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A PHENOMENOLOGY OF

TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS

A defence of Husserlian time-consciousness against the metaphysics of

pres-ence charge

JULY 21, 2014

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM

Research Master Thesis

Supervisor: Dr. Christian Skirke Second Reader: Dr. Julian Kiverstein

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Preface

For the past few minutes I’ve been sitting in my room listening to the first movement of the

Pathétique sonata by Beethoven that sounds from out of the stereo boxes of my CD-player. At a

cer-tain point, the exposition of the opening movement returns and while currently hearing the theme I also remember it and remember it as the same. I follow the theme along until its modulation; - be-cause I know where the theme is coming from I have an expectation of where it is going. Moreover, since I remember the other times that I listened to this sonata, I also expect that after the second time the exposition is played we will move on to the development of the movement.

This everyday example can serve as an illustration of how temporality is involved in differ-ent ways in experience. First, our experience of the world is simply flowing: I begin to listen to the opening bars of the Pathétique and before I know it, I’m in the repetition of the exposition and time keeps moving on. At the same time, I am still here, I am still listening to the Pathetique and I am the same as the one that started to listen to this sonata. Throughout the flowing away of the notes of the

Pathétique the music still remains the Pathétique and I remain its listener. This then shows us the

basic structure of our temporal experience as what Husserl called standing-streaming.

Secondly, we see the different ways in which the past or the future contributes to our pre-sent experience of listening to the theme of music. First, there is a direct sense in which I have a con-sciousness of where the melody is coming from, without which I would not be able to have a clue about the theme’s current modality. Likewise, I have a direct expectation of the modulation that is about to take place upon moving from the first to the second theme. These direct perceptions of the just-past and almost-present are called retention and protention respectively, and they play a consti-tuting role in all of perception. For example when I see a ball flying through the air on the football field, I perceive that ball very clearly as having just been kicked by someone as well as “seeing” al-ready where it will hit the ground so that I might be there in time and take possession of it.

The contribution of protention and retention are distinguished from the contribution that a more distant past and future have on my contribution. It is through the recollection of past experi-ences of listening to the Pathétique that I expect that there will not be another repetition of the ex-position but that we will move to a development section. When I recollect my past listening sessions in this manner they truly appear to me, in my present recollection, as being past listening sessions; as likewise my expectation of the future development section is truly given to me now as being in the future. Contrary to this, the manner in which the sense I have of “where the melody is coming from” is present to me in a much more vague sense than the note that I am currently hearing and likewise my protention of the next note that I am about to hear is also present to me in this vague sense.

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I am amazed then by the intricacies of my experience of the Pathétique almost as much as I am by the sheer power of the music itself. I ask myself now: how do these different structural mo-ments of the standing-streaming, recollection, expectation, retention and protention hold together throughout my present experience of the sonata. A question that can be formulated in Husserlian language as: what is the structure of time-consciousness? And what of this vague sense of presence?

But I also want to answer this question in a particular way. I want to suspend all my judg-ments about how I have up until now thought that temporality was structured and ask from my ex-perience of the sonata itself: how does temporality play a role here? I can say then that I want a phe-nomenological answer to my question. And if any pre-judgments turn out to be involved in my un-derstanding I will admit to my unun-derstanding being merely a metaphysical answer and not truly phe-nomenological.

*

This thesis will try to develop a transcendental-phenomenological account of temporality. In short we can say that the phenomenological moment of this account will mean that we will take descrip-tions of experience as prior to all philosophical consideradescrip-tions while correlating these experiences to what makes them possible as such. The second motivation to this thesis is the concern that our de-scriptions are still informed by the tradition that we are a part of, by judgments that we have made without qualification. Thus, we want specifically to attain a transcendental-phenomenological ac-count that can be defended as a truly non-metaphysical acac-count.

In order to develop this account we will start in the first chapter with an analysis of the works of Edmund Husserl on temporality. Doing so will show us that although there are some struc-tural elements that consistently remain throughout the different groups of analyses, there are some important differences as well that will put us before an interpretative puzzle. The first criterion for us to answer such a puzzle is of course to test the models on our own experience, but since we are wea-ry of pre-judgments in our own descriptions, this might not be enough. This is why our discussion of the metaphysical charge, will not only be a defence against an adversary, but through this defence we hope to find interpretative guidelines in the sense of ‘how not to be metaphysical.’

We will present the metaphysical charge under the heading of “metaphysics of presence,” a criticism which we shall formulate more carefully through the works of Heidegger and Derrida. We will consider that the main reasons for concern is the possibly unjustified prioritization of first, the now over the just-past and the just-present; secondly, of presence over absence or thirdly, of the present (though not necessarily understood as instantaneous) over the further past and future. In chapter two, we will first start to discuss Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon (VP) to come to a

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tion of these first two concerns, discuss in how far this criticism applies to Husserl’s texts on tempo-rality and investigate whether an account of tempotempo-rality that either escapes or defends itself against such criticisms. This will have brought us some way on our road to interpretation as well and we will try to take these results into account in our third chapter.

In the third chapter we will assess Heidegger’s general criticism of Husserl through a read-ing of his History of the Concept of Time (HCT) conjoined with a readread-ing of Taylor Carman’s

Heidegger’s Analytic (2003). We will discuss how the results of this reading have impact more

specifi-cally on Husserl’s thinking about temporality. Before answering these criticism we shall discuss Lilian Alweiss’ The World Unclaimed (2003) to formulate a strategy that will help us deal with the criticism proffered by Heidegger. We shall then use the results from this discussion to further elaborate our account of temporality. This interpretation should also reconcile itself with the results of the second chapter.

Thus, we hope to arrive at a transcendental-phenomenological account of temporality that safeguards itself from the different charges of metaphysics of presence raised by Derrida and Heidegger respectively.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One: Husserl’s analyses of time-consciousness ... 5

1. Introduction ... 5

2. The methodology of transcendental phenomenology ... 6

2.1 Introduction of key concepts ... 6

2.2 Some methodological comments ... 8

3. The time-manuscripts ... 14

3.1 The early discoveries: 1904-1911 ... 14

3.2 The three models of the middle period: 1917-8 ... 21

3.3 The key issues of the late period: 1929-34 ... 29

4. Concluding Remarks ... 32

Chapter Two: Derrida’s critique of Husserl ... 37

1. The charge of metaphysics of presence ... 37

2. Derrida’s reading of the transcendental reduction, the noema and ideality ... 38

3. The deconstruction of time ... 46

3.1 Derrida’s reading of Husserlian temporality ... 46

3.2 Defence ... 50

4. Zahavi’s critique of the L III model ... 53

Chapter Three: Heidegger’s critique of Husserl ... 59

1. Formulating concerns and making room for a discussion ... 59

2. Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology ... 61

3. Alweiss’ defence of Husserlian phenomenology ... 70

4. The notion of pre-consciousness and Husserlian methodology ... 77

5. Future and past assessed by the primal stream ... 81

Conclusion ... 85

List of abbreviations ... 87

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Chapter One: Husserl’s analyses of time-consciousness

1. Introduction

It is not only a wonderful melody, moving from its opening to its ending while changing the colour of its tonality, that makes us wonder how intricate the structure of our temporal experience is. Just staring at this white wall in front of me, which stands there without change, gives me the sense that it persists through time. Even in my moods of boredom there is a sense in which the things of the world are abiding their time much like I am. The temporal structure of experience, that we are start-ing to wonder about, has to explain how both change and persistence, motion and stillness are pos-sible.

In this first chapter, we want to present the wealth of material that Husserl has offered us in his analyses of time. As known, the only work published during Husserl’s lifetime of his thoughts on temporality is the book officially edited by Martin Heidegger but in actuality by Edith Stein, the 1928 Edmund Husserls Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, now published together with the material it was based on in Hua X. As Boehm explains in his Introduction to Hua X, this work is partly based upon the fourth chapter of the 1904/5 lectures, entitled ‘Zur Phänomenolo-gie der Zeit,” though in most part upon additions to these lectures in the years 1907-1911. The two other major groups of time analyses that we will be looking at are the Bernauer Manuskripte or L-manuscripts from 1917/18 published as Hua XXXIII and the C-L-manuscripts, published as Hua. Mat. VIII from the years 1929-34.

Not surprisingly then, the differences that we may find between these three groups of manuscripts are connected with important shifts in Husserl’s thinking as a whole. After all, as Husserl himself says in the introduction to his 1904/05 lectures, all phenomenological problems hold togeth-er and progress in the one area will enlighten the othtogeth-er.1 These differences may turn out to have influence on the way the very methodology of phenomenology must be understood and therefore presents our work with the further complication of taking these shifts into account. I believe that the only fruitful way to deal with all this material is to start in advance with an outline of our conception of transcendental phenomenology and take this as a first guiding thread in our interpretation.

Thus, the second section of this chapter will argue for a conception of transcendental phe-nomenology based mostly on ‘the way to the reduction via the lifeworld’ with further clarifications under the headings of what I call phenomenological positivism and open-ended concepts. Following

1 “Es hängt mit der innigen Verflechtung und wohl auch mit der Eigenart der phänomenologischen Probleme

zusammen, daß sie nicht isoliert zur Lösung kommen können, daß man bald die einen, bald die anderen ein Stück fördern muß, indem jeder Fortschritt in der Klärung der einen ein aufhellendes Licht zurückwirft auf die anderen.” (Ms. F I 9/4a-b; cited from the Boehm’s introduction to Hua X, xvi)

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this exposition, the third section will present the different models and accounts as we find them in the aforementioned groups of manuscripts and seek out the relevant similarities and differences.

2. The methodology of transcendental phenomenology

2.1 Introduction of key concepts

The key moves of the methodology of transcendental phenomenology as developed by Husserl are the eidetic and transcendental reductions and the epochē. In order to present these ideas I follow Kern implicitly by going into transcendental phenomenology via the life-world. This way, presented in the Crisis, is assessed by Kern (1962) as being the most effective way into transcendental phenome-nology, because it prevents some methodological problems, e.g. the supposed solipsism that the Cartesian way suggests.

In Ideas I, Husserl describes the eidetic reduction first as moving from matters of fact to

es-sences. On the basis of the intuition of the individual object we can focus our attention on what

makes this object what it is and we arrive at an eidetic intuition of the essence of the individual.2 It is very important to note that we “see” the essences (Wesensschau). As Moran points out: “these es-sences are not generated in our thinking, but are grasped, ‘framed’, in our acts of thinking.”3

We can say then, that the eidetic reduction brings us from our particular, individual experi-ences to the essential structures of these experiexperi-ences. Thus, we can recall many instances in which we listened to a melody but essential to all of these melodies is that their unity as object is spread out over a temporal difference. Thus, a melody necessarily exists out of different notes with a differ-ent temporal position. If we would imagine it to be otherwise, the object we are considering would no longer be a melody: e.g. if the object were to consist of one note being repeated in or sustained throughout different temporal positions we would have a repetition or sustain of a note; if the object were to combine different notes in one temporal position we would have a chord. Thus, we get to an essential or eidetic law of a melody by finding the limits of variation on the experiences of melody we can remember: we can imagine melodies to be different in many ways but not these ways. This then shows us the methodology of eidetic variation at work and it is the way in which we can come to the seeing of essences.

Grasping the essence of the melody helps us to distinguish it from mere sound. Likewise, we can come to distinguish sounds from visual objects, and so on. In this manner, we see how eidetic variation can help us discern the types of objects we encounter in our everyday lives.4 And we can categorize these objects into what we can call regions of being. We can build up a sort of inventory of all the objects that seem to exist to us in our experience of the world we live in, the life-world. Thus,

2 Cq. Ideas I, §§3-4 3 Moran (2000), 135 4 Cq. Ideas I, p. 11

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Husserl states that it is possible for the world to become the subject of “an ontology of the life-world purely as experiential life-world”.5

The epochē has the task of suspending all our prior judgments about the subject matter so that we start off with a true philosophical wonder and try to come to an unprejudiced understanding of our topic. The epochē is “a withholding of natural, naive validities and in general of validities al-ready in effect.”6 But now it holds that only through our experiences of listening to music can we say something about the ontological structure of the melody. The ontological structure of the life-world is always given to us in subjective manners of givenness. In order to make explicit how I can talk about an object such as a melody I have to reflect on this melody as it is given to me as experienced melody. By doing so I correlate the melody itself, as object, to the way I experience this melody. Since all I can say about the melody as object presupposes that I experience it in this or that manner, the manner of givenness of a melody is a presupposition to the knowledge of the melody as an ob-ject. But if the epochē requires me to suspend all prior judgments in order to gain philosophical knowledge and all objects of experience are only given in subjective manners of givenness, then I must take the latter into account in my description of the first, although the latter can only be the-matized as the subjective manners of an experienced object. Thus, the ontology of the life-world presupposes a science of these a priori correlations between the objects and their manners of givenness.7 This correlation of objects experienced to the subjective ways in which they are experi-enced is the task of the transcendental reduction. It is a consequence of the epochē that descriptive phenomenology becomes transcendental phenomenology.8

These correlations within the transcendental field are understood by Husserl as processes of constitution. Thus, analysing the different dimensions of temporality that play a role in the melody is a matter of assessing the constituting role of time-consciousness in the consciousness of a tem-poral object. Since we are analysing objects, which are essentially non-egoic, and subjective manners of givenness that belong to the egoic: such a process of constitution should be understood as always taking place between a primal ego and a primal non-ego, since we are after all talking about correla-tions.9 Thus, as Zahavi (2003, 73) points out this means that the process of constitution that is dis-covered in the analysis of phenomena undis-covered by the transcendental reduction, must be

5 Crisis, 173 6 Crisis, 135

7 The idea to describe transcendental phenomenology as a science of a priori correlations is taken from Held

(2003a).

8 It is worthwhile to emphasize here that I follow Zahavi (2003, 46) in keeping the distinction between the

epochē and transcendental reduction sharp, because whereas the epochē is the term for our suspension of our beliefs the reduction stands for the thematization of the correlations between subjectivity and world. The im-portance of this clear distinction shall become apparent in Chapter Three.

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stood as a process that through the constituents of subjectivity and world allows things and events to unfold as what they are. We follow Zahavi then in returning to Fink’s statement that “the true topic of phenomenology is neither the world nor a worldless subject, but the becoming of the world in the self-constitution of the transcendental subject.”10

2.2 Some methodological comments

From its very birth, phenomenology has had to deal with scepticism as regards its methodology. Hav-ing sketched our basic understandHav-ing of some of the central methodological concepts that are em-ployed by transcendental phenomenology, we want to discuss in more detail some points that might upset our work on time-consciousness from the very beginning. We will discuss in this section there-fore with more scrutiny the nature of the epochē, the role of reflection in describing experience, the idea of self-foundation and the problem of making universal claims over individual experience. Cer-bone (2013) shows that the true disagreement between naturalism and phenomenology is about the

epochē. “What the naturalist denies is that such techniques leave something – the experience in and

of itself – whose structure can be delineated independently of what we hold true about the world.”11 But I take it that insofar as the sceptic thinks that after the epochē we describe experience completely independent from the knowledge we already have, that he has presumed wrongfully that the epochē means to keep us far away from all our prior judgments about empirical objects of the world. Thus, the epochē does not exclude the empirical, as that which can be thought not to exist, that which can be doubted. Rather it suspends the validity of our judgments or our capacity to judge precisely to open up our field of research. This field of research must then be described or elucidated. Held explains this very well as follows:

Not taking part in the belief that objects exist independently of consciousness, the belief of the natural attitude, does not mean that we no longer pay attention to objects. On the contrary, it is only through reflection that the matter of objects al-lows itself to be analyzed in such a way that we can see, unreduced, how it pre-sents itself originarily to consciousness, and it is only through the epochē and the phenomenological reduction that reflection opens itself unconditionally to the analysis of originary manners of givenness.12

We therefore do not describe our experience of the object independent from what we hold true about the world but rather try to understand how what we hold true about the world (or one of its objects) is made possible by the manners of givenness that the transcendental or phenomenological

10 Zahavi (2003), 75 11 Cerbone (2013), 10 12 Held (2003a), 24

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reduction opens up to us. And while performing this research, we do not have any interest in the validity of what we hold true about the world. Thus, in phenomenology we learn equally as much about our perception of the world in the case of an illusion as in the case of a “true” perception.

The citation of Held points us to a second point that I would like to bring out, viz. that it is through reflection that we can come to analyse objects in terms of their original manners of givenness. As Husserl says: “the phenomenological method operates exclusively in acts of reflec-tion.”13 Reflection, as Husserl understands it, “has the characteristic of being a modification of a

con-sciousness and, moreover, a modification which essentially any concon-sciousness can undergo.”14 Re-flecting on experience within transcendental phenomenology therefore does not mean that we in-tend towards our experiences as objects in our conscious life, as it were “probing around in [our] ‘stream of consciousness,”15 but it is attending to the manner in which the given object is given in my experience.

As Cerbone (2013, 3-4) explains, sceptics have pointed out that this methodology of tion over experience requires that there is a difference between the lived experience and the reflec-tion, description or knowledge of the experience. Cerbone explains that we can place these sceptics into two camps: first, the epistemological sceptics who state that we can never be quite sure that our description of the experience is correct and second, the ontological sceptics who claim that descrip-tions are about our beliefs about experiences and that it is therefore irrelevant whether anything corresponds to those beliefs.

Whatever the style of scepticism is, both seem to be born especially about a concern for time. As Cerbone explains:

The stretch of experience described […] took place over time; moreover, by the time the description is formulated and reported, that stretch of experience has come and gone. Thus, any endeavour to describe it now has to rely on memories of the experience, and that opens the door to the question of how one knows that the experience at the time really was the way it is remembered to be now.

(Cer-bone 2013, 4)

We see therefore that some important sceptical worries about the methodology of phenomenology are tied up with a theory of time, for in the manner that it is formulated here, it requires that experi-ences are remembered before we can reflect upon them. We shall have to see in our subsequent analyses whether such a time-theory is really the one we want to be working with. Hopefully, we will be able to formulate an account of temporality that answer these sceptical concerns. For now, we

13 Ideas I, 174 14 Ideas I, 178 15 Cerbone (2013), 3

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have to note that whatever we will make of these concerns, phenomenology does have to consider the relationship between its act of reflection and the original experience upon which it is reflecting. It has to do so, because it needs be shown against the sceptics that the act of reflection or the given description is grounded in the original experience itself, and not only in our beliefs about this experi-ence. Thus, experience has to show up as the ground for thinking about experiexperi-ence. It is in this light that Merleau-Ponty says that a phenomenological positivism grounds the possible in the actual.16 Or as Husserl formulates it: “if ‘positivism’ is tantamount to an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the ‘positive,’ that is to say, on what can be seized upon originaliter, then we are the genuine positivists.”17 This appreciation of concrete experience as a demand that can be formulated as phenomenological positivism shall return in this work several times.

Thirdly, the necessity for phenomenology to reflect not only over its object but also over its act of reflection brings us to its self-founding character. As Ströker (1987) has shown, this project of self-foundation of phenomenology in the end motivates Husserl to shift his attention from the idea of presuppositionless science to the idea of justification. Starting from the idea that philosophy is interested solely in the truth, transcendental phenomenology becomes necessary for two reasons: (1) phenomenology is not only aimed at reaching truths that are the end of certain praxes but also at the truths that found such practices. Thus, phenomenology is both interested in elucidating the meaning of scientific concepts as well as the foundation of science in the life-world. (2) Phenomenol-ogy does not only want to reach these truths, but also wants to clarify the meaning of “truth”. Yet the clarification of the meaning of “truth” is a life-long assignment to the philosopher and for this reason philosophy to Husserl is ultimately founded upon the notion of self-responsibility. Phenome-nology is first philosophy insofar as it is guided by the idea of a critical responsibility (Verantwortung) for the clarification of the meaning of truth. As Zahavi (2003, 68) formulates this development in Husserl’s thought, “what is decisive for Husserl is not the possession of absolute truth, but the very

attempt to live a life in absolute self-responsibility, that is, the very attempt to base one’s thoughts

and deeds on as much insight as possible.”

