  As usual, there are complications. Although in this passage Husserl rejects the horizontal and transverse modes of intentionality that he previously held to be responsible for the creation of temporal unities in experience, it is not clear that he took the ego to be responsible for all modes of temporal unity. There are occasions when he seems think the most basic forms of experience possess a passive ‘pre-temporal’ flow-structure prior to the involvement of the ego – see Kortooms (2002: chapter 6) for more on this. This complication aside, the basic picture is reasonably clear. As with absolute consciousness, since the ego is not itself a temporal object – it lies outside time, it is what creates or constitutes temporality – and so the issue of what unifies the successive phases of an ego (or an ego’s awareness) simply does not arise.