PREVIEW-Episode 47: Sartre on Consciousness and the Self

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0:42 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point said I'm doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 47 is what is the self? And read by John Paul Sartre's the Transcendence of the Ego, written in a link to an online version of the text. More information on Sartre and a discussion to this episode, check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:12 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

1:14 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:17 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:20 Seth: What?

1:20 Mark: No guest? Strange. Yes, we're back to the. This is the core group, man. So Jean Paul Sartre, which I think is often. There's no good way to Americanize it. So I've heard it just as Sartre, but I prefer Sartre. That's at least the way I learned it.

1:40 Dylan: What does Wikipedia say?

1:42 Mark: Do they have pronunciations?

1:44 Seth: Wikipedia says whatever the majority of yahoos on the Internet say.

1:47 Dylan: Isn't it Wikipedians? Whatever the Wikipedians say, the Wikipedians not. They are hooligans.

1:53 Mark: Sartre.

1:54 Seth: Sartre.

1:56 Mark: I think it says Sartre on. Oh no, English. Sartre. It is right there.

2:01 Seth: Sartre.

2:02 Mark: Yeah, I just heard two different lectures that just called him Sartre, which sounds so country western.

2:07 Seth: Sartre.

2:08 Mark: Let's read some Sart. Actually, it was by like a guy from a southern university, so maybe that's why it sounds country western to me.

2:19 Seth: I can't believe I'm being stereotyped in such a way.

2:22 Mark: Oh, we're not doing ground rules, are we?

2:25 Seth: Yeah, we ought to. We've been doing it for two and a half years now.

2:28 Mark: So we took a break last time because we didn't want to make Matt our special guest because he was an actual professor. We didn't want to make him not name drop. He could talk about dumbit if he wants to. So number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about. Or has any other background in philosophy. And I know that we terrible at that one pretty constantly. Don't name drop. Just make your point. Don't say you would understand me if only you'd read Herman Cain's secrets of numerology 999. Man.

2:58 Wes: That's when he was teaching at St. John's that he wrote that book. We had a few people in the numerology when I was at St. John's Whoa.

3:08 Mark: They write the number 23 over their wall a million times and get it tattooed on the face.

3:14 Wes: Not quite so bad.

3:15 Mark: Nobody's seen that movie. It's a terrible movie.

3:17 Seth: Which one?

3:18 Mark: 23 it was called.

3:19 Seth: It had Jim Carrey.

3:21 Mark: Jim Carrey. It's ridiculous. And number three is we will be rigorous and exact. And all that we say, unless doing so would be boring. The end.

3:33 Dylan: The end.

3:34 Mark: We just had daylight savings time today, so it is an hour later starting in my biology than it normally is. I'm already tired before we say the first word about Sartre. And I have a mass of impenetrable notes in front of me. I felt in reading this transcendence of the ego. So it's subtitles an existentialist theory of consciousness. And he gives all these elements that have all these different relations to each other. And so I was trying to make some kind of chart or something, and it ended up being this long outline thing. Is it a little confusing?

4:09 Seth: Yeah. I have a lot of handwritten notes too, because I had to get a copy. I can't read electronic copies of things anymore and try to do our podcast. So I checked one out from the Austin Public Library, which is awesome. I think everybody should support it who lives in Austin. And I think my political leanings are pretty well known, even though I try not to explicitly say them. But tonight I'm going to take a very strong stand on one subject. I would like to do away with daylight savings time. I don't like setting the clock forward or back, and I don't understand the purpose of it.

4:44 Mark: I thought you were going to talk about your politics of your pro nudism stance.

4:48 Seth: My pro nudism stance?

4:50 Mark: Well, it rarely comes up.

4:52 Seth: No, I. That's definitely one of those political stances that I would like to see implemented globally, but I only enact locally, as William Carlos Williams might say, if I alone.

5:06 Mark: This is episode 47, and we have not yet ever made a joke that I can remember about how, you know, the typical radio joke of how none of us are wearing pants right now or something to that effect. I can't believe it, that we avoided it for that long.

5:20 Seth: I thought it was taken for granted

5:22 Mark: that we're all in some state of undress.

5:24 Seth: Yes, in my house, it's actually hot enough where that would not be inappropriate. I'm wearing shorts. I don't know what it's like where you guys are.

5:32 Mark: What are you wearing? Wes, are you still there? Wes?

