The things we experience present themselves as identities within manifolds of appearance. Our own self, our “ego,” also establishes and presents itself to us as an identity in a manifold of appearances, but the manifold in which we are presented to ourselves is different from those in which things are presented. We never show up to ourselves in the world as just one more thing; we stand out, each of us, as central, as the agents of our intentional life, as the one who has the world and the things in it given to him. Our power of disclosure, our being the dative of manifestation for things that appear, introduces us into the life of reason and the human way of being.

THE EMPIRICAL AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

There is a marvelous ambiguity to the ego: on the one hand, it is an ordinary part of the world, one of the many things that inhabit it. It occupies space, endures through time, has physical and psychic features, and interacts causally with other things in the world: if it falls, it falls like any other body; if it is pushed, it topples over like any other thing; if it is treated with chemicals, it reacts like any living organism; if light rays hit its visual organs, it reacts electronically, chemically, and psychologically. “I” am a material, organic, and psychological thing. If we were to take the self simply as one of the things in the world, we would be treating it as what can be called the empirical ego.