How Can We Understand Transcendence of the Ego?

Introduction: What Is the Self ?

As I understand the question "what is the self ?" or "what is the ego?," it is just an abstract, generic version of the personal, existential question "what am I?"

Thus understood, the question is one that can be asked only in first-person language—that is, language with such indexical expressions as "I," "here," "now." Scientific theories, when officially formulated, are written in third-person language—that is, language devoid of indexical expressions. Hence, at least on the face of it, the answer to this question cannot be given by a scientific theory. A scientific theory could imply, for example, that Homo sapiens is thus or so, such as evolved from Homo ergaster, and requires oxygen to survive. Then I could take a step further by adding the first-person statement "I am of the species Homo sapiens." But that would not end the question for me unless I added another first-person statement, such as "all that is true about me follows from the fact that I am of the species homo sapiens in such or such conditions." Those first-person statements could not be supplied by any scientific theory.

Taking the question of the self in this way contrasts with much of the literature on this subject.¹ But to understand "what is the self?" as instead a query about the nature or character of an entity that could be distinct from the person whose self it is seems to me to derive from a confusion about language. In this respect I agree with Anthony Kenny, who blames much on confusion between "my self" and "myself," and Hector-Neri Castaneda, who likens "the self" to the phrase "the whale" as in "the whale is found in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans."²

The question "what am I?" is personal and individual, and so will have different answers depending on who is asking. As a philosophical topic, though, it requires finding universal aspects, aspects that must be present, explicitly or implicitly, in everyone's answer. That is why the abstract, general formulation "what is the self?" is after all not inapt. The specific question on this level of generality that I wish to broach is whether the self, the referent of the word I, is immanent or transcendent. But that requires first of all a way to understand that question.

On Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego³

Here and elsewhere I propose to approach the question "what am I?" at least in certain respects as it was approached in existential phenomenology—as read through my (analytic philosophy) eyes.

Jean-Paul Sartre's thesis that the ego is transcendent and his arguments for this become clear in the course of a largely critical discussion of this topic in modern philosophy. He begins:

For most philosophers the ego is an "inhabitant" of consciousness. . . . We should like to show here that the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the ego of another.⁴

This is the informal explanation of what he means by "transcendent": what is not "mental" or "in thought" but what thought is about, what desires are directed to outside, in the world, is transcendent.

The transcendent objects of thought he mentions as examples include not just concreta in nature, but also such abstract entities as the proposition that 2 plus 2 equals 4. So there is as yet no implication here about what sort of thing the self might be, nor indeed that it is a thing at all.⁵

When Sartre sums up some of his conclusions, he writes:

First, the I is an existent. It has a concrete type of existence, undoubtedly different from the existence of mathematical truths, of meanings, or of spatio-temporal beings, but no less real. The I gives itself as transcendent.⁶

That the I is not in any sense "internal" became very important in the existential phenomenology of the 1940s and 1950s. Joseph Kockelmans, who was my teacher in...