one to have a permanent reason for the epoche: the explanation of the angst and its perpetuation. Husserl would have lost this Sartre-an necessity by adopting the personal transcendental ego, which might allow a subjectivity and provide a refuge for 2nd degree consciousness form itself. Taking a step back from the self taking a step back would allow a more active role as opposed to the passive receptivity. Sartre is quite critical of Husserl here and wishes to free the epoche from a fetter as an intellectual instrument for epistemic interest as well as accident in daily life.
Sartre's second remark is is that his argument is the only possible refutation of solipsism. Sartre believes that the I's place as a structure of consciousness allows a credence for the solipsist argument because the I can oppose consciousness with all other existents. If I am creating and stuck within consciousness qua its structurally central ego, then solipsism is not necessarily impossible for Sartre as the I is creating with an activness rather than passivity from what I can tell and therefore other I's can be my creation or unreal.

Yet, I as a transcendent is no longer an absolute but is an object reducible by the epoche. Absolute consciousness alone exists as absolute instead of an I existing absolutely. The ego is as questionable as consciousness of others, which is in reference to their intuiting and the transcendental sphere. The aim is not their denial but their opacity before consciousness.
Finally, Sartre takes on a criticism of some "extreme Left" that I imagine to be French 20th century marxists. Their critique is that that phenomenology is an idealism drowning in ideas, at least according to Sartre. Before I go on, I should note that I think I see why materialists oppose idealism: connotations of spirtuality. I suppose Bishop Berkley comes to mind here, but I don't know if I agree idealism must allow for a spirituality anymore than materialism must allow for no spirituality. For Sartre, the refutation of this critique is that phenomenology forces man back into the world and its external problems as well as sufferings. Sartre does make an interesting suggestion by making the me an existent, which will likely be critical for his thought's development. For Sartre, no metaphysics of materialism is necessary as historical materialism need only share his view of the me as an object in the world for an augmenting. He goes on to suggest that the order of objective and subjective is not neccessary for values and an ethics grounded reality, nor does philsophy need to preoccupy itself with this debate any further. Here he closes with continued kairos: "The World has not create the me: the me has not created the World" (p. 106). of course, both appear to simply be since they are part of the World; the World and the me are objects before absolute consciousness. Without an I in absolute consciousness, there is no longer the subject; instead absolute consciousness is the first condition and absolute source of existence.

[Sajid · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was Sartre in his earliest period as the youngest philosopher of France. Before the outbreak of World war 2, he went to Germany to study Husserl. During that time he was highly influenced by Husserl only to disagree with him later. Husserl,through his phenomenonlogical method claimed that consciousness is intentional and it is always a consciousness of something. But..yes there is simple “but” attached here...there is an Ego behind which is the synthesizing source of all the states of consciousness. In other words, The Ego is the master signifier that unites all the states and qualities of consciousness. But Sartre denies it.

Sartre claims that consciousness, even when it is unreflecting, is always minimally conscious of itself. This mode of consciousness he describes as "non-positional" and "non-thetic" indicating that in this mode, consciousness does not posit itself as an object, nor is it confronted by itself. Rather, this irreducible self-awareness is taken to be an invariable quality of both unreflecting and reflecting consciousness.

A reflecting consciousness is one that is positing itself as its object. Fundamentally, says Sartre, the reflecting consciousness and the consciousness that is the object of reflection (the "reflected consciousness") are identical. Nevertheless, we can distinguish between them, at least in abstraction, and so talk about two consciousnesses here: the reflecting and the reflected.

His main purpose in analyzing self-consciousness is to show that self-reflection does not support the thesis that there is an ego situated within or behind consciousness. He first distinguishes two kinds of reflection: (1) reflection on an earlier state of consciousness that is recalled to mind by memory–so this earlier state now becomes an object of present consciousness; and (2) reflection in the immediate present where consciousness takes itself as it is now for its object. Retrospective reflection of the first kind, he argues, reveals only an unreflecting consciousness of objects along with the non-positional self-awareness that is an invariable feature of consciousness.

