Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Hegeler Institute is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Monist.
http://www.jstor.org
INNER
The present article is an attempt to set forth and examine the conclusions
of what is perhaps Husserl's
finest piece of philosophical
investigation, and
one of the finest
in
the
whole
of
history
pieces
philosophy: the investigation
of the consciousness of time, with its extraordinary combination of an un
an absolute flux of which it is none other than the very
changing form with
form itself. This investigation puts Husserl on a level with the wisest heads
on thematter, with Aristotle in Books IV and VI of the
Physics, with Augus
tine in Book X of the Confessions, and with Kant, whose whole Critique of
Pure Reason may be said to be an examination of what is necessary to tem
In Husserl's work we have, we may say, the greatest of
poral experience.
recent
tackling the greatest of philosophical problems, one in
philosophers
which contradiction is always appearing in novel forms, to be evaded only
a
or a Gr?nbaum, or
by the na?ve superficiality of Minkowski
by such in
as
Husserl himself practises. As Husserl himself put
finitely useful subtlety
it near the beginning of his 1905 Lectures:
Meanwhile the longed-for clarity beckons us after long labours, we think
the most glorious results are so near at hand thatwe have only to stretch
our hands forth to grasp them. All difficulties seem to dissolve, our critical
sensemows down contradictions one by one, till only one last step remains.
sum up our result.We begin with a self-conscious "therefore", and
We
then at once a point of difficultystarts up that gets bigger and bigger. It
a
our arguments
spreads and spreads into form of horror that devours all
and reanimates the contradictions we have just mown down. The corpses
all revive and grin at us mockingly. Our struggle and efforthave to begin
all over again. [Husserliana, X, p. 393.]
treatment of the time-consciousness is not free from incoher
treatment of such a subject
from
and dogmatic fixities?no
obscurities
ences,
more
to the
is
to
it
all
sensitive
these?but
could hope
escape
infinitely rami
more
and copes
manfully with any and all
fying problematic of the topic,
such ramifications, than any previous fruit of human excogitation.
For the survival of Husserl's wonderful work on the subject we have a
students to thank: first of all the deeply devoted Edith
number of Husserl
nun and a racial martyr under theNazis, who
a
afterwards
Carmelite
Stein,
Husserl's
J.
. FINDLAY
and
HUSSERL
ON
INNER
E-CONSCIOUSNESS
also accepting a time which has real being, but which is not the time of the
: it is the immanent time of the stream
experienced world {Erfahrungswelt)
of consciousness* (1928 edition, p. 369). Husserl even says that there is a
sensed temporality [empfundenes Zeitliches)
which is the necessary phe
on which the
datum
nomenological
perception and thought of objective
time is founded, such 'founding* signifying that there is a sense-given
to our
is such as to
temporality attaching
primitive sense-contents, which
enable us to pass from these to a corresponding but necessarily quite different
can be
objective temporality which
represented by many such subjective
in a sense trying to discover the origin
that
he
is
Husserl
says
'temporalities'.
of our consciousness of time, but only in the sense that the consciousness
of objects in time rests upon and presupposes and has an evidential basis in
a more fundamental
time-consciousness, which need not however precede
of nativism versus
it either in experienced or objective time?questions
are
irrelevant
(1928 edition, p. 373)?and
empiricism
phenomenologically
which does not plainly lead to the objective time-consciousness by any ex
plicit process of inference.
J.
. FINDLAY
utterances
'transcendent' of experience. Husserl has not, it is
plain, despite
that tell in another direction, ever advanced to the Twardowskian-Meinongian
notion of a sense content (or any other mental content) as a nuance of ex
perience intrinsically capable of presenting something objective, while remain
ing quite unlike it in quality or mode of being. Nor has Husserl accepted
Brentano's view of sense-data as physical rather than mental entities, nor
view of them as 'homeless', nonexistent objects. He believes,
Meinong's
in fact, like Berkeley, that the data of sense are objects
inseparably bound
acts
that
with
the
conscious
up
(though differing from)
bring them before
us, and so as much immanent in, or parts of our mental life as the latter.
