ThinkBlog

If that title sounds like an essay, you got it. I wrote this overnight after having read the section on Time-Consciousness from Husserl’s Logical Investigations. He’s starting to make sense; it’s exciting to see where he’s going with some of these things. This paper needs to be fleshed out a little more to be comprehensible to someone with no familiarity with Husserl, but the more I learn about intentionality and other constructs of consciousness, the less daunting (more fun) that seems.

One thing that strikes me about Husserl is the sheer readability of his work. It’s extremely dense, no doubt!—but it makes sense, and he doesn’t sound like he’s talking from five hundred years back (because he’s not). It’s a nice change from the early moderns to see something so near-conversant. Seems like somewhere after Augustine, Occam, and Boethius, along came a lot of linguistic superfluity and made things complicated. You’ll probably find Husserl dense, but with patience, you realize how contagious his subtle intensity is.

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For as long as philosophers have considered time, they have argued about it. Debates on the nature of time from the ancient Greeks up through Augustine and the inquiry of the modern period frame the point in the conversation at which Edmund Husserl (1859—1938) enters. Augustine began an almost tongue-in-cheek cogitation about time in the fourth century C.E., answering himself in explaining that time is explicable only until someone asks him to explain it. His was the first psychological consideration of time as it is perceived: those who came before him only dealt with it in the transcendent sense, and broadly (in questions of its linear versus cyclical nature, and so forth). Phenomenology must go beyond this, Husserl insists, to consider not only objective time but also the way that we mentally order events (so-called “internal time”) and, most importantly, our awareness of that internal continuum (referred to as time-consciousness). Since Husserl is concerned with pure phenomenology, he must not only investigate the objective idea of time itself, but also as it appears or presents itself to the individual perception. Thus, the subject of time and time-consciousness is important for Husserl because it is a question that he cannot avoid in propounding the “new science,” especially since he is focused on its psychological (and, therefore, necessarily subjective) perception; and we must understand his account of time-consciousness in light of what he has already said about phenomenology generally.

Time-consciousness necessarily exists as a sub-categorization of consciousness itself. Since this is precisely what is so important to analyze phenomenologically, and since this awareness of time is such a fundamental aspect of consciousness, Husserl must give an account of how we conceive of time if his “logical investigations” are to be comprehensive. If phenomenology qua descriptive psychology is the “new science” by which we know “transcendental” truths through complete descriptions of what appears to us, that is, to our consciousness, then it is important to understand how the consciousness conceives of the passage of time.

Because phenomenological inquiry must be conducted from a first-person perspective, time-consciousness itself is foundational to the understanding and analysis of experience. Husserl turns the classic conception of time, e.g., that it would continue to flow regardless of our existence and our ability to perceive it internally, on its head. For the phenomenologist, transcendent time is almost a misnomer, because without subjective, internal awareness of time, its passage in the world would cease to have any meaning. Furthermore, without an awareness of our internal time (and the perceptions, experiences, and so on that this encompasses), the latter would cease to exist or, more precisely, to have any meaning.

For Husserl, the “consciousness is engaged in a continuous alteration” (Moran & Mooney 2004); and as he studies the structure of consciousness, he is able to give a description of the awareness of temporal events and objects. The description of that awareness begins with a description of how we understand the present: the “primal impression,” says Husserl, from a temporal object, is stored in the consciousness as a “now.” For each successive point in time, each with its own corresponding state of that same object, a new “now” is formed and the previous moment is retained, in a sense, in consciousness.

Impressions, then, are known to us immediately through perception; in that precise moment in which we are presently conscious of a temporal event or object, the now is just as immediately transferred into a retained awareness. Husserl calls this the retentional consciousness; that is to say, the consciousness of the immediate past or the “just now” (Moran & Mooney 2002). To better illustrate impression and retention, Husserl turns to the example of a melody. As even a single note is held out, “the tonal now is changed into one that has been,” and each subsequent retention modifies the initially perceived point (as opposed to each retention modifying only its immediately preceding retention, which would lead to infinite regress).

There is a fundamental difference between perceived sound and retained sound, according to Husserl. Perceived sound—that of which we are conscious in the now by way of sensory impression—necessarily precedes retained sound; there cannot be an instance in which we have, as it were, a memory of a sound or any other temporal object or event without its preceding impression. Furthermore, we are, or can be, aware of temporal objects even if we don’t take explicit notice of them (an idea that will later resurface in Freud in a different form). He goes on to preemptively answer criticisms in this area by saying that there can be a memory (i.e., retention) of a thing that does not actually exist, as in the case of a fictional thing—but that the mind must first perceive it.

A temporal object, Husserl says, is one that is available to our consciousness for more than an instant in time. This includes any phenomena, not necessarily physically manifested (as distinguished from mental phenomena, e.g., intentionality); and in the case of those physically manifested, they need only be sensory impressions of any sort, whether auditory or visual or so forth. Objects in this sense are conceived of on the perception-retention continuum, such that while the now is explicitly different from the “just now,” or the past, temporal objects that are conceived of as identical from one moment to the next can be said to endure. Husserl compares the progression of time as it appears to our consciousness as a comet, whose head is the now and whose tail stretches far back in a string of progressively-modified retentions.

If primary remembrance is a succession of retentions strung along comet-like behind an experience having taken place “just now,” secondary remembrance is the recall of that whole string far after the fact. Calling the means by which a stimulus is presented to the consciousness (insofar as this is different than the raw sensory input called perception) a “presentification,” Husserl says that “just as immediate presentifications are joined to perceptions, so also can autonomous presentifications appear without being joined to perceptions” (Moran & Mooney 2002).

This later recall, or secondary remembrance, is a subject to which Husserl returns throughout his explication on time-consciousness. He explains that there is an ideal limit to the perception of the now, a gradient with progressively less saturated “shades” of the present available to consciousness. This limit is like the asymptote away from which retentions progressively descend into what just was. So unlike originary perception, or that comet-trail moment of having just experienced a temporal object, secondary retention and recollection contain within themselves a whole temporal object. That is to say, for instance, in light of Husserl’s example using melody, that while we must necessarily hear it note-wise (that is, via the now) at first, when we recall it we can recall the entire melody as such, as a single, complete temporal object (Moran & Mooney 2002).

What Husserl explains about the nature of time-consciousness is important because of his focus in phenomenology, though it has been criticized for perhaps suffering from too-specific language that has nothing to do with descriptive psychology. However, the fact that a specialized jargon need be employed for the description of a conscious phenomenon need not deter a careful reader, since Husserl himself redefines and uses examples for most of his ideas. Ultimately, too, his is the most specific account of our perception of time since Kant and, in its way, is perhaps more empirically sound (in that it is based on experience, instead of being the logical outflow of a much broader epistemological theory).

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References.

Beyer, Christian. (2004). “Edmund Husserl”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.). <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2004/entries/husserl/>.

Chamberlain, Jane. (2004). “Thinking Time: Ricoeur’s Husserl in Time and Narrative”. <http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol2/husserl.html>.

Moran, Dermot & Mooney, Timothy, eds. (2002). The Phenomenology Reader, pp. 78-123. New York: Routledge.

If that title sounds like an essay, you got it. I wrote this overnight after having read the section on Time-Consciousness from Husserl’s Logical Investigations. He’s starting to make sense; it’s exciting to see where he’s going with some of these things. This paper needs to be fleshed out a little more to be comprehensible to someone with no familiarity with Husserl, but the more I learn about intentionality and other constructs of consciousness, the less daunting (more fun) that seems.

One thing that strikes me about Husserl is the sheer readability of his work. It’s extremely dense, no doubt!—but it makes sense, and he doesn’t sound like he’s talking from five hundred years back (because he’s not). It’s a nice change from the early moderns to see something so near-conversant. Seems like somewhere after Augustine, Occam, and Boethius, along came a lot of linguistic superfluity and made things complicated. You’ll probably find Husserl dense, but with patience, you realize how contagious his subtle intensity is.

---

For as long as philosophers have considered time, they have argued about it. Debates on the nature of time from the ancient Greeks up through Augustine and the inquiry of the modern period frame the point in the conversation at which Edmund Husserl (1859—1938) enters. Augustine began an almost tongue-in-cheek cogitation about time in the fourth century C.E., answering himself in explaining that time is explicable only until someone asks him to explain it. His was the first psychological consideration of time as it is perceived: those who came before him only dealt with it in the transcendent sense, and broadly (in questions of its linear versus cyclical nature, and so forth). Phenomenology must go beyond this, Husserl insists, to consider not only objective time but also the way that we mentally order events (so-called “internal time”) and, most importantly, our awareness of that internal continuum (referred to as time-consciousness). Since Husserl is concerned with pure phenomenology, he must not only investigate the objective idea of time itself, but also as it appears or presents itself to the individual perception. Thus, the subject of time and time-consciousness is important for Husserl because it is a question that he cannot avoid in propounding the “new science,” especially since he is focused on its psychological (and, therefore, necessarily subjective) perception; and we must understand his account of time-consciousness in light of what he has already said about phenomenology generally.

Time-consciousness necessarily exists as a sub-categorization of consciousness itself. Since this is precisely what is so important to analyze phenomenologically, and since this awareness of time is such a fundamental aspect of consciousness, Husserl must give an account of how we conceive of time if his “logical investigations” are to be comprehensive. If phenomenology qua descriptive psychology is the “new science” by which we know “transcendental” truths through complete descriptions of what appears to us, that is, to our consciousness, then it is important to understand how the consciousness conceives of the passage of time.

Because phenomenological inquiry must be conducted from a first-person perspective, time-consciousness itself is foundational to the understanding and analysis of experience. Husserl turns the classic conception of time, e.g., that it would continue to flow regardless of our existence and our ability to perceive it internally, on its head. For the phenomenologist, transcendent time is almost a misnomer, because without subjective, internal awareness of time, its passage in the world would cease to have any meaning. Furthermore, without an awareness of our internal time (and the perceptions, experiences, and so on that this encompasses), the latter would cease to exist or, more precisely, to have any meaning.

For Husserl, the “consciousness is engaged in a continuous alteration” (Moran & Mooney 2004); and as he studies the structure of consciousness, he is able to give a description of the awareness of temporal events and objects. The description of that awareness begins with a description of how we understand the present: the “primal impression,” says Husserl, from a temporal object, is stored in the consciousness as a “now.” For each successive point in time, each with its own corresponding state of that same object, a new “now” is formed and the previous moment is retained, in a sense, in consciousness.

Impressions, then, are known to us immediately through perception; in that precise moment in which we are presently conscious of a temporal event or object, the now is just as immediately transferred into a retained awareness. Husserl calls this the retentional consciousness; that is to say, the consciousness of the immediate past or the “just now” (Moran & Mooney 2002). To better illustrate impression and retention, Husserl turns to the example of a melody. As even a single note is held out, “the tonal now is changed into one that has been,” and each subsequent retention modifies the initially perceived point (as opposed to each retention modifying only its immediately preceding retention, which would lead to infinite regress).

There is a fundamental difference between perceived sound and retained sound, according to Husserl. Perceived sound—that of which we are conscious in the now by way of sensory impression—necessarily precedes retained sound; there cannot be an instance in which we have, as it were, a memory of a sound or any other temporal object or event without its preceding impression. Furthermore, we are, or can be, aware of temporal objects even if we don’t take explicit notice of them (an idea that will later resurface in Freud in a different form). He goes on to preemptively answer criticisms in this area by saying that there can be a memory (i.e., retention) of a thing that does not actually exist, as in the case of a fictional thing—but that the mind must first perceive it.

A temporal object, Husserl says, is one that is available to our consciousness for more than an instant in time. This includes any phenomena, not necessarily physically manifested (as distinguished from mental phenomena, e.g., intentionality); and in the case of those physically manifested, they need only be sensory impressions of any sort, whether auditory or visual or so forth. Objects in this sense are conceived of on the perception-retention continuum, such that while the now is explicitly different from the “just now,” or the past, temporal objects that are conceived of as identical from one moment to the next can be said to endure. Husserl compares the progression of time as it appears to our consciousness as a comet, whose head is the now and whose tail stretches far back in a string of progressively-modified retentions.

If primary remembrance is a succession of retentions strung along comet-like behind an experience having taken place “just now,” secondary remembrance is the recall of that whole string far after the fact. Calling the means by which a stimulus is presented to the consciousness (insofar as this is different than the raw sensory input called perception) a “presentification,” Husserl says that “just as immediate presentifications are joined to perceptions, so also can autonomous presentifications appear without being joined to perceptions” (Moran & Mooney 2002).

This later recall, or secondary remembrance, is a subject to which Husserl returns throughout his explication on time-consciousness. He explains that there is an ideal limit to the perception of the now, a gradient with progressively less saturated “shades” of the present available to consciousness. This limit is like the asymptote away from which retentions progressively descend into what just was. So unlike originary perception, or that comet-trail moment of having just experienced a temporal object, secondary retention and recollection contain within themselves a whole temporal object. That is to say, for instance, in light of Husserl’s example using melody, that while we must necessarily hear it note-wise (that is, via the now) at first, when we recall it we can recall the entire melody as such, as a single, complete temporal object (Moran & Mooney 2002).

What Husserl explains about the nature of time-consciousness is important because of his focus in phenomenology, though it has been criticized for perhaps suffering from too-specific language that has nothing to do with descriptive psychology. However, the fact that a specialized jargon need be employed for the description of a conscious phenomenon need not deter a careful reader, since Husserl himself redefines and uses examples for most of his ideas. Ultimately, too, his is the most specific account of our perception of time since Kant and, in its way, is perhaps more empirically sound (in that it is based on experience, instead of being the logical outflow of a much broader epistemological theory).

---

References.

Beyer, Christian. (2004). “Edmund Husserl”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.). <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2004/entries/husserl/>.

Chamberlain, Jane. (2004). “Thinking Time: Ricoeur’s Husserl in Time and Narrative”. <http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol2/husserl.html>.

Moran, Dermot & Mooney, Timothy, eds. (2002). The Phenomenology Reader, pp. 78-123. New York: Routledge.