In the western culture, especially an academic one, we are a witness to rapidly increasing relevance of eastern religions and teachings that are being compared and synthesized with many other western religions and philosophies. This could be a symptom of a growing spirituality crisis in the western world that is trying very seriously to rethink their own relationship to spirituality during the upsurge of technology that is starting to dominate many aspects of our personal lives.
With the methods of a comparative philosophy we try to explicate the similarities and differences between, what could seem at first, two diametrically opposed currents of thought. By means of comparison, we begin this undergraduate thesis with Sartre’s rejection of Husserl’s transcendental ego, before moving on to introduce Sartre’s idea of pre-reflective consciousness, and describing the structure of consciousness, as Sartre understands it, in general. After short description we expatiate on Sartre’s view on the empirical ego and its role in the world, through which we later on link with Buddhist teachings, which denies the existence of the self, but accepts the existence of an empirical ego.
After familiarizing the reader with Buddhist ideas on the self and empirical ego, we move on to the concept of desire that, at first, seems to be invincible obstacle to any further synthesis of the two currents of thought. At this point we introduce existential psychoanalysis as means of overcoming the obstacle, and we elaborate a bit more on its methods that enable further coexistence of two systems of thought. At the end we reflect on possibilities of further research that this paper seems to tread path for.
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