5:37 Wes: I'm here. You really want to know what I'm wearing?

5:40 Seth: He's probably got his traditional. What's that thing called? A caftan?

5:44 Mark: We're wearing exactly what we're wearing in our pictures, on the site, in our caricatures. So I'm wearing some sort of pilgrim garb. And that would be a toga.

5:53 Wes: I'm actually. Sorry. I'm actually sarching the.

5:56 Seth: Yes, you are.

5:57 Mark: Yep, that's right.

5:59 Seth: I thought that was like a Hegel or a Kant. I have to know.

6:01 Mark: That's why he's drawn very short. Even though Wes is not short.

6:05 Seth: Yeah, he's taller than me, that's for sure. I'm easily the shortest of the three of us. Four of us. I'm just guessing. I haven't met Dylan, but I'm sure that I'm shorter than him.

6:15 Mark: I'm attempting to commission a version of Dylan. For that. We might just draw a stick figure next to the three caricatures with glasses.

6:24 Seth: How about, like the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans? Titans. The old. Just floating over one of our shoulders. So, wait a second, Wes. You're supposed to be Sartre. Sartre. Sartre.

6:37 Dylan: Yeah.

6:38 Seth: Okay, so first off, your eyes are not googly the way hises are.

6:42 Mark: Yeah. No, there were limits. I discussed this with Ken, that there are limits of how you can do a caricature and make it look like the person. So we couldn't do a Nietzsche because Nietzsche is just his giant mustache. Like, that would hide.

6:52 Wes: Yes, I would have preferred Nietzsche. That would be great.

6:55 Mark: But none of us has a giant mustache, and you can't add a feature like that and still have look like the person you want it to. It does not work as a costume.

7:03 Wes: Sartre was really ugly, though. My God,

7:08 Seth: he was kind of ugly.

7:10 Wes: Transcendence of the eyeballs.

7:14 Dylan: Well, I mean, really? Are there any beautiful philosophers?

7:18 Seth: Ooh, good question.

7:19 Mark: I think that picture. That really artsy picture of Hume. I was just looking up pictures of Hume as a potential model for Dylan's.

7:27 Dylan: He's so jowly, though.

7:28 Mark: Well, all right. Maybe it's just a beautiful painting. It's not a beautiful subject.

7:32 Seth: He's a big man, but he was apparently quite attractive to the ladies.

7:36 Wes: He was.

7:37 Unknown speaker: Really?

7:38 Seth: Yeah.

7:38 Dylan: I didn't know that.

7:39 Seth: I might just be making that up.

7:41 Wes: That's right. He was very popular when he was in France. He was very.

7:44 Seth: Yeah, Yeah.

7:45 Mark: I believe that philosopher Matt Evans is a looker. We're just talking about historical figures. I wanted to bring it to the present day. You realize if you say all philosophers are ugly, you're off every single potential celebrity guest that we could have on the show. Damn you.

8:04 Seth: Yeah. And we know that Socrates was famous for being ugly, but the busts of Plato, he strikes me as neither handsome nor ugly. I haven't had that kind of a judgment that I had to make about him.

8:17 Dylan: He was a wrestler. Right. So broad shoulders. Exactly.

8:20 Wes: Which is what Plato means.

8:21 Mark: Well, according to, I think, Seth, in our episode one that I just listened to again today for the purposes of doing a synopsis for our potential future episode guide, you said that Socrates was known as having a giant member.

8:35 Seth: Yes.

8:35 Mark: I don't know if you were just

8:36 Wes: where does that come from? Diogenes Laertius.

8:41 Seth: I don't know, man. That was like two and a half years.

8:42 Wes: Is that in the clouds? Is that Aristophanes? Like caricature?

8:46 Dylan: I don't think in the clouds that he is presented as being erotic at all.

8:51 Seth: No, he doesn't get a good. The clouds is not Socrates shiny.

8:55 Wes: I've never heard that.

8:56 Mark: So I have found we're supposed to have some growth over the episodes that we're kind of adding things more and more referring to the old episodes, but certainly beyond a certain point, like beyond six months maybe. I don't really remember what I said, so I have to go back and listen again if I want to incorporate that. So I did that for this time for the Husserl episode. Our most difficult one, the Sartre is sort of, I think, a most direct follow up on the Husserl. And I listened to some of the Heidegger as well. And yeah, I was out of control on the Husserl one. I apologize to everyone. I should blame Husserl himself and blame Seth for falling asleep and not being there for the end to moderate my manic going on and on about him. But yeah, that one was difficult even for me to follow.

