Husserl's analysis of the inner time-consciousness

Hegeler Institute

HUSSERL'S ANALYSIS OF THE INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESSAuthor(s): J. N. FindlaySource: The Monist, Vol. 59, No. 1, The Philosophy of Husserl (JANUARY, 1975), pp. 3-20Published by: Hegeler InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27902401 .Accessed: 24/09/2014 04:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Hegeler Institute is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Monist.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.214.29.29 on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 04:24:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hegelerhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/27902401?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

HUSSERL'S ANALYSIS OF THE INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS

The present article is an attempt to set forth and examine the conclusions of what is perhaps Husserl's finest piece of philosophical investigation, and one of the finest pieces in the whole history of philosophy: the investigation of the consciousness of time, with its extraordinary combination of an un

changing form with an absolute flux of which it is none other than the very form itself. This investigation puts Husserl on a level with the wisest heads on the matter, with Aristotle in Books IV and VI of the Physics, with Augus tine in Book X of the Confessions, and with Kant, whose whole Critique of Pure Reason may be said to be an examination of what is necessary to tem

poral experience. In Husserl's work we have, we may say, the greatest of recent philosophers tackling the greatest of philosophical problems, one in which contradiction is always appearing in novel forms, to be evaded only by the na?ve superficiality of a Minkowski or a Gr?nbaum, or by such in

finitely useful subtlety as Husserl himself practises. As Husserl himself put it near the beginning of his 1905 Lectures:

Meanwhile the longed-for clarity beckons us after long labours, we think the most glorious results are so near at hand that we have only to stretch our hands forth to grasp them. All difficulties seem to dissolve, our critical sense mows down contradictions one by one, till only one last step remains.

We sum up our result. We begin with a self-conscious "therefore", and then at once a point of difficulty starts up that gets bigger and bigger. It

spreads and spreads into a form of horror that devours all our arguments and reanimates the contradictions we have just mown down. The corpses all revive and grin at us mockingly. Our struggle and effort have to begin all over again. [Husserliana, X, p. 393.]

Husserl's treatment of the time-consciousness is not free from incoher

ences, from obscurities and dogmatic fixities?no treatment of such a subject could hope to escape all these?but it is more sensitive to the infinitely rami

fying problematic of the topic, and copes more manfully with any and all

such ramifications, than any previous fruit of human excogitation. For the survival of Husserl's wonderful work on the subject we have a

number of Husserl students to thank: first of all the deeply devoted Edith

Stein, afterwards a Carmelite nun and a racial martyr under the Nazis, who


http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

4 J. . FINDLAY

transcribed all Husserl's shorthand scrawls on the time-consciousness between

1905 and 1917, and who imposed on them an expository order which,

inevitably selective and arbitrary at times, was none the less needed to bring out the unified message, and which, approved by Husserl, was to serve as the basis for Heidegger's first publication of the time-treatises in 1928. To this unified exposition Edith Stein appended thirteen further Beilagen of great value, all based on Husserlian manuscripts and overseen by Husserl himself. For the full understanding of the publications of 1928 we have further to thank Rudolf Boehm and the various others who cooperated with him in the magnificent Husserliana edition of 1966: this provides us with the full manuscript material on which Edith Stein only drew partially, and answers a great number of the questions that the previously published material was bound to raise. The time has now come to achieve a philosophi cal assessment, in terms wider than the scholastically 'phenomenological', of all these invaluable writings.

The first seven sections of the 1928 Main Text are all based on Husserl's lecture notes of 1905, and on earlier treatments incorporated in these: they set the stage for the subsequent exposition, and they connect this with its roots in Brentano's treatment of temporal intentionality. There had been, when Husserl lectured on the time-consciousness in 1905, no publication of Brentano's views on the subject: Husserl bases himself on what he had

garnered from Brentano's Vienna lectures in the eighties. We are much better apprised, since the posthumous publication of many Brentano writings, of the opinions on which Husserl builds, but which it is not now the occasion to consider apart from Husserl's understanding of them. Husserl

begins his investigations with an exclusion of objective time, an anticipation of the phenomenological suspense (e ) that he was later to make so much more elaborate. If we are to study time as it comes before us or appears to us in consciousness, we must disregard the objective time in which conscious

experience takes place, and which is also the time of the bodily events

which may underlie consciousness causally, and of which consciousness takes

cognizance. This objective time may afterwards be brought into the picture as something 'constituted' by and for consciousness in many 'transcendent'

convictions, assumptions and even perceptions, but it must at the start

be separated from the time in which things primitively appear, and in which our own apprehension of them is primitively placed. 'What we accept', Husserl says, 'is not the existence of a cosmic time, of an endurance of

things etc., but of a time and a duration which are as such apparent. These are absolute data, which it would be senseless to question. We are therefore



HUSSERL ON INNER E-CONSCIOUSNESS 5

also accepting a time which has real being, but which is not the time of the

experienced world {Erfahrungswelt) : it is the immanent time of the stream of consciousness* (1928 edition, p. 369). Husserl even says that there is a

sensed temporality [empfundenes Zeitliches) which is the necessary phe nomenological datum on which the perception and thought of objective time is founded, such 'founding* signifying that there is a sense-given

temporality attaching to our primitive sense-contents, which is such as to

enable us to pass from these to a corresponding but necessarily quite different

objective temporality which can be represented by many such subjective

'temporalities'. Husserl says that he is in a sense trying to discover the origin of our consciousness of time, but only in the sense that the consciousness of objects in time rests upon and presupposes and has an evidential basis in a more fundamental time-consciousness, which need not however precede it either in experienced or objective time?questions of nativism versus

empiricism are phenomenologically irrelevant (1928 edition, p. 373)?and which does not plainly lead to the objective time-consciousness by any ex

plicit process of inference.

Here, at the very beginning of Husserl's time-probe, we find him making certain assumptions which Anglo-Saxon analysts have long taught themselves to criticize or distrust, and which warp, though they do not in any way ruin, what he finally concludes. Husserl assumes without question that there are in

tuitively given data which are in some sense the foundation of all our objective references, which are immensely reduced, intensively abstracted objects which alone can provide a fulfilling content and an evidential justification for such references. He also assumes, though with occasional hesitation (see, e.g., Husserliana X, p. 284), that such intuitive data are also real parts of our experiences, actually immanent in them, in a sense in which many of the

objects intended in and through such data, brought before us by 'animating' the latter with an interpretative 'conception' [Auffassung), are not real, immanent parts of our experiences, and in that sense wholly transcend those

experiences, even if, as happens often, they are quite imaginary and do not exist anywhere. Whereas Anglo-Saxon reflection has long learnt to

doubt whether the so-called 'directly seen' data of sense can be cleanly and

unambiguously abstracted from our referential experiences, or whether, however much accumulated, they can exhaustively 'fulfill' and attest all that we mean and understand in such references. And even if admitted into

Anglo-Saxon theory, as in the original Moorean conception of 'sense-data',

they are put into exactly the same objective category as the remoter objects that they help to introduce. All alike are controversially 'immanent' in, or



6 J. . FINDLAY

'transcendent' of experience. Husserl has not, it is plain, despite utterances that tell in another direction, ever advanced to the Twardowskian-Meinongian notion of a sense content (or any other mental content) as a nuance of ex

perience intrinsically capable of presenting something objective, while remain

ing quite unlike it in quality or mode of being. Nor has Husserl accepted Brentano's view of sense-data as physical rather than mental entities, nor

Meinong's view of them as 'homeless', nonexistent objects. He believes, in fact, like Berkeley, that the data of sense are objects inseparably bound

up with (though differing from) the conscious acts that bring them before

us, and so as much immanent in, or parts of our mental life as the latter. All these, however, are extremely questionable assumptions, and by no means the firm foundations on which a phenomenology can be reliably built.

It would, however, be a mistake to attach too much importance to Husserl's ill thought out treatment of so-called 'hyletic data': it should not

be allowed to confuse his magnificent account of the phenomenology of time. For whether or not reduced objects of perception like 'tones' or

patches of colour really play the central part in perception and knowledge that he thinks they do, and whether or not they are 'immanent' in our

experience in a sense in which other objects, e.g., motor cars, are not, they at least simplify the treatment of our temporal experiences: there are per spicuities in discussing the starting and stopping, or waxing and waning of a noise which are not present when we consider a motor car as standing still or starting up or as changing its velocity. Husserl moreover admits that by 'tones', his preferred examples, we sometimes mean enduring objects of sense with widely varying properties, which do not therefore differ from the much more complex objects into whose 'constitution' they enter (see, e.g., Husserliana X, p. 272). What are important for phenomenology are not distinctions between the time of intuitively given sense objects and the time of objects not adequately given by sense, but the distinctions between the time we live through without making it an object, the time we perceive in the objects we perceive around us, and the time, lastly, that provides the framework for objects that extend far beyond what we can perceive or

imagine. All these distinctions are made and explored in Husserl's treatment, which is rather a study of concretely experienced and envisaged time than of time as attaching to so controversial a category as the immediate things of sense.

Husserl's criticisms of what he had understood Brentano to teach in lectures are in many ways interesting and important (Main Text of 1928,

?3). Brentano had accepted as an ultimate law of consciousness that new



HUSSERL ON INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS 7

presentations as they arise are associated with a reproduced context of im

mediately previous presentations and their objects, to which, however, a

characteristic note of 'pastness' is added, a note whose addition must spring from a newly operative, productive, unlearnt, mental association, whose

operation can then be indefinitely extended into the remoter past and future. What is just past lingers on, but it lingers on as just past, and this note of

just pastness was not part of it in its past, but is purely and wholly a creative

novelty. This added note has further the property of being modal rather than real: it alters the whole manner of being of what it attaches to rather than its quality, for a noise or flash that is past is not strictly speaking a real noise or flash at all. Brentano is at least clear as to certain basic facts of tem

