The presence of husserl

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 59-75

  Alweiss, Lilian S ^a  

^a MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 11244343133     PISSN: 00071773     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1999.11008544     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Cf.Jacques Derrida,: Speech and Phenomena; and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 103.
2. Cf.Plato: Timaeus, 37d.
3. It is worth noting that the idea of eternity as a form of duration is not that novel, nor indeed peculiar to Husserl alone but can be traced back to Parmenides. We here allude to Michael Theunissen's reading of Parmenides’ notion of being as an unlimited form or duration. Theunissen draws on Fragment 8 lines 5–6a: “oὐδέ πoτ ἠν oὐδ ἕσται, ἐπεì νũν ἕστιν ὁμoũ πᾶν ἕν συνεχές” which can be translated as either: “It [Being] neither was nor will be, since it is now together as a whole, one, continuous” or “Neither was it at one time, nor will it be (at some time)”. This leads Theunissen to observe: “According to the first reading, that is, Parmenides intends to negate the temporal difference between past and future; according to the second he is not at all interested in denying modal differences in time but merely wants to negate a passing away settled in the past and a coming to be located in the future. If the first reading credits the Eleatic with carrying through a conceptually adequate intention of timelessness, the second assumes he indeed aimed for timelessness but in fact achieved only unlimited duration” (Michael Theunissen: “Metaphysics’ Forgetfulness of Time: On the Controversy over Parmenides, Frag. 8,5” in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, eds. A., Honneth, T., McCarthy, C., Offe & A., Wellmer, translated by William Rehg, Camb. Mass: MIT Press, 1992, p. 6). I should like to thank my colleague Peter Osborne for drawing my attention to this article.
4. Cf. e.g. Phaedo, 77c.
5. As Descartes argues: “The first [resolution] was never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgement than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it” (René Descartes: “Discourse on Method” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. I, trans, by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, Part Two, p. 120/18 (in the margin).
6. Cf.Edmund Husserl,: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology: Collected Works Vol. II, trans, by F. Kersten: The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982, §49. Ideas I, hereafter. The location of all quotations in Husserl's work is given by specifying the relevant section (§) and page number of the original German text as provided in the margins of the translated texts.
7. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917): Collected Works IV, trans, by John Barnett Brough: Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. ITC, hereafter. Unless indicated otherwise I have made only the following amendment to Brough's translation. I have translated the term Erlebnis as “lived experience” and not as “mental process”.
8. According to Husserl, Brentano opposes memory or memorial presentation to perception. Thus, when I hear a melody I actually perceive only a single note at any one time. What Brentano calls memorial presentation Husserl will call “retention” (see below).
9. To follow Husserl: “Brentano speaks of a law of original association according to which representations of a momentary memory attach themselves to the perceptions of the moment […] When Brentano speaks of the acquisition of the future, he distinguishes between the original intuition of time, which according to him is the creation of original association, and the extended intuition of time, which also derives from phantasy but not from original asociation” (ITC, §6, pp. 15–16).
10. Here Husserl is following Kant, insofar as the emphasis is on the moment of synthesis. As Iso Kern points out: “The most significant of Kant's discoveries according to Husserl was his doctrine of synthesis” (Iso Kern,: Husserl und Kant: eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus, (Phaenomenologica 16), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 247). However, unlike Kant, Husserl believes that not all synthesis is active. There is a synthesis “which is not to be thought of as an active and discrete synthesis” (Ideas I, §118, p. 246). Synthesis is given.
11. A similar argument is developed by Donald Davidson in his article: “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (1974)”, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. 183–199.
12. Husserl refers to this as the “retroactive crossing out of earlier predelineations which are still consciously retained” (Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis—Husserliana Vol. XI; (Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926), ed. Margot Fleischer, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, §7, p. 30.
13. Such a conception of time adheres to a vision of philosophy that seeks to transcend the cave that is marred by change and loss in order to set out upon the pure path of light to disclose the eternal realm of Ideas that is non-changing, immutable and indeed timeless.
14. Phaedo, trans, by Harold North Flower, The Loeb Classical Library Plato: Vol. I, London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1914, 77c.
15. Cf.Aristotle: Physics, 219b.
16. To follow Husserl: “But this incompleteness or ‘imperfection’, pertaining to the essence of the perception of a lived experience, is radically different from the incompleteness or ‘imperfection’ pertaining to the essence of the perception of something ‘transcendent’” (Ideas I, §44, p. 82).
17. Phänomenologische Psychologie (1925)—Husserliana IX; ed. Walter Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1962, §30, p. 164.
18. “Both the inner temporal object and the experiencing of an inner temporal object are thus assimilative wholes, not disjunctive and exclusive as spatial objects are” (Robert Sokolowski,: Husserlian Meditations, (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, Chapter 6, §62, p. 164). Within all his systematicity a peculiar Nietzschean moment suddenly seems to erupt.
19. To clarify this issue, Husserl draws the distinction between the adumbration [Abschattung] and the adumbrated [Abgeschattetes]. “The adumbrating is a lived experience. But a lived experience is possible only as a lived experience, and not as something spatial. However, the adumbrated is of essential necessity possible only as something spatial” (Ideas I, §41, p. 75). Unfortunately, Husserl is not consistent here. Frequently he refers to adumbrations when describing the nature of the immanent sphere.
