Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego and Hegel's "Perception"

This is probably pretty tangential to what we’re talking about in Hegel, but I’ve noticed an interesting parallel in Husserlian phenomenology, particularly with Edmund Husserl himself and Sartre, to the Also vs. One debate in Hegel’s “Perception.” For a quick overview, I’ll explain very briefly my understanding of phenomenology from Husserl’s perspective just for some background (and my knowledge is by no means exhaustive and probably doesn’t do the study justice, and I invite anyone to add their knowledge if they know more), then discuss Husserl and Sartre’s perspectives on the Self, and finally relate them back to Hegel’s Also and One.

Though they share the same name, Husserl’s phenomenology hardly resembles Hegel’s. Phenomenology here still refers to the study of appearances, but the methodology is quite different (no Hegelian dialectic as far as I can tell). What’s essential to Husserl’s methodology is called the phenomenological reduction, which involves “bracketing” any positing of some noumenal reality behind the appearances presented to us. What’s left to us is merely a description of appearances in a sort of Cartesian spirit: Describing appearances as they appear to consciousness. So much for the methodology. Husserl had some interesting thoughts on the Ego, the Self, and it bears some similarity to Kant. We conceive of the Ego here as something that unifies all the perceptions of consciousness across time. For Husserl, the ego was a transcendental ego. This means that one’s self is somehow behind the appearances but is not given as an appearance. Rather it is the thing that holds the appearances and all consciousness together. We can deduce from this that the ego is prior to consciousness: Before there is perception of anything, there is still an ego ready to unify whatever is given to it. This last point is important because it is something that Sartre explicitly rejects.

Sartre was also a phenomenologist of the Husserlian kind. His magnum opus Being and Nothingness expands upon the existentialist themes of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in a methodology that resembles Husserl. To make many of the claims in this work, Sartre often appeals to his understanding of consciousness as a radical freedom, spontaneity; it is here where Sartre directly diverges with Husserl on the Ego. He completely rejects that the ego is transcendental, that it somehow lies behind appearances as a supersensible entity that holds consciousness together. Rather he sees the ego as a result of the workings of consciousness. In reduced form, for Sartre, there is a prereflective consciousness, for which there is no “I” or self; then there is reflective consciousness, which is not an “I” reflecting on itself but rather consciousness regarding itself as object (At this point there is still no I.); and finally reflection upon reflective consciousness produces the “I,” the ego, the self, and this self provides a sort of stability against the spontaneity of prereflective consciousness. We see then that self does not hold the appearances of consciousness together, but rather that the self is a byproduct of the workings of consciousness.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Hegel? Recall that Hegel says that in Perception we can perceive objects, but either as Also (the table is wooden, and also, firm, and also flat, etc.) or as One (there is a substance that is holding together the properties of the table: being woodeness, firm, flat, etc.). The debate between Husserl and Sartre seems to be an instance of the One vs. Also debate but with regard to the self only. Husserl seems to regard the self in sort of One fashion: The transcendental ego is that stuff that holds its properties, viz. consciousness and its contents, together. Sartre, however, more closely resembles the view of the Also. (Although I admit that for Sartre the analogy is a little loose. I think we can definitely agree though that the self for Sartre is definitely not a One at all.) I thought this was an interesting parallel. For more on Husserl and Sartre, there’s a good podcast on the same subject on Partially Examined Life series that Dr. Johnson mentioned, and I found the article on Sartre’s existentialism on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy informative.