Husserl offers a technical concept that is illuminating here. My “I,” he says, is not just given, a thing of nature; I am generated: I am put together, “come about,” over time. My self (what philosophers like to call an ego, “I am” in Latin) has a history, and at the bottom of the “I” is what Husserl calls a “substrate of habitualities.”6 This “substrate” can be understood as a base layer of experiences that become habits for me and make further experience possible. The history of my own experiences becomes a seedbed cultivated by time so that future experiences have possibilities to grow.
