Donald Robertson, 1993
LA TRANSCENDANCE DE L'EGO:
SARTRE'S NON-EGOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In La Transcendance de L'Ego Sartre initializes his break from Husserlian Phenomenology by formulating a non-egological account of consciousness. He begins with a series of criticisms against the Transcendental Ego, which he sees as applying to any egological account of consciousness. First comes Sartre's argument against the Transcendental Ego as a formal requirement of the activity of consciousness (contra Husserl and Kant). This is followed by his denial of the possibility of encountering the Transcendental Ego in reflected consciousness (contra Husserl and Descartes). Finally Sartre concludes with a positive thesis regarding the nature and constitution of the ego as a transcendent object for consciousness. I will attempt to describe, and comment upon, each of these topics in turn and to make some criticism along the way, although I cannot hope to do so without some omission due to the complex nature of the topic.
Sartre's Criticism of the Husserlian Transcendental Ego
Sartre characterizes the Husserlian position regarding the Transcendental Ego as follows,
This I would be, so to speak, behind each consciousness, a necessary structure of consciousness whose rays would light upon each phenomenon presenting itself in the field of attention. Thus transcendental consciousness becomes thoroughly personal.
Sartre asks: 'Was this notion necessary? Is it compatible with the definition of consciousness given by Husserl?' , and evidently he wishes to answer 'No'. His objection to the Transcendental Ego is principally due to the fact that he thinks of it as 'polluting' the Transcendental Field.
If it existed it would tear consciousness from itself; it would divide consciousness; it would slide into every consciousness like an opaque blade. The transcendental I is the death of consciousness.
Sartre wishes to establish the emptiness and translucency of consciousness and to make of it an impersonal absolute. However, I will delay discussion of this particular aspect of La Transcendance de L'Ego until I have first dealt with Sartre's criticism of the argument for the formal requirement of a Transcendental Ego.
The Formal Requirement of a Transcendental Ego
[...] is the I that we encounter in our consciousness made possible by the synthetic unity of our representations, or is it the I which in fact unites the representations to each other?
Sartre seeks to show, contrary to Husserl, that the existence Transcendental Ego is not a formal requirement for the unity and individuality of consciousness to be secured. In fact, as we will see, he maintains that it is the unity of consciousness which supports the constitution of the ego.
It is true that one must be able to unify what might be thought of as diverse instants of consciousness in order to distinguish between different 'consciousnesses'; in the sense, that is, of being able to speak of the consciousness of Peter as distinct from that of Paul one must at least be able to find some factor to unify Peter's consciousness. Sartre, in denying the existence of a Transcendental Ego, is forced to fall back on an account of the impersonal operation of consciousness in order to establish this. However, it is far from clear exactly what form Sartre's solution is to take, most commentators view his solution in La Transcendance de L'Ego as being incomplete and as requiring, at least, supplementation from L'Etre et L'Neant. Indeed, there are several interpretations of a) the kind of unification which Sartre is referring to, b) the nature of his solution. However it seems to me that Sartre means to address the following problems.
Firstly, in each particular instant of consciousness, if we are to speak of a single embodied consciousness at all, we must be able to unify the operation of consciousness with regard to its object. For example (mine), when I bite into an apple the diverse elements of perception, the taste, the 'crunch', the smell of apples and so on, are all said to be present to a single consciousness . Sartre's account of this kind of unity is extremely brief and obscure. The following points are clear however, Sartre is saying that it is the object of consciousness, rather than the Transcendental Ego, which unifies the instant; 'it is in the object that the unity of consciousness is found' . The unity to which Sartre is referring is that of 'a thousand active consciousnesses' which operate on the same object. This unity is tied to the transcendence of the intentional object, in the sense of its being temporally trans-phenomenal. The object is transcendent, in one sense, insofar as it is given as temporally exceeding the present experience, it is unified with its past and future appearances. The unity of consciousness, then, is the consciousness of transcendent unity; pure consciousness (purged of ego-structure) is an empty relation to the transcendent unity of its object. It might be objected to this, following Sukale , that if unity really is 'in the object' then surely two individuals who intend the same object must share a single consciousness. It seems as if Sartre's account, as it stands, is open to this objection. However, the second stage in his argument will overcome this difficulty by adding another criteria for the unity of consciousness.
