THE WIZARD EGO AND THE MAGICAL ILLUSION

Abstract

The Ego, such as Sartre conceives, is understood as an intentional object in a very specific
way: it deceives us about his own existence, showing itself like it was already there, previously to
reflexion. But what concerns this deceit? What motivates consciousness to deceits itself? If we bestow
on consciousness a constitutive power, how could we assure the reliability of reflexion as a privileged
method to phenomenology? This article has as its objective to describe phenomenologically how
consciousness constitutes this very specific object, researching the origin of this selfdeceive operated
by the consciousness. We start by describing the structure of consciousness in its multiple degrees
(unreflected, reflected, reflexive). Secondly, we will expose how the Ego is constituted trough a
modification operated by the reflexive consciousness and, finally, we will describe how consciousness
is capable of producing an illusion about itself, deceiving itself about his own constitution – masking to itself his constitutive ontological indetermination, and apprehending itself as an object in reflexion.
Our exposition will attach to The transcendence of the Ego, by Jean-Paul Sartre, as a main text,
eventually resorting to his opera magna Being and nothing, as much as his classical interpreters, such
as Flajoeliet, Correbyter, and Gurwitsch’s famous paper about this issue, in order to improve
insufficiently addressed issues.