Husserl's Ego

Abstract

John Locke appears to have held that we possess, as part of our whole being, a soul substance, a thinking thing rooted squarely in the Cartesian tradition. But Locke adds that our awareness of personal identity does not depend on that soul and should not be confused with substantial identity. The sense of personal identity derives from consciousness, and particularly from memory. Many a soul or many a body could, in principle, host the same person, provided that a continuity of consciousness remained. A cynical commentator might be inclined to see here Locke as the philosophical hermaphrodite-half Descartes and half Hume, though tending a bit in the Humean direction. Edmund Husserl would not accept Locke's adherence to a soul substance. He would sympathize with Locke's view that the sense of personal identity depends on consciousness. This is not to suggest that in parting with Descartes' substantialist position (the view of consciousness as a "box" or "bag," as Husserl sometimes characterizes it),' Husserl joins forces with Hume in defending the bundle theory of the self. In his conception of the ego, Husserl, typically, adopts none of the standard positions delivered by the tradition. He does not view the ego as a hermetic container for psychic acts, or as an empty pole of consciousness, or as a swarm of psychic events held together in the present solely by their contiguity and, with respect to the past, by threads of memory. That Husserl is thus untraditional has not always been appreciated. Jean-Paul Sartre and Aron Gurwitsch argued that Husserl defended an essentially Cartesian view of the ego, and that this conception of the self was illegitimate and indefensible from the perspective of the very phenomenology that Husserl himself had fathered. I will argue in this essay that Sartre's and Gurwitsch's criticisms directed at Husserl's conception of the ego are misplaced and misguided. It may seem to some, of course, that this is a fine example of thrashing a dead horse. But this horse is still kicking. The issue of the ego and its proper interpretation remains vital for anyone concerned with phenomenology as Husserl conceived it. And while Sartre and Gurwitsch may have laid down their basic objections some seventy years ago, the pertinence and the demands these objections make on our attention have not weakened with age. I mean to show that Sartre's and Gurwitsch's objections are unsound, but only with the intent of revealing just how compelling Husserl's conception of the ego turns out to be. Since Sartre and Gurwitsch advance in all important respects the same arguments, I will base my discussion chiefly on Sartre's critique as it appears in his Transcendence of the Ego. Sartre's Critique of the Husserlian Ego Before presenting his philosophical arguments against what he takes to be Husserl's conception of the ego, Sartre takes note of the (now) familiar fact that while the transcendental ego appears in the Ideas of 1913, it is absent from the first edition of the Logical Investigations (1900-1901). Sartre takes this absence to be significant and appears to assume that when Husserl later fell victim to egological backsliding, the ego he came to accept is of the same nature as the one he earlier rejected. We will consider later whether that is a valid assumption. The ego against which Sartre argues has the following characteristics. It is not co-extensive with consciousness but "in" consciousness as an inhabitant is in a dwelling,2 as a blade is plunged into the heart (dividing, tearing, killing),3 as an empty pole indifferent to what it supports.4 It is personal,5 substantial,6 monadic, opaque,7 heavy, and ponderable.8 It is the owner of consciousness, the empty principle of the unification of consciousness, and "the inseparable companion" of each conscious act.9 "All this," Sartre writes, "is unfortunately the orientation of the new thought of Husserl" (that is, in the Ideas and Cartesian Mediations). …