There is a fascinating discussion of this very thing in John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics. I cannot do it justice in a post, but it centers on the crisis of assuming,. on the one hand, that a phenomenological presence is predelineated (Husserl's term) eidetically as well as in the recalled adumbrations of actuality, and since it is by this that the, as Kant put it, intuitions are not blind, we are forced to acknowledge that presence as such is thereby lost altogether in time, and this is Heidegger's thesis. Heidegger thought Husserl was thinking magically to suppose that the transcendental ego could even be imagined as an absolute when all thought is relativized, contextualized in time: it is Heraclitus' world, not Parmenedes' and Being does not sit still for presence to be a meaningful term at all.The quick history of the Epoche. Let’s begin with Aristotle. He had what is called the hylomorphic view of things. Everything is a subject with properties. Those properties or Forms (morphe) inhere in the subject or hyle (matter). Moving along to Descartes, that subject became the Self. the I, and the properties became sense data. Then, because there are no external relations in any of that philosophizing, the Self, the mind, with the phenomenal sense data inhering in it lose all connection to the world “outside itself”. Berkeley finished off the very notion of matter tout suite.
With Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations, we still have the Self and phenomenal properties inhering in it, but we, in the meantime have passed through Kant. So now even beyond the empirical Self there is another noumenal Self. The Noumena becomes the ultimate Subject. It has derived from and finally replaced Aristotle’s Hyle, Prime Matter. Dark and beyond knowing.
Prime Matter was also supposed to ground the Hic et Nunc, the tode ti. Eventually the Hic part dropped off and we are left with the Nunc, the Eternal Now. Time is the ground of the Self. Time is the ground of everything. As Hegel said, Das Sein des Geistes is die Zeit. We could also say that Time is the substance of the world. Phenomenology at last bows before, not the Self, but Time. And phenomenology is materialism. High Romanticism tending toward decadence.
Capauto lays it out in tracing the history of this idea of presence, from Kierkegaard to Derrida. A very helpful read! It helped me understand the idea of presence much better. One has to keep in mind that if Heidegger was right, and were are delimited by the disclosing power of ideas, that is, language is the "house of Being" and it and sensory intuitions are joined at the hip, then he still has to face Levinas, for in the circularity of interpretation meanings, a circularity Heiedgger embraced, the is the other and the the Other. Metaphysics is built into the world, and the theory that draws the line where language ends is itself just a parcel of language. The epoche is not simply an historical residuum. It is a method for realizing what language hides, and the clue, I might add, lies in the absurdity of Heidegger's delimitations as well as in the intuitive presence of presence, which is what Husserl was really playing in to the equation. Finally, what Caputo and Derrida and Heidegger miss altogether is this striking piece of logic: value is the true validation Being, not ontology, or a post modern critique of ontology. This gets to the heart of our Being here, and philosophy meets its end here, its purpose run out, its arguments exhausted--it stares blankly at the world, finally ready to shut up and let the world speak.