term "phenomenology" in its etymological sense as the activity of
giving an account (logos) of the way things appear (phainomenon).
Hence, a phenomenology of time attempts to account for the way things
appear to us as temporal or how we experience time. Phenomenology
offers neither metaphysical speculation about time's relation to
motion (as does Aristotle), nor the psychological character of time's
past and future moments (as does Augustine), nor
transcendental-cognitive presumptions about time as a mind-dependent
construct (as does Kant). Rather, it investigates the essential
structures of consciousness that make possible the unified perception
of an object that occurs across successive moments. In its nuanced
attempts to provide an account of the form of intentionality
presupposed by all experience, the phenomenology of time-consciousness
provides important contributions to philosophical issues such as
perception, memory, expectation, imagination, habituation,
self-awareness, and self-identity over time.Within the
phenomenological movement, time-consciousness is central. The most
fundamental and important of all phenomenological problems,
time-consciousness pervades Husserl's theories of constitution,
evidence, objectivity and inter-subjectivity. Within continental
philosophy broadly construed, the movements of existential
phenomenology, hermeneutics, post-modernism and post-structuralism, as
well as the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Hans George Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, all return in
important ways to Husserl's theory of time-consciousness. After
devoting considerable attention to Husserl's reflections on
time-consciousness, this article treats the developments of the
phenomenological account of time in Heidegger, Sartre, and
Merleau-Ponty.
1. Husserl, Phenomenology, and Time-Consciousness
Phenomenology maintains that consciousness, in its very nature as
activity, is intentional. In its care for and interest in the world,
consciousness transcends itself and attends to the world by a myriad
of intentional acts, e.g., perceiving, remembering, imagining,
willing, judging, etc.—hence Husserl's claim that intentional
consciousness is correlated (that is, co-related) to the world.
Although the notion of intentionality includes the practical
connotations of willful interest, it fundamentally denotes the
relation conscious has to objects in the world. Of these many modes of
intentionality, time-consciousness arguably constitutes the central
one for understanding consciousness's intentional, transcending
character. Put differently, time-consciousness underscores these other
intentional acts because these other intentional acts presuppose or
include the consciousness of internal time. For this and other
reasons, Husserl, in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time (1893-1917) (1991), deemed time-consciousness the most
"important and difficult of all phenomenological problems" (PCIT, No.
50, No. 39). Together with Analyses Concerning Passive and Active
Syntheses (2001), Cartesian Meditations (1997) and Die 'Bernaur
Manuskripte' über das Zeitbewußtseins 1917/18 (2001), this work seeks
to account for this fundamental form of intentionality that the
experience of temporal (e.g., spatial and auditory) and non-temporal
(e.g., mathematical and logical) objects alike presupposes.
All experience entails a temporal horizon, according to phenomenology.
This claim seems indisputable: we rush, we long, we endure, we plan,
we reminisce, we perceive, we speak, we listen, etc. To highlight the
difficulty and importance of explaining the structures of
consciousness that make possible the experience of time, Husserl, like
his contemporaries Henri Bergson and William James, favored the
example of listening to a melody. For a melody to be a melody, it must
have distinguishable though inseparable moments. And for consciousness
to apprehend a melody, its structure must have features capable of
respecting these features of temporal objects. Certainly, we can
"time" the moments of a temporal object, a melody, with discrete
seconds (measured by clocks). But this scientific and psychological
account of time, which, following Newton, considers time as an empty
container of discrete, atomistic nows, is not adequate to the task of
explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object. In this
case of Newtonian time, each tone spreads its content out in a
corresponding now but each now and thus each tone remains separated
from every other. Newtonian time can explain the separation of moments
in time but not the continuity of these moments. Since temporal
objects, like a melody or a sentence, are characterized by and
experienced as a unity across a succession, an account of the
perception of a temporal object must explain how we synthesize a
flowing object in such a way that we (i) preserve the position of each
tone without (ii) eliminating the unity of the melody or (iii)
relating each tone by collapsing the difference in the order between
the tones.
Bergson, James and Husserl realized that if our consciousness were
structured in such a way that each moment occurred in strict
separation from every other (like planks of a picket fence), then we
never could apprehend or perceive the unity of our experiences or
enduring objects in time otherwise than as a convoluted patchwork. To
avoid this quantitative view of time as a container, Husserl's
phenomenology attempts to articulate the conscious experience of
lived-time as the prerequisite for the Newtonian, scientific notion of
time's reality as a march of discrete, atomistic moments measured by
clocks and science. In this way, Husserl's approach to
time-consciousness shares much in common with these popular nineteenth
Century treatments of time-consciousness. Yet to appreciate fully
Husserl's account of time-consciousness—the uniqueness of his
contribution beyond other popular nineteenth Century accounts
(deWarren 2008), and the priority he affords it in his own thinking—we
first must understand phenomenology's methodological device, the
phenomenological reduction.
a. Phenomenological Reduction and Time-consciousness
Husserl believed that every experience for intentional conscious has a
temporal character or background. We experience spatial objects, both
successive (e.g., a passing automobile) and stationary (e.g., a
house), as temporal. We do not, on the other hand, experience all
temporal objects (e.g., an imagined sequence or spoken sentence) as
spatial. For the phenomenologist, even non-temporal objects (e.g.,
geometrical postulates) presuppose time because we experience their
timeless character over time; for example, it takes time for me to
count from one to five although these numbers themselves remain
timeless, and it takes some a long time to understand and appreciate
the force of timeless geometrical postulates (PCIT § 45; see Brough
1991). To this point, common sense views of time may find Husserl
agreeable. Such agreement ceases, however, for those who expect
Husserl to proclaim that time resembles an indefinite series of nows
(like seconds) passing from the future through the present into the
past (as a river flows from the top of a mountain into a lake). This
common sense conception of time understands the future as not-yet-now,
the past as no-longer-now, and the present as what now-is, a thin,
ephemeral slice of time. Such is the natural attitude's view of time,
the time of the world, of measurement, of clocks, calendars, science,
management, calculation, cultural and anthropological history, etc.
This common sense view is not the phenomenologist's, who suspends all
naïve presuppositions through the reduction.
Phenomenology's fundamental methodological device, the
"phenomenological reduction," involves the philosopher's bracketing of
her natural belief about the world, much like in mathematics when we
bracket questions about whether numbers are mind-independent objects.
This natural belief Husserl terms the "natural attitude," under which
label he includes dogmatic scientific and philosophical beliefs, as
well as uncritical, every-day, common sense assumptions. Not a denial
of the external world, like Descartes methodologically proposed, the
phenomenological reduction neutralizes these dimensions of the natural
attitude towards experience in order to examine more closely
experience and its objects just as they appear to conscious experience
(Ideas I §§ 44-49; Sokolowski 2000). Put less technically, one could
consider phenomenology a critical rather than habitual or dogmatic
approach to understanding the world. To call phenomenology a critical
enterprise means that it is an enterprise guided by the goal of
faithfully describing what experience gives us—thus phenomenology's
famed return to the things themselves—rather than defaulting to what
we with our dogmas and prejudices expect from experience—thus
phenomenology's famed self-description as a "pressupositionless
science" (Logical Investigations)
That the phenomenologist suspends her natural attitude means that a
phenomenology of time bypasses the inquiry into both natural time
considered as a metaphysical entity and scientific world time
considered as a quantitative construct available for observation and
necessary for calculation (PCIT § 2). Without prejudice to the
sciences, the reduction also suspends all philosophical
presuppositions about time's metaphysical, psychological or
transcendental-cognitive nature. Hence, the phenomenological reduction
enables Husserl to examine the structures of consciousness that allow
us to apprehend and thus characterize the modes of temporal objects
appearing as now, past or future. As Husserlians often express it,
Husserl concerns himself not with the content of an object or event in
time (e.g., listening to a sentence) but with how an object or event
appears as temporal (Brough 1991).
As this discussion about the effect of the reduction on Husserl's
account of time implies, Husserl distinguishes three levels of time
for our consideration: (3) world[ly] or objective time; (2)
personalistic or subjective time; and (1) the consciousness of
internal time. We can make assessments and measurements, e.g.,
declaring things simultaneous or enduring, at the level of objective
time only because we experience a succession of mental states in our
subjective conscious life. Our awareness of objective time thus
depends upon our awareness of subjective time. We are aware of
subjective time, however, as a unity across succession of mental
states because the consciousness of internal time provides a
consciousness of succession that makes possible the apprehension and
unification of successive mental states (PCIT No. 40; Sokolowski
2000).