In order to secure the unity of consciousness through time Sartre refers to Husserl's account of temporal consciousness as divided into intention, protention and retention. Consciousness is unified through the 'transversal' play of intentionality. That is to say, on the non-reflective level, consciousness retains a concrete awareness its immediate past. If this were not the case then perception of temporal processes, such as the sound of a melody, would be impossible . This is most evident in our consciousness of serial activities such as Sartre's example of counting cigarettes from L'Etre et le Néant,
Yet at the moment when these cigarettes are revealed to me as a dozen, I have a non-thetic consciousness of my adding activity. If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, "What are you doing there?" I should reply at once, "I am counting." This reply aims not only at the instantaneous consciousness which I can achieve by reflection but at those fleeting consciousnesses which have passed without being reflected-on, this which are forever not-reflected-on in my immediate past.
In this sense, Sartre secures the unity of consciousness by appeal to the transversal nature of intentionality. The question concerning the unity of consciousness supposes that internal time is composed of discrete instants, and ignores its 'stream-like' character. Consciousness involves a consciousness of the immediate past and a concrete awareness of its transversal movement through time. When consciousness is viewed in this manner there is no disunity to explain away, and hence no need for a Transcendental Ego to unify temporally discrete consciousnesses.
When combined, these two arguments constitute the essence of Sartre's argument against the formal requirement of a Transcendental Ego. However, there is little more here than a restatement of Husserl's early position regarding the self-unifying of consciousness. Nevertheless, it may still be sufficient to dispose of the formal requirement of a Transcendental Ego.
The Phenomenological Evidence for the Existence of a Transcendental Ego
First of all, Sartre objects that the phenomenological evidence for the Transcendental Ego is invariably based upon reflection. That is, it is consciousness turned upon itself which provides the cogito of Descartes and Husserl. Sartre calls this consciousness 'of the second-order' as he sees in it a complex generated by the operation of an initially non-reflective consciousness upon itself. Consciousness turns toward itself and takes its own activity as object. Hence, he sees in this a paradox: as consciousness is defined by its being an intentional act bearing on a transcendent object -and is therefore, in this respect, essentially dyadic- the consciousness reflected must necessarily be distinguished from the reflecting consciousness, '[...] the consciousness which says I Think is precisely not the consciousness which thinks.' In order to elucidate this one must follow Sartre in analyzing the nature of 'first order' or 'non-reflective' consciousness.
i) Non-Reflective Consciousness
This is the condition which Emerson finds characteristic of his extended periods of solitude in the forests,
Standing on the bare ground -my head bathed by blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all [...]
or as Sartre would have it,
When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. There is consciousness of the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, etc. [....]
There are two radically opposed categories of being which are encountered on this level of consciousness: i) the transcendent being of the phenomena experienced, ii) the being of the intentional consciousness.
Sartre, of course, follows Husserl in defining consciousness strictly in terms of intentionality. The object of an intentional act is transcendent, in Sartre's sense of the word, to consciousness, by which we mean both that it exceeds the phenomena through which it is given -by extending to encompass the total series of such appearances- and that it is utterly outwith consciousness. It is obvious that if a Transcendental Ego were to be encountered on this level it would have to be given in a different manner from the transcendent objects which consciousness posits. This follows from Husserl's account of the Transcendental Ego as immanent, or internal to consciousness; transcendent object are, by definition, external entities, outwith consciousness.
Sartre holds, however, that a different kind of awareness necessarily accompanies such acts: a non-positional impersonal self-consciousness. To be aware of a transcendent object, one must be conscious of being aware. This self-knowledge cannot be of the same structure as the knowledge of a transcendent object as we would then be committed to an infinite regress of 'knower-thing known'. This simply follows from the principle of intentionality, whereby the object known transcends, and is by definition radically distanced from, the knowing consciousness. This makes self-knowledge -as Nietzsche would have it- a contradictio in adjecto; knowledge is only achieved through transcendence, through distance. This does not, however, render absurd the entire notion of self-knowledge. Sartre preserves the idea of non-positional self-consciousness,
the necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing consciousness to be knowledge of its object, is that it be consciousness of itself as being that knowledge. [...] if my consciousness were not consciousness of being consciousness of the table, it would then be consciousness of that table without consciousness of being so. In other words, it would be a consciousness ignorant of itself, an unconscious -which is absurd.
Sartre's view that a non-self-aware consciousness is absurd is heavily criticized by Ivan Soll who objects that Sartre's 'consciousness ignorant of itself' would simply be a 'consciousness of one thing (of the table) that was unconscious of something else (of being conscious of the table).' This is sound criticism, but only insofar as Sartre is unclear on this point and requires that his thesis be elucidated more carefully. Sartre -following Husserl- defines consciousness in terms of intentionality: 'All consciousness [...] is consciousness of something.' Intentionality necessarily involves a transcendent object: '[...] there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object.' However, most crucially, consciousness of a transcendent object necessarily implies consciousness (of) transcendence: 'consciousness is aware of itself in so far as it is consciousness of a transcendent object.' Bearing in mind that we are doing phenomenology, how is one to account for a transcendent object, qua transcendent, without reference to its externality (a relative concept), i.e. to the consciousness transcended. Soll's 'consciousness of one thing [...]' is no consciousness at all.
Now, Sartre holds that this non-reflective self-consciousness is devoid of any ego-structure, in fact, devoid of any 'content' whatsoever. If this were true, the last possible bastion of the Transcendental Ego -on the non-reflective level- would be destroyed. Sartre's reasons for denying the presence of a structure in immanence seem, at first, bizarre. He thinks consciousness is 'as clear as a great wind' ; and as we have seen, the Transcendental Ego would 'tear consciousness from itself; [...] divide consciousness; [...] slide into every consciousness like an opaque blade' . To understand this we must note that Husserl thinks of consciousness as consisting of two intentional poles, subjective and objective. The Transcendental Ego is given to intuition as the subjective pole of each intentional act which it transcends by pointing toward a unified series. However, the trans-phenomenality of the Transcendental Ego is given a privileged status by Husserl, as a 'transcendence in immanence'. Sartre does not accept this and places it on the same level as any other object. Sartre cannot see how it can be construed as anything other than an object inhabiting consciousness, and an object can only be relative to consciousness, in the sense of being the objective correlate of an intentional act. Hence, any inhabitant of consciousness would have to be also an object for consciousness, it becomes an intentional object which divides consciousness from its genuine object, and an entity which is simultaneously both inside and outside consciousness.
This particular attitude of Sartre's has been attacked as a misinterpretation of Husserl. Sartre seems to wish simply to reduce the Transcendental Ego to a kind of Cartesian res cogitans, however Husserl certainly appears to regard it as something much more subtle. I am not convinced there is an easy way to resolve this issue, indeed several writers -Alfred Schuetz, John Scanlon etc. - have accused Sartre of simply rediscovering, and misinterpreting, Husserl's Transcendental Ego in his own work. In order to establish the truth of this claim, however, Husserl's position concerning the special status of the Transcendental Ego would have to be given a much more sympathetic reading. However, to do this would require an extensive analysis of most of the basic principles of Husserl's Transcendental phenomenology; a task beyond the scope of this essay. With this difficulty in mind, we may proceed to Sartre's second argument against the phenomenological evidence for the presence of a Transcendental Ego in non-reflective consciousness.
Sartre holds that, with care, a non-reflective memory may be reproduced in which no reference to the ego occurs,
while I was reading, there was consciousness of the book, of the heroes of the novel, but the I was not inhabiting this consciousness. It was only consciousness of the object and non-positional consciousness of itself.
