This book does not offer a coherent philosophy of the self or of ethics. Rather it is my first attempt to present together the ideas which I consider as potentially my most substantial contribution to a new phenomenological philosophy. It is based on a new conception of the existing self on phenomenological foundations in a sense to be clarified through the doing of phenomenology in the following essays. This effort in all its inchoate character is to me the major justification for my philosophizing, if not my remaining raison d"être. I withheld it so long in the hope that by postponing its final formulation I could give it a better chance to mature and to speak to the condition of my fellow existers. But now the time has come when I no longer feel I have the right to wait.