Husserl's contention that all experience presupposes (1) at first
appears as an exhaustively subjective denial of time's reality,
particularly in light of the reduction. Moreover, since we believe
that natural time precedes and will outlast our existence, we tend to
consider (3) more fundamental than (1). As such, some may find
Husserl's privileging of (1) counterintuitive (Sokolowski 2000). Of
course, such a passively received attitude or belief about time and
our place therein amounts to cultural prejudice in favor of the
scientific view of human beings as mere physical entities subject to
the relentless march of time. A brief example may help us better
understand Husserl's objective and thus dispel these reservations:
When listening to a fifty minute lecture (level 3), one may experience
it as slow or as fast (level 2). Still, each listener's consciousness
has a structure (level 1) that makes it possible for her to apprehend
(3) and (2). This structure in (1) functions in such a way that each
listener can agree about the objective duration of the lecture while
disagreeing about their subjective experience of it. If (1) changed
subjectively as (2), then we never could reach a consensus or
objective agreement about (3). For the phenomenologist, who seeks to
give an account (logos) of the way things appear as temporal, the
manifest phenomenon of time is not fundamentally worldly/objective or
psychological/subjective time (Brough, 1991). Concerned with how
temporal phenomena manifest themselves to conscious perceivers, the
phenomenologist examines (1), namely the structures of intentional
consciousness that make possible the disclosure of time as a worldly
or psychological phenomenon. To begin to explain the priority of (1),
Husserl highlights how the now and past are not a part of time
considered according to the natural attitude view of (3) or (2).
b. Phenomenology, Experienced Time and Temporal Objects
It should be clear already that Husserl does not privilege the
Newtonian view of time as a series of now, past and future moments
considered as "things," containers for "things," or points on the
imagined "time-line" (PCIT §§ 1-2, No. 51). Conversely, he considers
the present, past, and future as modes of appearing or modes by which
we experience things and events as now, no longer (past) or not yet
(future). For example, though I experience the event of the space
shuttle Columbia's explosion as past, the past is not some
metaphysical container of which the Columbia shuttle tragedy is a
part; the past is the mode in which the Columbia shuttle tragedy
appears to me. This does not mean that Husserl views time as something
that flows willy-nilly, or that the time of the Columbia shuttle
tragedy is contemporaneous with the time of your reading this entry.
Husserl acknowledges that "time is fixed and that time flows" (PCIT §
31, No. 51). When we count from one to ten, two always occurs after
one and before three regardless of how far our counting progresses;
likewise, the temporal event of the Columbia shuttle tragedy occupies
an unchanging, determinate temporal position in world-time, "frozen"
between what came before and after it, ever-receding into the past of
world time (history) without losing its place. Phenomenology helps to
clarify the common sense understanding of time as a container—a
metaphysical placeholder—that contains events. This common sense
understanding of time as a container persists because we forget that
we first understand these fixed temporal relations and position thanks
to the modes of appearing, namely now, past and future (Brough, 1991).
As Husserlians put it, Husserl considers the now as conscious life's
absolute point of orientation from which things appearing as past and
future alter (PCIT §§ 7, 14, 31, 33). Since the now and past are not a
part of time but the modes by which things appear to me as temporal,
each now that becomes past can accommodate many events simultaneously,
e.g., one may remember where one was when the shuttle exploded, what
anchor man one might have heard, what channel one was watching, who
one was with, etc. (PCIT § 33; Brough 2005). The very fact that this
experience becomes part of one's conscious life implies that one
experienced it in the now. Moreover, I can remember what events
preceded and succeeded this tragedy, e.g., that my grade-school class
filed into the auditorium or that my teacher sniffled as she led us
back to our classroom. The very fact that one can place the event in
relation to preceding and succeeding events implies both that one
never experiences the now in isolation from the past and future and
that one experiences the relation between now, past and future without
collapsing these three modes of appearing (PCIT § 31).
These reflections on temporal objects and experienced time indicate
that the flow of our conscious life is the condition for the
possibility of the disclosure of temporal objects and experienced
time, a condition that begins from the privileged standpoint of the
now, which, again, nevertheless occurs in an interplay with past and
future rather than in isolation from them. More than this descriptive
account of some essential features of time's appearance, however,
Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness concerns itself with the
structure of the act of perceiving that allows us to apprehend a
temporal object as unified across its manifold moments. Indeed, our
preliminary reflections on time depend upon a series of successive
events but a succession of experiences or perceptions is not yet an
experience or perception of succession. Husserl turns his attention
toward (1)—the transcendental level of internal time-consciousness—in
order to explain how (2) and (3) become constituted conscious
experiences.
c. Phenomenology Not to be Confused with Augustine's Theory of Time
When we say that Husserl focuses his attention on (2) and (1), we mean
that his writings on time-consciousness attempt to explain how time
and experienced time appear to consciousness. This explanation begins,
for Husserl, by confronting the paradox of how to account for the
unity of a process of change that continues for an extended period of
time, a unity that develops in succession, e.g., listening to a
sentence or watching a film (PCIT No. 50). To unravel this theoretical
knot, Husserl believed, philosophy must realize that, beyond the
temporality of the object, the act of perceiving has its own temporal
character (PCIT No. 32). Consider the phrase, "Peter Piper picked a
pack of pickled peppers" at the word, "picked." In this example, I
hear "picked" yet somehow must hold onto "Peter" and "Piper" in just
the order in which I originally apprehended them. Husserl contends
that insofar as a temporal object such as a sentence occurs across
time in a now that includes what is no longer, consciousness too must
extend beyond the now; indeed, if all I heard were different words in
each new now without connecting them to past related words, then I
never would hear a sentence but only a barrage of sounding words.
Consciousness not only must extend beyond the now, but it also must
extend in such a way that it preserves the determinate temporal order
of the words and modifies their orientation to the now. Indeed, if I
preserved the words in a simultaneous or haphazard order, then I never
would hear a sentence but only a jumble of words.
To account for the unity of succession in a way that avoids these
difficulties, Husserl will not explain consciousness' extension beyond
the now in an act of perception by merely importing a view of
Newtonian time into the mind or translating such a view of natural
time into a transcendental condition of the mind. This was Kant's
dogmatic failure in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" of his Critique of
Pure Reason (Crisis 104 ff.). Nor will Husserl's account of the
"perception" of a temporal object conclude, as Augustine's did, that
consciousness extends beyond the now thanks to its "present of things
no longer" and a "present of thing yet to come" that echoed
Augustine's description of the soul's distention (PCIT § 1; Kelly
2005). Such an Augustinian account of "the present of thing no longer"
cannot explain the perception of a temporal object because it traps
the heard contents in the now (as a present of things no longer
remains present nevertheless). Augustine's notion of a "present of
things no longer" can explain consciousness' extension beyond the now
only as a result of a memorial recollection. But memory drags past
nows—and the contents occurring therein—back into the present, thereby
rendering past moments simultaneous with a present moment and
effectively halting time's flow. Any account of temporal awareness
that explains consciousness'' extension beyond the now by recourse to
memory conflates the acts of memory and perception and thus proves
inadequate to explain the conscious perception of a temporal object.
Memory gives not the perception of a temporal object but always only
what it is capable of giving: a memory (PCIT No. 50; Brough, 1991).
With respect to this problem of conflating memory and perception,
Husserl indicates two consequences. First, the distention of the now
through memory leaves us with a situation where, as Husserl admits, at
any given moment I perceive only the actually present word of the
sentence; hence, the whole of the enduring sentence appears in an act
that is predominantly memory and only marginally perception (PCIT §
12). Experience tells us, however, that we "perceive" (hear) the whole
sentence across its present (now) and absent (past or future) words
rather than hearing its present word and remembering (or expecting)
the others (PCIT § 7). Indeed, something quite different occurs when I
hear a sentence and when I remember the event of the Columbia shuttle
tragedy. Second, having conflated the past and the present by making
recourse to memory as a means to explain consciousness' extension
beyond the now, such a theory violates the law of non-contradiction,
for the mode of the present cannot present something as past, but only
as present, and vice versa (PCIT No. 14). In short, on such
Augustinian theory, everything remains 'now' and nothing can overcome
that fact (Brough 1993; Kelly 2005).
The problem of the consciousness of time becomes properly
phenomenological when Husserl asks how one explains the original
consciousness of the past upon which one can recognize an object as
past rather remembering a past moment. Put differently, the problem of
time becomes phenomenological when Husserl begins to seek an account
of the generation of a sense or consciousness of pastness upon which
(the) perception (of a temporal object) and memory depend. Indeed, to
claim that we remember something presupposes the very sense of the
past we are trying to explain (Sokolowski 2000). An adequate account
of the perception of a temporal object first requires a discussion of
how consciousness extends beyond the now, i.e., an account of the
difference between the consciousness of succession and the remembrance
of a succession of consciousnesses (PCIT No. 47; Brough 1972).
d. Phenomenology and the Consciousness of Internal Time: Living-Present
Unlike previous theories addressing the consciousness of time, Husserl
shifts his attention from an account of what is perceived as temporal
to an account of the temporality of that which does the perceiving.
Put differently, he tightens his focus, so to speak, recognizing that
when one perceives a temporal object one also experiences the flow of
the intentional act of perception (Brough 1991). In order to solve the
aforementioned paradox of how to account for the unity of a temporal
object over the succession of its parts (e.g., the sentence across it
many words), Husserl turns his attention to consciousness' lived
experience, to the structures of consciousness at level (1) that make
possible the unification of the manifold moments of that act of
perception at level (2) and the perceived object at level (3) (PCIT
No. 41).
To explain how consciousness extends beyond the now in its act of
perception, Husserl begins to think that consciousness itself must
have a "width." And this is just to say that consciousness must have a
sense of the past and a sense of the future to begin with (Sokolowski
2000). To this end, Husserl attempts to argue that consciousness
extends to capture past moments of experience and temporal objects
therein by "retaining" and "protending" the elapsed and yet to come
phases of its experience and thereby the past words that do not
presently exist (when I reach a certain point in listening to a
sentence) yet remain related to the present experience (PCIT, No. 54;
Zahavi, 2000). Rather than attempt to explain the unity of a
succession of discrete consciousnesses correlated with a succession of
discrete moments in a temporal object, Husserl attempts to explain the
consciousness of succession that makes possible the apprehension of a
succession of consciousnesses.
Husserl thus speaks almost exclusively of consciousness'
living-present, and he characterizes this life of consciousness with
three distinguishable yet inseparable moments: primal impression,
retention, and protention. This tripartite form or intentional
structure of the living-present should not be thought of as discrete,
independently occurring pieces in a process (or procession). Such an
atomistic view of the living-present's structure will not work. Were
the moments of the living-present thought as such, we would have to
remember or re-present each past state of consciousness. Not a
knife-edged moment, Husserl describes the life of consciousness, the
living-present, as extended like a comets tail, or saddle-back, to use
the image William James preferred, moments comprising an identity in a
manifold (James) (PCIT § 10).
Consciousness is no longer a punctual box with several acts
functioning in it simultaneously and directing themselves to the
appropriate instances of the object. Admittedly, it is difficult to
talk of this level of the consciousness of internal time, and Husserl
himself claims we are reduced to metaphors (PCIT §§ 34-36). In a
perhaps inadequate metaphor, Husserl's theory of the living-present
might be thought of as presenting a picture of consciousness as a
"block" with relevant "compartments" distinguished by "filters" or
"membranes," each connected to and aware of the other. In this life of
consciousness, Husserl maintains, consciousness apprehends itself and
that which flows within it. As Husserl describes it, retention
perceives the elapsed conscious phase of experience at level (1) and
thereby the past of the experience at level (2) and the past of the
object at level (3). The moments of retention and protention in the
tripartite form of consciousness that is the living-present make
possible consciousness' extension beyond the now in such a way that
avoids the problem of simultaneity and enables consciousness to attend
determinately to the temporal phases of the object of perception.
Unlike Augustine's notion of a present of things no longer, which
remembered or re-presented a past content in the now, Husserl draws a
distinction between memory and retention. On the one hand, memory
provides a "consciousness of the [instant] that has been" (PCIT § 12).
On the other hand, retention "designates the intentional relation of
phase of consciousness to phase of consciousness" (PCIT No. 50), i.e.,
a "consciousness of the past of the [experience]" (PCIT No. 47) and
thereby the instant of the object that has been.
This distinction does not mean that memory differs from retention
merely as a matter of temporal distance, the former reaching back
further into time. Rather, Husserl draws a structural distinction
between memory and retention: The former is an active, mediated,
objectifying awareness of a past object, while the latter is a
passive, immediate, non-objectifying, conscious awareness of the
elapsed phase of conscious experience. First, memory reveals itself to
be an act under the voluntary auspices of consciousness, whereas
retention occurs passively. Second, while memories occur faster or
slower and can be edited or reconstructed, retention occurs
"automatically" and cannot be varied at one's whim (though it can, at
level 2, be experienced as faster or slower, as noted above in our
example of listening to a lecture). Third, remembering re-produces a
completed temporal object, whereas retention works at completing the
consciousness of a temporal object, unifying its presence and absence.
Fourth, as the representation of a new intentional object, memory is
an act of presenting something as past, as absent, whereas the
retention that attempts to account for the perception of an object
over time constitutes an intuition of that which has just passed and
is now in some sense absent, an act of presenting something as a unity
in succession. Fifth, memory provides us with a new intentional object
not now intuitively presented as the thing itself "in person"—e.g.,
remembering my friend's face when she is absent from me in this
moment—whereas retention accounts for the perception across time of an
object now intuitively presented for me—e.g., the progressive clarity
of my perception of my friends face as she approaches me from the
street. Sixth, despite memory's character as a presenting act, when it
represents to me my friend's face it represents it in the now with a
change in temporal index or a qualification of the remembered object
as past, whereas retention holds on to that which is related to my
present perception in a mode of absences (e.g., as when I hear
"picked" while retaining "Peter Piper"). Seventh, memory depends upon
or is "founded" upon retention as the condition of its very
possibility, for memory could never represent an object as a completed
whole if retention did not first play its role in constituting across
time the object now remembered (PCIT, No 50; Zahavi; Brough 1991.
To explain time-consciousness at level (1), then, Husserl comes to
favor the theory that consciousness of the past and future must be
explained by the intentional direction of retention and protention to
the past and future of consciousness' lived experience rather than a
mode of memorial apprehension that issues from the now to animate past
impressions. Returning to our above example of listening to a
sentence, when I hear "picked," I do not remember "Peter Piper."
Rather, I intuitively perceive the sentence as a temporally
differentiated yet nonetheless related to the current [of this]
experience. To be sure, the words do not occur simultaneously; each
word passes and yet remains relevant to the presently lived
experience. The interpreter of Husserl must take care at this point
not to read the turn to consciousness as entailing a loss of the
perceived; rather, what is retained is precisely the impressional
moment as experienced in that moment and having been retained in this
experience. In fact, this account allows that the words, "Peter
Piper," have passed, metaphysically, but remain on hand in this
apprehension of "picked" thanks to consciousness' retention of its
past phase of experience wherein it heard the related words, "Peter
Piper." As a moment of the intentional relationship between the phases
of consciousness' living-present, retention "automatically"
experiences its intuitively present conscious life and determinately
provides a consciousness of the past of the experience.
Husserl's account of the living-present ultimately articulates the
condition for the possibility of all objectifying acts, a condition
itself not objectified. As such, the discussion of retention brings us
to the bottom line, the final and most difficult layer of intentional
analysis, namely consciousness' double-intentionality (PCIT No. 54).
e. The Living-Present's Double-Intentionality
The living-present marks the essence of all manifestation, for in its
automatic or passive self-givenness the living-present makes possible
the apprehension of the elapsed phases of the life of consciousness
and thereby the elapsed moments of the transcendent spatio-temporal
object of which the conscious self is aware. This is possible, Husserl
argues, because the "flow" (PCIT § 37) of conscious life enjoys two
modes of simultaneously operative intentionality. One mode of
intentionality, which he terms Langsintentionalität, or horizontal
intentionality, runs along protention and retention in the flow of the
living-present. The other mode of intentionality, which Husserl terms
the Querintentionalität, or transverse intentionality, runs from the
living-present to the object of which consciousness is aware (PCIT No.
45; Brough 1991).
Husserl explains the unity of these two intentional modes as a
consciousness wherein the Querintentionalität is capable of intending
a temporal object across its successive appearings because the
Langsintentionalität provides consciousness' self-awareness and
awareness of its experiences over time. As an absolute flowing
identity in a manifold—of primal impression, retention and
protention—the stream of conscious life in the living-present
constitutes the procession of words in the sentence that appears and
is experienced sequentially in accordance with the temporally distinct
position of each word. Husserl thus describes consciousness as having
a "double-intentionality": the Querintentionalität, which objectively
and actively grasps the transcendent object—the heard sentence—and the
Langsintentionalität, which non-objectively and automatically or
passively grasps consciousness' lived-experience—the flow of the
living-present (PCIT No. 45). That I hear the words of the
fifty-minute lecture and feel myself inspired or bored is possible
only on the basis of my self-awareness or consciousness of internal
time.
Though Husserl terms this consciousness that is the special form of
horizontal intentionality in the living-present a "flow," he employs
the label "metaphorically" because the living-present's flow manifests
itself, paradoxically, as a non-temporal temporalizing (PCIT § 32, No.
54). That the living-present temporalizes means that it grasps its
past and future as absent without reducing its past and future to the
present, thus freezing consciousness temporal flow. To capture
Husserl's image of a non-temporal flow more aptly, some commentators
prefer the image of shimmering (Sokolowski 1974). As Husserl himself
admits that we have no words for this time-constituting phenomenon,
the image of shimmering seems a more appropriate descriptor, for
Husserl understand the living-present paradoxically as a
standing-streaming (PCIT No. 54). Though non-temporal, Husserl assigns
the living-present a time-constituting status, for this absolute
consciousness makes possible the disclosure of temporal objects
insofar as it makes possible the disclosure of consciousness''
temporality by accounting for our original sense of the past and of
the future in the retentional and protentional dimension of the
living-present (PCIT § 37).
Husserl must characterize the flow as non-temporal. If that which
makes possible the awareness of a unity in succession itself occurred
in succession, then we would need to account for the apprehension of
the succession unique to the living-present, and so on and so forth,
ad infnitum (PCIT, No. 39, No. 50). An infinite regress of
consciousness, however, would mean that we never would achieve an
answer to the question of what makes possible the consciousness of
time. In order to avoid an infinite regress, then, and in accordance
with experience, which tells us that we do apprehend time and temporal
objects, Husserl describes the living-present's flow as a non-temporal
temporalizing. This argument in favor of the non-temporal character of
the living-present brings us to the two senses in which the special
form of intentional consciousness is an absolute consciousness.
First, Husserl characterizes the living-present as absolute because a
non-temporal consciousness that needs no other consciousness behind it
to account for its self-apprehension is just that, absolute, the
bottom line. Second, as the absolute bedrock of intentional analysis
(Sokolowski 2000), the absolute flow as a mode of intentionality
peculiar to the living-present conveys a move away from a model of
awareness or intentionality dependent upon a subject's relation to an
object. If philosophy construes all awareness according to an
object-intentionality model of awareness, i.e., the dyadic relation of
a subject (knower) to an object (known), then it can never account for
the relation between knower and known in the case of
self-consciousness. For example, when I am writing this entry, I am
conscious of the computer on which I am typing, as well as myself as
the one typing. To explain, philosophically, however, how I apprehend
myself as the one typing, the dyadic object-intentionality model of
awareness will not suffice. The issue, of course, concerns
self-awareness and thus philosophy's standard understanding of
self-identity over time.
In the classic treatment of self-consciousness, John Locke in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding accounts for self-identity over
time thanks to consciousness' reflective grasp on its past states.
Locke establishes this account by distinguishing (i) simple ideas of
sense directed toward (iia) objects from (i) simple ideas of
reflection directed toward (iib) the self. In both cases, (i) knows
(iia) and (iib) in the same manner insofar as (i) takes (iia) and
(iib) as objects while (i) itself goes unnoticed or unaccounted for.
Locke's account thus turns the self or subject into an object without
ever really presenting the self. Even if a simple idea of reflection
directs itself toward the self, one self (the reflecting self) remains
subject while the other self (the reflected self) becomes the object.
In self-awareness, however, no difference, distance or separation
exists between the knower and the known. Forced to apprehend itself as
an object in an exercise of simple sense reflection, the Lockean
subject never coincides with itself, caught as it is in a sequence of
epistemic tail chasing (Locke, 1959 I; Zahavi, 1999). Such tail
chasing, moreover, entails an infinite regress of selves themselves
never self-aware. Locke's failure stems from his restriction of
intentionality to the model of object-awareness, the dyadic model of
awareness, where all awareness requires a subject knowing an object.
Husserl's account of the unity of (1) this dynamic, shimmering
living-present makes possible the consciousness of (2) psychological
or subjective time and (3) worldly or objective time provides an
alternative to the traditional account of awareness as merely an
objectivating relation of a subject to object (Brough, 1991;
Sokolowski, 1973; Zahavi, 1999). By retaining the elapsed phase of
consciousness and thereby the past of the object, retention unifies
consciousness' flow and the time-span of the perceived temporal
object, thus providing at once a non-objective self-awareness and an
objective awareness of spatio-temporal entities.
Despite the heady accomplishments of Husserl's theory of
time-consciousness as founded in the living-present's
double-intentionality, contemporary phenomenologists still disagree
about Husserl's discovery. Some commentators, under the influence of
Derrida's critique of Husserl's theory of the living-present (Derrida
1973), express reservations over the legitimacy of the status of the
living-present as an absolute, non-temporal temporalizing, arguing
that it amounts to a mythical construct (Evans, 1990). Yet decisive
refutations of these criticisms, based on their insensitivity to the
nuances of Husserl's theory, are plenty (Brough, 1993; Zahavi, 1999).
Still, even those who accept its legitimacy disagree about how best to
explain the relation between levels (1) and (2) of time-consciousness
(see Zahavi, 1999; Brough 2002). Interestingly, the very complexities
and details of Husserl's theory of internal time-consciousness, which
remain a central point of debate for contemporary phenomenologists,
proved germane to phenomenology's development and alteration
throughout the Twentieth Century.
2. Heidegger on Phenomenology and Time
If the double-intentionality of Husserl's theory of consciousness
proves fruitful, it is because it allows us to given an account of the
temporality of individual experiences (e.g., listening to a sentence)
as well as the temporal ordering of a multiplicity of experience
(e.g., recognizing the classroom to which I return each week as the
same room differentiated over a span of time) and all of these
experiences as mine, as belonging to me. Husserl's first follower,
Martin Heidegger, took up the benefits of Husserl's theory and
developed them into his own unique brand of phenomenology. In fact,
Heidegger developed his brand of phenomenology precisely in light of
Husserl's reflections on the intentionality unique to absolute
time-constituting consciousness. As we shall see, Heidegger might put
the point more forcefully, claiming that he developed his
phenomenology in opposition to Husserl's theory of absolute
time-constituting consciousness. In any event, we can begin by
identifying a fundamental difference between Husserl and Heidegger:
Husserl emphasized the retentional side of the life of consciousness
because he was interested in cognition, which builds up over time,
while Heidegger emphasized the protentional or futural side of the
subject because he is more interested in practical activity (the "in
order to" or "for the sake of").
According to Heidegger, the essence of absolute time-constituting
consciousness amounted to a subject divorced and isolated from the
world because Husserl construed absolute consciousness as a theory
only about the a priori, presuppositionless and essential structures
of consciousness that made possible the unified perception of an
object occurring in successive moments. As an alternative to what he
considered Husserl's abstracted view of the human being, Heidegger
suggests that philosophy cannot advance a proper understanding of the
being of the human being by bracketing its and the world's existence.
