At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then you had to smell tear-gas.

As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

I believe that if we would carefully apply the distinction between transparency and opacity to the different layers of the human self-model, looking at self-consciousness in a much more careful and fine-grained manner, then we might also arrive at a new answer to your original question: What a "first-person perspective" really is.

The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.

Subjectivity means to catch yourself in the act.

I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.

Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.