The Temporal Structure of Identity

Abstract

Within the whole of Husserl’s work, the notion of self-givenness (“Selbstgegebenheit”), in spite of the ambiguities and complexities accompanying its understanding and use, cannot fail to convey Husserl’s demand on himself to return philosophical thinking to descriptive thinking. To describe is not to explain. It is, instead, to reveal. Revelation is a mode of being which pertains to truth as it manifests itself and thus as it belongs to the peculiar mode of its appearing. Thinking, therefore, in order to be descriptive of that which is self-revealing, must find its way back to that which is originally given of itself as it itself. But what is given originally is what is seen originally. A thinking which describes the given must, as a consequence, arise from a seeing or, rather, from the simplicity of a primordial seeing which can and must be brought to be one and the same with the mode of appearing of that which (either immanent or transcendent) appears within it.