our consciousness, is it made possible by the synthetic unity of our
representations or rather is it the Ego that unifies these representations
among themselves?” (TE 95 ). He reverses the usual response by supporting
the former. Consciousness sustains its unity from two sources, the identity
of the objects that it “intends” (the “synthetic unity of its representations”)
and the temporal flow of consciousness itself.
Consider a melody. It has a unity that is not attributable to a substance
(for example Descartes’s “thinkingthing”), but that which comes from
within: “from the absolute indissolubility of its elements” (TE 114 – 115 ).^43
Just as the world is the infinite synthetic totality – the “horizon,” as Husserl
says, of everything the prereflective consciousness can intend – so, Sartre
argues, the ego is the horizon of all our psychic states, qualities and actions.
“The Ego is to psychic objects what the World is to things” (TE 115 ).
Mention of a melody evokes temporality, one of Husserl’s most
original phenomenological analyses. We have observed Sartre’s life-long
interest in time, dating from his encounter with Bergson’s theory while
in the lyce ́e and his not uncritical acceptance of the same in the following
years. Sartre’s reading of Husserl’s lectures on internal time conscious-
ness left him with another perspective on temporality to be adopted and
critically adapted as he had done with Bergson’s perspective (and later
Heidegger’s).^44 Husserl describes our experience of the temporal “flow”
as a series of overlapping waves of “protentions” of the futural
(^43) In a footnote, Sartre mentions Husserl’s “remarkable study” of synthetic totality in his
discussion of wholes and parts in his thirdLogical Investigation§§ 17 and 18 (seeTE 190 ,
n. 64 ). The analogy of the flowing unity of time with that of a melody has been a favored
image among philosophers for comprehending the paradoxical nature of both. An amateur
musician, as we have seen, Sartre made occasional reference to the musical line and the ebb
and flow of narrative in the authors he discussed in his Le Havre lectures ( 1932 – 1933 ),
especially the works of Virginia Woolf. Regarding her novelMrs. Dalloway, for example, he
observes: “It is striking that Virginia Woolf seems to direct herself toward a musical
conception of the technique of the novel. Following Gide, Huxley and Joyce himself, she
seems in a sense to be telling us: ‘Here music is called for...some symphony with its chords,
its dissonances and its modulations, with its intricate base below, each of the instruments be
44 they violin, flute, trumpet or whatever, would play its melody” (ES^16 ,^112 ).
See Edmund Husserl,Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness, trans. and ed. John B. Brough
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991 ). This is a later version from theGesamtausgabeto which Sartre
would not have had access. His reference is to what is translated by James F. Churchill asThe
Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964
[Marburg, 1928 ]). For Sartre’s critique of Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger on temporality,
see below,Chapter 7 andBN 107 – 170 ;EN 150 – 218.
The first fruit of Sartre’s Berlin efforts 73