On A Common and Unmooted (Neo-)Platonic Source

for the Husserlian and Augustinian Conceptions of

Memory: A Response to Michael R. Kelly

Roger Wasserman

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Abstract: Although Professor Kelly, in his article, “On the Mind’s Pronouncement of
Time” (Proceedings of the ACPA, Vol. 78, 2005, pp. 247-262), is correct to maintain that
Augustine and Husserl share a common conception of time-consciousness, I argue that
the similarity does not lie where he thinks nor is it restricted to Husserl’s early period.
Instead I locate the source of this commonality in a shared response to a particular
Platonic problematic, which I find expressed at Parmenides 151e-152e. This essay shows
how the Neoplatonic conception of time, which I claim inspired Augustine, emerged from
that problematic and how Husserl, in a thought experiment from 1901, wrestles with a
similar problematic before adopting a model of time-consciousness roughly analogous to
that of Augustine. It is suggested that Kelly is misled by his Aristotelian approach, which
causes him to regard the Augustinian and Husserlian models of memory as “trapped” in
the present. The point is a significant one if, as I conclude, there is no escaping the
conception of time as absolute flow, once we abandon the Platonic view of time as a
completed succession of nows, eternally fixed.

In his contribution to the 2004 edition of this quarterly’s Proceedings,1 Michael

Kelly attacks what he dubs “the standard historical comparison” favored by S. Knuuttila

and D. Polk,2 which he feels brings Augustine and Husserl into closer alignment than is

warranted by their actual views on memory and time-perception.3 While allowing the

comparison a certain historical legitimacy - time, after all, is bound up with presence of

1Michael R. Kelly, “On the Mind’s Pronouncement of Time: Aristotle, Augustine, and Husserl on Time-
Consciousness,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 78, 2005, pp. 247-262.
2S. Knuuttila, “Time and Creation in Augustine,” The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (eds. E. Stump
and N. Kretzmann). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 103-115, and D. Polk, “Temporal
Impermanence and the Disparity of Time and Eternity,” Augustine Studies, 22, 1991, 63-82.
3 Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Augustine’s Confessions are to Henry Chadwick’s
outstanding translation (Oxford 1991). Passages from the Augustinian text are generally cited by book,
chapter, and section number; where the context makes clear which book is meant, only the section number
is given. All references to Husserl are to John Brough’s definitive English translation of the Husserliana
volume on time, The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer 1991).
 !2

soul in Augustine and Husserl explicitly acknowledges his debt to Augustine’s analysis of

time - Kelly does not think the affinity extends far enough to justify Knuuttila’s

identifying Augustine’s distending soul (distentio animi) with Husserl’s tripartite

consciousness - at least not beyond 1907, when Husserl is alleged to have changed his

views radically. One way of parsing the difference between Augustine and the later

Husserl is, as Kelly does, to use Aristotle as a touchstone, in particular Physics IV.10: On

Knuuttila’s reading, which Kelly conditionally endorses, Augustine’s notion of memory,

like the early Husserl’s, essentially applies Aristotle’s definition of time as the measure of

motion to non-identical mental contents. For Kelly, Husserl’s later notion of retention is

clearly superior in that it does not merely seek to apply this definition but actually

acknowledges the force of the argumentation behind it: namely, that memory, on

Husserl’s earlier account, is not sufficient to explain how the mind, in inner time,

distinguishes the two “nows,” the one before, the other after. The reason is that

consciousness of succession requires the preservation of the earlier “now” of perception

in the present “now,” but memory, as conceived by both Augustine and the early Husserl,

cannot explain how the prior “now” is perceived as past since it assumes that the earlier

“now,” in order to be directly perceived, must actually be present in the current “now,”

seemingly abolishing the distinction between past and present by making the present all-

inclusive.

