On Sartre's Early Theory Of The Ego

For most philosophers,they suggest that the Ego as an “inhabitant” of consciousness to unify our empirical experiences.Some of them hold that the Ego is an “inner” entity at the core of individual human beings.Psychologists,also,claim they can discover the Ego as a centre of desires and acts.All of these arguments are aimed to constitute that the Ego is a sort of entity and makes consciousness to be a unity.Sartre,a phenomenologist claims that we do not need the concept of ego to establish some theory of consciousness and the Ego is superfluous to the consciousness.He points out that,in The Transcendence of the Ego(hereafter TE)which was first published in France in 1937 as a journal article,as well as one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications,the Ego is neither necessary,nor possible,nor actual.Sartre's strategy is twofold.Firstly,it is directed against the Husserlian version that an Ego is in consciousness.Sartre accepts these relevant viewpoints of the streams of consciousness,inner awareness and intentionality in Logical Investigations,but rejects the concept of transcendental I or pure Ego in Ideas1.And secondly,the Ego is a transcendent object of consciousness that only appears to the reflective consciousness.After researching on the phenomenology,Sartre said the mode of existence that consciousness has is that it is consciousness of itself—self-consciousness.Indeed,the unification of the consciousness is the structure of intentionality,not an Ego.For Sartre,a stream of consciousness to grasp an object by going beyond itself.When the Ego become a transcendent object before the reflecting consciousness,it has already been constituted as a pole of the states,actions and qualities.On the side of the one-order theory of consciousness,Sartre believes that the notion of selfconsciousness can clarify the Bewusstheit without assuming an immanent Ego.As a supporter of nonegological view,Sartre puts out the nature of consciousness and all consciousness is conscious of itself as the reason for why conscious experiences become a unity and are remarked as mine.Only the concept of self-consciousness is enough for explaining that.After reconstructing Sartre's theory of the Ego,this paper will evaluate two of the most important criticisms as following: positive influence and sufficiency.Sartre reveals the profound relationship between the consciousness and being,in the TE and Being and Nothingness,by denying the pure Ego of Husserl in his work Ideas1.Although here are many principles used by Sartre in his essay as an apodictic presupposition which come from Husserl and other phenomenologists,Sartre should show us how.Because of few precise accounts,especially,it is hard to explain the account of how consciousness works by its spontaneity.Similarly,there has been no detailed analysis of the new entity in the reflective consciousness called Ego.Moreover,here are some still difficult to interpret the identity of different conscious experiences.This paper would demonstrate the success of the proof of transcendence of the Ego and unsuccess of the account of Bewusstheit.