9:39 Wes: Although we've gotten some compliments on that

9:41 Seth: episode, I think, which is inexplicable to me. That is easily the hardest book I've ever tried to read.

9:47 Mark: Don't we have the best sort of search result figures for like, Hegel podcast is often in our Heidegger 1 is one of the most downloaded ones that we've ever had. So I think those harder continental figures, there's a hunger for that. People aren't like, I don't understand Dawkins. Can someone explain Dawkins to me? You know, they're not like that with Descartes, but with these guys, what the hell are they talking about? There's a need that we're fulfilling. Maybe.

10:14 Seth: Yeah. Well, I think if you want to. I mean, at least with Heidegger, if you want any kind of podcast content, there's not a lot of options. Whereas there's 100,000 videos of Sam Harris and Dawkins and all Those Clowns on YouTube. Aside from Dreyfus, I don't know what else there is out there.

10:31 Mark: And when I was looking for Sartre videos, which we'll put some links to, some on the website, I was mostly seeing references to Sartre's later work, his existentialism, which of course, what he's best known for, with all that emotional connotations of nausea and angst and despair, which none of that is in this book. Transcendence of the Ego.

10:53 Wes: Yes. We chose a very technical groundwork for all the juicier stuff, and I'm sure people would rather get straight to.

10:59 Mark: And one of the videos I saw that you can find is Bob Solomon, our late Prof. From University of Texas, and his. I think probably the thing that Solomon was most interested in as a philosopher, I would think, is Sartre's view of freedom, this absolute freedom and thus responsibility. There are no excuses. He has a whole existentialist lecture series, and I believe no Excuses is the title of the thing. And we do get some of that in here, in fact. Whereas his view of freedom, this absolute freedom, sounds just kind of bizarre, this book, Transcendence to the Ego, kind of gives, I think, an ontological basis for that.

Why this radical freedom? Oh, because there's some sort of disconnect between the sort of analysis that we give to consciousness and the sort of analysis that we give to things which are determined. Which, when I say it like that, it sounds just like Kant on Ethics, if you want to look back to that episode. So there's. There's more to it.

11:52 Dylan: Well, why don't we start? He lays out at the beginning, sort of what his question is going to be, and he lines it up essentially, you guys correct me if I'm wrong with Kant and you're wrong. Thanks.

12:04 Mark: Okay, sorry.

12:04 Dylan: With Kant and Descartes, right he's taking on the question of. He says, On 34 of my book,

12:10 Mark: there is only one book I believe.

12:12 Dylan: Okay. He says, the question maybe formulated is, thus is the I we encounter in our consciousness made possible by the synthetic unity of our representations, or is it the I which in fact unites the representations to each other?

12:25 Mark: So let's say that more slowly, we

12:27 Wes: could give some background on what this idea of transcendence and transcendental.

12:31 Dylan: Yes, let's do that.

12:32 Mark: Okay, let's refresh our Kant in Husserl.

12:34 Wes: Traditionally, a transcendent object, right, Is an object that's beyond experience. It's unknowable. And so traditionally, the typical example of such an object was God. And you could say soul and other sorts of objects like that, objects of metaphysics. Kant comes along and offers a critique of metaphysics where he objects to the notion of any knowledge of transcendent objects. But what he substitutes is a sort of critical knowledge of the transcendental, where transcendental, in a way, is beyond experience as well. But really, anything that's transcendental is the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience.

So Kant talks about the transcendental ideality of space and time and then his categories, including causality. So it's really. Hume actually is the first to put us on the path of the transcendental, these things that really don't come in through experience. You're skeptical about causality. You realize that causality is not something that comes in through the senses. It's supplied by the mind in some way. And so that's what the transcendental is.

13:41 Mark: So it seems like it's a logical derivation instead of a causal derivation. It's not saying our experience is such because we have these faculties of understanding and sensibility that come and cause experience like this. Because again, like you just said, causality is a notion of things within experience. You can't apply the notion of causality beyond experience. That's just the way Kant's system works.