no
All
these, however, are extremely questionable
assumptions, and by
can be
means the firm foundations on which a
built.
reliably
phenomenology
to
to attach too much
It would, however, be a mistake
importance
Husserl's
ill thought out treatment of so-called 'hyletic data': it should not
of
be allowed to confuse his magnificent account of the phenomenology
time. For whether or not reduced objects of
'tones' or
like
perception
patches of colour really play the central part in perception and knowledge
that he thinks they do, and whether or not they are 'immanent' in our
a sense in which other
objects, e.g., motor cars, are not, they
experience in
our
are
at least
treatment of
per
temporal experiences: there
simplify the
or
in discussing the starting and stopping,
and
of
waxing
waning
spicuities
we consider a motor car as
a noise which are not
present when
standing still
or
or as
starting up
changing its velocity. Husserl moreover admits that by
'tones', his preferred examples, we sometimes mean enduring objects of
sense with widely varying
not therefore differ from
properties, which do
'constitution' they enter (see,
the much more complex objects into whose
are
are
X, p. 272). What
e.g., Husserliana
important for phenomenology
not distinctions between the time of intuitively given sense objects and the
time of objects not adequately given by sense, but the distinctions between
the time we live through without making it an object, the time we
perceive
in the objects we perceive around us, and the time, lastly, that
provides
or
the framework for objects that extend far beyond what we can
perceive
are made and
distinctions
in
All
these
Husserl's
treatment,
imagine.
explored
which is rather a study of concretely experienced and envisaged time than
of time as attaching to so controversial a category as the immediate things
of sense.
criticisms of what he had understood Brentano to teach in
Husserl's
are
in many ways interesting and important (Main Text of 1928,
lectures
Brentano
had accepted as an ultimate law of consciousness that new
?3).
HUSSERL
ON
INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS
as
a
context of im
they arise are associated with
presentations
reproduced
to
their
and
which, however, a
objects,
mediately previous presentations
characteristic note of 'pastness' is added, a note whose addition must spring
from a newly operative, productive, unlearnt, mental association, whose
can then be
remoter past and future.
indefinitely extended into the
operation
is just past lingers on, but it lingers on as just past, and this note of
What
a creative
just pastness was not part of it in its past, but is purely and wholly
note
modal
rather
further
the
of
This
added
has
novelty.
being
property
than real: it alters the whole manner of being of what it attaches to rather
than its quality, for a noise or flash that is past is not strictly speaking a real
noise or flash at all. Brentano is at least clear as to certain basic facts of tem
most wiseacres of
poral grammar which have eluded
physical space-time
out
that the theory is not really workable:
theory. Husserl, however, points
it is not by associating a new character, even if we call it one of 'pastness',
with some objective datum that a modal change of the sort needed can be
or content
as
as
truly achieved. The datum
qualified
'past', will remain
much 'there' as the datum or content it purports to reproduce. 'The presence
of an A in consciousness cannot, even by the addition of a new moment
called by us "pastness", explain the transcendent consciousness: A is past.
It cannot give rise to the most distant notion that what I have in conscious
ness is in its new character the same as
not in conscious
something which is
nor
ness since it has been. ... An added moment cannot
produce unreality
existence'
how
Husserl
edition,
is,
(1928
pp. 381-82).
abrogate present
ever, building upon, as well as criticizing Brentano's doctrine, for he is
the latter of a crude associationism of contents, and is deepening it
purging
into a full recognition of the irreducibly intentional and modal character of
the reference to the past, as well as its underived presence in even the most
elementary perceptions.
are Husserl's
treatments of W.
Stern's 1897 article
Equally interesting
as we now call it,
on the
or,
specious present, and of Meinong's
'psychic'
1899 article on 'Objects of Higher Order', which included some criticism
of Stern. Stern had argued against the dogma that the awareness of a suc
cession cannot run parallel with the succession itself, but must necessarily
be summed up in some nonsuccessive,
i.e., momentary, awareness of the
whole
successive series. He had suggested that one act of apprehension,
out over a single 'psychic present', might embrace in its unity a
spread
whole series of successive phases, so that the apprehension's time coincided
with the time of what it apprehended, and did not have to be summed up
J.
. FINDLAY
in ?7 where Husserl
The
starts by using
exposition gets underway
we have called attention, and says that,
to
which
the questionable
language
having eliminated all transcendent conception and assertion, he will now
are
consider our consciousness of purely 'immanent time-objects'. These
as
not
do
such
go beyond what is intuitively and adequately given to con
therefore takes them to be immanent parts of
sciousness, and Husserl
consciousness, and also calls them 'hyletic data'. They are the supposedly
HUSSERL
ON
INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS
10
J.
was-phase,
an
ever
. FINDLAY
new
retentional
consciousness.
Going
down
the
stream,
we
en
HUSSERL
ON
INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS
11
datum for consciousness, and it does not make sense to suppose itwas other
than what it now gives itself out as just having been (see, e.g., Husserliana X,
Immediate retention is thus not open to the errors to which
pp. 343, 353).
recollection and memory are plainly subject: the just past must be given to
neces
us just as itwas. Here as elsewhere, in the case of Husserl's a
priori
sities, we may counsel a reduction to moral certainties, likely claims that
should only yield to yet likelier claims. There are cases in which we are
as to what has
we
just been before us, or what experience
certainly unclear
have just undergone, and yet long-range comparison with other data or
lead us to describe what we saw or underwent more defi
experiences may
or to revise whatever we
to hold. If the
nitely,
previously tended
uninterpreted
datum is a legend, there can be no irrefragable certainties or clarities that it
It is on the impossibility that all the cases of a basic kind of meaning
inspires.
should be without target, or that all the assurances of a certain basic sort
should be invalid, that a true phenomenology should rest itself, not on those
clarities and certainties that can never be satisfactorily
supposedly prime
off.
marked
sums up his account of the mechanics of retention in a remark
Husserl
William
with a
12
J.
logical
or
questioned
of Time'.
. FINDLAY
a
perspectival present,
supposition that has been interestingly
in
Mind
article on Our Direct Apprehension
Mabbott
his
1953
by
consciousness
perience.
As regards the reference to the future, Husserl,
like William
James,
believes in a tending forwards, a protention, which is as much part of our
as the retention which trails its comet
originative experience of time-objects
tail behind it, a protention which, however, differs from retention in that
it may leave quite open, and emptily conceived, just how the time-object
will be developed or superseded. In some cases, of course, as where, e.g., the
time-object is quite familiar or represents what has been wished or planned,
as detailed in content as retention
(Husserliana X,
protention may be almost
Protention
from
in
further
differs
retention
that it receives
297,
pp.
305).
continuous fulfilment or 'disappointment' of a decisive kind by what there
HUSSERL
ON
INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS
13
such.
As we
14
J.
. FINDLAY
HUSSERL
ON
INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS
without making an object of it. And when I do make an object of it, this
also has a position in time, and, if I follow it frommoment to moment,
an extension in time. . . . And the time of this change of appearance is
identical with the time of what is objective in it. If we are dealing with,
e.g., an invariant tone, the subjective duration of such an immanent tone
is identical with the time-stretchinwhich its appearance [to consciousness]
continuously changes. But is this not a most astonishing state of affairs?
For can one speak in this case of a change where a nonchange, an un
con
changingly filled duration, is unthinkable? For there is no possible
can
to
in
flux
which
their
of
be
stancy
steady
opposed
appearance-phases
consciousness. In this original flux there is no duration. For duration is
the form of an entity that lasts, something that endures, that remains the
same through the time-serieswhich functions as its duration. . . . For
objective time is a form pertaining to enduring objects, to their changes,
and to the events which happen to them. An event is therefore a concept
that presupposes persistence, and persistence is something that gets con
stituted in the conscious flux, a flux which is essentially such that nothing
are phases of
experience and con
persists in it. In the conscious flux there
tinuous series of such phases. But each such phase or each continuous
series of such phases involves nothing enduring. ... Its identity is not the
...