We see therefore that the epochē is not merely a methodological tool to the acquisition of truth to be thrown away upon reaching the truth but rather is a task that the philosopher takes upon himself time and time again throughout his life in his constant search for the truth. In other words, each philosopher has to begin anew, take up the critical attitude towards all inherited knowledge and beliefs and try to come to an appreciation of concrete experience. In this way, phenomenology can indeed be understood as self-founding in the sense that it self-critical. The biggest threat to phenom-enology is the inheritance of a traditional concept or understanding of a phenomenon that is not

16 Merleau-Ponty (2009), 45/xii 17 Husserl, Ideas I, 39/38

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critically evaluated against the investigation of the phenomenological field of correlations. It is in this sense then that our thesis asks not only for a transcendental-phenomenological account of temporal-ity but more specifically whether this account is truly phenomenological and not still metaphysical. This also clarifies that metaphysics throughout this essay will mean any philosophical account which works with an uncritically inherited concept, set of concepts or “direction of thought”, i.e. an uncriti-cal methodology.

There is a final concern that arises as soon as we realize that transcendental phenomenolo-gy has to recognize experience as the original ground of its own thinking. The experience of which I can speak is always my individual experience. Thus, with our current understanding of the epochē in place we can say that the task of the phenomenologist is to criticize the inherited knowledge and beliefs through a critical reflection on his own experience. This view of phenomenology is backed up by Siewert (2013) who states phenomenology is: “a sustained and unified effort to clarify our under-standing of philosophically or theoretically relevant distinctions, with recourse to an underived and critical use of first-person reflection.”18

Let us clarify what this means for the phenomenological procedure. I can tell you the expe-rience that I’ve had of a melody and moreover, I can tell you the structures that I believe to be essen-tial to it. You, subsequently, analyse your own experience of a melody and concur with or reject my ideas. Such is the way of discourse in the community of phenomenologists. Thus, we indicate certain experiences and we express what we believe to be the structure thereof. The only way for agree-ment to arise is for the other to follow the indication and express what he believes to be the struc-ture thereof. A disagreement in the expression of the relevant strucstruc-ture is interesting because it leads to a phenomenological discussion. In this sense, transcendental phenomenology as a practice would look much like Taylor’s understanding of transcendental philosophy in which:

the conclusions of transcendental arguments are apodeictic yet open to endless debate. For although a correct formulation will be self-evidently valid, the ques-tion may arise whether we have formulated things correctly.19

An enterprise that we would all gladly venture upon since it is both adventurous in looking for the correct description as certain in the validity of its argumentative steps. Each new phenomenologist can perform the epochē and be critical of the descriptions handed to him by the phenomenological tradition.

Yet, such an enterprise, as Siewert admits:

18 Siewert (2013), 2 19 Taylor (1978), 164

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proceeds on the basis of a warranted if defeasible presumption that one under-stands the terms in which one expresses the first-person judgements in question, which entails that one enjoys some competence in thus using them to state what is so. (Siewert (2013), 3)

But what happens when somebody does not grasp my indication of the experience that I want to discuss in the first place? In other words, what if we disagree upon the terms that we cannot really come to talk about the same thing and thus argue how it is best described?

Allow me to diverge on an anecdote to illustrate this point. Once in a bar I tried to explain to a girl, how the Müller-Lyer illusion, and the fact that I can perceive the lines as either equal or un-equal to each other, but not as un-equal and unun-equal, shows according to Merleau-Ponty that we have to understand perception on the basis of being-towards-the-world instead of more classical empiri-cist or intellectualist theories. But besides the fact that I evidently do not know how to talk to girls in bars, something else went wrong. For the girl answered me and in a most convinced manner assured me that she did perceive the lines as both equal and unequal at the same time. Now, up until this day it is my firm belief that she did not have a concurring theory of the Müller-Lyer phenomenon, but that she simply did not follow my indication correctly and that she was talking of her understanding of the drawing whereas I was trying to talk of the perception that can be regarded as founding that understanding. It is thus on the basis of a misunderstanding of the indication of the relevant experi-ence that a differexperi-ence in opinion arose that could not be settled in a phenomenological debate. As a consequence of course, I did not get the girl’s number.

This shows the difficulty for a community of phenomenologists to assure that they are talk-ing about the same phenomena and hence the methodological scrutiny that they employ to over-come this problem. It shows the difficulty for us to assume that our concepts clearly indicate the relevant experiences that we have been investigating and consequently we have to be careful not to assume too readily that a certain concept always refers to the same sort of experience, and conse-quently can be analysed in a homogeneous way. There might be a problem with our terms before we even start our work.

To get a firmer grasp on this problem, we can discuss a criticism addressed towards tran-scendental philosophy in a more general sense. Kuusela understands trantran-scendental arguments as making universal claims upon the basis of necessary conditions of possibility. He argues however that such arguments involve a dogmatism, insofar as they assume a notion of simple conceptual unity. Thus, if we describe an instance of knowledge A as being essentially characterized by quality b and we analyse this characteristic as relying on the transcendental structure c, then we can posit that c is a necessary structure for knowledge as such only on the basis of the assumption that b characterizes all instances of knowledge. Thus, b, possibly in connection with other characteristics, designates the

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unity of knowledge throughout its multiplicity. But as Kuusela argues it is also possible that we un-derstand the unity of the instances of knowledge according to Wittgenstein’s notion of family

rela-tions. Thus, to assume that all instances of knowledge have the characteristic b is a dogmatism.

It is important to apply Kuusela’s criticism properly to Husserlian phenomenology. As we have seen in the above, we basically work with two sets of terms: indications that point us to certain experiences to be described and expressions that signify the essences or eidetic laws of these experi-ences. As Cerbone points out, phenomenology’s “findings concerning essential structures are in a sense conditional: if what happened with me experientially was seeing a rotating coffee cup, then it was an adumbratively structured experience.”20 Thus, Kuusela’s criticism would only apply to indica-tions. For example, I might be puzzled by Cerbone’s conclusion that a rotating coffee cup is an adum-bratively structured experience if ‘rotating’ to me means ‘the concept of …’, which would let the indi-cation ‘rotating coffee cup’ indicate a non-adumbratively experienced concept and not an adumbra-tively experienced spatial object.