That's how he comes to the conclusion that the “i” itself is the product of reflective consciousness.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sartre utilizes the tenets of phenomenology (primarily intentionality of consciousness) to reveal the fictional nature of the I within experience. According to Sartre, the ego or I is "given through reflective consciousness" (51), as a modification of the spontaneous consciousness of the Erlebnis. In the end, this 'radical' thought of Sartre's impersonal consciousness embedded in the world seems not so different from the lifeworld of the late Husserl and of Merleau-Ponty. But maybe I just haven't read enough of the latter two to make the nuanced distinction.

Although Sartre does much in tearing dowm the facade of the transcendental ego, in transcending this sense of ego in finding the transcendence of the ego constituted or written into experience by reflection. But Sartre seems to take as given that the object of intentionality, of intuition, is the thing itself - that it is not an abstaction or conceptually formulated 'essence.' He inherits this naivety directly from Husserl. But can we grasp the existence of the thing itself, or does it ever remain outside of us, beyond us, as other? How does consciousness WORK? Is it active or passive in its relations with an other? These questions, which Sartre seems to appropriate unquestioningly from Husserl and phenomenology, need perhaps be delved into further - an adventure that requires us to throw aside all fear of a headfirst plunge into an abyss.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely a book that shows that Sartre owes a debt to Husserl, Descartes, and Kant. It is intended to show how he carves out a place for the active unity of the ego, but that underlying its synthetic unity is absolute nothingness. He even says, foreshadowing Being and Nothingness that once the ego begins to consciously reflect inward upon itself the mind realizes that the 'me' (or the self beyond the mere ego as it is represented) comes ex nihilo, or exists out of nothing. To me that is the most important part of this book. It takes a rather subtle turn towards Buddhism and I dig it towards the end.

The first forty pages or so are really about sorting out his differences with Husserl and explaining where he disagrees. Since it is only about 110 pages the last half of the book is the most interesting because he puts forward a totally unique conception of the ego. I enjoyed this a lot and I will return to it again and again. Can be read in one sitting, but it takes repeated readings to fully absorb all of it.

[Amal · Rating 3 out of 5]

هذا الكتاب هو باكورة مؤلفات سارتر" وهو محاولة لوضع فلسفته الخاصة في فينومينولوجيا الوجود مُستخدماً فلسفة هوسرل" بعد دراستها لسنوات كُسلم للوصول لفلسفته الخاصة عن الأنا موجود بالوجود ونحو العالم "
فهو بذلك ناقد وشارح لكل من فلسفة كانط وديكارت وهوسول تحديداً ومُعاصريهم وصولاً لتلخيص الفترتين اللتين ميزتا الوعي الأوربي بالأنا أُفكر لكانط والأنا موجود لديكارت"
ومحاولة تخليص الأنا من الوصف " بالصورية والمادية " التي التبس بهما في تلك الفترة وتبين مخاطرها وتأثيرها على الوعي والحضارة بالعالم بعد ذلك .،
الكتاب صعب نوعاً ما برغم حجمه الصغير ، لكنهُ مُفيد هكذا وجدته وإن لم أفهم كل مايحتويه بالمُطلق لكنني فهمت الفكرة العامة والغاية والكثير من المعلومات عن الفلاسفة وعلاقتهم وقيمة الفلسفة ذاتها ، لهذا أجدهُ مُفيداً كتراكُم قراءات فلسفية ترفدُ معرفتي بالمزيد .،

[Mohamedridha Alaskari محمد رضا العسكري · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sarte language was so difficult to me, I think it's deeper than my knowledge.

Also this boom is very important for knowing Ego. Must read.