Prior to reading Kelly’s instructive and thought-provoking paper, I would have

thought that, to the extent that a consensus had formed around this issue at all, the link

between Augustine and Husserl was to be found via a detour through Neoplatonism - not
 !3

Aristotle - and, more specifically, via Plotinus’s emanation theory of the One. Since a

significant portion of Kelly’s paper is devoted to denying the persistence of such a link

beyond 1907, I will be using this essay to demonstrate how a plausible case might be

constructed for the opposing thesis, taking Plato as the natural starting-point for both

Augustine and Husserl’s views on memory and time-consciousness. My argument will be

that Husserl, in a thought experiment dated 1901, unknowingly reproduces an aporia

analogous to the one formulated at 151e-152e of Plato’s Parmenides - an aporia with

fundamental bearing on the nature of time - and that Husserl’s response proves, on closer

scrutiny, to be remarkably similar to that of Augustine, whose exposure to that same

Platonic problematic came through Plotinian sources. Before I can go on, however, to

show how Augustine and Husserl’s views on time-consciousness were shaped by the

dilemma expressed in the aforementioned passage, I will have to confront Kelly’s claim

that both models of time are vitiated by the fact that they are unable to reconcile the

notion of temporal extension with that of immediate, non-extended presence.

In the first section, I will show that Augustine, who is aware of the difficulty, does

not himself fall victim to it and that he, like Husserl, does not treat the present as lacking

extension; for that reason Husserl, too, is unaffected by the paradox. After defending my

own preferred readings of the texts at issue, I will present, in the second section, the

Neoplatonic interpretation of the dilemma posed by Parmenides 151e-152e, which I view

Augustine as having appropriated by the time of the Confessions. The very nature of that

dilemma makes it reasonable to suppose that Augustine, like his Neoplatonic

predecessors, adopted the notion of sheer duration or continuous becoming as a means of

 !4

circumventing it, a supposition that is borne out by various passages in Book XI. In

Husserl’s case, it is his own reflections on the question of how the now can be known,

given that its content is always changing, which lead him to posit a continuum of lived

experience through which the pure evidence of the now is apprehended (Section IV).

Although I regard Husserl’s earlier model of memory (prior to 1907) as having been

decisively influenced by the “Neoplatonic” consequences of this thought experiment,

Kelly views this same model as having been superseded by Husserl’s later theory of time-

consciousness. In Section III, I argue, however, that what changes is not the Neoplatonic

schema for interpreting our awareness of the passage of time, which conceives of that

passage as an interaction between sheer temporal flow and actual now, but the mechanism

by which Husserl attempts to account for this evidential datum. In the end I hope to have

demonstrated that both Augustine and Husserl subscribe to a kind of Neoplatonic

“emanation” theory of time. Such a conception of time may properly be called an

“emanation” theory insofar as the absolute flow of consciousness, the soul’s distention,

“emanates” from a One, alternately conceived as primary impression or eternal present.

This hearkens back, of course, to the Plotinian conception of time as involving an

interplay between eternal life or the “living present” – “a Life changelessly motionless

and ever holding the universal content in actual presence; not this now and now that

other, but always all” – and the life of the soul, “the ceaseless forward movement of

Life…as it achieves its stages.”4 The point I am making here, though, is not primarily a

philological one but has significant implications for phenomenological practice: If, as

4 Plotinus, The Enneads (trans. S. MacKenna, ed. J. Dillon). London: Penguin 1991, pp. 216, 228.
 !5

appears to follow from Husserl’s thought-experiment of 1901, an “emanation” theory of

time is the inevitable result of rejecting the Idea of “objective” or divine time as fixed,

permanent, and complete in itself, then the successor notion of time as absolute

subjective flow would appear to function as an “absolute metaphor” in phenomenology,

marking the limits of what is discursively knowable (Section V).

I.

