characterizes that reduction as an act offreedom and concludes that
the resistance to performing it stems from a “fear” of that very freedom.
The empirical ego, in effect, is a life jacket that keeps us from sinking
into the depths of our own possibility – what Kierkegaard called “the
possibility of possibility,” the consciousness of which isAngst. In a form
of self-deception that he would famously term “bad faith” inBeing and
Nothingness, Sartre claims that we resist the evidence that our ego is
an object (almost) like any other psychical object. It offers a haven of
identity from the storms of our own piercing consciousness, but at the
price of blocking or distracting the consciousness that constitutes and
sustains it. As Nietzsche reversed the cause–effect relation in order to
obviate the substantial self or responsible subject, so Husserl, on Sartre’s
reading, is inverting the relation between consciousness and ego that
offers false comfort to us in the natural attitude. The ego is constituted
by the reflective consciousness, not vice versa.
A major corollary is that the “essential function of the Ego is not so much
theoretical as practical” (TE 128 ). Rather than serving chiefly as a unifying
ideal, Sartre suggests, “perhaps the essential role [of the empirical ego] is to
conceal from consciousness its proper spontaneity.” And since one cannot
distinguish voluntary from involuntary spontaneity, he insists, “everything
occurs as if consciousness constituted the Ego as a false representation of
itself ” (TE 129 ). And where Husserl (or his student Eugen Fink) appeals to
the “miracle” of transcendental reduction, Sartre sees theepochēas a
courageous and hence relatively rare act of freedom that after the war he
will describe in hisNotebooks for an Ethicsas the willingness to “live without
the Ego” and endorse as “authenticity” (NE 414 ).
Anyone familiar with the work of Husserl will realize immediately that
Sartre, despite the admiration which he held for Husserl’s writings up to
the time he stopped following them, was not a slavish commentator. In
fact, his startling failure in the first part of theagre ́gationexam revealed his
independence of thought (and perhaps originality) evenin extremis. And
when he believed he was being true to the spirit of Husserl’s position,
Sartre was nonetheless reading these texts in his own way. He was to do
the same with Heidegger as he would with most every major thinker he
encountered. If we date the composition of theTranscendence of the Egoto
1934 , then the “existential” character of Sartrean phenomenology has
revealed itself a full decade ahead ofBeing and Nothingness.
The first fruit of Sartre’s Berlin efforts 75