[Nathan Perry · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you like having absolutely no idea what the fuck this dude is talking about for 90% of the book this is for you

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

"... for conscious spontaneity to tear itself brusquely away from the I"

out anything ive ever read transcendence of the ego is the work i wish i wouldve written myself.

despite trying to really deepread this i found it super challenging. nevertheless, reading this was elating, like the culmination and radical extension of ideas ive had and tried to unfold. the feeling of bliss, comfort, and freedom all at once which i got from reading page 49 (routledge edition) is what i thought meditation was supposed to give. im not understwting when im saying that i have really looked long for an insight to consciousness that would make me feel this way. it made me feel in myself the radical freedom of consciousness that is supposed to underpin sartres existentialism but which would feel meaningless to me without his phenomenology here. i even almost accidentally skipped that page.

i think if i believed in things ever being finished, then you could give me this book and tell me philosophy can go rest now

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most certainly I should not review this book.
If you respect all that is right in this world, turn away.
I’m about to show I have no idea what I’m talking about…

And yet something about this one compels me to write.
Thinking this might be a small road sign to leave behind.
A missive from a traveling mind…

Right out of the gate I feel like this short work is something that would probably have gone right over my head if I currently wasn’t triangulating with Sartre’s other works and the various introductions to those works. But damn this is a stiff 105 pages! Like telling someone looking for a short fiction read, “Sure, go read Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, it’s just over 100 pages… no worries.” Lost many students and friends with that one.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre states, “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.”

It seems to me that one of Sartre’s main goals is to strip everything away from bare naked existence to find what is left at the core, and what seems to be left for Sartre is the pre-reflective cogito, or positional consciousness-of a transcendental object, or perhaps also as he states, pure appearance, which to me all speaks of a razor thin transaction of information passing (as appearance) from an object to a subject. The core of being for humans is this “empty” pre-reflective consciousness. Pure information intake. No contents in that core. Pure processing. Which I believe is why he sometimes refers to it as impersonal. Because the you that is processing (i.e., being consciousness-of something) is only an empty processing activity. All the pieces of you that you identify with yourself, your ego for example, lies outside this processing/apprehending. And this pure processing, this ur-existing, comes before any of piece of you, anything that might be considered your essence, comes into being.

To exist is first to be a consciousness-of.

This is why the ego can’t be seen hiding behind the I of consciousness.
The ego is transcendental, outside of consciousness.
But first there must be an “I exist” and that is known by being a consciousness-of even before one can reflect on the fact that they are indeed conscious.
For Sartre, consciousness-of is translucent, unclouded by states and qualities which are part of the reflected-consciousness or ego which is transcendental and outside.

Or something like that...

Sartre argues against theorists like Freud who think we are controlled and affected by the desires of the unconscious. For consciousness to be translucent, there can be no hidden area of desires or states that affect or color its apprehensions.

While I know what Sartre is trying to prove I’m not completely sure I agree with him on this point. It’s hard to see it having to be true that even if we strip the I back to only the consciousness-of that means that it necessarily has to be translucent and unaffected. Biology, information theory and particle physics would lead us to believe that genetics or prior experience as it has remapped neurons might affect the very manner in which consciousness-of is conscious of objects. At the very least Sartre’s assumptions are problematic when viewed in this greater arena.

Or I might not know what I’m talking about at all…
So it goes...

[VII · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the extremely informative introduction by Sarah Richmond (my review is heavily based on it since I am not interested enough in this to reread it closely) says, this article's value (Sartre's first) is mostly historical. It deals with how Sartre views the Ego, but within (Husserl's) phenomenological tradition.

Husserl thinks that there is a (pure) Ego that can be reached if we put aside the ordinary way we experience the world and observe our consciousness (like meditation?) which will help us discover “the nature of experience”. Sartre doesn't disagree with this method (it is after all what phenomenology is about) but thinks that this Ego that Husserl finds is an unnecessary duplication of the ordinary Self; it doesn't exist but it is created the moment we reflect upon it. Another sign that it doesn't exist appears when we remember reading a book or driving and the heroes of the book or the road was there are but our Ego wasn't.

So there is only the ordinary everyday Self, the ordinary consciousness that is absolute and not reducible to anything else. If it was, then human freedom would be at stake. However, as Richmond notes, this claim is never defended by Sartre, he says we just know it. Also if consciousness is indivisible then how do we (divide it and) posit this fake Ego? And since he is skeptical of introspection as a means to describe our inner lives, this undermines phenomenology as a whole and not only this specific issue. Maybe he would say that the problem is that Husserl's reflection is impure.