Now, Sartre cites this as phenomenological evidence and generalizes from particular instances of recollection to conclude that the Transcendental Ego is never present in non-reflective consciousness. However, it is not clear why Sartre thinks this is evidential, it is certainly not a conventional technique of phenomenology to invoke reproductive memory. Husserl would, almost certainly, object that reproductive memory necessarily modifies the structure of a recollected consciousness in such a way as to render it untenable as phenomenological evidence for the argument which Sartre is trying to articulate.
ii) Reflective Consciousness
Reflective consciousness is defined as an intentional act which takes its own consciousness as its object. Sartre believes it is possible to engage in 'pure reflection' where the reflected act and the reflecting act perfectly coincide and 'consciousness knows itself as absolute inwardness'. However, it is primarily with 'impure reflection' which we will be concerned as it is from this process which Sartre thinks our sole experience of the ego, as constituted transcendent object, is to be found. This arises from a desire on the part of consciousness to posit itself as an object in the manner of the consciousness of the 'Other'. Such acts are divided into 'reflecting' and 'reflected' consciousness, the former is identical to non-reflective consciousness save for its object, so it is principally with reflected consciousness that we will be concerned.
Sartre rejects the Husserlian notion that the Transcendental Ego is given evidentially in reflection,
the I Think does not appear to reflection as the reflected consciousness: it is given through reflected consciousness.
In the reflected consciousness we encounter noeses, or intentional acts, which are transcended by the reflecting act and undergo the modification into explicit objects of consciousness. These particular acts are -in the reflected consciousness- merely phenomenal, but they point beyond themselves to trans-phenomenal psychic objects which Sartre calls: 'states', 'actions' and 'qualities'.
'States' are transcendent objects which unify particular consciousnesses given in reflection. They represent the trans-phenomenal synthesis of an infinity of particular reflected acts. The meaning of this is best brought out by Sartre's example,
I see Peter, I feel a sort of profound convulsion of repugnance and anger at the sight of him (I am already on the reflective level): the convulsion is consciousness. I cannot be mistaken when I say: I feel at this moment a violent repugnance for Peter. But is this experience of repugnance hatred? Obviously not. Moreover, it is not given as such. In reality, I have hated Peter a long time and I think that I shall hate him always. An instantaneous consciousness of repugnance could not, then, be my hatred.
A State, then, is temporally trans-phenomenal, and transcendent in relation to any particular instance which might be construed as revealing it. My repugnant feeling toward Peter seems to point beyond itself to a latent, subsisting -occasionally instantiated- hatred of him.
It should be clear that Sartre thinks of States as being constituted by reflection on particular consciousnesses. This, however, is the complete reverse of our common notion of psychic states, whereby hatred is seen as overpowering us and generating a sense of repugnance toward Peter. Sartre calls this supposed power of the State to forcibly express itself through consciousness 'magic'.
'Actions', such as 'playing the piano', 'driving a car' and 'writing', are also of the 'magical' nature of States. It is easy to see how activities taken in the world transcend our consciousnesses by being given in profile, but Sartre also includes purely psychical activities such as Descartes' methodological doubt, as they are temporally trans-phenomenal -they take time to be carried out. My project of methodically doubting the entire inventory of my knowledge does not effect individual consciousnesses of discrimination, recollection, judgement, except in the phantasmal 'magical' sense. Rather the process of doubting appears behind the reflected consciousness in which I apprehend the flux of spontaneous consciousnesses which materially constitute it. Like States, Actions are passive, they are parasitic upon genuinely active, fleeting consciousnesses.
'Qualities' are dispositions which make up the transcendent unity of particular States, together these three types of psychic object constitute the ego. The ego of Sartre's phenomenological account, however, unlike that of Husserl's, is not to be thought of as a 'pole' or a 'support' around which psychic phenomena cluster. Rather, it is nothing more than the indissoluble synthetic totality of the psychic objects,
The ego is nothing outside of the concrete totality of states and actions it supports. Undoubtedly it is transcendent to all the states which it unifies, but not as an abstract X whose mission is only to unify: rather, it is the infinite totality of states and of actions which is never reducible to an action or to a state.
