Ep. 47: Sartre on Consciousness and the Self

Product Description

Discussing Jean-Paul Sarte's The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness (written in 1934).

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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Running Time: 2 hrs., 1 min. Recorded: November 6, 2011. Participants: Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan

As a bonus, your purchase includes a high-bitrate mp3 of the song that concludes the episode, “Thing In the World,” by Mark Lint (2011).