common-sense awareness. It is the “I” or the “me” of our scientific
experiments and our everyday experience – what Husserl calls the
“natural attitude.”
The transcendental “Ego” or “consciousness,” on Kant’s view, is the
subject that cannot be objectified because it is the condition of the
possibility of every conscious act.^36 It is the “I think,” as Kant says,
that accompanies our awareness but is not the object of any awareness
itself. We must conclude to its existence by “transcendental” (or “regres-
sive”) argument from fact to the condition of its possibility. Sartre adds
the “ought to” (doit pouvoir) accompany all of our representations in
Kant’s formulation because he is going to insist that it doesn’t always do
so; that our conscious acts are for the most part “prereflective” and hence
“egoless.” The empirical ego, the only one Sartre admits, makes its
appearance only when we reflect. In fact, such reflection “constitutes”
that ego, either as subject (“I”) or as object (“me”), depending on the
circumstance. In effect, this is how Sartre understands phenomenology
as adescriptiveand not a deductive science; as a kind of broad empiri-
cism, one that allows for the intuition of essences.
The genius of the “transcendental turn” that Kant and his heirs
effected is that it seems to short-circuit the skeptical doubt that has
plagued philosophy since the ancient Greeks and which assumed par-
ticular virulence with David Hume in the eighteenth century. In fact
both Kant and Husserl reckon Hume a critical force to be dealt with.
Counterintuitively, the transcendental turn concedes that such funda-
mental principles as “the principle of causality” or basic concepts like
that of a “substantial self ” cannot be known in themselves. This appears
at first to be a total capitulation to the skeptics such as Hume, who
question our ability to know cause and effect, for example, as features of
the world as it is “in itself,” independent of our awareness of it, or to
( 1933 ): 319 – 383 as well as his observation that “Husserl’s concept of transcendental ego is
identical with Criticism’s [neoKantian] concept of ‘transcendental apperception’” (Eugene
Fink, “Husserl’s Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism,” in Roy O. Elvelton [ed.],The
Phenomenology of Husserl[Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1970 ], 90 ). Husserl endorsed this essay36 by his assistant in a prefatory statement.
Kant speaks of the “transcendental unity of apperception” but not of “transcendental Ego”
or “transcendental consciousness or subjectivity” as does Husserl (see Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith [New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1965 ], § 16 B, 131 – 132 ;TE 177 ,n. 5 ).
The first fruit of Sartre’s Berlin efforts 67