Before I go on, however, to show how Augustine and Husserl came, each in his

own way, to confront the aforementioned Platonic problematic concerning time’s

passage, I will first have to address Kelly’s claim that the two models of memory put

forward by Augustine and the early Husserl are seriously defective. Kelly argues that the

notions of memory which the two invoke fallaciously treat the past as if it could be

directly perceived, or experienced, from the standpoint of the Now (or present) –

fallaciously, because to the extent that it is perceived as (still) present, it would be present

and not past. In his formulation of this critique, Kelly seems to have been influenced by

S. Gallagher, whom he quotes approvingly in this connection and who explains the

underlying problem in terms of what he calls the “cognitive paradox.” The butt of this

paradox, insofar as it bears on Augustine (Gallagher does not mention Husserl), is that

“although time is reducible to the present and the present is not extended, time itself is

extended in some fashion.” 5 Thus, any conception of memory which assumes perception

of the past to take place in an extensionless Now is intrinsically incapable of doing justice

5 Shaun Gallagher, The Inordinance of Time. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998, pp. 6-7.
 !6

to our experience of the past, which, in its very pastness, presupposes the extension of

time, i.e., that a certain “distance,” or temporal extension, has elapsed between the past

“now” and the present “now.” On this view, which Kelly appears to adopt, Augustine is

understood to have conceived of the Now as unextended. While a full-blown refutation of

this view would involve presenting my own sustained interpretation of Book XI on time,

it suffices, I think, if I can point to alternative interpretations that are equally, if not more,

plausible, to show that the reading under consideration is not in itself dispositive. One

way in which Gallagher’s interpretation seems to me to fall short of a full understanding

of Augustine’s text is that, in accepting a purely aporetic interpretation of the

Confessions, it posits an absolute and potentially irresolvable disjunction between time as

extended continuum and the present as an unextended point. It is not, of course, difficult

to understand how Gallagher could have arrived at such a conclusion for, as R. Nash

points out in his own analysis of Augustine’s De magistro, “Augustine’s argument

proceeds in dialectical fashion and is sometimes difficult to follow”: “[D]uring its course

[Augustine] often asserts with great certainty statements that are later denied with equal

confidence.” Still,

[i]t must be remembered that Augustine was well schooled in the art of
rhetoric and the science of arguing dialectically. This method, which
is illustrated in the writings of Parmenides and Zeno and especially in
the second part of Plato’s Parmenides, begins with the acceptance of
the very position one is trying to refute. By showing that this position
leads to a contradiction or absurdity, one can effectively demonstrate
the truth of the opposite position.6

6Ronald H. Nash , The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1969, pp. 84-85.
 !7

Thus Augustine, who, as we shall show, was doubtless influenced by the Plotinian

reading of the Parmenides, is not likely to have presented the aporiae of the Confessions,

including the so-called “cognitive paradox,” as intellectual exercises to be resolved by the

reader without any mediating effort on his part to demonstrate the truth of the opposing

position, i.e., that periods of time are measured by the mind. On the interpretation I am

here endorsing, Book XI of the Confessions, which does not close without offering its

own particular solution to the problem of the unreality of time, should be read as

consisting of three basic parts: The first “aporetic” section [(1)-(17)] ends with the

positive insight that God created time, which is thus a real entity and not an abstract

measure of change, so that it clearly makes no sense, for example, to ask what God was

doing prior to Creation. By contrast, the second section [(17) - (34)] is truly aporetic in

the sense that it leaves the “cognitive paradox” to which Gallagher refers tentatively

unresolved; even so, the contradictions involved in reconciling a present which “occupies

no space” (20) and “has no extension” (33) with “periods of time possessing

extension” (23) are presented at this stage of Augustine’s deliberations not as afflicting

his own model of time-consciousness but as actually preventing him from being able to

offer any model at all. Augustine’s paradigm for the human experience of time, with

which he opens this section [(18),(21)], is our ability to measure time in terms of “short”

and “long” periods by comparing intervals of limited, or finite, duration. The key

questions that he sets himself to answer here in the face of the paradox just mentioned are

(1) what is it that we are actually measuring in comparing intervals, and - assuming, as he

later argues, that it is sheer duration, or time in its passing - (2) “in what extension then
 !8

do we measure time as it is passing?” 7 It is a sign that we have come full circle (and

clearly intended as such) when, at the end of the second section, Augustine recalls these

questions, as if to measure his own progress in time: “What then am I measuring? Time

as it passes but not time past? That is what I affirmed earlier” (33). Although manifestly

inconclusive, the section ends on a hopeful note by introducing the Neoplatonic notion of

distentio - a neologism coined by Augustine in a verbal echo of the Plotinian diastasis,

the “spreading out,” or differentiation, of life in the passage of time - as an untested but

provisional hypothesis for explaining how we measure time. As he explicitly notes, this is

“the point where truth is beginning to dawn” (34).