Another reason he is skeptical is because of the “range” of our states. He says we are entitled to say what we feel at that moment, like in a case of a strong revulsion towards someone, but we are not entitled to say we hate someone as this implies a continuous state.

But he still goes ahead and describes what this fake Ego (that we posit during reflection) does. Its job is to unify our experiences but how it does that is as he writes “magical”. We don't know. We know the reflection of an event (which is undeniable, indubitable like the cogito) and the original event and what we end up with is the unification of those two. There is a sense of regret for what we end up with but it's not clear if it's because of our intellectual limitations or our culpability.

Richmond also adds (I don't remember if it was in the text) that the reason we introspect is the anguish we feel because the natural attitude "masks from consciousness its own spontaneity". We stay in the natural attitude to avoid the anguish that spontaneity of consciousness will induce, but sometimes it appears and makes us reflect.

Overall, this article is too limited by phenomenology to be of any interest to me. The most interesting thing was that, since he puts consciousness out in the world (because he is skeptical of accurate introspection), he says that we don't have any privileged access to our states (like hate). My access to my state of hate is as good as your access to MY state of hate. This is in a way close to how Rorty uses Sellars' “myth of the given”. Sellars says we don't have any special access to our inner states and Rorty takes it and argues in favor of an epistemological behaviorism where our access to our inner states is defined by how our community views them.

[Hussam Nabil · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've never seen Sartre as a serious Philosopher but as a Juggler of concepts and a charlatan.
This book was one of his books that made it very clear to me, he juggled his superficial interpretations of Heidegger along with depth psychology to arrive at a semi-fictional account of consciousness.
One might ask- and rightly so- where could we draw the line between theory and fiction when it comes to the speculative endeavours that philosophers are bound to embark on, to this I have both a subjective and an objective argument.
The subjective argument is that I believe that involvement and concern are what make us think and it is more so when it comes to philosophers.
Sartre doesn't seem to be involved or have a real interest in his topics.
I always visualise him making writing prompts for the hot topics of the day and just writing to see what he can make of them.
*To be Continued*

[Casey Kelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first read this book in a hipster haze in the FSU Honors Dorm. I gained nothing from it but a smug sense of satisfaction as I glanced at it on my bookshelf, taunting me. I did not understand it. I do not understand Sartre. There, I said it. A fitting admission the day I realized I have been out of college for longer than I was in college - tear. Need to try it again.

[S.M.Y Kayseri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sartre’s distaste towards the “inner life” reached an extreme point in this book, where he puts forth a controversial thesis: that Ego is neither formally nor materially in the consciousness: it is outside, in the world. Sartre rejected introspection as an infallible way to lay claim on the existence of a personal inner self, he said that as an “impure act” because “…it presupposes a permanent state of hatred out from a single episode of disgust…” After demolishing the home base, he then conceived consciousness can be grasped intuitively and completely in a non-positional way. Eg: chasing-the-bus rather than I-am-chasing-bus. And so, the consciousness located in the world, it is an object in the transcendental space just like a chair in the physical space. Consciousness emanates towards the I synthetically, not from it. But what determines the direction of spontaneity of consciousness, in fact, who blows the breath of Ego? Ironically, Sartre had to recycle vocabulary from dogmatism he so despised such as, “…the relation of Ego to states, quality and action is a poetic production, a creation from ex nihilo….”

Sartre’s ideas are certainly well-thought, it draws a coherent map that makes you click with everything what he said. But he concluding as such, while succeeding in appeasing the immediate, he yet to solve the jarring loophole of his ideas. Who blows the breath? Would it suffice to end the book by saying that the Ego is an autonomous and sui generic spontaneity?

In answering this question, the thinker Sartre leaves as the poet Sartre enters. It is the hallmark of a poet to "lament" his fate rather than to "dissect" it. The Ego's function, according to this poet, is to serve to mask from consciousness from its own spontaneity. Yes, here you can feel the aura of him saying "...Man is condemned to be free...", or the more popular Rousseau's adage, "Men is born free, but everywhere he is in chains". Sartre is saying that "...consciousness takes fright of its own spontaneity, because it senses that it lies beyond freedom...". Man is free because he is spontaneous, but this freedom is ironically, beyond freedom because he can never master this spontaneity, because whatever or whenever he found himself, he already found himself anterior, in the world, bounded and in facticity. Poetic, yes. But can we take a statement of problem as an answer to life? I don't think so.


****

2/7/23

How the wheel has turned. When I was reading Sartre about few years ago, and especially this book, I was thinking on how absurd his idea in denying the “inner life”. I put aside Sartre and the rest of his ideas as nihilistic, until recently.

My observation on neurotic patients has disclosed a uniform data: each of them had a kind of materialistic, opaque idea of the Self. Drawings by neurotics, in both children and adult populations, showed grim sketches of an isolated person. Sometimes, they even added shadings surrounding themselves, or placed the subject of the sketches in an enclosed room. They all resonated on the same idea of a trapped Self. By contrast, drawings by healthy children, or in depressed teenagers in remission, or currently in a better mood depicted themselves in multicolor sketches, and there is no drawings of an enclosed space. Instead, the subject of the drawings often depicted in an open landscape, or in between the hugs of people. And so, I started to formulate whether the former conception of Self played a role in the neuroticism in our age.

My brief excursion in history, as mentioned elsewhere, has revealed that this conception of the Self in a kind of materialistic sense is actually a modern product, instead of being derived from tried and true traditions and philosophy. Descartes initiated the entire movement, heralding the coming of Renaissance with his dictum, “I think, therefore I am”. Since then, the concept of “I am” has become the ghost behind every great Western thinkers, from Hegel down to Jaspers. Who is, or what is actually the true nature of this elusive entity “I am” is the Holy Grail behind every serious existentialist thinkers.

The hunt for the Ego eventually, reached the hands of Sartre. In this volume, he insisted that the “I am” is something that emerged in reflection, a retrospect entity in consciousness, instead of an a priori fact. Prior to reflection, according to Sartre, consciousness indeed maintains the consciousness of itself, but not positionally.

Sartre pointed out that the need for a transcendental I by the common people, is primarily due to the need of individuality. But at the level of transcendental, it is the intentionality that directs the synthesis of the experiences that give rise to the content of consciousness, without any need for a transcendental I. Whenever the bracketing by intentionality obtains its datum, the consciousness would be synthesised, without ever the need to resort to an I. Again and again, Sartre’s analysis found the I as a retrospect fact.

Sartre’s analysis pivoted on a basic observation that there exists two kinds of consciousness, the unreflected and the reflected. He found that most of the time, our consciousness is in the form of the former. For an example, whenever we run after a train etc, there is a consciousness of the tram-needing-to-be-caught etc; a non-positional consciousness of consciousness. It is in the unreflected consciousness arise the origin for the constitution of the unity of my consciousness, from which values, arises. But, nowhere in this primordial consciousness the I can be found. In Sartre’s words; “I have disappeared, I have annihilated myself”.

But, to deny the existence of the “inner life”, Sartre faced a humongous task to prove several things. They all can be summed up in how to explain the seemingly “inner” mechanism that is commonly done by the private self.

Regarding this Sartre resorted to explain the contents of the consciousness; state, qualities and actions. These three primordial aspects are Sartre’s idea of primary modes of the consciousness, i.e. whenever we thought of the role of the consciousness, we would think it as the spring for our volitions and actions.

Sartre observed that to say that I hate or love a person in a singular occasion of consciousness of revulsion or attraction is to perform an infinitization of assumption; of which cannot be logically given in that single consciousness in that one moment; thus a transcendental act. It is certain that Peter repulses me, Sartre said, but it is and will always remain doubtful whether I hate him; this goes beyond the power of reflection; it is impure even. But due to the demand of the hatred for it to be the origin and the primordial, it is being framed as the prior to the consciousness of repulsion. The result would be that repulsion seemed to emanate from hatred, instead of the opposite way. Thus Sartre explained away the states of the transcendent pole of synthetic unity without the need of the personal I; from misappropriation of relations.