Instead, we must understand the human being as being-in-the-world,
Dasein, literally there-being; we only can understand what the world
contributes to us and what we contribute to the world if we consider
each as co-dependent without reducing one to the other. To put it
differently, Husserl's transcendental phenomenology provides an
"upward" oriented approach while Heidegger's ontological phenomenology
provides a "downward" oriented approach, and their approaches stem
from their different views of time (Macann 1991).
Heidegger maintains that Husserl's phenomenology proves inadequate to
the task of understanding Dasein's relation to the world because
Husserl fails to articulate adequately the relation between
consciousness, or being, and time. Specifically, Husserl's
construction of the fundamental form of intentionality as absolute
time-constituting consciousness remains, according to Heidegger,
prisoner to the bias of pure presence. As Heidegger puts it, the bias
of pure presence entails the reduction of "being" to the moment that
"is" fully articulated in the conscious now at the expense of absence,
i.e., what falls outside the conscious now, i.e., the moments of past
and future. Such a view of consciousness, Heidegger insists,
capitulates to the prejudice of presence because it implies that
something can appear to consciousness only in the form of an object
now given or before one in person and unified by consciousness across
its manifold moments (BT, § 67c). At a general level of
intentionality, Heidegger wants to correct Husserl's overly cognitive
assessment of the subject. For Heidegger, an intention or intentio
literally conveys a sense of "stretching out" or "straining"
(Heidegger 1925). For Heidegger, Dasein is being in the world, a being
with goals and projects toward which it comports itself or toward
which it stretches out. The projects toward which it stretches itself
makes Dasein fundamentally futural in its intentional directedness
toward the world.
Having failed to investigate the practical comportment of the subject,
Heidegger argues, Husserl's view of consciousness seems to reduce all
awareness to awareness of an object in the present, thus reducing the
past to the present and consciousness' self-awareness to an object
among objects (Dahlstron 1999). Together, these related consequences
motivate Heidegger's conclusion that Husserl fails to perform the
phenomenological reduction completely. Or, better, Heidegger concluded
that the performance of the reduction adulterates the view of the
subject and thus should be abandoned. Heidegger's version of
phenomenology thus does not begin from a phenomenological reduction
although competing views of this matter exist (Crowell 1990; Blattner
1999).
As mentioned already, Heidegger's very conception of Dasein as
co-dependent with the world displays, he believes, his difference from
Husserl's view of the human being as absolute time-constituting
consciousness. Put negatively and in terms of his History of the
Concept of Time (1925), Heidegger criticizes Husserl for not
considering fully the existence of the human being, bracketing its
existence in favor of an analysis of the essential features of
consciousness' intentional structures (Heidegger 1925). Put positively
and in terms of his Being and Time (1927), Heidegger claims that
Dasein's essence is its existence (BT § 9). Hence, one might claim,
Heidegger introduces the movement of existential phenomenology, a
development in phenomenology concerned with the very existence of the
human being, which we have seen is termed Dasein by Heidegger.
Concern with Dasein's existence as its essence does necessarily reduce
to the assumption that Heidegger takes existence in the sense of
biological or genetic determinants. Though such factors may condition
Dasein's manner of existing, they do not determine it, according to
Heidegger. Dasein is neither fully determined nor uninhibitedly free
(BT 144). She exists in the mode of her possibilities and her
possibilities are motivated by environmental influences, her skills
and interests, etc. (Blattner, 1999). Dasein, for Heidegger, is thus a
being concerned about her being, reckoning with the world through her
activities and commitments. Centering his existential phenomenology on
how the world appears to a being concerned about its being,
Heidegger's inquiry starts from how Dasein comports herself as
manifest in the everyday activities of her life, activities to which
she commits herself or about which she cares (BT § 7). Heideggerian
phenomenology thus begins from an interest in how the world appears to
a being that cares about its existence, an intentional being but one
who, in intending the world, is primarily practical and secondarily
contemplative. Less concerned with the Husserlian search for
presuppositionless certainty and essential structures, Heidegger's
existential phenomenology amounts to an interpretive description or
hermeneutics that attempts to express the unexpressed (or articulate
the pre-predicative) mode of Dasein's engagement with the world (BT §
7). And this manner of engagement finds its fullest expression in
Heidegger's account of Dasein's temporality.
a. Heidegger and Dasein's Temporality
The notion of Dasein's projects proves crucial to understanding
Heidegger's analysis of Dasein's temporality and its difference from
Husserl's phenomenology. In discussing Dasein's projects, Heidegger
takes the term etymologically; to pro-ject means to put out there or
to put forward. That Dasein projects itself in the world implies
something fundamental about it. Dasein finds itself thrown into a
world historical circumstance and projects itself in that world. Born
(thrown) into a time and culture not of one's choosing, Dasein always
already exists in the world and suffers some limitations from which
she nevertheless may wiggle free thanks to her interests and concerns
about the world and her existence therein. The way things matter to
Dasein—how she finds herself affected, in Heidegger's language—and her
skills and interest constitute different possibilities for her,
different ways of being-in-the-world. These possibilities, in turn,
manifest themselves in Dasein's projects, i.e., in how she puts
herself forward or projects or comports herself. These conditions
suggest to Heidegger that the essential mode of being in the world for
Dasein is a temporal one. Of the three temporal dimensions
characterizing Dasein, we may say: First, the fact that Dasein finds
herself thrown into a world and characterized by certain dispositions,
etc. implies a "pastness" to her being. Second, the fact she projects
herself implies a "futurity" to her being. And, third, the fact that
she finds herself busied with the world as she projects herself in an
effort to fulfill the present tasks required by the goal that is her
project implies a "presentness" to her being (Blattner 1999).
The fundamental characteristic of the being that cares about its
being, Dasein, then, is temporality. But things are not as simple (or
common-sense) as they seem thus far. Time resembles Dasein insofar as
time projects itself or stands outside itself in its future and past
without losing itself—time and Dasein thus appear ontologically
similar, or similar in their ontological structure. Since the question
concerns the being for whom its being is a concern, and since the
fundamental structure of this being is its temporality, philosophy's
very attempt to understand Dasein fundamentally concerns the relation
between being and time at a pre-predicative level of
worldly-engagement, a level prior to articulated judgment, prior to
the conscious conceptualizations of traditional metaphysics or
Husserlian phenomenology; hence, the title of Heidegger's famous work,
Being and Time (Richardson 1967). In Heidegger's terms, an "authentic"
understanding of the being concerned about its being rests upon a
proper understanding of that being's temporality.
To understand Dasein, then, Heidegger first distinguishes originary or
authentic time understood as Dasein's way of being in the world from
worldly- and ordinary-time understood inauthentically or uncritically
by the common-sense, pre-philosophical mind (BT § 80). As the labels
imply, Heidegger articulates a hierarchical structure between these
levels of time, much like Husserl's levels of time (Sokolowski 1974).
The hierarchical structure envisioned by Heidegger looks like this:
World-time grounds ordinary-time, and both in turn are grounded by
originary-time.
To establish the fundamental feature of Dasein as originary
temporality, Heidegger distances his view of Dasein's temporality from
all common sense understandings of time as a series of nows, thereby
deferring the common sense understanding of past as no-longer-now and
future as not-yet-now. His position depends on a distinction between
how time shows itself to Dasein as world-time and ordinary-time, the
latter being derivative of the former. World-time denotes the manner
in which the world appears as significant to Dasein in its everyday
reckoning with the world at a practical level through its projects.
For example, the world appears to an academic with certain
significances or importance. Objects like chalk, books, computers, and
libraries all manifest themselves with a particular value, and time
does, as well (just consider the fact that the new year begins in late
August rather than the first day of January). When I sit in my office,
the approaching time of three in the afternoon does not appear merely
as an indifferent hour on the clock. Rather, it appears to me as the
time when, according to my project, I must head to class—just as it
may appear to a postal work as the time when she should return to the
station from her route. For me, the time-span of my class does not
merely appear as seventy-five successive minutes. Rather, the
classroom time of my project appears to me as the time when I project
myself toward my students, the material for the day's discussion and
the material equipment in the class that facilitates my teaching well.
If my class begins to go poorly, however, I may become self-conscious
about how well I meet the demands of my project as a teacher. When the
focus of my attention shifts from my project to my failures, the time
of my project ceases to be my primary focus. Perhaps in this case I
shift my focus to the passing nows or seconds of each increasingly
long minute. If such a shift occurs, Heidegger might claim that I
shift from the mode of world-time to the mode of ordinary-time, the
time understood as a measurable succession of nows, seconds, minutes,
etc.