At the beginning of the third and final section [(34) –(41)], he reaffirms, despite

all the paradoxes of the previous section, which he here recapitulates, his conviction that

“nevertheless we do measure time” (34). The “extension” (spatium) in which we measure

time as passing is not, however, in objective time but, as Augustine already hinted at the

end of the second section, “it would be surprising if it [i.e., that extension, now

tentatively identified with the distentio] is not that of the mind itself” (33). Part of the

problem in the preceding section had been that Augustine was unsure of where to draw

the boundary between objective (or divine) time and subjective time since he could not

determine the exact extent of their interaction. 8 To resolve the ambiguity that had hitherto

7Note the similarity of the second question to this passage from Enneads III.7: “This is what our discussion
has aimed at from the first: ‘What essentially is Time?’ It comes to this: we ask ‘What is Time?’ and we are
answered, ‘Time is the extension of Movement in Time’! On the one hand Time is said to be an extension
apart from and outside that of Movement, and we are left to guess what this extension may be; on the other
hand, it is represented as the extension of Movement….What then is this thing of extension? To what order
of beings does it belong? It obviously is not spatial, for place, too, is something outside it” (p. 223).
8By having the three books divide up this way, Augustine clearly means to contrast the divine “vision of
occurrences in time,” which “is not temporally conditioned” (1), with our mortal plight, which, Augustine
poignantly says, “I know myself to be conditioned by time” (32).
 !9

undermined his attempts to specify what exactly is being measured with time’s passage,

he purposely borrows the expression, distentio, from the Neoplatonist vocabulary to

distinguish extension in subjective time from extension in objective time (spatium).

(Indeed it is an open question to what extent passage or becoming is even possible in

objective time, as the earlier paradoxes may be taken to show.) Thus, even if “present

time lacks any extension because it passes in a flash …attention [itself] is continuous,” a

kind of sheer duration, and “it is through this that what will be present progresses towards

being absent” (37). 9 With this solution in hand, Augustine is now able to state definitively

that “it is in you, my mind, that I measure periods of time….In you, I affirm, I measure

periods of time” (36). If Gallagher fails to recognize this as the long proffered solution to

the paradoxes of the earlier section, the reason, I submit, lies in his translating, contrary

to current exegetical practice, both spatium and distentio as “extension,” thus obscuring

the movement of thought that culminates in Augustine’s intended answer.

As for the early Husserl, the “cognitive paradox,” which afflicts all models of

memory that make past and future simultaneous in an unextended present, applies only if

he can be shown to have conceived of the now-phase of the temporal object as lacking

extension. This suggestion, though, can be easily discounted: Although Husserl

acknowledges that we can discern among the degrees of immediate past and future

belonging to what he calls the “rough” now a “finer” now and that this “now” can be

subdivided even further until a limit is reached, he is equally quick to point out that the

9 Again,
note the similarity to Plotinus: “Would it, then, be sound to define Time as the Life of the Soul in
movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another? Yes…” (p. 228 [III.7]).
 !10

now thus conceived is “only an ideal limit, something abstract” (42).10 It is, in fact, a

purely theoretical entity, much as the point was considered by ancient Greek

mathematicians to be an abstraction, which could be created by “cutting” or dividing, a

pre-existing, or hypothetically posited, line segment; just as the point was for the ancient