poral grammar which have eluded most wiseacres of physical space-time theory. Husserl, however, points out that the theory is not really workable: it is not by associating a new character, even if we call it one of 'pastness',

with some objective datum that a modal change of the sort needed can be

truly achieved. The datum or content qualified as 'past', will remain as

much 'there' as the datum or content it purports to reproduce. 'The presence of an A in consciousness cannot, even by the addition of a new moment called by us "pastness", explain the transcendent consciousness: A is past. It cannot give rise to the most distant notion that what I have in conscious ness is in its new character the same as something which is not in conscious ness since it has been. ... An added moment cannot produce unreality nor

abrogate present existence' (1928 edition, pp. 381-82). Husserl is, how

ever, building upon, as well as criticizing Brentano's doctrine, for he is

purging the latter of a crude associationism of contents, and is deepening it into a full recognition of the irreducibly intentional and modal character of the reference to the past, as well as its underived presence in even the most

elementary perceptions. Equally interesting are Husserl's treatments of W. Stern's 1897 article

on the 'psychic' or, as we now call it, specious present, and of Meinong's 1899 article on 'Objects of Higher Order', which included some criticism of Stern. Stern had argued against the dogma that the awareness of a suc

cession cannot run parallel with the succession itself, but must necessarily be summed up in some nonsuccessive, i.e., momentary, awareness of the whole successive series. He had suggested that one act of apprehension,

spread out over a single 'psychic present', might embrace in its unity a

whole series of successive phases, so that the apprehension's time coincided with the time of what it apprehended, and did not have to be summed up

during the series or at its end (1928 edition, pp. 383-84). To this view



J. . FINDLAY

Meinong had objected that the apprehension of a 'temporally distributed'

object, i.e., one like a melody which can only unfold itself fully in a period of time, can only be consummated when the distribution is completed, i.e., it has to be consummated in an apprehension which is undistributed, and

which, though lasting for a while, is full and complete throughout the time that it lasts (Husserliana X, p. 226). Husserl's position is curiously media torial as between these two positions. While he does not deny that an act of apprehension may be consummated over a period, and may be present in varying completeness throughout the period, and not wholly concentrated in some final summing up, he yet holds that it must somehow manage to

be totally present in each of its phases, whether or not what it apprehends in such total presentation is totally 'given'. To be aware of a developing

whole incompletely, and as it develops, is yet always to be aware of it as a whole: what is not as yet fully written in, is written in as yet to be written in. A wholly momentary state of mind is of course a mere abstraction, and all apprehension is therefore developmental, but this does not mean that

apprehension may not cast its beams over a wider tract of becoming, and concentrate more phases in what it objectively intends, than it itself em

braces or covers. The past invariably clings to and is incorporated in the

present, but this clinging and incorporation extends further, we must allow, in the case of what is set before consciousness than in the case of conscious ness itself or of anything else. Were it not so, there would be no difference between a succession of apprehensions and an apprehension of succession.

(The Bergsonian view that conscious experience limits and weakens, rather than extends and intensifies, the holding together of past with present need here merely be mentioned.) It is not clear that Husserl has managed to resolve all the profound difficulties that he at least recognizes: the diffi

culty of making present existence be wholly continuous with what is modally different from it, the difficulty of making what is strictly present a mere

limit to what is modally different from it, and so on, but as the time-conscious ness rather than time as such is his theme, we may leave such objections aside.

The exposition gets underway in ?7 where Husserl starts by using the questionable language to which we have called attention, and says that,

having eliminated all transcendent conception and assertion, he will now consider our consciousness of purely 'immanent time-objects'. These are such as do not go beyond what is intuitively and adequately given to con

sciousness, and Husserl therefore takes them to be immanent parts of

consciousness, and also calls them 'hyletic data'. They are the supposedly




primitive stuff on which all our conscious slants are imposed, and which, when thus slanted, will yield the changing perspectives of objects. Tones are the well-chosen class of objects or data which are most purely and

obviously temporal: they last through time, and what they are, e.g., rising or falling or remaining constant in pitch, swelling, fainting or remaining constant in intensity, are only fully exhibited in the whole of a time-tract which they pick out and diversify. But not only do tones have the intrinsic

properties we have mentioned: they also begin absolutely and end absolutely, and while they last they are always exhibiting a different face before

consciousness, as e.g., having just begun, having gone on for a while, being nearly over etc., and when they cease they are not merely over, but sink fur ther and further into the past, being weighed down as it were by the super incumbent stages that came after them. This changing phenomenology goes

with a change in our consciousness of them: as long as they are not quite over, we recognize ourselves as still actually hearing them, and as preeminently hearing a very small part of them which turns out, on reflection, to be an

abstract limit rather than a part, whereas when they, or any part of them, is truly over, we recognize ourselves, in respect of such a whole or part, as no longer hearing, but merely keeping or retaining it in mind, a retention which becomes more and more sketchy and inexplicit the further they lapse into the past, until they become merely such that we could recur to them or could resuscitate them if we chose. There is, as it were, a regular per

spectival change in an 'immanent* object like a tone or any of its successive

phases: it is given in a series of 'presences' which are more and more distant from the original freshness of perception. This decline in freshness is not

merely an intrinsic change: it is also due to the accumulation of phases that have come after a phase, and to the fact that each phase is retained in each

phase that comes after it, and retained in phases which are themselves re tained in other phases, a more distant retention being one that can thus be

regarded as the relative product or power of as many intermediate retentions as one likes. The process doubtless involves the built-in infinity inseparable from continuity, but there need be nothing vicious about this: we can

abstractly isolate as many close or distant retentions as we like in the living continuum of retention. As Husserl puts it in ?11:

