You come into conversation with an important philosopher who comments on the Critique and you realize: he grasps some things in a different way again; what's inside it displays itself differently.
What's inside of the different editions or what's inside of a copy produced by a typewriter has, in one way, a unified, understandable meaning, but then again, what is meant is grasped once more in this way, and then in that way; it expresses [45] itself, it displays itself, in different ways. In a manifold of occurrences, Max Weber's lecture course, "Kant's Critique of Pure Reason;' the Munich Semester, manifests itself. Everything that we encounter in living life manifests itself in a context of occurrences. The tendencies and the fulfillments of tendencies somehow always express themselves. Thus, how everything or how just each thing depicts itself does not interest us, or for the most part does not interest us [or if it does, then only the self-sufficient mode of life in itself interests us].
The jumping around of the center of manifestation, the change of layer—peculiar phenomena. Even when my attitude is directed to that wherein something manifests itself to me in the relevant situation, what shows itself is how this displaying itself again gives itself only in manifestations. Just being attuned to the book cover itself, I see it in various lights, from various sides, in various moods, and that applies, as well, to the individual colorings, decorations, and imprints.
Even the with-world gives itself in such a way that the relevant people live together with me, insofar as they display themselves to me in individual actions, in their behaviors, their manner of talking, keeping quiet, dress, temper, taste. You manifest your self in such appearances—forms of manifestation, which, upon closer consideration, express themselves again in some sort of way. This applies not only to individual people, but also to groups, such as the following groups: a family gives itself through particular needs, through the reciprocal behavior of its members to each other, perhaps even just through the opposition of the basic views of parents and children, through their various interests within the family unit itself. The same goes for clubs, associations, scientific societies, all the way up to large social organizations (compare religious communities and sects).
The environing-world, the self-world are encountered in such manifestations. But even the self-world stands and lives in this way in my self-life. Yesterday, the day before yesterday, last Sunday, my last vacation, [46] my time in high school—my self-world at that time and even my proper self express themselves in particular occurrences that have befallen me, and, to be sure, these occurrences mostly correlate to my current self-world in a very particular way; never in such a way that they simply were my experiences, but rather only in such a way that I myself had a particular
36 BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY