Abstract

The “I think” that accompanies all my intentional acts is the prereflective cogito. It can be declined in the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative cases: nominative because I am given to myself as a subject, genitive because each experiential awareness is mine, dative because the content of each awareness is given to me, and accusative because even as subject I am always given to myself as the object of the look and address of another. But it is a mistake to think ofconsciousness as “pure” by virtue of the formality of this structure. Even at the transcendental level, consciousness is contaminated by contingency and particularly in ways that render it opaque to itself in its relation to nature, society, and God