Actions, on the other hand, are the noematic unity of a stream of consciousness, while at the same time being a concrete realization. Actions appear to both the consciousness and the World sides. Actions, according to Sartre, requires time to be carried out, naturally there are sections and moments from which arises reflective consciousness that displays itself as the active principal.

Several times of constancies of states would naturally be unified and then tasked with a psychical disposition for the Self to produce them. The relation between qualities and actions are thought to be relation of actualization.

To wit, the entire inward character of the Ego and thus its transcendence are explained by its intimacy. Reflection allows an inwardness that closed into itself; it is understood as being intimate and privy due to its inwardness. But this intimacy actually are viewed from outside due to very fact that reflective consciousness is a second-order consciousness that need to be manufactured posteriorly. The neurotic manufactures this inward sense of Ego, at every instance of grief he turned inward and was surprised each time to see the opaque nature of its own Ego. This sense of intimacy is certainly a passive partner; we can elicit whether we are lazy or hardworking by asking around us, but no answer at all would be offered by asking the resident ego; except if we deals the memory objectively, as if I am dealing with another person. In a similar vein, Wittgenstein countered against the argument of the private language that seemed to be an argument in supporting of an inward Ego. He sufficiently disproved it, and satisfactorily said that the best picture of the soul is the face itself. The intimacy of Ego, thus, seemed to yield everything, but its lack of distinctness in reality, yields nothing.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is heavy on terminology; the argument is thick. I think the basic theme is as follows: Husserl posits some sort of Transcendent Ego, something out there, external to humans, yet manifested by them in the way they perceive the world. Husserl's Ego entity is akin in some way to Kant's a priori structures.

Sartre, once aligned philosophically with Husserl, breaks with this form of consciousness. Sartre transcends Husserl's Transcendent Ego by pulling the latter down to Earth, and transforming it into a repository of expressions as formed by the objective world. Sartre puts ego in its place. In becoming earth-bound, ego loses its mystery and transcendental potency.

In transforming the ego in this way, Sartre joins the nurture camp through and through. The ego is object like any other; it does not have a special standing that is exempt from the day-to-day world. The self as ego takes on and is formed by what we see and experience with the outside. We, via a regularized ego, process this incoming stimuli and make choices about how to relate to the world. In making choices, I believe it's fair to say that for Sartre there is a basic goodness in the human heart or, if not, there ought to be.

A third rail, neither Husserl's or Sartre's, but one that combines elements of both, might be as follows: Take Husserl's transcendental Ego and bring it back to Earth. At its most basic level, it is the Self seeking to survive, but that life force is more than eating, pooping, peeing and consummating. It permeates how we relate to the world, not only via the all-pervasive social instincts, but more generally as well. We are not value-free entities. We are value-infused entities who reflect thoroughly Hume's observation that passion direct our thought and we are more Freudian Id than we care to admit.

Sartre denies this fixed form of ego. His ego is object only. Or, alternatively, it is subject only so far as it has been modified by the outside via learning and experience. But the relationship with the world is more complicated than that. The ego has both fixed and variable elements. It starts with primal ego, as subject, as a self that pushes itself into the world based on a full-suite of needs. The object, a subject it is own right (other selves; the environment), in turn modifies the self. It tells the self how it must manifest itself in order to satisfy its needs. The self's needs remain fixed, but how needs are satisfied are variable and they are subject to the reactions (and actions) of the outside world. This is how the ego gets modified, transformed, in the way that Sartre seems to be getting at.

In regard to Sartre's belief in the basic goodness of human nature (if that's his position), it could be that the needs of many or their fears, are stronger than those of others, and it is this that leads them to impose themselves on the world rather than, Tao-like, to accommodate themselves to it. In contrast, Sartre might say that this is a wrong-headed way to look at it. Mind ought to commit on behalf of humanity. But when mind is seen as the body's tool, Sartre's mind-directed behavior is fruitless if there's no motivation to change one's behavior (i.e., if one's needs or fears are too great). Corrective behavior - choices on behalf of humanity - then need to come from external sources to counter excessively self-oriented behavior.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Κάποιες σκόρπιες σκέψεις από ένα βιβλίο δυσαναγνωστο αλλά και καθαρά φιλοσοφικο:

