ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to measure the consequences of the account of the opacity of the Ego on self-knowledge. The intentional translucence of conscious experience lets consciousness become fascinated by its own creation, introducing within itself the opacity of the object it constituted. The chapter shows that Jean-Paul Sartre's radical interpretation of the intentionality thesis allows him to keep separate two claims that are usually taken to stem from one another in philosophy of mind. It highlights the paradox that arises from Sartre's theory, making the quest for self-knowledge both impossible and necessary. Sartre's version of the transparency thesis says that the description of a conscious phenomenon is always reducible to the description of the way its intentional object appears. The chapter draws on Stanely Cavell's analysis of the use of first- and third-person narrators in literature in order to provide a more refined account of this paradox about the opacity of self-knowledge.
