 As co-existence, sensing is characterized by an intentionality that sympathetically attunes itself to the sensed according to a dialectic in which both terms—the perceiving body and the perceived thing—are equally active and receptive: the thing invites the body to adopt the attitude that will lead to its disclosure. Since the subject of this perception is not the idealist’s “for itself”, neither is the object of perception the realist’s “in itself”; rather, the agent of perception is the pre-reflective and anonymous subjectivity of the body, which remains enmeshed in and “connatural” with the world that it perceives. The senses are unified without losing their distinctness in a fashion comparable to the binocular synthesis of vision, and their anonymity is a consequence of the “historical thickness” of perception as a tradition that operates beneath the level of reflective consciousness (PP: 285/248). For first-person awareness, one’s anonymous perceptual engagement with the world operates as a kind of “original past, a past that has never been present” (PP: 252/252).