The "I" is the protagonist of purposeful action, but as purposeful action is woven out of diverse strands and is indefinitely hierarchical and multi-layered, so is the "I". You go for a walk to a favourite café in order to sit for a while and enjoy a cup of good coffee. As you walk along, and the walking is itself a highly complex articulated action, your mind drifts to various things, playing with ideas of experience, with prospects, memories, rehearsals, alternative scripts, etc., all of which can be in some sense exhausted in their meaning by the frame of a polymorphous functionality. But when you are seated before a hot and fragrant brew and you reach out and lift it to your lips what takes over for just a moment is a pure experience of qualia, in which there is no longer an "I" since there is no longer any purpose but just sensory enjoyment, pure relish without judgment. Sometimes it is like this, and when it is it is always a surprise, almost as if you had never tasted coffee before, but not always. To speak of qualia in an authentic sense is not to merely speak off-handedly about the sensory 'feel' of an experience, but to point to something rare and arresting. Isn't something like this implicitly acknowledged in the contemporary obsession with gastronomy, where it sometimes seems as if cuisine has replaced art as the vehicle for transcendence? If this is so then it is necessary to add that connoisseurship, while paying homage to this, is not its proper expression, but in some ways expresses the failed attempt to enlist the experience of qualia as purpose. Consider again what it is that is so intensely pleasurable about hearing a great performance of a musical work. In a mediocre performance you are aware of the notes being played, of their timbre and tone and of how they don't quite attain to sublation into musical form. In a good performance timbre and tone are integrated into the musical form. But in a truly great performance you enter so totally into the musical form that you can re-experience the physical and particular tone of the sound, its pure contingency, on the other side of the music. It need only happen at a few isolated moments, but it produces something like bliss, absolute freedom from the self. This ought to be what is meant by qualia, not this side of the ideal, but beyond it.