Every actual Now of consciousness is subject to the law of modification. It

changes into the retention of a retention and does so continuously. There

accordingly arises a regular continuum of retention such that every later

point is the retention of every earlier one. Each retention is already a con tinuum. A tone begins and goes on steadily: its now-phase changes into a



10 J. . FINDLAY

was-phase, and our impressionai consciousness constantly flows over into an ever new retentional consciousness. Going down the stream,

we en

counter a continuous series of retentions harking back to the same starting point. ... To each of such retentions a continuum of retentional modi fications is added, and this continuum is itself a point in the actuality that is

being retentionally projected. This leads to no simple infinite regress, since each retention is intrinsically a continuous modification, which so to

say carries the heritage of its past in itself. It is not merely the case, that, going downstream, each earlier retention is continuously replaced by a new one. Each later retention is not merely a continuous modification stem

ming from an original impression: it is also a continuous modification of all previous continuous modifications of the same starting-point. [1928 edition, p. 390.]

Husserl further argues that it would be wrong to suppose that some

weakened form of the retained content persists in pure retention, as was

held in Brentano's previously criticized theory. Retention is an irreducibly distinctive mode of consciousness, which requires the having been but not

the actual being of what it retains. This view is a difficult one in view of the fact that retention is for Husserl part and parcel of all perception, and that what in perception is not retention is only an unreachable limit. Perhaps

Husserl should have dropped the whole notion of retention as in some sense a derived or modified state of awareness harking back to one that was

more toriginary\ Quite arguably retention is the prime form of conscious

ness, though some cases of it certainly derive from others, and some have the distinction of deriving from nothing, and are then said to 'extend up into the present/ i.e., the nonpast. There are passages where Husserl seems to

incline to such a view. Whether we should not also regard pastness as

the unmodified form of individual being, and so-called presentness as merely a distinctive, incomplete form of it, instead of reversing the priorities as we

usually try to do, is something we cannot here discuss. Our aim is to discuss the views of Husserl, not to modify them profoundly. And Husserl, despite

much so-called Platonism, retains a residual faith in what are probably only three great legends; the concretely particular, the fully given and the un

mixedly present. Husserl further maintains it to be an a priori necessity that retentions

which have ceased to embrace a perceptual or now-phase must once have

embraced one, that pure retentions, in other words, must rest on perceptions, and cannot meaningfully be thought to be /^representing the latter. We are absolutely sure of what is immediately retained, considered as a pure




datum for consciousness, and it does not make sense to suppose it was other than what it now gives itself out as just having been (see, e.g., Husserliana X,

pp. 343, 353). Immediate retention is thus not open to the errors to which recollection and memory are plainly subject: the just past must be given to us just as it was. Here as elsewhere, in the case of Husserl's a priori neces

sities, we may counsel a reduction to moral certainties, likely claims that should only yield to yet likelier claims. There are cases in which we are

certainly unclear as to what has just been before us, or what experience we

have just undergone, and yet long-range comparison with other data or

experiences may lead us to describe what we saw or underwent more defi

nitely, or to revise whatever we previously tended to hold. If the uninterpreted datum is a legend, there can be no irrefragable certainties or clarities that it

inspires. It is on the impossibility that all the cases of a basic kind of meaning should be without target, or that all the assurances of a certain basic sort

should be invalid, that a true phenomenology should rest itself, not on those

supposedly prime clarities and certainties that can never be satisfactorily marked off.

Husserl sums up his account of the mechanics of retention in a remark able two-dimensional diagram, which lends exactness to the vivid poetry of

William James's account of the same machinery, and also agrees very largely with a diagram worked out by C. D. Broad in his account of the phenomenol ogy of time in his commentary on McTaggart. The convergence of the accounts of Broad and Husserl is certainly very remarkable. In Husserl's

diagram there is a longitudinal, horizontal dimension which represents the actual flux of time, while a transverse, vertical dimension represents per

spectival or phenomenological time: the former stays on the surface of what is present, while the latter always includes a deep swath of the immediate past. On such a diagram a datum moves along the hypotenuse of a triangle from a state of impressionai superficiality to an ever deeper im mersion beneath the impressionai surface, till at last it can no longer claim to be a datum or retained at all (see Husserliana, pp. 35, 330, 365). In

such a representation, sinking phases are given as retaining their identity as

they sink, an identity of course quite distinct from that of the lasting thing or event that they characterize, and they are also given as retaining their distances and other relations from all other similarly sinking phases. The whole past sinks in a mass, taking all its arranged contents with it.