Greeks the non-extended terminus of a divided line-continuum, so the ideal now-limit is,

for Husserl, “always and essentially a border-point of an extent of time” (72). What is

real is the currently experienced Now, which we invariably perceive as extended:

according to Husserl (as paraphrased by Brough), “we never experience a completely

unextended now” (xxviii). Invoking the work of D. Zahavi in support, Kelly goes on to

suggest that it was the problematic assumption that the Now-perception “cannot provide

us with consciousness of anything with a temporal duration” which ultimately led Husserl

to abandon his earlier model of memory in favor of a conception where “perception has

width”:11 to the extent that the later model can be regarded as providing a solution to the

original problem, the implication is that Husserl was able to preserve the extendedness of

our experience and so expand our current perception to include the experience of a just-

elapsed now by situating our retention of the past at the level of absolute consciousness,

which perceives not the past phase of the extended temporal object but our consciousness

of that phase. Against this, it should be pointed out that the argument which persuaded

Husserl to change his views on memory (text no. 49 in Brough’s translation) had nothing

whatsoever to do with the Now’s being unextended (or extended, for that matter). The

10Cf. also the diagram in text no. 27 dated 1904 where it is explicitly said that “the momentary phases are
ideal limits” (217), although for graphic purposes they are being represented by breadthless lines.

Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. Evanston, Ill.:

11
Northwestern University, 1999, p. 64.
 !11

point of Husserl’s argument is simply as follows: Once we admit that past “nows” are

experienced by consciousness as part of the living present, there is no mechanism - not

even Husserl’s own temporal “apprehensions” - that we could postulate which could

endow them with the character of succession, except “retrospectively” or post hoc; they

simply cannot be perceived as simultaneously present (i.e., as being, together with the

now-perception, in one and the same present) and past. Consequently, if past nows are

experienced as present, they are “now” and cannot be past. It should be noted that the

just-elapsed nows and imminent nows are collected, or co-present, in the momentary

phase of consciousness that constitutes our experience of the Now - and not in the

isolated Now-perception – so the Now, to which Husserl is here referring, is most

definitely extended. If anything, the Now’s lack of extension would seem to follow from

this argument rather than being presupposed by it: if all temporal contents are assumed to

coexist “timelessly” in the Now, then this would seem to leave nothing outside the actual

Now - no past or future - thus putting the lie to time’s putative extension.

II.

As we have seen, Kelly’s objection to the Augustinian memoria was that it

remains confined to the unextended present whereas time, as the measure of motion,

requires a succession of nows. Kelly’s decision to focus on Aristotle as offering the best

access to Augustine’s views on time is, however, itself surprising as it has become

virtually a commonplace in the research literature - at least since G.E.L. Owen’s

pioneering work in this field 12 - that Aristotle’s treatment of time in the Physics, like his

12G.E.L. Owen, Logic, Science, and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy (ed. Martha
Nussbaum), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, pp. 244-250
 !12

handling of the related topics of place, motion, and infinity, owes much to the final

section of the Parmenides (135d-166c), which Aristotle would have known from its use

as a training exercise in Plato’s Academy. As R.E. Allen notes in his commentary on the

Parmenides, “the Physics continues a professional Academic tradition in physics and

mathematics that is also represented by various arguments in the Parmenides.”13 If so, it

would presumably be more helpful to start from Plato’s initial formulation of the problem

rather than assimilate Augustine’s conception of time to one purported solution to that

problem (Aristotle’s), which automatically presupposes a certain interpretation of what

the underlying conceptual difficulty is. Hermeneutically, this amounts simply to

acknowledging that the problematic posed by the existence of time has its own internal

logic, which may be obscured by the attempts of others, first, to interpret the nature of the

difficulty and, then, to resolve it. It follows that if we uncritically embrace Aristotle’s

diagnosis of the problem, as Kelly’s position invites us to do, we are simultaneously

committing ourselves to Aristotle’s solution being the correct one, an issue we, as

hermeneutically open, fair-minded readers of Augustine, should avoid prejudging. In

point of fact, there is a relatively direct line of argumentation which leads from Plato’s

Parmenides (151e-152e) over the Timaeus (37c- 38a) and Chapter 10 of Book IV in

Aristotle’s Physics (i.e., the paradoxes relating to the unreality of time) to Book XI of the

Confessions and which ultimately explains the passage of time - its division into past,

present, and future - in terms of an interplay between the One qua moving “now” and

sheer duration, which is infinitely divisible in respect of “before” and “after.” It is

