JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Phenomenology59consciousness. That there is an objective world available to us is argued tobe an achievement of consciousness. It is the positing and constitution ofthe world that makes knowledge of it possible. If we ask how consciousnessitself is possible, then Husserl’s answer, increasingly from 1913, is thatconsciousness is grounded in the pure ego (reine Ich). The term‘transcendental ego’ (transzendentale Ich) is first used in the ErstePhilosophie and Phanomenologische Psychologie and appears in thesecond volume of Ideas (which Husserl worked on from 1912–28).There are three aspects of this Husserlian picture which Sartre cruciallyrejects: the transcendental ego, the essentialism and the epoché. In TheTranscendence of the Ego (1937) Sartre argues that the existence of thetranscendental ego is inconsistent with the unity of consciousness. Thereis the unity of consciousness, so there is no transcendental ego. The verypostulation of the transcendental ego is phenomenologically illegitimatebecause phenomenology describes only what appears to consciousnessand, as subject of consciousness, no transcendental ego appears toconsciousness.Sartre’s existentialism, including Roquentin’s meditations in Nausea onthe contingency of things being and being what they are, is an implicitrepudiation of Husserl’s essentialism. Husserl grounds what is in necessity,Sartre in contingency.Sartre rejects the phenomenological epoché because it entails thatconscious states may be coherently studied in abstraction from their realobjects in the world. To understand this we need to turn to the phenomenologyof Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).Heidegger’s massive and influential Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)(1927) is an attempt to clarify the question of being (Seinsfrage). The questionof being is not What exists? but What is it for anything to be rather than notbe?, What exactly does it consist in for there to be something rather thannothing?. Heidegger thinks the question of being has been forgotten orrepressed since Plato and Aristotle. It was thought in a pure form, whichshould be recovered, by the pre-socratic philosophers, notably Parmenidesand Heraclitus. However, Heidegger thinks a pre-requisite for the inquiryinto being is an inquiry into the being of the inquirer: the being who iscapable of raising the question of being. Heidegger’s name for one’s ownbeing, or the kind of existence exhibited by human being, is Dasein.