Husserl and Broad alike presume that there is a perfectly definite point at which retention ceases and makes way for such processes as reproduction and memory, and they also believe in an invariant length for the phenomeno



12 J. . FINDLAY

logical or perspectival present, a supposition that has been interestingly questioned by Mabbott in his 1953 Mind article on Our Direct Apprehension of Time'.

With the immediate retention which is part and parcel of our time consciousness at any time, Husserl strongly contrasts memory proper or the

secondary reproduction of time-contents. When we have actually run through a series of tones in impression and primary retention, we can replay the same series in retrospective recapture. In such a memorial replay it may be

(more or less) as if we were experiencing the original series, and we are

then in a sense representing it in its original successiveness and in the

sinking of retained contents under the weight of later retained contents. There are, however, other cases where we merely rehearse isolated phases of what was previously given, or vary their order at will, or survey what was given in a single sweeping glance with great loss of clearness and ex

plicitness. Such memorial replay must not be assimilated to the retention which is an absolute part of perception itself, nor has it the reliability of the latter. But it makes of the original time-object, or any phase of it, a

time-object that can be recurred to and replayed on countless subsequent occasions, and that can further be remembered as having been remembered and so on to any degree of higher-order complication. It can also give a

time-object, e.g., a heard melody, a place in the whole order of remembered events which make up our personal memory. Reproductive recollection further contrasts with an imagination which may re-present much that has been previously given, but lacks a note of assertion in regard to what it thus reproduces, and all placing of this in what was previously given. There is also an imagination which, while not representing some content as pre viously given, none the less puts it in a place in the historic past or future which lies beyond what the imagining person has experienced or will ex

perience. As regards the reference to the future, Husserl, like William James,

believes in a tending forwards, a protention, which is as much part of our

originative experience of time-objects as the retention which trails its comet tail behind it, a protention which, however, differs from retention in that it may leave quite open, and emptily conceived, just how the time-object

will be developed or superseded. In some cases, of course, as where, e.g., the

time-object is quite familiar or represents what has been wished or planned, protention may be almost as detailed in content as retention (Husserliana X,

pp. 297, 305). Protention further differs from retention in that it receives

continuous fulfilment or 'disappointment' of a decisive kind by what there




upon is impressionally given, whereas retention can look forward only to

indirect, indecisive fulfilments. And just as retention opens the possibility of replays later given as replays, or replays of such replays etc., of its origi native data, protention opens the possibility of more remotely ranging antici

pations, or anticipations of anticipations etc., varying from the most concretely intuitive to the most emptily conceptual. Such anticipations, like the proten tions they extend, admit of a posterior fulfilment impossible in the case of

explicit reproductions, and may then themselves, when replayed in memory, be reproduced both with and without the fulfilments or frustrations of ex

pectation which followed upon them. In remembering our own past, our mind undoubtedly oscillates curiously between reconstituting our own past ignorance and error as to the future, and correcting or filling it in with later hindsight (see e.g., 1928 edition, pp. 457-58). In all these immensely intricate analyses, which burgeon and blossom like a tropical forest, and from which we have only culled a few samples, the superiority of Husserl's

method shows itself. Since we admit no transcendent, no independently real facts into our accounts of what goes on in consciousness, we discover in it the infinitely repeatable feed-back of which naturalistic psychologies know nothing, and which is the true hallmark of the intentional, the conscious as such.

As we consider Husserl's account of the original constitution of time

objects, in various mental stances like retention, anticipation etc., an obvious lacuna makes itself evident: how shall we explain our awareness of the various mental stances which form the content of our whole description, of the time-properties and relations that we so freely predicate of them as when we say, e.g., that direct perception always involves retention, that retention is always being overlaid by subsequent retentions, that its content can be replayed in a memory which can itself be reconstituted or replayed, etc.? Plainly our whole account presupposes an internal as well as an external

time-perception, an appearance to consciousness of the succession of its own subjective attitudes as well as of the succession of the objects of such attitudes. Yet plainly there are here threats of a vicious infinity if, in order to have a sequence of mental attitudes, we have to retain and protend our

retentions and protentions, retain and protend these retentions and proten tions etc., and it looks as if the clever methods which so successfully consti tuted the immanent and transcendent objects of our time-consciousness will not be successful in constituting that time-consciousness itself. In face of

these questions, Husserl displays great hesitation, and has recourse to a

variety of strategies, to none of which he firmly commits himself. The first



14 J. . FINDLAY

consists in treating the whole matter as plain and obvious: states of conscious ness are given in time just as their immediate or remote objects are, and

there is in fact only a difference of 'slant' in placing a time-datum, e.g., a

phase of tone, in a serial succession, and in placing the hearing of it in the same succession. The second strategy consists in regarding the time for con

sciousness and the time of consciousness as only analogically similar, and in

holding that the latter time really transcends significant expression and is

only something that we can inadequately gesture towards rather than clearly talk about. The third strategy, with which Husserl would not seem to be

wholly satisfied, is almost Kantian in its postulation of a profound and

necessary harmony and accommodation between the distinct and opposed subjective and objective 'sides' of our experience.

