Untrue to One's Own Self: Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego

Abstract

While recent scholarship has increasingly succeeded in making a case for the importance of The Transcendence of the Ego (TE), Sartre’s first substantial philosophical publication, different ap proaches up to now seem to share the same twofold methodological premise. Since TE’s explicit object of philosophical concern is the self, the assumption seems to be that philosophical commentary must equally focus, first, on the notion of the self, and, second, on what Sartre explicitly says about it. To be sure, commentators are not unaware that the notion of the self, as discussed in TE, is deeply connected with a wide variety of other notions of such philosophical importance as consciousness, personal identity, reflection, intentionality, temporality, contingency, freedom, the possibility of an ethics, and so on. Thus, none of these notions fail to receive serious attention in two recent and important contributions on TE, Stephen Priest’s The Subject in Question, the first English monograph on TE, and Vincent De Coorebyter’s Sartre Face a la Phenomenologie: Autour de “L’intentionnalite” et de “La Transcendance de l’Ego”, a remarkable piece of scholarship on early Sartre’s reception of Husserlian phenomenology. Now although these two scholar contributions display two quite dif ferent approaches to TE, the common twofold working assumption remains that the notions indicated above are best elucidated by, first, focusing on the central notion of the self, and, second, assessing Sartre by mostly considering TE according to what it explicitly states. Thus, Priest indicates: “I have written the book so that it can be read in two ways. On the one hand, it is a critical commentary which tracks Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego chapter by chapter. ... On the other hand, the book ... may be read as an argumentative analysis of [Husserl’s and Sartre’s] disagreement over the self” (Priest 2000: viii). For his part, and although prima facie less clearly