A state of mind is taken to be the element of experience that belongs in the first-person mode, but this is not to say that all of experience can be contained in the first-person, or even that the first-person is an entirely coherent idea. Think of it rather as arising within an evolving project, so that the notion of an invariant deep-subject, the possessor of such states, represents a stage in the relationship between the known and the unknown, between light and darkness. It may seem to be the vanguard in the resolution of a dialectic but this is not to say that it is able to contain the truth towards which that process is striving, a way indeed of drawing the striving itself into the foreground. This is not to devalue the first-person technics of the subject, but to see what can be revealed by regarding it as a special case rather than as an essence.