14:05 Wes: Well, which is to say that, yeah, when Kant was describing the transcendental ego, he was warning us against reifying it. He wasn't saying that there's this substantial ego, like a Cartesian ego, that's working on experience to unify it. He was saying that for experience to be unified in the way that we understand it, for experience to be experienced, it has to be capable of being accompanied by what he calls the. I think, or you could call that the ego as well. And we can talk about why that is, but just to get us to the phenomenologists for someone like Husserl.

Husserl reintroduces this word transcendent, which has some things in common with the transcendental. But I think that one of the reasons for returning to the transcendent is that any sort of object will turn out to be transcendent. And why is that? Because what we're given, an experience, say if we're looking at any object of perception, say a chair in front of me, we're given moments in time where we have a series of perspectives. Let's say the chair from the front, the chair from the back. And the object itself really transcends that. The object isn't any one perspective, but it's the thing behind all those different possible perspectives.

So Sartre will talk of the ideal infinite series of all the different possible takes on the object. So that's where you get this reintroduction of transcendence, which applies to any old object. The argument that Sartre is going to be making is that there's no such thing as transcendental ego, but there is a transcendent ego in the sense that the ego is like any object, and it's transcendent in that sense.

15:40 Dylan: I was just going to have one little quibble about ideal and want to substitute unity in there, because it seemed to me that especially with the case of the ego, but in his analysis of the way we would interact with any kind of object, it's that that transcendent aspect is the unifying character of all that infinite progression.

16:01 Wes: Well, it's the ideal unity. Right.

16:03 Mark: I would object to the notion. I can see why you want to say that the object itself is behind all the appearances. But that's explicitly what the phenomenologist wants to deny that this is why Dylan was just saying that it's the unity, the synthetic unity of appearances, which is very Kantian kind of terminology. And I think the move from Kant to Husserl is, if anything, to clarify what transcendental means. That for Husserl it really is all just supposed to be a description of experience, because that's what phenomenology is. I'm not giving a behind the scenes look at what makes up experience. I'm giving just here are the essential structures of experience. And maybe that's what Kant is doing too.

16:45 Wes: For Husserl, though, there is a transcendental ego behind it. Yes, for later Husserl.

16:49 Dylan: And that's why this book is partly a criticism of Husserl. On exactly that point.

16:54 Mark: I thought what was at issue was Husserl is, like I said, he's just trying to describe the contents of experience. And one of those contents is a transcendent, which is again, like, if you say this chair in front of me is transcendent, that means that what it is is the series of possible appearances of the chair, not just even the whole series of actual appearances. So even the whole series of things is not going to be enough. There are always more things. So in that sense, it's transcendent, but it is a function of experience. It's not referring to something behind experience. There is no behind.

17:30 Wes: Behind is rejected with regard to the transcendental by Sartre, although it's accepted, Husserl will say, at least in the case of the transcendental ego, there is this sort of behind. But let's get at what I mean. We agree on the fundamental issue, which

17:43 Mark: is that we argued last.

17:46 Wes: There's a reason why the phenomenologists introduced this transcendent object. And what they were getting at is the concept of intentionality. What they were rejecting in Kant, or one of the implications of Kant, is that you have all these objects within experience that are essentially constructed. They take a sense data from the outside, that's the only thing they get. And then the object itself is constructed within experience and entirely dependent on the ego. For the phenomenologist, the object has to be independent of the ego. Intentionality reaches out to the independent object.

And even though you're looking at. When you do phenomenology, you're looking at the ways in which consciousness, you could say, constructs things. It's important to say that even when you have a dream, even when you're imagining a mountain, you're not simply directing your consciousness towards a content of consciousness, you're directing your consciousness towards a real object that is external to consciousness.

18:45 Seth: I'm sorry, were you talking Kant or Husserl?

18:47 Wes: I'm describing the fundamental insight of the phenomenologists.

18:50 Seth: Well, the phenomenologist takes a neutral stance with respect to the existence of the

18:55 Wes: object for the sake of doing phenomenology and describing the structure of experience. Yes, you do the reduction.

19:01 Seth: Right.

19:02 Wes: But the idea is that the object isn't simply a construction of the ego. So for instance, two plus two equals four is an object towards which intentionality is directed. It's not simply a construction of the mind. Sure, but at that point, after all, this is like. So for this is discussed in the introduction and by Sartre himself and all this.