This time that measures successive nows, Heidegger deems
ordinary-time, which depends upon world-time. Heidegger distinguishes
the two by pointing out that the significance which colors world-time
goes missing in the view of ordinary time and time appears no longer
as the span of my project but the mere succession of punctual,
atomistic nows (the Newtonian scientific view of time as an empty
container or place holder). When the time-span of practical reckoning
with the world ceases for Dasein, ordinary-time emerges (BT§ 80;
Blattner 1999). The above example does not quite get Heidegger exactly
right, however, for in it I remain interested in human concerns
(except that now I am worried about them). What the example does
convey is the shift in understanding time from a mode of time as an
extended reckoning with the world laden with significance to a mode of
time considered as a purely abstract marching of moments, a view of
time most accurately associated with the mathematical and scientific
view of time (but not to the mathematician or scientist working with
this view of time).
All of these distinctions between world- and ordinary-time are meant
to elaborate Heidegger's view that as a series of projects Dasein is
no mere entity in the world but a temporal structure peculiar to its
kind of being-in-the-world that makes manifest world- and
ordinary-time. For Heidegger, the now denotes a mode of Dasein's
manner of being that discloses the appearance of the world to us,
i.e., Dasein's way of being-in-the-world. As a series of projects,
Dasein in its originary temporality is characterized by a tripartite
mode of transcendence or process (albeit a non-sequential process,
since Heidegger has distanced himself from the ordinary view of time).
First, as transcendence, as that which goes from itself and to which
the world comes, Dasein has a futural moment. Second, as
transcendence, as that which manifests itself non-objectively while
reckoning with that which stands before it, Dasein has a present
moment as the place wherein the world appears to, or manifests itself
to, that which cares about it. And, third, as transcendence, as that
to which the world comes, Dasein has a past moment because that which
comes and manifests itself comes and manifests itself to one who
always already is there (Heidegger 1927; Richardson 1967). As
transcendence, as temporality, Heidegger describes Dasein as
"ecstatic," where ecstatic means to stand out (Sokolowski 2000). As
the kind of being that is always outside itself without leaving itself
behind, Dasein is a process of separating and consolidating itself
(Sokolowski 1974). Outside of itself in the future, Dasein projects
itself and reckons with that about which it cares; outside of itself
in the present, Dasein makes manifest or present the appearance of
that to which it goes out in its interest and according to its
projects; outside of itself in the past, Dasein drags along that which
it has been, its life, which, in turn, colors its present experiences
and future projects.
This union of past, present and future as modes of originary-time in
Dasein's being-in-the-world renders Dasein authentic—one with itself
or its own—because the projection into the future makes the present
and the past part of Dasein's project—its essence is its existence.
However, insofar as I assume a project or life-orientation passively
and without realizing myself as responsible for that project, argues
Heidegger, I live inauthentically. And this is because I am engaged in
the world without a full understanding of myself within the world. Put
differently, rather than consciously make myself who I am through my
choices, I passively assume a role within society—hence the temptation
to label Heidegger an existentialist, a label the he himself rejected.
Many rhetorical differences exist between how Husserl and Heidegger
execute the phenomenological method, particularly the phenomenology of
temporality. Despite these differences, Heidegger begins his inquiry
into Dasein's temporality much like Husserl began his consideration of
absolute, time-constituting consciousness. Just as Husserl established
that neither the now nor the consciousness of the now is itself a part
of time, Heidegger begins his account of Dasein's originary
temporality with the observation that neither the now nor Dasein is
itself a part of time (BT § 62). As Heidegger puts it, as always
already being-in-the-world, Dasein's temporality is neither before nor
after nor already in terms of the way common sense understands time as
a sequence of discrete, empty nows (BT § 65). Hence, Heidegger
translates Husserl's account of the levels of time into an account of
Dasein's originary temporality. Moreover, Heidegger and Husserl
seemingly end on the same note, for Husserl describes the
living-present as a non-objectivating transcendence, an intentional
being that transcends itself toward the world, and this description
equally characterizes Heidegger's more practically oriented discussion
of Dasein's originary-temporality. Like Husserl's notion of the
living-present, Heidegger's theory of Dasein's structure as originary
temporality considers Dasein a mode of objectivating not itself
objectified, the condition for the possibility of all awareness of
objects at the levels of worldly- and ordinary-time (BT § 70).
Still, an important difference exists with respect to their
phenomenologies of time and time-consciousness. First, despite the
implicit levels of time, Heidegger employs the phenomenological
reduction quite ambivalently and ambiguously. Second, Heidegger
explicitly rejects the outcome of the phenomenological reduction as a
privileged access to absolute time-constituting consciousness. Third,
Heidegger quite unequivocally privileges the moment of the future in
his account of Dasein's originary temporality. By emphasizing Dasein's
being-in-the-world as manifest through its throwness in the world, and
its care for the world as manifest through its projects, Heidegger's
focuses on Dasein's futural character distinguishes his account from
Husserl's, for Husserl emphasized the moment of retention in the
living-present almost to the exclusion of any remarks on protention,
the anticipatory moment of the living-present. For these reasons,
Heidegger considered his phenomenology radically different from
Husserl's. In particular, Heidegger thought Husserl's overly cognitive
account of how consciousness constitutes a unified temporal object
across a succession of moments articulated only one of the many issues
surrounding the temporality of Dasein, a merely scientific or
cognitive account of how consciousness presents an object in the world
to itself. Husserl's restrictive phenomenology of time, Heidegger
argues, overlooks the existential dimension of Dasein's temporality,
how Dasein reckons with the world at a tacit level rather than how it
cognizes the world. And in particular, Heidegger thought philosophy
could assess Dasein's manner of reckoning with the world only by
examining its futural moment as manifest in the projects that
characterize Dasein's mode of existence as the ongoing realization of
its possibilities or construction of its essence.
3. Sartre and the Temporality of the "For-Itself"
Heidegger's innovative contributions to the phenomenology of time did
not go unnoticed by later phenomenologists. Both Sartre and
Merelau-Ponty adopted Heidegger's view of Dasein as
being-in-the-world, an entity whose essence is its existence. The
originality of Sartre's phenomenology of time lies not in his
reflections on time, which, as we shall see, return to some rather
pedestrian claims. Rather, Sartre's unique contribution to the
phenomenology of time lies in his understanding of how consciousness,
the "for-itself," relates to the world, the "in-itself." What in their
discussions of this fundamental mode of transcendence Husserl labeled
absolute time-constituting consciousness, and Heidegger Dasein, Sartre
termed the "for-itself." Given Husserl and Heidegger's differing views
of consciousness' mode of intentionality and its fundamental
self-transcending nature in its mode of temporality, Sartre's theory
presents an unlikely marriage of the two.
Fusing Heidegger's view of being-in-the-world with what he considered
was a greater fidelity to Husserl's notion of intentionality, Sartre
considered the being of the "for-itself" an ecstatic temporal
structure characterized by a sheer transcendence or intentionality. In
his earliest work, Transcendence of the Ego (1939), Sartre defines the
"for-itself" by intentionality, i.e., the Husserlian claim that
consciousness transcends itself (Sartre 1936). As self-transcending,
Sartre further delimits the "for-itself" as a
being-in-itself-in-the-world. The "for-itself" is a field of being
always already engaged with the world, as Heidegger expressed Dasein
as intentional and thrown. For Sartre, however, in its activity of
engaging the world the "for-itself" reveals itself as nothing, a
"no-thing," or not-the-being-of-which-it-is-conscious. Sartre further
qualifies the being of the "for-itself" that always already is engaged
with the world as a non-positional consciousness (Sartre 1936). A
non-positional consciousness always already engaged the world, Sartre
contends, consciousness does not take a position on itself but on the
world; hence, consciousness is non-positional. To evidence his point,
Sartre maintains that I, when late for a meeting and running to catch
the subway, do not primarily concern myself with myself but only have
a consciousness of the subway to be caught (Sartre 1936). Rather than
taking a position on myself as I pursue the subway, I implicitly carry
myself along as I tarry explicitly with the world. For this reason,
Sartre argues that absolute consciousness in Husserl's sense of the
living-present does not unify a temporal experience because the unity
of consciousness itself is found in the object (Sartre 1936).
