The Ego

Sartre’s view also diverges from Husserl’s on the important issue of the ego. For Sartre,
Husserl adopted the view that the subject is a substance with attributes, as a result of his
interpretation of Kant’s unity of apperception. Husserl endorsed the Kantian claim that
the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany any representation of which I am conscious, but
reified this ‘I’ into a transcendental ego. Such a move is not warranted for Sartre, as he
explains in The Transcendence of the Ego. Moreover, it leads to the following problems for
our phenomenological analysis of consciousness.
The ego would have to feature as an object in all states of consciousness. This would
result in its obstructing our conscious access to the world. But this would conflict with
the direct nature of this conscious access. Correlatively, consciousness would be divided
into consciousness of ego and consciousness of the world. This would however be at
odds with the simple, and thus undivided, nature of our access to the world through
conscious experience. In other words, when I am conscious of a tree, I am directly
conscious of it, and am not myself an object of consciousness. Sartre proposes therefore
to view the ego as a unity produced by consciousness. In other words, he adds to the
Humean picture of the self as a bundle of perceptions, an account of its unity. This unity
of the ego is a product of conscious activity. As a result, the traditional Cartesian view
that self-consciousness is the consciousness the ego has of itself no longer holds, since
the ego is not given but created by consciousness. What model does Sartre propose for
our understanding of self-consciousness and the production of the ego through
conscious activity? The key to answering the first part of the question lies in Sartre’s
introduction of a pre-reflective level, while the second can then be addressed by
examining conscious activity at the other level, i.e. that of reflection. An example of pre-
reflective consciousness is the seeing of a house. This type of consciousness is directed
to a transcendent object, but this does not involve my focussing upon it, i.e. it does not
require that an ego be involved in a conscious relation to the object. For Sartre, this pre-
reflective consciousness is thus impersonal: there is no place for an ‘I’ at this level.
Importantly, Sartre insists that self-consciousness is involved in any such state of
consciousness: it is the consciousness this state has of itself. This accounts for the
phenomenology of ‘seeing’, which is such that the subject is clearly aware of her pre-
reflective consciousness of the house. This awareness does not have an ego as its object,
but it is rather the awareness that there is an act of ‘seeing’. Reflective consciousness is
the type of state of consciousness involved in my looking at a house. For Sartre, the
cogito emerges as a result of consciousness’s being directed upon the pre-reflectively
conscious. In so doing, reflective consciousness takes the pre-reflectively conscious as
being mine. It thus reveals an ego insofar as an ‘I’ is brought into focus: the pre-
reflective consciousness which is objectified is viewed as mine. This ‘I’ is the correlate of
the unity that I impose upon the pre-reflective states of consciousness through my
reflection upon them. To account for the prevalence of the Cartesian picture, Sartre
argues that we are prone to the illusion that this ‘I’ was in fact already present prior to
the reflective conscious act, i.e. present at the pre-reflective level. By substituting his
model of a two-tiered consciousness for this traditional picture, Sartre provides an
account of self-consciousness that does not rely upon a pre-existing ego, and shows how
an ego is constructed in reflection.

https://iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/