In the
identityof something that persists and cannot be made such.
flux [of consciousness] there can in principle be no part that is not in flux.
This flux [of consciousness] is not a contingent flux like an objective flux:
the change of itsphases can never cease, nor pass over into a constant con
tinuum of like phases. ... If I live in the appearance of a tone, the tone
stands before me, and either persists or changes. But if I attend to the
appearance of the tone in consciousness this likewise stands before me and
has its temporal spread, its persistence or change. . . . But now the ab
solute flux of conscious states is in its turn to be made our object and
case also therewould have to be a conscious
given itsplace in time. In its
ness which constituted such an objectivity and therewith also its time.
But we could in principle again reflecton this and so on indefinitely. Is it
to prove the non-vicious character of such an infinite regress? . . .
possible
But even if reflection is not pursued to infinity,and there need not be any
such reflection at all, somethingmust at least be given which makes such
reflectionpossible, which makes a regress in infinitumpossible in principle.
And herein lies our problem. [1928 edition, Appendix VI, pp. 463-68.]
Text. Husserl
writes:
16
J.
. FINDLAY
for any stretchof the flux. On the contrary,we have a flux which of neces
sity involves continuous change, and which also involves the absurdity that
it runs as it runs, and can never runmore quickly or more slowly.We have
no object
present in such a case that could change, and, to the extent that
something or other happens in every happening, nothing at all happens
here. . . .The phenomena which constitute time are quite evidently other
in principle than those which are constituted in time. The former are not
individual objects or events, and we cannot significantly apply predicates
which fit objects and events to them. It does not thereforemake sense,
at least not the same sense as in the case of other things, to say of such
constitutive phenomena that they are occurring now, or did so previously,
or that
they followed one another in time, or occurred simultaneously etc.
We however can and must say that a certain continuity of appearance which
is a phase of the time-constitutiveflux, belongs with a Now, i.e., with the
.
can only say: This flux is
Now that it constitutes. . . We
something that
we say exists now, in virtue of what it constitutes, but it is not
temporally
objective. It is an absolute subjectivity, and has absolute properties which
are figuratively described by the term "flux", and by
saying that it springs
from a point of actuality, an originative source-point, a Now.
In the
we
an
this
of
have
originative source-point and a
experience
actuality
resonances.
we
names
of
But
lack
for all these things! [p. 429?]
continuity
In the passages we have
faces a
quoted it will be noted that Husserl
an infinite regress if the conscious flux
the
threat
of
double problem:
(a)
has to be 'constituted' as temporally objective in a second conscious flux,
and so on indefinitely; (b) the difficulty of making sense of a pure flux of
awareness which is
can exhibit
quite void of content, and which accordingly
no difference between constancy and variation, nor any conceivable accelera
tion or retardation.
of
HUSSERL
ON
INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS
17
or
does not here amount to being referentially
meant?perceiving
. . .
an
nor
Every experience in the preg
object
apprehending it.
not in the
is inwardly
this
but
inward
perceived,
perceiving is
an
inner
not itself inwardly
It
This
is
perceived'.
experience.
that accordingly enters into all experience must be distinguished
perception
from the inner
which accompanies a reproduction of the experi
perception
aware of its own
ence in
in
being inwardly
question, which,
re-presentative
also
therefore
distances
from
and
character,
itself,
objectifies, the experience
to Husserl
that it re-presents. According
in one odd passage there is prac
no difference between the
a house,
tically
reproduction of the perception of
*The
the
the
house
and
itself (1928 edition, p. 483).
re-presentation of
an
indication
duplicity in the intentionality of retention, he goes on, provides
which goes some distance towards resolving our difficulty as to how it is
not posited
directed to
nant sense
same sense
possible to have any knowledge about any unified item [Einheit) in the
ultimate, constitutive flux of consciousness'
18
J.
. FINDLAY
The
HUSSERL
ON
INNER TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS
19
20
j.
of phenomenological
time of the modern
. findlay
local
Boston
University
J. N.
Findlay