This Sartrean view that the experience unifies itself not only recalls
Heidegger's insistence that Dasein is a self-consolidating process,
but also renders the notion of an absolute time-constituting
consciousness superfluous, according to Sartre. Indeed, Sartre
believed that a deep fidelity to Husserl's theory of intentionality
necessitated the abandonment of Husserl's notion of absolute
consciousness; hence, he dramatically declared that the Husserlian
notion of an absolute consciousness would mean the death of
consciousness (Sartre 1936). If one assumes, with Husserl, the notion
of a living-present characterized by the moments of retention, primal
impression and protention, Sartre argues, consciousness dies of
asphyxiation, so to speak. A consciousness divided in this way,
according to Sartre, amounts to a series of instantaneous and discrete
moments that themselves require connection. Such an instantaneous
series of consciousness amounts to a caricature of intentionality, in
Sartre's view, because this kind of consciousness cannot transcend
itself; as Sartre expresses it, an internally divided consciousness
will suffocate itself as it batters in vain against the window-pains
of the present without shattering them (Sartre 1943).
Sartre's critique of the living-present or absolute time-constituting
consciousness seems rather questionable. Indeed, this image leaves one
wondering whether or not Sartre derives this caricatured view of
time-consciousness from a caricature of Husserl's view of
intentionality. Nevertheless, Sartre abandons Husserl's notion of the
tripartite structure of absolute time-constituting consciousness in
favor of something like Heidegger's notion of Dasein's ecstatic
temporality and its projects and possibilities. And yet Sartres'
adaptation of Heidegger's notion of Dasein's possibilities seems
questionable as well. Recall that Dasein's possibilities were not
purely uninhibited, that Dasein did not simply choose its projects and
possibilities from a position of total freedom because of its thrown
condition and affective dispositions. Sartre's theory of the
"for-itself" seems to reject the kinds of limiting conditions entailed
by Heidegger's notion of thrownness. Indeed, Sartre's melodramatic
image of a consciousness with cabin fever implies that he cannot fully
embrace any limiting factors on how the "for-itself" fashions its
essence through its existence. For Sartre, the "for-itself" is
radically free (Blattner 1999), and the result of Sartre's reflections
on the temporality of the "for-itself" is a rather pedestrian view of
temporality.
Like Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre does not consider the past, present
and future as moments of time considered as contents or containers for
contents. Rather, each marks a mode in which the "for-itself" makes
manifest itself and the world. But Sartre's account neither surpasses
nor achieves either the rigor of Husserl's analyses or the descriptive
quality of Heidegger's. For Sartre, the past of the "for-itself"
amounts to that which was but is no longer—similar to the view of the
past itself, which Augustine rejected, as that which was but is
no-longer. By mirror opposite, the future of the "for-itself" amounts
to which it intends to be but is not yet—similar to the view of the
future itself, which Augustine rejected, as that which will be but is
not yet. And between the two, the present of the "for-itself" is that
which it is not, for its being is characterized as
being-not-the-thing-of-which-it-is-conscious—similar to the view of
the present, which Augustine rejected, as the thin, ephemeral slice of
the now.
4. Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Ambiguity: The Subject as Time
Whether Husserl's, Heidegger's or Sartre's account, for phenomenology
we cannot separate the issue of time from the issue of subjectivity's
structure. And Merleau-Ponty's discussion of temporality in
Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is no exception. It is, however,
the most exceptional case of the intertwining of these issues.
Developing Heidegger's notion of Dasein as being-in-the-world,
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the being of Dasein as its bodily comportment
and declares the body an essentially intentional part of the subject.
Since Merleau-Ponty wants to make the body itself intentional, it is
no surprise that he intertwines time and the subject, (in)famously
remarking that "we must understand time as the subject and the subject
as time" (Merleau-Ponty 1945).
To situate Merleau-Ponty's account in this trajectory of
phenomenological theories of time, it is useful to bear in mind that
his account amounts to an innovative synthesis of Husserl and
Heidegger's understandings of time. Though the same can and has been
said of Sartre's account, Merleau-Ponty's synthesis of Husserl and
Heidegger differs from Sartre's on three important scores. First,
Merleau-Ponty rejects the dualistic ontology of the "for-itself" and
the "in-itself" that led Sartre to rashly criticize Husserl's notion
of absolute consciousness and superficially adopt Heidegger's
phenomenological account of Dasein's temporality as manifest in its
projects and possibilities." Second, Merleau-Ponty will not adopt
Heidegger's notion of Dasein's temporality as an alternative to some
purported shortcoming of Husserl's account of the mode of
intentionality unique to absolute time-constituting consciousness.
Rather, third, more sensitive to the subtleties of Husserl's theory of
absolute time-constituting consciousness in the living-present than
even Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty proposes to think the "unthought" of
Husserl's account of time through an intensified version of
Heidegger's account of the self's inseparability from time.
From the outset, the "Temporality" chapter of his Phenomenology of
Perception explicitly links time to the problem of subjectivity,
noting that the analysis of time cannot follow a "pre-established
conception of subjectivity" (Merleau-Ponty 1945). On the one hand,
Merleau-Ponty rejects the traditional idealist conception of
subjectivity in favor of an account of subjectivity in "its concrete
structure;" on the other hand, since we must seek subjectivity "at the
intersections of its dimensions," which intersections concern "time
itself and … its internal dialectic," Merleau-Ponty rejects the
realistic conception of subjectivity's states as Nacheinander, i.e.,
successive, punctual, atomistic instants that lack intersection
(Merleau-Ponty 1945). Hence, our understanding of Merleau-Ponty's
account of temporality and subjectivity's temporality should follow
the "triadic" structure of the Phenomenology: reject realism and
idealism to demonstrate the merits of phenomenology (Sallis 1971).
The intellectualist account of time as (in) the subject fails because
it extracts the subject from time and reduces time to consciousness'
quasi-eternity. The realist account of the subject as (in) time fails
because it reduces the subject to a perpetually new present without
unity to its flow. Both failures force upon the philosopher the
realization that she can resolve the problem of time and subjectivity
only by forfeiting the commitment to a "notion of time … as an object
of our knowledge." If we no longer can consider time "an object of our
knowledge," we must consider it a "dimension of our being"
(Merleau-Ponty 1945). Hence, an account of subjectivity's
temporality—of time as a dimension of our being—necessarily entails
the development of a model of bodily consciousness' pre-reflective,
non-objectifying awareness beyond the "pre-established conception of
subjectivity" that takes time as an object of our knowledge.
This means not that (1) "time is for someone" but that (2) "time is
someone" (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Phenomenologists and commentators alike
often attribute (1) to Husserl and (2) to Heidegger. This should not
surprise us given that Heidegger himself seemed to ascribe (2) to
himself and his examination of Dasein's lived-temporality in
opposition to (1) Husserl's account of how consciousness synthesizes
an object across time. Often one of Husserl's most sympathetic and
accurate commentators (in Phenomenology of Perception, at least)
Merleau-Ponty suggests that Husserl's theory of absolute
time-constituting consciousness in the living-present with its
tripartite intentional structure provided an account of how (2) made
time appear for reflection as (1). In short, Merleau-Ponty understood
better than Heidegger that Husserl's theory of the living-present
articulated a theory of lived-time. What remained unthought by Husserl
according to Merleau-Ponty was the inseparability of time and the
subject in the theory of the living-present. Hence, an ambiguity
intentionally pervades the account of time provided in Phenomenology
of Perception.
This ambiguity at hand in Phenomenology of Perception stems from
Merleau-Ponty's honest admission that one never can fully execute the
phenomenological reduction: "the most important lesson the reduction
teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction"
(Merleau-Ponty 1945). Merleau-Ponty does not advocate discarding the
reduction, however, as Heidegger somewhat equivocally did. Rather, he
aims to explain that Husserl merely meant the reduction as a critical
device that ensured phenomenologists would retain the stance of
presuppositionlessness, the stance of a perpetual beginner. The
motivation for Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl's phenomenological
reduction is the fact that philosophical reflection always depends
upon a pre-reflective lived experience, a lived experience that always
occurs in the temporal flux of bodily consciousness. Under the
influence of Heidegger's theory of Dasein's being-in-the-world,
Merleau-Ponty fashions his starting point in the exploration of time
as an attempt to provide an account of the structures of
pre-reflective consciousness that make reflection possible. And much
like Heidegger, who sought to articulate the pre-predicative element
of lived experience, Merleau-Ponty believed that these structures of
pre-reflective consciousness reveal themselves as primarily temporal.