Good illustrations of the first, 'obvious' strategy are the following

passages: It pertains to the a priori essence of time that it is a continuity of temporal positions, sometimes with identical and sometimes with varying objective contents that fill these positions: the homogeneity of absolute time consti tutes itself unceasingly in the flux of modifications of pastness and in a

steady streaming forth from a Now which is the creative point of time, the

point of origin of all time-points. It also pertains to the a priori essence of the situation that sensation, conception, attitude all share in the same flux of time, and that objective, absolute time is necessarily identical with the time which pertains to sensation and conception. [1928 edition, p. 427.] If we eliminate transcendent objects we may ask how it stands as regards the simultaneity of perceived and perception in the immanent sphere.

. . . If reflexion and retention presuppose the impressionai inner consciousness of the immanent datum in question in its original constitution, and this is

concretely one with, and inseparable from, its originative impression? we have here in very truth strict simultaneity of perception and perceived*. [1928 edition, pp. 462-63.] An interesting example of the second, 'ineffable' strategy is the following: The objects with which we are concerned are temporal objects which have to be constituted [for consciousness]. The sensory kernel of appearance without conceptual slant exists "now" and has just been and was earlier etc. . . . When a phenomenological reduction has been instituted, each

temporal appearance resolves itself into such a flux. But I cannot in turn

perceive the consciousness itself in which all these things are resolved. For such a new percept would in its turn be something temporal, which would point back to a constitutive consciousness of precisely the same

sort, and so on in in fini turn. ... I of course have a consciousness of time



HUSSERL ON INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS

without making an object of it. And when I do make an object of it, this also has a position in time, and, if I follow it from moment to moment, an extension in time. . . . And the time of this change of appearance is identical with the time of what is objective in it. If we are dealing with, e.g., an invariant tone, the subjective duration of such an immanent tone is identical with the time-stretch in which its appearance [to consciousness] continuously changes. But is this not a most astonishing state of affairs? For can one speak in this case of a change where a nonchange, an un

changingly filled duration, is unthinkable? For there is no possible con

stancy of appearance-phases which can be opposed to their steady flux in consciousness. In this original flux there is no duration. For duration is the form of an entity that lasts, something that endures, that remains the same through the time-series which functions as its duration. . . . For

objective time is a form pertaining to enduring objects, to their changes, and to the events which happen to them. An event is therefore a concept that presupposes persistence, and persistence is something that gets con stituted in the conscious flux, a flux which is essentially such that nothing persists in it. In the conscious flux there are phases of experience and con tinuous series of such phases. But each such phase or each continuous series of such phases involves nothing enduring. ... Its identity is not the

identity of something that persists and cannot be made such. ... In the flux [of consciousness] there can in principle be no part that is not in flux. This flux [of consciousness] is not a contingent flux like an objective flux: the change of its phases can never cease, nor pass over into a constant con tinuum of like phases. ... If I live in the appearance of a tone, the tone stands before me, and either persists or changes. But if I attend to the

appearance of the tone in consciousness this likewise stands before me and has its temporal spread, its persistence or change.

. . . But now the ab solute flux of conscious states is in its turn to be made our object and

given its place in time. In its case also there would have to be a conscious ness which constituted such an objectivity and therewith also its time. But we could in principle again reflect on this and so on indefinitely. Is it

possible to prove the non-vicious character of such an infinite regress? . . . But even if reflection is not pursued to infinity, and there need not be any such reflection at all, something must at least be given which makes such reflection possible, which makes a regress in infinitum possible in principle. And herein lies our problem. [1928 edition, Appendix VI, pp. 463-68.]

The 'problem' raised in this interesting Appendix is also dealt with the 1928 Main Text. Husserl writes:

If we now examine the phenomena which constitute temporal objects, we find a flux ... in which no phase can in principle be extended into a succession which remains constant, in which no phase can be the same



16 J. . FINDLAY

for any stretch of the flux. On the contrary, we have a flux which of neces

sity involves continuous change, and which also involves the absurdity that it runs as it runs, and can never run more quickly or more slowly. We have no object present in such a case that could change, and, to the extent that

something or other happens in every happening, nothing at all happens here. . . . The phenomena which constitute time are quite evidently other in principle than those which are constituted in time. The former are not individual objects or events, and we cannot significantly apply predicates

which fit objects and events to them. It does not therefore make sense, at least not the same sense as in the case of other things, to say of such constitutive phenomena that they are occurring now, or did so previously, or that they followed one another in time, or occurred simultaneously etc.

We however can and must say that a certain continuity of appearance which is a phase of the time-constitutive flux, belongs with a Now, i.e., with the

Now that it constitutes. . . . We can only say: This flux is something that we say exists now, in virtue of what it constitutes, but it is not temporally objective. It is an absolute subjectivity, and has absolute properties which are figuratively described by the term "flux", and by saying that it springs from a point of actuality, an originative source-point, a Now. In the

experience of this actuality we have an originative source-point and a

continuity of resonances. But we lack names for all these things! [p. 429?]

