" Time is 'self-affection of itself'; time, as a thrust and a passage toward a future, is the one who affects; time, as a spread-out series of presents, is the one affected; the affecting and the affected are identical because the thrust of time is nothing other than the transition from one present to another. Subjectivity is precisely this ek-stase, or this projection of an indivisible power into a term that is present to it. This originary flow, says Husserl, does not merely exist, for it must necessarily give itself a 'manifestation of itself'...It is essential to time to be not only actual time or time that flows, but also time that knows itself, for the explosion or dehiscence of the present toward the future is the archetype of the relation of self to self, and it sketches out an interiority or an ipseity. Here a light shines forth, for here we are no longer dealing with a being who rests in itself, but rather with a being whose entire essence, like that of light, is to make visible...Subjectivity is not an immobile self-identity: as for time, it is essential to subjectivity--in order for it to be subjectivity--to open up to an Other and to emerge from itself. We must not imagine the subject as constituting, and the multiplicity of its experiences or of its Erlebnisse as constituted; we must not treat the transcendental I as the true subject and the empirical myself as its shadow or as its wake...The most precise consciousness of which we are capable is always found to be affected by itself or given to itself...Consciousness has no sense outside of this duality. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Phenomenology of Perception