(For his part, Merleau-Ponty will refer to this pre-reflective
consciousness as the "tacit cogito," his expression for the
non-objectivating, pre-reflective consciousness articulated throughout
the phenomenologists we have considered in this entry.) Hence, one
could argue, despite the watershed reflections Merleau-Ponty provides
on embodiment, time proves the most fundamental investigation of
Phenomenology of Perception (Sallis 1971).
Since phenomenology's task includes providing an account of the
pre-reflective', lived experience that makes possible reflection,
Merleau-Ponty turns to the structure of time as an exemplar of that
which makes explicit the implicit. For Merleau-Ponty, time provides a
model that sheds light on the structure of subjectivity because
"temporal dimensions … bear each other out and ever confine themselves
to making explicit what was implied in each, being collectively
expressive of that one single explosion or thrust that is subjectivity
itself" (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Since to make explicit that which is
implied in each moment means to transcend, to go beyond, one could say
that Merleau-Ponty's paradoxical expression means that time and the
subject share the same structure of transcendence. That time is the
subject and the subject is time means that the subject exists in a
world that always outstrips her yet remains a world lived through by
the subject (Sallis 1971). To clarify this structure, Merleau-Ponty
invokes "with Husserl the 'passive synthesis' of time," for the
passive and non-objectivating characteristic of time's structure in
(what Husserl called) the living-present marks the archetype of the
self's structure, its transcendence that makes possible self- and
object-manifestation. The Husserlian notion of double-intentionality
thus pervades Merleau-Ponty's account (Merleau-Ponty 1945).
That the matter of a passive and non-objectivating synthesis takes
Merleau-Ponty to a consideration of the structure of absolute
time-constituting consciousness' double-intentionality—its
transcendence and self-manifestation—as the structure of time we know
to be the case for two reasons. First, Merleau-Ponty tells us, "in
order to become explicitly what it is implicitly, that is,
consciousness, [the self] needs to unfold itself into multiplicity;"
second, in addition to the distinction just implied between
non-objectivating and objectivating awareness, i.e., pre-reflective'
and reflective consciousness, Merleau-Ponty elaborates this manner of
unfolding by claiming that "what we [mean] by passive synthesis [is]
that we make our way into multiplicity, but that we do not synthesize
it" as intellectualist accounts of time such as Augustine's suggest. A
synthesis of the multiplicity of time's moments and the moments of the
self must be avoided because it would require a constituting
consciousness that stands outside time, and "we shall never manage to
understand how a … constituting subject is able to posit or become
aware of itself in time." To avoid this error of separating
consciousness from that of which it is aware, Merleau-Ponty appeals to
Husserl's theory of the living-present's absolute flow, a
"[consciousness that] is the very action of temporalization—of flux,
as Husserl has it—a self anticipatory … flow which never leaves
itself" (Merleau-Ponty 1945).
Merleau-Ponty seemingly provides an existential-phenomenological
account of Husserl's theory of absolute time-constituting
consciousness' double-intentionality. Nevertheless, he adopts
Husserl's theory according to his characteristic philosophy of
ambiguity. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty insists that "it is of the essence of
time to be not only actual time, or time which flows, but also time
which is aware of itself … the archetype of the relationship of self
to self" (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Ultimately with such remarks
Merleau-Ponty was on the verge of bringing phenomenology toward a
theory of ontology, which theory emerged in earnest in his later work,
The Visible and the Invisible (1961). In that work, Merleau-Ponty
expressly rejects his Phenomenology of Perception for having retained
the Husserlian philosophy of consciousness. And this move from
phenomenology to ontology manifests itself in some of his most
provocative observations about time. To say that he moves from
phenomenology to ontology is to say that he rejects any privileging of
the subject or consciousness as constituting time either as a
perceptual object or through a lived experience. As he puts it in the
working notes of his The Visible and the Invisible, "it is indeed the
past that adheres to the present and not the consciousness of the past
that adheres to the consciousness of the present" (Merleau-Ponty
1961). Time now is characterized as an ontologically independent
entity and not a construct disclosed by consciousness. It is the
essence of time to be time that is aware of itself, to be sure. But
this time is no longer an archetype of the self's non-objectivating
self-awareness. Rather, time constitutes the subject according to
Merleau-Ponty, who puts to rest the phenomenological notion of
absolute time-constituting consciousness, arguably Husserl's most
important discovery.
5. References and Further Reading
a. Primary Sources
* Augustine, A. Confessions. Trans. F. J. Sheed. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Co, 1999.
* Derrida, J. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. D. Allison. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973.
* Heidegger, M. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986; Being
and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and
Row, Publishers Inc, 1963.
* Heidegger, M. Gesamtausgabe Band 20: Prolegomena zur Geschichte
des Zeitbefriffs. Frankfut am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1979; The
History of the Concept of Time Trans. T. Kisiel. Bloomington: Indian
University Press, 1985.
* Husserl, E. Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins
(1983-1917). Ed. R. Boehm. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966; On the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1983-1917).
Trans. J. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
* Husserl, E. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlessungs-
und Forschungsmauskripten (1918-1926). Ed. M. Fleisher. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1966; Analyses Concerning Passive and Active
Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. A. Steinbock.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Husserl, E. Phatasie,
Bildbewußtseins, Erinnerung. Ed. E. Marbach. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1980; Fantasy, Image-Consciousness, Memory.
Trans. J. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.
* Husserl, E. Aktive Synthesen: Aus der Vorlesung 'Transzendental
Logik' 1920-21. Ergäzungsband zu 'Analysen sur passiven Synthesis.'
Ed. R. Breur. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000; Analyses
Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental
Logic. Trans. A. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2001.
* Husserl, E. Die 'Bernaur Manuskripte' über das Zeitbewußtseins
1917/18. Ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 2001.
* Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990.
* Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith.
New York: Routledge & Keegan Paul Ltd, 1962.
* Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. A.
Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969.
* Sartre, J. P. Transcendence of the Ego. Trans. F. Williams and
R. Kirkpatrick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957.
* Sartre, J. P. Being and Nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956.
b. Secondary Sources
* Blattner, W. Heidegger's Temporal Idealism. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
* Brough, J. B. "The Emergence of Absolute Consciousness in
Husserl's Early Writings on Time-Consciousness." Man and World (1972).
* Brough, J. B. "Translator's Introduction." In E. Husserl, On the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917).
Trans. by J. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
* Brough, J. B. "Husserl and the Deconstruction of Time," Review
of Metaphysics 46 (March 1993): 503-536.
* Brough, J. B. "Time and the One and the Many (In Husserl's
Bernaur Manuscripts on Time Consciousness)," Philosophy Today 46:5
(2002): 14-153.
* Dalhstrom, D. "Heidegger's Critique of Husserl." In Reading
Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought. Edited by T.
Kisiel and J. van Buren. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994.
* de Warren, N. The Promise of Time. New York: Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming.
* Evans, J. C. "The Myth of Absolute Consciousness." In Crises in
Continental Philosophy. Edited by A Dallery, et. al. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1990.
* Held, K. Lebendige Gegenwart. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.
* Kelly, M. "On the Mind's 'Pronouncement' of Time: Aristotle,
Augustine and Husserl on Time-consciousness. Proceedings of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2005.
* Macann, Christopher. Presence and Coincidence. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1991.
* Richardson, W. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967.
* Sallis, J. "Time, Subjectivity and the Phenomenology of
Perception." The Modern Schoolman XLVIII (May 1971): 343-357.
* Sokolowski, R. Husserlian Meditations. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1974.
* Sokolowski, R. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
* Wood, D. The Deconstruction of Time. Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities Press International, 1989.
* Zahavi, D. Self-awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological
Investigation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
* Zahavi, D. Husserl's Phenomenology. Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
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