In the passages we have quoted it will be noted that Husserl faces a double problem: (a) the threat of an infinite regress if the conscious flux has to be 'constituted' as temporally objective in a second conscious flux, and so on indefinitely; (b) the difficulty of making sense of a pure flux of awareness which is quite void of content, and which accordingly can exhibit no difference between constancy and variation, nor any conceivable accelera tion or retardation.

As regards the third strategy, it is best deployed in Appendix XII of the 1928 edition. (Husserliana X, pp. 126-130), and in the 54th Supplem

Text of the Husserliana X edition. Here Husserl makes important additions to his doctrine of 'inner perception', or the immediate consciousness of

consciousness, and moves in the direction of holding that there is at least a form of 'inner perception' which is part and parcel of every conscious state?the doctrine of Brentano and also of Sartre with his prereflexive Cogito?and which so much coincides with the state that it reflectively illuminates that no duplicity is present, and hence no possibility of an

infinite reduplication. 'Every conscious act is a consciousness of something, but is also consciously such (Jeder Akt ist auch beivusst). Each experience is "sensed", is immanently perceived by internal perception. Naturally it is




not posited or meant?perceiving does not here amount to being referentially directed to an object nor apprehending it.

. . . Every experience in the preg nant sense is inwardly perceived, but this inward perceiving is not in the same sense an experience. It is not itself inwardly perceived'. This inner

perception that accordingly enters into all experience must be distinguished from the inner perception which accompanies a reproduction of the experi ence in question, which, in being inwardly aware of its own re-presentative character, also distances from itself, and therefore objectifies, the experience that it re-presents. According to Husserl in one odd passage there is prac tically no difference between the reproduction of the perception of a house, and the re-presentation of the house itself (1928 edition, p. 483). *The

duplicity in the intentionality of retention, he goes on, provides an indication which goes some distance towards resolving our difficulty as to how it is

possible to have any knowledge about any unified item [Einheit) in the ultimate, constitutive flux of consciousness' ( 1st sentence, ? 39, 1928 edition).

It is the one single flux of consciousness in which the immanent temporal unity of a tone is constituted, and, together with this, the unity of the conscious flux itself. Objectionable and at first glance nonsensical as it

may seem that the flux of consciousness should constitute its own unity, this is none the less the case (next paragraph, ?39) ... In the one, unique flux of consciousness there are two inseparably united intentionalities, woven

together like two sides of one and the same thing. Through one of these intentionalities immanent time is constituted, a genuine objective time in

which there is persistence and also change in what persists. Through the other intentionality the quasi-tem?ot? arrangement of the phases of the flux is constituted, the phase of the Now which has an actuality which is of necessity ever-fleeting, and the series of phases that were formerly, or are not as yet actual. The pre-phenomenal, pre-immanent temporality is constituted intentionally as the form of the time-constituting consciousness and in that consciousness itself. . . . The appearance to self of the flux de mands no second flux: as phenomenon, it rather constitutes itself. . . .

The phases of the flux of consciousness in which phases of the same con scious flux constitute themselves phenomenologically, cannot be, and are

not, identical with these constituted phases. What are made to appear in the momentary actuality of the flux of consciousness are past phases of the conscious flux retained in the series of its retentional moments. [1928 edition, pp. 436-37.]

It is hard to overestimate the philosophical importance of these passages. They rediscover and revive the aporiae of the Critique of Pure Reason as to

how any point of permanence can be found in the ceaseless flux of conscious



18 J. . FINDLAY

ness, as well as the solution reached in the Kantian Refutation of Idealism to the effect that consciousness requires outer objects as points of permanence to which its flux of representations can attach themselves, thereby giving themselves, as the Transcendental Deduction teaches, the unity which would otherwise wholly elude them. Some of Husserl's difficulties certainly seem

factitious, and spring from his belief that even immanent contents, i.e., sense-data, feelings etc., are in some sense objects of primitive conscious acts

which constitute them, so that consciousness qua consciousness becomes

quite uniform and transparent, and its pure flux of acts does not differ from an unflickering, constant light. If Husserl had adopted a concept of 'content* more in line with that of Twardowski or Meinong, to whose views he

occasionally seems to incline, to views i.e., which make 'contents' colourings of consciousness quite unlike even the reduced objects, e.g., tones, that they bring before consciousness, the difficulty of the empty flux would vanish: our

experience would have an internal content which might be constant or

varied, and which would not necessarily be used in the constitution of

objects. The central place of the concept of 'constitution' in Husserl's

phenomenology is in fact the source of all its major weaknesses: it sug

gests that the only business of conscious experience is to set objects before itself and to contemplate them, and not simply to be the mixture of change and constancy, of unity and variety that it is, and to live through and enjoy that being without necessarily contemplating it. The importance of the

passages we have selected is that they show that the flux of states of mind, retentions, protentions etc., in which objective time is constituted, do not need to be objectified in order that they should exist and flow and perform their constitutive functions, nor is such ob j edification or constitution a

necessary condition of their being and functioning. Secondarily, of course,

they can be made into objects, and must be capable of so being, but the transcendence involved in such ob j edification is in a sense also immanent: it is our conscious states themselves which by adhering closely to what we are now experiencing make a rearward glance to themselves possible. When

they were lived through, they were bewusst, consciously there, though not

intended as objects, and now, by a transition certainly without parallel, but

entirely understandable in its uniqueness, they give rise to a retrospective awareness which is really their own self-declaration. The mechanics of such a transition have been more meticulously explored by Meinong than by Husserl: see, e.g., Meinong's distindion of an Ausw?rtswendung and an

