On the transcendence of self-identity: a philosophical account of Sartre’s personal praxis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jéan-Paul Sartre crafted himself a controversial profile that radically deviated from his natural identity. How do we reconcile the paradox of his national-intellectual heritage of a bourgeois white male native of the République française with his role as the collaborator with the founders of the Negritude Movement and the later Africanist anticolonial struggle? This paper accounts for this apparently paradoxical life-acts by explicating that they germinated from his novel philosophical postulation on the nature of consciousness and self-knowledge, his doctrine of the constantly self-creating ‘egoless consciousness’ which he developed during his monumental critique of Edmund Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego (1937). It is here argued that his insistence on the Ego as being reflective consciousness in its self-transcendence, which became a foundational tenet of his phenomenological existentialism, was demonstrated in his own life, framing himself a de-absolutised self-identity. Besides demonstrating this genitive link between the development of his philosophy and his consequent life of selfless solidarity with the un-free globally, it is highlighted that Sartre’s philopraxis may bear an efficacious contribution to contemporary debates on the force of the facticity of racial and national identity.