If all the psychic objects were to be stripped away one by one, no ego would remain; yet the ego is more than the aggregate of psychic objects, it is thematic of their synthesis. The ego is a transcendent unity of transcendent unities; an appropriate metaphor would be that of the melody which transcends individual notes.
It is in this sense, only, that Sartre thinks we encounter the ego. It is an object for consciousness, which transcends consciousness and pollutes reflection by stealing the spontaneity of consciousness through a 'magical' reversal of the genuine process of constitution. If reflection were carried out properly, consciousness being viewed as a spontaneous absolute, the entire psychic field would not arise as there would be no incentive to posit a transcendent object to explain away the spontaneity of consciousness.
Conclusion
Sartre gives good reason for disposing of the Transcendental Ego, as characterized by him. It must be established, however, if these arguments still bear on a more sympathetic reading of Husserl. Also, Sartre assumes a great deal in his use of the concepts of intentionality, transcendence etc. which may not hold up under analysis. Nevertheless, his criticism of Husserl is provocative, and his positive account of the nature of the ego is highly inspiring and potentially fruitful. It is difficult to give an accurate assessment of the validity of Sartre's arguments as i) they are manifold, ii) they assume a particular conception of Husserl's thesis, drawn from a specific period in the development of an extremely abstruse methodology, iii) they are not stated as clearly as they might have been, iv) they point beyond the work at hand to Sartre's later development of the phenomenological method, v) there is a lack of informed, systematic and lucid commentary.
To be clear, I have glossed over, or omitted, the following issues: i) the residual use of the 'I' concept in non-reflective consciousness, ii) the 'individualization' of consciousness (and its relation to the 'fundamental project' in L'Etre et le Néant), iii) the 'magic' nature of the ego (its relation to spontaneity and immanence, its evasiveness etc.), iv) the extent to which 'structure' may remain even after Sartre's attempted purification of consciousness, v) possible inconsistency in Sartre's account of non-reflective self-consciousness and his definition of intentionality, vi) the nature of 'pure' reflection, vii) Sartre's defense of his appeal to non-reflective memory. In particular, my account of the unification of consciousness may be based on a misinterpretation of Sartre's thesis. This is partly due to the obscure nature of Sartre's argument and to the general lack of consensus among his commentators upon the correct interpretation.
Despite these technical difficulties it is still possible to give a provisional, critical account of Sartre's major theses, and to gain an insight into the foundations of his later work; Sartre's view of the nature of the ego apparently remained virtually intact right up until the end of his career . The transcendence of the ego may not feature as explicitly in his later work but it is a correlate of the absolute translucency of consciousness which can only be considered a (the?) cornerstone in the development of Sartrean existential phenomenology.
*
Bibliography
Berdt Kenevan, Phyllis "Self-Consciousness and the Ego in the Philosophy of Sartre", in Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Glynn, Simon "The Eye/I of the Paradox: Sartre's View of Consciousness", in Sartre: An Investigation of Some Major Themes.
Gurwitsch, Aron "A Non-egological Conception of Consciousness", in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. I.
Hammond, Michael et al. Understanding Phenomenology.
Macann, Christopher Four Phenomenological Philosophers.
Sartre, Jean-Paul "A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology: Intentionality". "An interview with Jean-Paul Sartre", in Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness. Existentialism & Humanism. The Transcendence of the Ego.
Soll, Ivan "Sartre's rejection of the Freudian unconscious", in Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sukale, Michael "Sartre and the Cartesian Ego", in Comparative Studies in Phenomenology. "The Ego and Consciousness in Rival Perspectives: Sartre and Husserl", in Comparative Studies in Phenomenology.
Sutton Morris, Phyllis "Sartre on the Transcendence of the Ego", [?]