ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins with the need to break free from the two opposed but equally false propositions: that the self is distinct from, wholly above, the stream of its experiences, and that the self is nothing other than the stream of its experiences. He talks about Immanuel Kant, and in particular with those aspects of Kant's Groundwork which are most at variance with J. P. Sartre. Clearly the Kantian noumenal self provides a strong conception of personal identity through time, but people pay a price. Such a 'pure' self cannot be changed by experience; the ethical sphere remains 'a perpetual ought-to-be which never is', unable to be appropriated by the particular self. The self as noumenal will is, to all intents and purposes, as radically indeterminate as Sartre's being for-itself. For Sartre, man is condemned to be free, condemned to invent humanity in his every act or forebearance.