20. “For only in primary memory do we see what is past; only in it does the past become constituted, and constituted presentatively, not re-presentatively” (ITC, §17, p. 41).
21. Indeed, we can compare the function of the primal impression with the function Kant attributes to the transcendental object = x in the A version of his Critique of Pure Reason, trans, by Norman Kemp Smith: London: Macmillan Press, 1933. CPR hereafter. The transcendental object = x in the A version deals with what Henry Allison calls the “‘weighty’ sense of object” (Henry E. Allison,: Kant's Transcendental Idealism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, p. 147), which is concerned with the conditions of representation of an object, in contrast to the B version which is concerned with the objective validity of the unity of apperception. Cf. Chapter Two of my Ph.D. thesis: The Recovery of Time and the Loss of the World—Toward a Phenomenology of Space (unpublished).
22. I am adhering to Jean-Luc Marion's critique of Derrida. Marion argues that Derrida's reading of Husserl's phenomenology as a “metaphysics of presence” is too narrow. Derrida is concerned only with the Urimpression, which never appears and therefore fails to acknowledge that Husserl enlarges the present: “Paradoxically, Derrida's interpretation is not radical enough (by assuming that the significance lies in the rupture with the presence and thus is outside of metaphysics), since this reading relies upon a too limited understanding of the presence which lacks the depth of a truly Husserlian donation” (Jean-Luc Marion,: Réduction et donation, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, p. 56. See esp. Chapter One: “La percée et l'élargissement” pp. 11–63.
23. To follow Kant this “consciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular object, but a form of representation” (CPR, B 404).
24. “This permanent cannot be an intuition in me. For all grounds of determination of my existence which are to be met with in me are representations; and as representations themselves require a permanent distinct from them, in relation to which their change, and so my existence in the time wherein they change, may be determined”. (CPR, Bxl. n.l & B 275 n.l).
25. To follow Husserl: “This prephenomenal, preimmanent temporality becomes constituted intentionally as the form of the time-constituting consciousness and in it itself’ (ITC, §39, p. 83).
26. “It appears to be an evident and quite inescapable assumption of this conception that the intuition of an extent of time occurs in a now, in one time-point. It simply appears as a truism that every consciousness aimed at some whole, at some plurality of distinguishable moments (hence every consciousness of relation and combination), encompasses its object in an indivisible time-point. Wherever a consciousness is directed towards a whole whose parts are successive, there can be an intuitive consciousness of this whole only if the parts, in the form of representants, come together in the unity of the momentary intuition” (ITC, §7, p. 20).
27. As early as 1905 Husserl maintains that it is possible that apprehension “is extended over a stretch of time (the so-called “presence-time”) (ITC, §7, p. 20).
28. “I see with evidence that that final state is possible only as a final state, that any state or condition that intuits time is possible only as extended, […] that the consciousness of time itself [requires] time; the consciousness of duration, duration; and the consciousness of succession, succession” (ITC, No.20, p. 192). Cf. John, Brough who emphasises the same issue in “Husserl's Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness” in Husserl's Phenomenology: A Textbook, (Current Continental Research 551), Washington D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1989, pp. 249–289. The particular passage is cited on pp. 283–284.
29. If we recall Husserl's wording: “What matters to me here is only to lift the veil a little from this world of time-consciousness, so rich in mystery, that up until now has been hidden from us” (ITC, No.39, p. 276).
30. This is a phrase which John Brough uses when citing Husserl. Cf. John Brough's introduction to his translation of ITC, p. xix.
31. “Every single lived experience, e.g., a lived experience of joy, can begin as well as end and hence delimit its duration. But the stream of lived experiences cannot begin and end” (ITC, §81, p. 163).
32. Unpublished manuscripts: Ms. C7 II, p. 12, (1932) cited by Held in Lebendige Gegenwart, (Phaenomenologica 23), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, p. 70.
33. John Barnett Brough translates Längsintentionalität as “horizontal intentionality”. Here, however, James S. Churchill's chosen translation “longitudinal intentionality” seems more appropriate. Cf. James S. Churchill's translation of ITC: The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964, pp. 107–108.
34. Friedrich Nietzsche,: “Appendix to Zarathustra Section 8” in Unschuld des Werdens Vol. II, ed. Alfred Baeumler, § 1341, p. 476, Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1978.
35. The Idea of Phenomenology, trans, by William p. Alston and George Nakhnikian, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 24.
36. The aim is thereby to describe this absolute given, the unity of consciousness, without however falling prey to the dangers of what Kant calls the “Paralogism of Reason” (Cf. CPR, A 341/B399), that is, without inferring from the formal conditions of thought that there is a substance of thought, for all we are referring to is a constituting event.
37. Reflection on lived experiences.
38. “The constituting and the constituted coincide, and yet naturally they cannot coincide in every respect. The phases of the flow of consciousness in which phases of the same flow of consciousness become constituted phenomenally cannot be identical with these constituted phases, nor are they” (ITC, §39, p. 83).
39. It is Heidegger who will show that there is another form of disclosure which is neither based on the perceptual model, nor has its starting-point in a punctual now. Cf. Heidegger, M.,: Being and Time, translation—based on the seventh edition—by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962.
40. Maurice Merleau-Ponty,: Phenomenology of Perception, trans, by Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 1962, p. 242.