PHIL20611

Phenomenology
Week 4: Temporality - the flow of time (Husserl)

1. The Problem
Events, such as melodies, are 'stretched out' in time, having temporal parts or phases. How
is it that the temporal parts of a melody are experienced as parts of one and the same
continuous thing?
How is it that we have an experience of succession (of temporal parts), rather than simply a
succession of experiences? That is, what accounts for the fact that experience presents us
with temporally extended events as temporally extended?
This might seem an especially hard question to answer if we think that we can only be
perceptually aware of the present instant. For then, at any one time, experience will
present us with only that temporal part of an event that occurs at that time.

2. The Specious Present
A popular view has been that we are simultaneously aware of more than an instant.
According to William James,
the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain
breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two
directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a
duration (James, Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, p.609)
The doctrine of the specious present holds that we are experientially aware of a span of
time that includes the present and past (and perhaps future).
The specious present is present in the sense that the experienced phases of the event are
experienced as occurring now.
The specious present is specious in that those phases of the event that occur at times other
than the present instant are not really present.
The Simultaneity Problem: the view would seem to have the consequence that we
experience the successive phases of an event as simultaneous
The Repetition Problem: given that our experience at each instant would span a duration
longer than that instant, it seems that we would experience everything more than once.
In a sequence of two notes d, e we would experience d at the time at which d occurs, and
then again at the time at which e occurs. But, of course, we only experience each note
once.

3. Husserl on Time-Consciousness
Husserls position is not entirely unlike the specious present view.
He maintains that at any one instant one has experience of the phase occurring at that
instant, the phase that has just occurred, and that phase that is just about to occur.
His labels for these three aspects of experience are primal impression, retention and
protention. All three must be in place for the proper experience of a temporal object.
Primal impression: an intentional awareness of the present event as now happening.
Retention (primary memory): an intentional awareness of the past event as having just
happened.
Protention (expectational intuition): an intentional awareness of the future event as about
to happen.
In the experience of an event, not only is the past phase of that event retained, so is the

past experience (primal impression) of that past phase.

The retention and protention of phases and experiences of them, form the temporal
horizon against which the present phase is perceived. Think of horizons as 'experiential
contexts: the present phase is experienced as situated within a temporal context.
How is retention different from recollection? According to Husserl, when I recollect, I
reproduce a stretch of experience that contains the full protention-primal impression-
retention structure. This presentifies the object. In retention, the object is still given in
person (not presentified) and only the now is retained.
On Husserls view retention (and protention) are perceptual, so long as perception is taken
in a suitably broad sense (there is also a narrow sense, according to which only the now is
perceived).

4. Criticisms
1. Husserls account is not really perceptual.
o Surely the phenomenon in question is given perceptually (otherwise we are left
with the original problem). But, on Husserls picture the duration of events is not
strictly speaking perceptually given. Husserls narrow conception of perception is an
awareness of the present instant only and memory just isnt the sort of thing that
can truly be called perceptual. If retention is a form of memory, then it ought to
bear some phenomenological similarity to other forms of memory (including
recollection), and they merely presentify objects.
o In response it might be claimed that there are other similarities between retention
and recollection. For example, both involve the retaining of some cognitive
achievement: retention involves the automatic retaining of perceptual contact
(primal impression), recollection involves the retaining of extended episodes of
experience.
2. The repetition problem again
o If Husserls account is genuinely perceptual, then it faces the repetition problem
again. First we hear c as present, then we once again hear c as past. Adding that we
hear it as past does not change the fact that we hear it twice.
o Husserl is aware of this, taking pains to distinguish retention from reverberation,
but has he really explained how he can solve the problem whilst still allowing that
retention forms a part of the perceptual process itself?
3. Can Husserl account for complex succession?
o There is a difference between hearing b, c, d and hearing c, b, d. But when I have
already heard b and c, and am hearing d, I retain the experience of b and c in both
cases. How can Husserls account explain the difference?
o Husserls answer to this (given in 18) is that I retain not only b and c but also the
experience of c-following-on-from-b (which he writes as b c). What I am retaining
here is the experience of c whilst d was retained. Thus, retentions are nested, and
the problem is solved by pointing out that in the first experience I retain b c and in
the second I retain c b.
o In response it might be thought that this makes temporal experience too complex.
Is it phenomenologically accurate to require that the experience of the passing of
time requires us to retain not just a sequence of events but also a sequence of the
retentions of those events? Also, is this consistent with Husserl's way of
distinguishing retention from recollection?