ABSTRACT
In 1934, during a stay in Berlin, Sartre wrote The Transcendence of the Ego. It was during this stay that Sartre discovered Husserl’s phenomenology, specifically Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology (1913/2014). This text radically informed Sartre’s own approach to phenomenology, sharpening and refining his conception of the relationship between the transcendental consciousness and the ego. We can read the work of Sartre not so much as a complete rejection of Husserl’s phenomenology, but as a radicalization of Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness. For Husserl, indeed, the transcendental consciousness must be understood as fundamentally egological, as the consciousness of an ego, or, to say that otherwise, as inhabited by a transcendental subject, which is presented by Husserl as the source and principle of the unity of the intentional consciousness. Sartre, in contrast, thinks that the principle of intentionality, discovered by Husserl, must be radicalized-the ego is a worldly object constituted by the intentional consciousness when such a consciousness becomes reflexive. The ego, according to Sartre, can indeed claim, “It is a transcendent pole of synthetic unity, like the object-pole of the unreflected attitude. But this pole appears only in the world of reflection” (Sartre 2004, p. 21). On Husserl’s view, the field of the transcendental consciousness becomes reachable as a “new region of being,” to the phenomenological investigation, after an act of suspension of our natural attitude toward the world. This natural attitude designates our natural and spontaneous belief in the existence of an external world. The suspension of this belief (or, to use Husserl’s Greek terminology, “thesis”) Husserl-taking a concept belonging originally to Ancient Skepticismnames “Epokhè.” Through the Epokhè, Husserl presents the philosopher as “parenthesizing” or “putting out of action” our main existential belief towards the world. The “Epokhè” is then supposed, in the Husserlian perspective, to make the field of transcendental consciousness reachable to the phenomenological investigation, as a “region of being” that is offered to the phenomenological reflection once our acts of “positing” the world are suspended.