Now Siewert admits that “the understanding which phenomenology seeks is, of course, rooted in ordinary, shareable applications of language that precede it.”21 Yet, he is fairly confident that phenomenology can “use it as a starting point to create an articulate understanding of terms that will serve us well in addressing questions that arise regarding what we had already been speak-ing of.”22 But, as we have seen with Kuusela, the problem lies precisely in the “what we had already been speaking of”, in the susceptibility of our indications to be misunderstood, or better – since we do not have any position of authority to claim that we are using indications correctly – understood differently. It is not enough with Siewert to declare our faith in the capacity of phenomenology to come a more articulate understanding. We need to remain aware that our clarifications are rooted in the unclarified and realize that at all times the need for more precise articulation might become nec-essary.

What we need to take into account is that our indications of experience might one day prove also to refer to a phenomenon with a different structure and that what we have taken to be a simple phenomenon is in fact a complicated one that requires further scrutiny. For this reason, I take it that phenomenological concepts, due to their fundamental reference to experience as their ground, are essentially open-ended concepts. One day an experience might be indicated to us that invites us to take our concepts under reconsideration, i.e. to start again as philosopher, perform the

epochē once more and try to come to a better understanding of the structures of experience upon

the basis of the new experiences available to us. It is here that we see more clearly that the epochē is

20 Cerbone (2013), 7 21 Siewert (2013), 2 22 Ibid., 3

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indeed an infinite task in the sense that we constantly have to renew our critical attitude in the light of new experience. Or, which amounts to the same, our concepts insofar as they are indicative will necessarily remain open-ended.

3. The time-manuscripts

3.1 The early discoveries: 1904-1911

3.1.1 Zur Phänomenologie der Zeit

We have said that every philosopher must begin anew. Yet, this does not mean that he has to disre-gard the whole tradition of thought that he finds himself in. Indeed, we can ask ourselves: if we are to suspend everything that we have ever learned, how then are we still able to speak? We are al-ready speakers of a certain language-community and we are alal-ready philosophers who have read these texts and not those. As evident from the above, we stand in the tradition of transcendental phenomenology as conceived by Husserl. By doing so in a critical manner we hope to arrive at an interpretation of his work and an account of temporality that we can support ourselves.

As we already mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, we can divide the time-manuscripts of Husserl into three major groups, at least on the basis of chronology. The goal of this section is to present this material of these manuscript-groups and what they have to say about tem-porality. The work in this section is heavily indebted to the invaluable research of Toine Kortooms, presented in his 1999 doctoral thesis ‘Fenomenologie van de tijd’, whose work has helped me orient myself in the vast field of Husserl’s time-analyses. We start with presenting the material of the Hus-serliana X edition in two parts: first we will lay the basis of Husserl’s works as we can find it in the fourth chapter of the 1904/05 lectures entitled “Zur Phänomenologie der Zeit,” and secondly, we will discuss some of the advancements he came to make in the years following.

The first important conclusion is that the perception of a temporal object like a melody does not take place in one instantaneous moment of consciousness. Rather, it is “evident that the perception of a temporal object itself has temporality, that perception of a duration presupposes the duration of perception, that the perception of any temporal form itself has temporal form.”23 Yet, as Kortooms explains this leaves Husserl with the problem of explaining the unity of the temporal ob-ject, since he also holds that the succession of sensations is not yet a sensation of successions.24 This means that a mere succession of perceptions of notes does not make a melody; a unity must be brought to these perceptions.

The answer given to this question is that: “in order for the perception of the temporal ob-ject to be possible, not only the final act but every momentary act must be overlapping; the

23 Husserl (1999), 24

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tion, which itself is extended, distributed, consists in the fusion of these overlapping acts.”25 Every momentary act considered as such is therefore an abstraction,26 and every concrete perception must always be described as a fusion of acts, which only abstractly considered are independent. Following this, Husserl comes for the first time to his description of temporality as being a two-dimensional “continuum of continua”, distinguishing:

a) the continuum of perceptual phases,

b) the continuum of intuitive apprehension within a phase. This continuum terminates in an apprehension of the now, which is the transit point for the apprehension of the past and the apprehensions of the future. We call each such continuum the intuitive continuum of a cross section

[Querschnittskon-tinuum]. A vague continuum of empty intentions, related to the parts of the

temporal object that are no longer intuitive, attaches itself to the continuity of the intuitive continua belonging to the cross sections.27

Each phase of consciousness is therefore a continuum of apprehensions, tying together different moments of the temporal object into one phase of consciousness. This continuum can be described as a continuum of phantasms (for the moments of the past) ascending towards a sensation for the now-moment; these phantasms are modifications of the original sensations.28 The apprehension of the past is what Husserl calls primary memory and the apprehension of the future is called a primary

expectation.

It is important to notice here that in the manuscript Husserl first claims that the “apprehen-sion-content, which at only one point has the character of sensation and, in being continuously shad-ed off, has a modifishad-ed character for the rest of the points,” he later addshad-ed the comment: “Why that? That is not essential.”29 We can understand Husserl’s doubt about his description of the continuum within a phase of consciousness in terms of phantasms and sensations, since he already posited the abstract nature of the momentary act. If a momentary act is only an abstract notion, then to describe it in terms of its “apprehension-contents” is a bridge too far, since we cannot give a phenomenologi-cal description of this content as it is always “fused” with the “phantasms” of the co-original appre-hension of the past. We have to take into account two different forms of abstractions. First we can consider phenomenologically grounded abstraction. We see for example that the momentary phase of consciousness grounds the abstract description of this phase as consisting of apprehensions of

25 Husserl (1999), 234. 26 Idem 27 Ibid., 240 28 Ibid., 241-2 29 Ibid., 241

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past and future centred on an apprehension of the now. This abstraction is grounded because we admitted firstly that a perception of a temporal object is itself temporally extended and secondly that a continuity of apprehensions is not an apprehension of continuity, which requires our model for clarification of the unity of temporal objects. But, and this is the relevance of Husserl’s inserted comment about the inessential nature of the description of this continuum in terms of sensations and phantasms, it is not clear why the need to explain the unity of temporal objects requires us to settle what the supposed apprehension-contents of the abstract momentary acts are. And since ab-stract acts do not allow for a phenomenological analysis on their own, we should doubt the phenom-enological value of this description. In other words, why an abstract notion of sensation is still to be considered phenomenological concept and not an empirical remainder, remains to be argued for. We shall see that this problem is a central one to the interpretation and appreciation of Husserlian tem-porality.

This problem is recognized by Husserl in the further discussion of the status of primary memory. Before we are able to discuss this status, we have to understand the double meaning ‘per-ception’ can have to Husserl:

In the case of the “perception of the melody,” we distinguish the tone given now, calling it the “perceived” tone, and the tones that are over with, calling them “not perceived.” On the other hand, we call the whole melody a perceived melody, even though only the now-point is perceived.30

On the first hand then we have what we can call abstract perception, which as ‘primal impression’ constitutes the now-point. “But the now is precisely only an ideal limit, something abstract, which can be nothing by itself.”31 Moreover it is in continuous mediation with the not-now. So we have a constant mediation of the abstract perception or primal impression with primary memory. In this sense, primary memory is opposed to perception as memory.32 And the other type of perception that Husserl explicates from the quoted example, is what we can call concrete perception, “the act that

originally constitutes the object,”33 which is opposed to representation. But, as co-constitutive of temporal objects, primary memory is precisely a form of concrete perception.

Thus, from a concrete perspective we have to characterize primary memory as perception while from an abstract perspective we may characterize it as opposed to abstract perception. Yet, however we view it, it is necessary for the constitution of temporal objects that primary memory is continuous with the primal impression or abstract perception. By contrast, the difference between

30 Ibid., 40 31 Ibid., 42 32 Ibid., 42 33 Ibid., 43

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concrete perception and secondary memory is discrete. This is the reason that Husserl has to reject his description of the continuum within a phase of consciousness in terms of sensations and phan-tasms, since “whoever assumes an essential difference between sensations and phantasms naturally may not claim that the apprehension-contents for the just-past phases of time are phantasms; for these contents continuously pass over into the apprehension-contents belong to the now-moment.”34 And as Kortooms, points out in an earlier chapter of the 1904/05 lectures, Husserl pre-cisely argued that there has to be such an essential difference between sensation and phantasm, if phantasms are a real part of consciousness.35 For this reason, Husserl considers in 1905 to under-stand the content of the apprehension of the past as a shading-off (Abstufung) of the originally given apprehension-content.

Thus, in Husserl’s first understanding of temporality of 1905 temporal objects are consti-tuted by a time-consciousness that is described as a continuum of continua, where each phase of consciousness can be described as consisting of primary memories and primary expectations centred on a primal impression of which they are modifications. These moments of the phase of conscious-ness are only abstractly considered to be acts, however. The primal impression is said to furnish us with the original sensation. Finally, while Husserl considered to describe the content of the primary memory as a phantasm, he rejects this because it could not explain the unity between the primal impression and the primary memory and so he describes the content instead as a shading-off

(Ab-stufung) of the original sensation. 3.1.2 Development after 1905

The first development that we want to point out is the fact that Husserl now starts to call time-consciousness absolute time-consciousness. As Kortooms explains, this term first arises in lectures from ‘06/’07, published in Hua XXIV, Husserl distinguishes three forms of consciousness. First, conscious-ness as experience where we can, upon reflection, become aware of our sensations as sensations. Prior to this reflection however, “we do not see sensations” although we are conscious of them.36 But we have to ask ourselves what it is that we are pre-reflectively aware of. The sensations do not belong to the background for example. The reflection is a modified consciousness over against the original that explicates the moments of the perception as implicitly belonging to the experience, the being of which is called pre-phenomenal. We are pre-phenomenally conscious of the experiences in which we are phenomenally conscious of objects. These sensations and all other moments of scious that are only perceived upon reflection, have their pre-phenomenal being in the primal con-sciousness. This primal consciousness is the absolute consciousness, according to Husserl, in which

34 Ibid., 49

35 Kortooms (1999), 26 36 Hua XXIV, 243

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these pre-phenomenal beings have their pre-objective being in the temporal flow.37 This conscious-ness is pre-intentional. The consciousconscious-ness of the glass of wine, which I perceive now as a glass of wine to be drunk, is perceived by me, among other elements, by the sensations of redness that the perception can be said to consist of. Yet, I am not directed towards these sensations, but towards the wine to be drunk. I only become aware of these sensations when I reflect over the wine’s colour. The second consciousness is intentional consciousness, and only here can we say that an “object” ap-pears though it need not be apprehended actively as such. We could say, opposed to pre-intentional consciousness, that here consciousness is about something. We are intentionally aware of the back-ground of a perception, e.g. the red colour of the glass of wine. I am conscious of this colour in the sense that, although I am directed towards the wine as “to be drunk”, I do see its colour in a non-thematized manner. I am therefore also intentionally conscious of this colour although in a less ex-plicit way. The third form of consciousness then is positing consciousness which grasps its intentional object as object, the glass of wine as the wine to be drunk.38 Summing up we can say that the posited “wine to be drunk” involves the intentional awareness of the red colour of the wine, which is based on the sensations of redness of which I am pre-intentionally conscious.

A second development of Husserl’s thinking is that where sensations and phantasms were construed as really immanent parts of consciousness, – we can think of sensations as “matter” “with-in” consciousness upon which intentions first take hold – they are now held to be already constitut-ed. In ‘09, Husserl draws the conclusion that the immanent object, i.e. the perceived tone, is not a real part of consciousness, it does not have the being of absolute consciousness. Rather, it is consti-tuted and the peculiar quality about this constitution is that the formula esse est percipi applies to it. This conclusion is drawn by Husserl in a text that is published as Text Nr. 39 in Hua X: “The esse of the perceived sound-thing in a certain sense dissolves into its percipi. This percipi is not itself a thing and has a different mode of being, but the one is given a priori with the other.”39

But if immanent perception is characterized by the esse est percipi, it can no longer be merely experiencing consciousness but has to be a intentional consciousness.40 Thus, prior to the reflection that enables immanent perception, mere experiencing has to be understood as according to the second concept of consciousness, which makes the unperceived, yet conscious data streaming in absolute conscious, into background objects that can be focused upon in reflection. Tied with this is the idea that not even the now-present phase of perception is really immanently given. As Kor-tooms points out, this is a changed position from the ‘04/’05 lectures and even the ‘06/’07 lecture in

37 Hua XXIV, 244-6 38 Cq. Hua XXIV, 246-52 39 Husserl (1999), 294 40 Kortooms (1999), 87

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which Husserl still takes the primal impression to be a consciousness in the first sense of the word in which a now-point of the immanent temporal object is experienced.41

This development has a further, important consequence for the way in which Husserl thinks about primary memory. In the ‘06/’07 lectures Husserl on the one hand maintains that phantasy-consciousness and primary memory have to be kept distinct42, so that the content of primary memory cannot be understood as phantasms. But even to speak of the content of primary memory as shading-offs cannot be interpreted as modified contents of a sensation, that subsequently get viewed by primary memory as past.43 The problem is brought out shortly in a text, presumably from ’09:

Let us assume that red appears. And then it is just past. Still intuitive. Can an ac-tually present red continue to be preserved and continue to function as a “repre-sentant” there? Can we manage with the theory of representation? If a red were

still there – actually experienced – in the same sense as the earlier red, then the

red would really simply endure, at most fading away, diminishing in fullness, in-tensity, and the like.44

The problem here is that we cannot distinguish between an enduring content and a retained content. Husserl thus discards his old “theory of representation” which understood the content of primary memory as being a modified content somehow available “in” consciousness, subsequently to be ap-prehended. Rather, we now have to follow the idea that even the content of sensation is not “really immanent” to consciousness, but is already constituted. Primary memory can then be understood as modification of this constitution-process and not as an apprehension of a modified content.45 Thus, in this development we see dissolving of the apprehension – apprehension-content scheme.