19:26 Seth: Maybe it's just the way you're saying

19:27 Mark: It Wes, we had some disagreement on the Husserl episode, since I just listened to this, on how to take Husserl on this point. And maybe we can just leave that. I mean, let me give the two possible interpretations of him, but Sartre is actually very unambiguous. So we will spend the rest of our time talking about this. One is, as Seth was saying, I mean, Husserl is, what he's famous for is this epoché or phenomenological reduction, which is I'm just going to describe the contents of consciousness and I'm not going to say either way whether there's something behind it or not.

And then there's always the question like, well, that's how he starts, but how does he finish? And in the book that we read, Cartesian Meditations, he actually ended up as some kind of idealist, which means that he actually thought that the entirety of our experience is the field of the transcendental ego. And the transcendental ego then is just a way of referring to the structure of this experience. Again, it's not a secret thing hiding outside of experience, because nothing is outside of experience. All the transcendent objects are within experience.

But that leaves a giant problem. And he even says even the recognition of other people of those objects and the recognition of other people themselves, that itself is within experience. So it seems crazy, it seems idealistic. So he came out as some kind of idealists.

20:45 Wes: You can be an idealist and still say that the object has to be external to any individual consciousness, because that's the whole point of talking about imaginary mountains. And two plus two equals four.

20:55 Mark: There you go.

20:56 Wes: Those things are mental. The phenomenologist doesn't deny that those things are mental. And you could even be an idealist and say everything is mental, but they're not the particular. When I'm thinking about two plus two, this is the anti psychologist position, right? If we remember when I'm calculating 2 plus 2 equals 4, I'm not dealing with Wes's particular representation, the contents of Wes's consciousness. And even if you think of two plus two equals four as purely mental, I'm dealing with an object that anyone can grasp. This goes back to Frege as well. Frege and Husserl share the same anti psychologistic position. This is a position which Sartre is going to extend to the idea of the ego. The idea that it's not just the particular content, a representation of my consciousness that I'm talking about, even when I talk about an imaginary mountain, is extremely

21:43 Mark: important to this whole project in our Husserl discussion. I was attributing to Husserl as well as then later in the Hegel discussion. This fundamental insight which exactly describes what Sartre's view is, which at the time I called aspectualism, which is intentionality, which all these guys have in common, like you were saying, is the notion that our states of consciousness are always aimed at some. So in other words, it's not aimed at some imminent content. And what I mean by imminent is entirely within your consciousness. I don't want to overgeneralize this because maybe there could be some imminent content, like an image, like a wisp of a dream or something like that.

That's not something objective that you can grasp in any way. That's not a transcendent. But ordinary perception, at least, is always grasping something. Let's not say external. We've already said transcendent. But there's just still the question, sort of, what picture does that give you? If you say consciousness always has content. You could have a picture of consciousness as like a big box that always has something in it. And you could even say, like Frege, that it has a Fregean sense in it. That is an objective thing or a word. We all use the same words.

And I have this word in my head, and you have that word in your head, something like that. But we could still have a notion that it's still within us. So that's sort of a version of intentionality. That still is this very internalist, like Descartes, scanning the contents of my consciousness. This is the Cartesian theater, something like that. And that's exactly what Sartre, at least, who the hell knows what Husserl really believes? But Sartre, at least, is entirely against that, that he's not like. I just described Husserl as being like the whole world is my ego just unpacked.

In some strange way, we are actually, and this almost sounds like the naive realist position. We are actually directly perceiving the external things. The only notion of external that makes any sense at all. So I'm most profound only not seeing my image of the chair. I'm seeing the chair. And you can see the same chair. It's just, you know, you see it in a different way. You see it through a different aspect. And as you were saying, those aspects are infinite. So when we say, well, what is the chair? I don't see the whole chair, in fact, because I don't see the whole chair.

He says perception is always doubtful. Right.

23:58 Dylan: I think you have to Come in at this point and say, what is it? I mean, the key seems to me for Sartre on this is that the ego represents the unity of those perceptions for those aspects. So. And he wants to even say they're self constrained. So on the one hand, the ego isn't a skeleton on which all these perceptions hang. And it's not an entity that receives perceptions, you know, like a mini brain or something. It is in itself the unity of those perceptions.

24:25 Mark: I was trying to forestall the jumping to the ego.

24:28 Dylan: How about the me and the I? Right.

24:30 Seth: I feel like this has gotten very complicated very quickly. And when I read it, I don't remember it being this complicated this quickly.