Η συνείδηση είναι ο καθρέπτης του Εγώ μας και το φως για να το δούμε και ανασκοπικα να το καταλάβουμε. Το εγώ παράγει αυθόρμητα καταστασεις κ η συνείδηση τις εντοπίζει και λογικά τις εξηγει. Με αυτό τον τροπο το εγώ ξανά σχηματίζεται μέσω της πραξης της συνείδησης. Θα λέγαμε ότι η συνείδηση βοηθά στην εξέλιξη του εγώ κ το εξευμενιζει. Το βγάζει από το σκοτάδι και από την φαινομελογια και του δίνει μορφη. "Το Ego ειναθ ένα αντικείμενο που συλλαμβάνεται αλλά και συγκροτειται από την ανασκοπικη συνείδηση " Σαρτρ. Συνείδηση - καταστάσεις - Εγώ.

Όμως η συνείδηση δεν είναι η πηγή της κατάστασης αρα είναι μια αναπαρασταση του πραγματικού, αυθορμητου και μαγικου Εγώ. Αυτή η αυθόρμητα δημιουργία είναι μαγική και αγνωστη ως προς τον ανθρωπο. Για αυτό το εγώ κατοικεί εκτός του ανθρώπου στον Κόσμο ως αντικειμενο και μέλος της ολοτητας. " Η δράση ή η κατάσταση επιστρέφει στο Εγώ για να το προσδιορίσει ποιοτικά ". Ζούμε σε αυτό το παράλογο - βλέπω Εμενα αλλά μέσω της συνειδησης βλέπω το Εγώ. Το Εμένα που φέρεται ως ψυχο φυσικο εμφανίζεται σαν συνεπιβατης της συνείδησης στο ταξίδι κατανοησης του Εγώ. Για αυτό υπάρχει κ αυτό συναισθημα ότι το Εγω μέσω της συνείδησης δεν ταιριαζει με Εμένα όπως το έχεις σχηματίσει η ανασκοπικη συνείδηση. Δηλαδή νιώθω ξένος σε εμένα ενώ βλέπω εμένα. "Το Εγώ δεν εμφανιζεται ποτέ, παρά μόνο όταν δεν το κοιταμε"

[Jon Stout · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading this after many years for a philosophy discussion group, I found a lot of interesting connections. Sartre’s relatively early book marked a difference from Edmund Husserl, whom Sartre followed as a phenomenologist. All phenomenologists take their starting point in consciousness, but Husserl had postulated a transcendental ego as what it is that is conscious. Sartre argued that since the transcendental ego cannot be found in consciousness, it cannot be assumed by phenomenology.

Consciousness is, for Sartre, Nothingness, a blank slate, a movie screen or a mirror in which things appear. We can become conscious of ourselves being conscious, but then the lower level consciousness becomes reflected within the Nothingness of our higher level consciousness, and the self of the overall consciousness can never be captured within consciousness. This leads to Sartre’s evolution from phenomenology to existentialism.

To quote Sartre, “The ego never appears, in fact, except when one is not looking at it. The reflective gaze must be fixed on the Erlebnis [lived experience], insofar as it emanates from the state. Then behind the state, at the horizon, the ego appears. It is, therefore, never seen except ‘out of the corner of the eye.’”

This passage bears a remarkable resemblance to Wittgenstein, and a very different philosophical tradition, when Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world, not part of it.”

[Márcio Ricardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cometi o erro de ler este livro sem ter arcabouço filosófico pra tal. Já desconfiava que isso pudesse acontecer, mas caí na presunção de que o livro seria mais fácil ou de que fosse capaz de o absorver com maior ou menor dificuldade. Dá pra entender muita coisa, mas pra compreensão mais próxima à totalidade faz-se necessário adquirir alicerces sólidos em filosofia. Neste caso, convém saber sobre principalmente sobre Descartes, Kant, Husserl e La Rochefoucauld.

[r0b · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phew! Pretty dense!
The last few pages (section 3 of his ‘conclusions’) especially great.