These latter two developments, i.e. the understanding of experiencing as absolute and con-stituting consciousness and the dissolving of the apprehension – apprehension-content scheme, pre-pare the way for probably the famous and most important text of Hua X: Text No. 54, which also informed the Heidegger/Stein edition, but is a text from 1911. Since we have reached the conclusion that consciousness as experiencing is a constituting consciousness for Husserl, such that a sensation is already constituted, and we have the same type of pre-reflective awareness of our impression as of the sensation, that is to say, we have a pre-reflective awareness of what it is like to experience a sen-sation, then this awareness or consciousness itself must also be constituted within consciousness. To

41 Ibid., 88-9 42 Hua XXIV, 258 43 Ibid., 260-1n2 44 Husserl (1999), 330 45 Kortooms (1999), 96-7

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quote Husserl: “the unity of the tone-duration becomes constituted in the flow, but the flow itself becomes constituted in its turn as the unity of the consciousness of the tone-duration.” This is why the primal consciousness is called an absolute consciousness: it has to constitute itself to itself.46 Husserl tries to understand this in the following manner:

There is one, unique flow of consciousness (perhaps within an ultimate conscious-ness) in which both the unity of the tone in immanent time and the unity of the flow of consciousness itself become constituted at once. … How is it possible? Eve-ry adumbration of consciousness of the species “retention”47 has, I answer, a

dou-ble intentionality: one serves for the constitution of the immanent object. … The

other intentionality is constitutive of the unity of this primary memory in the flow.48

Thus time-consciousness is an absolute consciousness that operates via two fundamental intention-alities. The first, horizontal intentionality [Längstintentionalität] constitutes the unity of the flow of consciousness, i.e. consciousness as experiencing, “as a one-dimensional quasi-temporal order by virtue of the continuity of reproductive modifications [which are] reproductions of one another.”49 The second, transverse intentionality [Querintentionalität] constitutes the unity of the object-point throughout its flowing away in the continuum of reproductive adumbrations.

We see here however, that Husserl still understands the flowing away or shading-off of immanent objects or phases of consciousness as reproductive modifications. Thus, even in horizontal intentionality there is a difference between the constituting consciousness and the constituted sciousness, inasmuch as the latter is constituted as a reproduction of the former. But since the con-stituted phase of consciousness is an intentionality and since Husserl holds that: “only intentionality can be modified into intentionality;”50 it follows that the constituting phase of consciousness has to be intentional and therefore constituted as such as well. We need to have an ultimate intentionality that first constitutes a certain phase of consciousness before the horizontal intentionality of con-sciousness can constitute the unit of this phase of concon-sciousness throughout its flowing away. But then this ultimate consciousness, would as Husserl observes be an

“unconscious” consciousness; that is to say, as ultimate intentionality it cannot be an object of attention (if paying attention always presupposes intentionality

46 Husserl (1999), 389

47 To my knowledge this is the first time Husserl call “primary memory” “retention”. 48 Ibid., 390

49 Ibid., 392 50 Ibid., 394

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ready given in advance), and therefore it can never become conscious in this par-ticular sense.51

To sum up, because the development in Husserl’s understanding of consciousness as experiencing as absolute consciousness means that this consciousness is already consciousness of the second variety, i.e. intentional consciousness, it means that we always have to ask for the constitution-process un-derlying even the most fundamental consciousness. This would whirl us into an infinite regress. Un-less that is, if we understand the ultimate consciousness, underlying the absolute time-consciousness that can be described as a double intentionality, as an unconscious consciousness – whatever that means.

3.2 The three models of the middle period: 1917-8

3.2.1 The first model

The years 1917 and 1918 form a time where Husserl again paid a great deal of thought to the studies of time, inspired by the editing work that Edith Stein was undertaking at the time. As such, the

Ber-nau Manuscripts, based on the group of manuscripts in the archives known as the L-manuscripts,

which collect these new meditations, are at first a continuation of the earlier work on time but soon take a new direction.52 One of the most important phenomenological developments, as Bernet and Lohmar point out in their introduction to Hua XXXIII, is that Husserl now pays more attention to the nature of protention and its interweaving with retention.53

In order to present this material I follow Kortooms proposal to analyse these manuscripts in terms of three separate models of time-consciousness that Husserl seems to consider and discuss in detail. The first thing this allows us to say, is that the attention paid to protention is only paid within the context of the third model.54

On a terminological note, we can say that the concepts ‘primary memory’, ‘primary expec-tation’ and ‘primal impression’ are replaced by the terms ‘retention’, ‘protention’ and ‘primal presentation’, although we already saw the term ‘retention’ in Hua. X, Text No. 54. It is important to note however that the fact that Husserl speaks of ‘primal presentation’ instead of ‘primal impression’ suggests a move away from any form of intuitionism that we might attribute to Husserl. Thus, the terminology here confirms a development that we have discovered in the previous section, viz. the idea that the content of a presentation is modified ‘through and through’ and as such, experiencing consciousness is a constituted consciousness. We will see that Husserl sometimes fails to understand retention in this way in the L-manuscripts and criticizes himself for it. As such, we see a line in which

51 Idem

52 Hua XXXIII, xix-xxi 53 Hua XXXIII, xxxiii 54 Kortooms (1999), 105

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Husserl understands retention more and more as central to the constitution process. Moreover, it is also important to Husserl that we do not longer call retention ‘primary memory’, because “die Reten-tion (das Bewusstsein der PostpräsentaReten-tion) ist genau besehen keine Erinnerung, sie soll also nicht primäre Erinnerung genannt werden. Sie ist keine Vergegenwärtigung.”55

With these preliminary comments in mind, we will start with the assessment of the first model of the L-manuscripts. As Kortooms explains, the “point of departure of the first model … is that a time-point of the immanent object is absolutely self-given in a primal presentation.”56 Or as Husserl formulates it: “die Urphase stellt nicht dar, oder (wenn man will) sie stellt sich selbst dar,”57 so that there can be no distinction between the appearance and that which appears. Upon this basis Husserl then tries to understand the nature of retention: first, as representation; secondly, as a form of image-consciousness and thirdly as a modification of primal presentation.

