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Discussing Jean-Paul Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego (written in 1934).
This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 1-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Sartre" and look under "Albums."
What is consciousness, and does it necessarily involve an "I" who is conscious of things? Sartre says no: typical experience is consciousness of some object and doesn't involve the experience of myself as someone having this consciousness. It's only when we reflect on our own conscious experiences that we posit this "I." The ego is our own creation, or more precisely a social creation. This means that far from being some primordial structure of all experience, this transparent thing inside us that we have more immediate knowledge of than anything else, the ego is an object: it has parts we don't see, and we can be wrong when we make judgments about it. Other people might even know us better than we know ourselves.
This is a difficult text, and we spend lots of time bickering about what Sartre might mean by terms like "transcendent" or "non-positional consciousness," so surely you will love that. Read more about the topic.
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End song: "Thing in the World," by Mark Lint. This song was begun around 1996 but mostly written and wholly recorded just now, with Mark playing all the instruments, with lyrics actually motivated by this Sartre reading.
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You can purchase the Close Reading mentioned at the end of the episode here or get it free as a PEL Citizen.
Martin Larsson says
December 2, 2011 at 11:37 amGood looking philosopher? Kierkegaard is as close to a boy band member as you get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard
PW says
December 2, 2011 at 5:27 pmAnother great episode.
“The ego is an intellectual construct that defines itself through its reflection in the world” rough idea is developed in Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach” and “Figments of reality” by Stewart and Cohen.
(Possibly this was mentioned in the podcast ..)
Masako says
December 2, 2011 at 9:46 pmLudwig Wittgenstein is said to have been quite handsome. Part of his appeal, I suspect.
David Buchanan says
December 13, 2011 at 11:06 pmThey say Bourdieu had his fair share of erotic capital and I’ve heard that Nietzsche was a real chick-magnet.
Kyle says
December 25, 2011 at 10:42 pmNothing like listening to an excellent and very thought provoking discussion and then being overwhelmed by toilet humor….”Suddenly being overcome and filled with the quality of rupugnance and hatred when somebody farted in the room”
That cracked me up…
Although I would think the perception would be repugnance, and then hatred perhaps on reflection and rendering a judgment. Flatus does not usually inspire hatred.
dmf says
February 6, 2012 at 8:50 amhere is a posting on Sartre that may tie in with issues raised in the ZAMM and M-Ponty pcasts that might be a nice lead in to structuralism and perhaps head us towards cybernetics:
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/antipraxis/
James Pendley says
May 25, 2012 at 2:52 amAppreciated this episode. I’d read a lot of Sartre but have never discussed this book w/ anyone. Found that the selections read on this podcast were the ones I had highlighted and could relate to some of the comments. Just a great show with a worthy objective.
Seth Paskin says
May 25, 2012 at 9:24 amThanks James! This was one of my favorites as well. You might want to check out Mark’s close reading of the first section of Being and Nothingness.
Cheers,
–seth
dmf says
May 30, 2013 at 12:24 pmhttp://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publiclecturesandevents/20130528_1830_sartreOnTheTranscendentalI.mp3
“This lecture will discuss some of the central ideas contained within Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego and consider their continued relevance for contemporary accounts of conscious experience.”
Simone says
June 6, 2013 at 3:25 amThis episode is really great. Really really great.
I especially love when Seth’s response to Mark’s comment about Heidegger’s ‘bullshit’, “Hey Heidegger invented that! He wasn’t steeped in it, he INVENTED it. Don’t make me take my earrings off!”
Jonathon Jones says
September 24, 2015 at 6:38 pmMy favorite part was a similarly snarky bit in which Seth tried to tell Wes “you can’t talk about objects” and then Wes informed him that he was actually quoting Sartre at that point.
But really, the whole episode wonderfully shows how people can get really fired up about what outsiders would think are trivial bits of interpretation, and how this kind of fired up argument can actually be extremely productive. I loved it.
Alex Kalgin says
June 21, 2013 at 2:14 pmBrilliant episode. The song at the end is great, too. I have to admit, I skip the closing songs most of the time, but this one was so good, that I even went and downloaded it in good quality and have been listening to it since :).
Is it possible to find the lyrics of “Thing in the World”? 🙂 I checked Mark’s website, but it does not seem to have it.
JAMES BRIGGS says
September 29, 2014 at 9:47 pmThe hard stuff is easy. 1. transcendent means not in or of the world. That’s the whole idea that the world doesn’t feel and we do making us alien and absurd. 2. non-positional consciousness means many things but the most basic is that consciousness doesn’t a position just like space doesn’t have a position. Space is a place where energy can occur and consciousness is a place where thoughts emotions and perceptions can occur.
What is consciousness, and does it necessarily involve an “I” who is conscious of things? Seems difficult but all he is saying is consciousness is rarely self conscious. Instead waking consciousness is usually aware that it is conscious of something other than itself and experiences it as an other.