24:38 Mark: Well, it's just if we're going to give a picture of the historical progression of what exactly Sartre is objecting to, One way into that, to continue our previous discussion, which of course was hellishly complicated in the Searle episode, is to talk about the progress in the epistemology. And this is not a book of epistemology. It lays it out sort of as a side issue. And I think it is enlightening to understand what's in the book. But if we really want to do what is Sartre's argument against idealism, that would mean reading the beginning of Being Nothingness.

25:09 Dylan: We don't have to do is. I haven't read hardly any of that stuff. I read a little bit of Husserl, but I haven't read much of Cartesian Meditations. And I thought that this held together pretty well without having to do that.

25:21 Seth: I feel like maybe there's some extraneous stuff getting in here. His point is very concise. He's making one specific point, I think, in this book, or at least one major point.

25:32 Mark: I've said all we need to say about the epistemology, and let's not argue about Husserl's epistemology.

25:36 Seth: All right? So what you take away from Husserl for Sartre is that consciousness is intentional. And all that means is that consciousness is always consciousness of an object. It always has an intention, it has an intentional object. It's always consciousness of something. So you're aware of something, you're thinking of something. Whatever the case may be, then when consciousness takes itself as that object, when consciousness turns on itself, so to speak, and takes itself as an object, it still has this intentional character, but it's somewhat different.

And what he basically says is that Husserl couldn't stand the thought that that's all there was to it. There was consciousness of Things or ideas or whatever you want to call it. And then consciousness of self. But there was nothing that held it all together or that somehow grounded it or transcended it. And so we had the transcendental ego, which was the I that stands behind self consciousness, that gives you identity. And what Sartre is basically saying in this book, as I read it, was, you can't make that move. Husserl was wrong to make that move.

The only thing there is is consciousness. And he breaks it down into unreflective consciousness, which is regular old consciousness of objects, and then reflective consciousness, which is consciousness reflecting on itself. And what he then spends time talking about is, what is the nature of consciousness? And it turns out, of course, that there's no I that transcends it. There's no substance that underlies it. It simply is the unity of experience. And that's all there is to it.

27:10 Dylan: There's a great place where Sartre summarizes this. On page 39, bottom of 39, he says, the individuality of consciousness evidently stems from the nature of consciousness. Consciousness can be limited only by itself. Thus it constitutes a synthetic and individual totality entirely isolated from other totalities of the same type. And the I can evidently be only an expression rather than a condition of this incommunicability and inwardness of consciousness. At the end of the paragraph, consequently, we may reply without hesitation. The phenomenological conception of consciousness renders the unifying and individualizing role of the I totally useless. It is consciousness, on the contrary, which makes possible the unity and personality of my I. The transcendental I, therefore has no reason

27:57 Seth: d' etre raison, right?

28:01 Mark: So even just back to Descartes, right? His primary move is, I observe that there is thinking going on, that there is contents of my consciousness. Therefore there must be an I that is causing this thought. And that's exactly what Sartre thinks is not going on, that the I is not causing it. The I is constituted sort of as an after effect, reflecting on the thought. It's just. The thought is just there. It is sufficient to provide being for itself. It doesn't need an eye to give it ontological status, to underlie it, like you were saying.

28:31 Wes: Well, the other part of this is that the reason why Husserl thought that there was this synthesizing ego that was necessary was that you take a succession of consciousnesses. Sartre talks a lot about consciousnesses, right? So those are different moments in time, different acts. I have a succession of one, you know, I'm walking around the chair, I have one perspective, next perspective, so on and so forth. Well, one necessary condition of me being able to take the chair as an object and to unify all those different perspectives is that each of those perspectives belong to the same consciousness.

The idea of an object identity, A equals A is predicated on the idea of identity within consciousness. So for Kant, for something to be an experience, it must at least be, in principle, be able to be accompanied by. I think all of this is going on within time, and I have to be able to reach backwards and collect all these different consciousnesses, and that's what gives me my object. But they have to belong to the same me in order to get there. Kant warns against making a substantial synthesizer out of that ego, but Husserl returns to this idea that you can have an ego which is actually unifying experience as a sort of agent.

Sartre wants to take us back to the point where in fact, consciousness can unify itself. One of his main points is that a single moment of consciousness is all of consciousness. It sort of carries on the past consciousnesses with it. It has that unifying agency within itself, and you don't need this transcendental ego to do that for you.

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