In his first attempt to come to a better understanding of retention he tries to regard it as

representation. That this attempt is not successful is evident already from our preliminary remark

that retention should precisely not be understood as representation and from the fact that Husserl already discarded his idea to reject the understanding of retention as a form of phantasy-consciousness as a representation-theory as early as 1909. Yet, Husserl still reconsiders this posi-tion58, though it seems only academically, and re-iterates his earlier objections by stating that: first, the object is not co-present as in phantasy, the being-past is presented originally, albeit in a now; second, retention cannot be continuous with the real content of a primal presentation if she is modi-fied content through and through.

The idea that though a past is presented in a now, there can be no talk of representation because the past is not given as co-present, leads Husserl to his second attempt to understand reten-tion. He now compares it to image-consciousness, where we have “present data, a presently, percep-tually constituted picture (Bild), in which another, the pictured (Abgebildete), posits (darstellt) it-self.”59 Consequently, there is some hyletic datum present in consciousness that can serve as the picture through which the retention will then apprehend the pictured. Thus, although Husserl views consciousness as experiencing as absolute consciousness, the apprehension – apprehension-content model has not been left entirely. Instead, the schema ‘apprehension – apprehension-content’ has to

be nuanced, the data of consciousness are dependent moments, which only exist in their

apprehen-sion: esse est percipi.

55 Hua XXXIII, 55

56 Kortooms (1999), 108; my translation 57 Hua XXXIII, 56

58 Compare, e.g. Hua XXXIII, 57f 59 Hua XXXIII, 57

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Now, Kortooms understands this as a response to Boehm and Brough who both view the rejection of this schema as an important development in Husserl’s thinking.60 Yet, if we look at the texts on which Kortooms bases his countering, then we have to give a little more credit to Boehm and Brough. First, Kortooms refers to Boehm’s Introduction to Hua X, obviously contextualizing the latter’s statements to Husserl’s early development. Second, Brough (1972) clearly is concerned with Husserl’s early writings as well and does not consider any text from beyond 1911.61 Thus, I would prefer to say that Husserl did came to reject the schema towards the end of his early period, but reconsiders a nuanced version of it in his middle period.

Within the context of the first model and image-consciousness this nuanced schema cer-tainly has a role to play. A primal “sounding” (Urklang) is originally present, after which “sounding-offs” (Abklänge) are which have a relation of similarity with the primal sounding.62 Retention is un-derstood as “empty consciousness, which fills itself with a full, intuitive consciousness in which the sounding-off of that which is retained, is given.”63 But Husserl now comes to reject this understand-ing because it contradicts his ground-intuition that retention is perception.64

Husserl thirdly suggests that retention should be understood as modification of a primal presentation.65 The nuanced schema remains in place however as Husserl now states that “although we view the retentional modifications … as intuitive modifications of the primal presenting moment, [we can now assume] that real “soundings-afters” (Nachklänge) are given with the memorial adum-brations.”66 Yet, if the contents of retention have to be real hyletic data, then it becomes impossible to distinguish between a tone that is resonating very softly and a no-mosounding-tone that is re-tained by consciousness. As Husserl said in Text No. 47 of Hua X: “the reverberation of a violin tone is precisely a feeble present violin tone and in itself has nothing to do whatsoever with the memory of the loud tone that has just passed.”67 This notion of retention therefore has to be discarded as well, leaving us with the conclusion that the first model as such is untenable

3.2.2 The second model

We thus have to challenge the premise of the first model which is “that a time-point of the imma-nent object is absolutely self-given in a primal presentation.”68 The first way to do so is to challenge

60 Kortooms (1999), 114

61 Compare especially Brough (1972), p. 313 where the section-heading of Husserl’s ‘new interpretation’ clearly

states that this interpretation relies on texts from 1909 to 1911

62 Hua XXXIII, 82 63 Ibid., 87; my translation. 64 Idem 65 Ibid., 88 66 Ibid., 88; my translation. 67 Husserl (1999), 323-4 68 Kortooms (1999), 108; my translation

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the idea that a time-point is absolutely self-given in the primal presentation. The notion of absolute consciousness in the first model has suggested that not only are we conscious of a sensation in the primal presentation, the primal presentation is itself originarily given in the absolute flow. Likewise, though retentions present us with non-original contents, they are themselves original moments of the experience.69 That the primal presentation must itself be originarily given points to an infinite regress much like the model of Hua Text No. 54 does. This goes back to the development that we have pointed out in section 3.1 that absolute consciousness is intentional consciousness. The second model of the L-manuscripts will answer this regress by denying that the primal presentation needs to be originarily given to absolute consciousness.

This can be done by hypothesizing that the original givenness or presence (Gegenwart) of the primal presentation is only constituted by apprehending consciousness and not by non-apprehending intentional consciousness. As Husserl points out this means a departure from his usual

Aufmerksamheitstheorie that states that apprehension is a founded mode of intentionality, a

particu-lar way in which an intentional experience can be lived.

As Kortooms explains, Husserl in some texts chooses the side of his

Aufmerksamheitstheo-rie, e.g. Text No. 11, §7 of the Hua XXXIII, where Husserl characterizes the suggestion of the second

model as denying the essence of intentionality (das Eigene der Intentionalität).70 Yet, there are also some texts in which he works out the hypothesis of the second model. The basic idea of this model is that constituting consciousness only appears as an immanent temporal object when attentive con-sciousness directs itself towards it. Husserl thus considers whether there can be “a process of experi-encing that does not constitute time”, i.e. whether “it is a meaningful possibility that there is a pro-cess of experiencing which is not conscious of itself nor its constituted objects.”71 Or again: “can a process of primal life be without being a process of consciousness, without being conscious of itself as process?”72

Husserl suggests at a certain point that it might be possible that if the primal process is not continually immanent time-constituting consciousness, that “there can be a process of hyletic primal data, that are sufficient for a constitution of hyletic unities of experience, but which require “atten-tions” (“Auffassungen”) for a genuine constitution but can exist without this.”73 As Kortooms adds, this suggestion is not followed further in the L-manuscripts but only taken up again in the C-manuscripts.74 For now, however, it is a problem that if there is such a hyletic process “how can we

69 Compare Hua XXXIII, 223 70 Hua XXXIII, 225

71 Ibid., 187; my translation

72 Ibid., 188;my translation and emphasis 73 Hua XXXIII, 204; my translation. 74 Kortooms (1999), 133

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