first step, the critical destruction of the involvements of objectification [Objektivierungseinschlüsse]. Among these are understood not just those that are momentary, discovered during the first examination of the phenomenon, but rather also those that are possible, which suggest themselves while sliding off the objectification of factical life.
The having-me-myself, which is improminent in vital life-experiences, is not: a reflection on experience and experiencing, stepping out of itself to make the I into an object, so that the I would be recognized as I, as belonging to its object-region, as being of its species. It is not a placement [Einstellung] in relationships of order, in which system of relationships the I would be conclusive through classification, so that in accordance with the ordering, nothing more could be said about it. This applies both to the I as an empty relational-point and to the I as a concrete multiplicity of object-determinations. Because, in the latter case, it could only concern a hierarchy of multiple regions and their possibilities for relationship and order. The having-me-myself is not a positioning [Ansetzen] to determinations of order. It does not lie in this directional-tendency.
The having-me-myself in vital life-experience is much [165] less—which the designation in the word already wards off—an inference from the fact of experiencing to that which is experiencing, which has the experiences, which logically must have them, to which something like experiencing attaches as its property. More fundamentally: the I is not something that has life, that dedicates itself [to life], that is encumbered with [life] as the table is with its color, as though the I—more originally, the self—were an intelligibility running within itself and as though life, for its part, were also something like this.
Overall: the situation is not a configuration of thing-elements determined by an order. It is rather phenomenon, life-formation, life-context.
Further, the having-me-myself is not something like an inductive collective consideration of individual life-experiences as such, which, through their happening together, through their context of happening, let the I spring up as a conglomeration in the sense of a result, a product, that places itself or does not place itself, that arrives, that thereby jumps out.
The having-me-myself does not involve staring at an object, it is not a fixed determination. It is rather the vital process of winning and losing familiarity with concrete lived life itself. As a process it is not a matter of dwelling upon an object. Rather, coming from out of life-experiences, it is a matter of leaning itself forward [sich Vorneigen] into new, vital horizons that are near. It is a coming from and a leaning-forward, wherein I, living, am intelligible to myself, even if what is experienced presents the most difficult puzzle of my existence. The intelligible context is life itself, and therein I have my self.
88 BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY