I

The soul’s discovery of its own inwardness is constitutive of the soul itself. Not that we can say this intimacy straightaway has an individual character and consequently allows me immediately to determine this soul as mine. For the discovery of subjectivity precedes, we might say, the discovery of my own subjectivity. In reality the latter is an experience which is not primitive and instantaneous but constantly goes on and deepens throughout my entire life:

 I have never come to the end of distinguishing between the absolute subjectivity and this imperfect subjectivity through which I say “me” by contrasting myself with other beings who also say “me” and are present within the absolute subjectivity like me and with me. Yet the relation of each subjectivity to the pure subjectivity, or to another subjectivity, cannot be reduced to the inside or outside relationship: it goes beyond it.

 I become more interior to the interiority of being in the measure that I become more interior to myself again: and the mutual exteriority of two particular beings decreases accordingly. This exteriority is explained by the presence of the body: we know that the I is always linked to the body as to its limits and that these limits are variable since the I is never completely slave to its body but then again never completely its master.