Untrue to One’s Own Self Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego

While recent scholarship has increasingly succeeded in making a case for the importance of The Transcendence of the Ego (TE), Sartre’s first substantial philosophical publication, different ap-proaches up to now seem to share the same twofold methodologi-cal premise. Since TE’s explicit object of philosophical concern is the self, the assumption seems to be that philosophical commentary must equally focus, first, on the notion of the self, and, second, on what Sartre explicitly says about it. To be sure, commentators are not unaware that the notion of the self, as discussed in TE, is deeply connected with a wide variety of other notions of such philosophical importance as consciousness, personal identity, reflec-tion, intentionality, temporality, contingency, freedom, the possibil-ity of an ethics, and so on. Thus, none of these notions fail to receive serious attention in two recent and important contribution