Einw?rtswendung of the same conscious presentation, and the doctrine of

self-presentation as set forth in his ueber emotionale Pr?sentation. (See the




recently published translation in the Northwestern University Studies in

Phenomenology.) Where Husserl goes wrong is in his failure fully to rec

ognize what we may call the existential dimension of experience: its having of states, actions, tendencies, tensions, transitions etc., in the sense of living through them rather than setting them up before itself as objects. Such living through states, transitions etc., is not perhaps a defective mode of conscious ness perfected in the conscious intentional reference: it is perhaps the per fection to which the conscious intentional reference merely aspires. A

recognition of this supra-conscious, existential dimension might have made Husserl willing to recognize an analogue of the latter even in unconscious natural realities, organic and inorganic, and so halted that rush towards a transcendental subjectivism in which, like the Gadarene swine in the

Sea of Galilee, he finally submerged and drowned himself. The existential dimension of experience might further have been adjudged such as to

require the consciously referential dimension and vice versa: it might be

only by setting up objects in opposition to our own immanent life of sen

sations, feelings etc. that we could in fact enjoy and have the latter. In this manner the Husserlian position may indeed be correct that consciousness only constitutes the serial flux of its own acts and states, in the sense of making them possible objects of its awareness, in and through the constitution of the objects of those same acts. It is by minding objects that we can have

something contrasting to mind in ourselves. Neither Husserl nor Kant has

unfortunately offered us a completely satisfactory 'deduction' of the need for objectivity and objective categories in order that there should be such a thing as self-feeling and self-awareness and vice versa, but both have moved in this direction, and Husserl would seem to have moved further than Kant.

Having constituted immanent time-objects, and, by a suitable abstraction, immanent time itself, Husserl goes on to consider the further constitution of transcendent objects of various sorts, of things which change or remain constant in time, or of the events and states which enter into their history. Into this interesting and admirable work of detail we shall not here enter.

Since Husserl's reflections on the phenomenology of time terminated in

1917, there is naturally no suggestion in his work of the constitution for

consciousness of a cosmic space-time, such as modern physics has proposed, a space-time in which countless local times

are integrated, and from which

they can again be differentiated. Such local times certainly have a structure more or less parallel to that of the immanent time of consciousness, while

cosmic space-time has another far richer structure. The full integration



20 j. . findlay

of phenomenological and local time with the depersonalized, unlocalized time of the modern physical outlook, is very far from having been philo sophically accomplished. To see this one has only to consider the incredible na?vet? of, e.g., a Gr?nbaum, who thinks that experienced time can be related to physical time as the sense-qualities red, loud etc., are related to their physical foundations. Husserl's work on time-phenomenology has

obviously many defects, but by and large it represents a piece of sustained

thinking on a surpassingly difficult topic, exploring countless alternatives and not rashly committing itself to any of them, and quite capable of being used

by thinkers who are very allergic to some of Husserl's most cherished pro grammes. It is in fact altogether on a level with the finest work of Aristotle. To resolve more of the puzzles of temporality it will be perhaps necessary to go beyond Husserl, but it will only be by building on him and studying him profoundly that it will be possible to go beyond him.

J. N. Findlay Boston University



Article Contentsp. [3]p. 4p. 5p. 6p. 7p. 8p. 9p. 10p. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20

Issue Table of ContentsThe Monist, Vol. 59, No. 1, The Philosophy of Husserl (JANUARY, 1975), pp. 1-160Front MatterHUSSERL'S ANALYSIS OF THE INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS [pp. 3-20]BEWUSSTSEIN ALS GEGENWART DES VERGANGENEN [pp. 21-39]HUSSERL ON MEMORY [pp. 40-62]THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION AS EPOCHE AND AS EXPLICATION [pp. 63-80]HUSSERL'S CONCEPTS OF EVIDENCE AND SCIENCE [pp. 81-97]IS TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY COMMITTED TO IDEALISM? [pp. 98-114]HUSSERL'S IDENTIFICATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA [pp. 115-132]HUSSERL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS [pp. 133-137]BOOKS RECEIVED [pp. 142-143]AUTHORS' ABSTRACTS OF RECENT BOOKS [pp. 144-160]Back Matter

Husserl's analysis of the inner time-consciousness

Documents

Transcript of Husserl's analysis of the inner time-consciousness