Transcendental ego vs. empirical ego

Husserl's trouble, Witkacy wrote to Ingarden, is that he lacks a body: in Shore's retelling, just eyes, glasses and a beard floating in space, never present in the real world as a person.

Strip away the contingent particulars distinguishing empirical egos and a transcendental ego remains: the deepest, most essential I, yet universal and identical in everyone, as H2O underlies all water.

Put simply Husserl: strip away everything that makes each actual person different, and a "transcendental ego" is left: the deepest core of the self, yet the same in everyone. To use the lecture's analogy, it is like H2O in all water.

In the text In the Fifth Cartesian Meditation (§56), Husserl describes other egos as "monads, existing for themselves precisely as I exist for myself", a plurality he calls transcendental intersubjectivity.

Where Freud locates the essential self in what is most hidden, the transcendental ego is pure light: nothing in it stays concealed, and knowing is a matter of clear seeing.

Put simply Freud thinks the most important part of the self is what is most hidden. Husserl's pure self is the opposite: nothing in it stays hidden, and knowing means seeing clearly.

Husserl, in Shore's judgment, wants to dance at both weddings at once, as the Polish proverb forbids: subjectivity's full depth and objectivity's firm certainty, surrendering neither.

Put simply Shore's judgment: Husserl tries to "dance at two weddings at once," as a Polish proverb says you cannot. He wants all the depth of the inner self and all the firm certainty of objective knowledge, giving up neither.

Husserl's transcendental ego is wholly transparent to itself; Dasein never is. Forever up to something, evading something, tempted toward inauthenticity, it stays partly hidden from itself, closer to Freud.

Put simply Husserl's pure self can see all of itself clearly. Heidegger's human being never can. Always busy with something, dodging something, tempted to follow the crowd, it stays partly hidden from itself. In this Heidegger is closer to Freud.

I have no direct line into anyone else's primordial experience. So for Husserl, another person counts as an existing other only insofar as my consciousness constitutes them as such.

Put simply Husserl: I can never live through another person's experience from the inside. So, for me, someone else is another person only because my own consciousness makes sense of them as one.

Husserl's reduction brackets whatever may or may not exist, other egos included; only my transcendental ego stays unbracketed. What remains is the sphere of ownness: what is mine.

Put simply Husserl's reduction asks me to put aside every question about what exists, other people included. Only my own "I" stays. What remains is my "sphere of ownness": whatever is given to me as mine.

Stein's objection to the transcendental ego is that it has no body. A subject, she insists, cannot be conceived as bodiless pure consciousness; philosophy has to reckon with embodiment.

Put simply Edith Stein's objection to Husserl: you cannot picture a person as a pure, bodiless consciousness. Any account of the self has to reckon with our bodies.

Descartes's cogito, Husserl's transcendental ego, Heidegger's Dasein, Sartre's radical freedom: each keeps an indubitable self at the center, and Foucault's early work revolts against that sovereign subject.

Put simply Foucault's early work rebels against the "sovereign subject": the self that philosophers from Descartes to Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre kept at the center as the one thing beyond doubt.

Foucault rejects one approach above all, the phenomenological, which gives the observing subject absolute priority and ends in a transcendental consciousness; scientific discourse should be analyzed as discursive practice.

Put simply Foucault rejects above all the phenomenological approach, which gives the observing mind absolute priority and ends in a "transcendental consciousness". The history of scientific discourse should instead be analyzed as "discursive practice": how people speak and write.