Deleting the Ego

Why, Leszel Kolakowski ( Husserl Search For Certitude ) wants to know, do philosophers talke about “Ego” when they mean the person, the self, or the soul? He thinks it’s a trick of language: You can’t say that the Ego is the philosopher, a real “I,” since for these philosophers the Ego in view is not identical to any particular person. It’s ungrammatical to say taht the “I thinks” or to use “I” as a noun, as in “the I.” By switching to Latin, the problem is solved. Nobody thinks about what the word means anymore.

This clever reposte to transcendental egoism is part of Kolakowski’s critique of Husserl, whom he sees as carrying forward the Ego-based philosophy of Descartes into a kind of self-nihilism. According to Husserl (as summarized by Kolakowski):

“Descartes ’ blunder consists in his decision that he could doubt the existence of the world but not his own existence-that his Ego was given him in absolute immediacy and he was thus a thinking substance. But in pure phenomena no thinking substance appears . Therefore we have to eliminate the substantial Ego as well.

This is what Husserl’s phenomenology does: It represents the “purification of the field of consciousness from any existence-this transcendental reduction-is the first and necessary operation on the way toward certitude . It frees me from all prejudices of common sense , in particular concerning the existence of both the world and the subject. Both are suspended or put into brackets or endowed with the ‘epistemological zero-indicator. We neither negate their existence nor even doubt it, we simply put the question provisionally aside . We suspend any transcendence, anything going beyond the pure phenomenon of cogitatio .” Not cogito ergo sum but, more strictly, cogitatio est .