Abstract

Sartre says that no Husserlian transcendental ego can exist because it would have to be simultaneously both a principle of unification and a concrete, individual moment in the stream of consciousness. If the former, it could not be experienced phenomenologically and would become a hypothetical and purely theoretical construction, nor would it be congruent with the phenomenological idea of consciousness as experience. If the latter, it could not unify all moments of consciousness because it would exist merely as one of the moments to be unified. Against Sartre’s argument, we submit that the ego can be and is both these things simultaneously, owing to the directional character of consciousness which Husserl describes in his lectures on time consciousness.