Transcendental ego

Kant’s term for the basic logical fact of one’s own self-consciousness. Also: That which is necessary for a unified, empirical self-consciousness, and which synthesizes sensations in concert with the categories of the understanding. The transcendental ego is not, however, an object of knowledge but, rather, the condition of knowledge itself. The concept was taken up by such post-Kantian existentialists and phenomenologists as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938).