13 R.E. Allen, Plato’s Parmenides. New Haven: Yale University, 1997, p. xii.
 !13

important to realize that this conception, to which I shall be referring as the

“Neoplatonic” theory of time, depends on a very specific reading of the Parmenides. On

the surface, the two passages in question (151e-152b, 152b-152e), when taken in

conjunction, present a double reductio ad absurdum, disproving a proposition and its

denial at two levels (part of what Allen describes as a “massive, reticulated aporia”): 14

Not only is Unity, or the One, in the process of becoming both older and younger than

itself (151e-152b) so that it is qualified by opposites - a result which Plato clearly intends

to be paradoxical - but even if, alternately, Unity is assumed, on the basis of this

contradictory result, to be rather than to become, it can be shown to be qualified by the

same two opposites, with Unity being both older and younger than itself (152b-152e).

Contrary to Plato’s intention in casting the dialogue in aporetic form, however, the

Neoplatonic reading of the dialogue, which I am arguing inspired Augustine’s conception

of time, takes the passages (151e-152b, 152b-152e) to be offering two instances of

positive doctrine, that is, not as initiating an open-ended line of inquiry on, say, the nature

of time but as offering a phenomenological description of time’s movement. On this

(Neoplatonic) reading, the first passage establishes the infinite divisibility of time, while

the second explains this aspect of time in terms of the possibility of continuous becoming

or duration.

To begin with the first section (151e-152b): Regardless of which interpretation

one chooses to adopt - the dogmatic or the aporetic - this section clearly shows how

Unity, or the One, becomes older and younger than itself. As R.E. Allen argues, this need

14 Ibid., p. xii.
 !14

not be taken “as [expressing]…more than the common-sense point that a thing becomes

older than it was at every successive stage of its existence in time,”15 which is precisely

how Neoplatonists like Plotinus – and, possibly, Porphyry and Iamblichus – would seem

to have taken it. Unity, in its earlier stages, will be older with respect to those subsequent

stages or “nows” corresponding to the “after” and these subsequent “nows” may,

conversely, be considered younger with respect to those earlier stages corresponding to

the “before”; indeed, the same “now” can be regarded as older or younger depending on

the stage or “now” – whether it is a “before” or an “after” – from which it is regarded.

The proof for this assertion, as the Neoplatonists must have understood it, would

have been two-tiered: They would have read the passage, first, as showing that if Unity,

or the One, exists at all, then it must be entirely in the “now” or present. Within the

framework of Plato’s metaphysics, as developed in the Parmenides, to say that the One

exists is equivalent to saying that it partakes of - “participates” or “has a share” in -

Being. On the basis of admissions made in 141e, it would further have been assumed that

“to be is to be in time,” so that if Unity exists, it partakes of Being in present time. Since

neither the future (as “not yet”) nor the past (as “no longer”) exist, the One, insofar as it is

or has Being, corresponds here to an eternal or timeless present. If, in the next stage of

the proof, the Neoplatonist assumes, as we are twice prompted to do (152a), that time

passes (or, as Plato has Parmenides say, “travels,”), then he will now envisage the share

of Being in which the One partakes - the “present” share of Being - as varying with each

successive moment, changing as the “now” changes. As a result, the following temporal

15 Ibid., p. 299.
 !15

structures, indicative of time’s potentially infinite divisibility, will be observed: For any

given point t1, the One will be older at tn+1 than it had been at t1, and at tn+2 will become

even older than it had been at tn+1. By the same token, the One will also be younger at tn+1

than it had been at t1, insofar as the One at tn+1 is the most recent temporal slice or “now,”

having just come into existence; at tn+2 , which will then be the newest “now,” the One

will, in turn, have become even younger than it was at tn+1. The argument, although

trivially true if taken in the sense that between any two points in time, t1 and tn+2, there

will always be a third, tn+1, which is older or younger than the first and younger or older,

respectively, than the third, masks an equivocation: In assuming that the individual

temporal stages of the One can legitimately be compared with one another in respect of

“older” and “younger,” we are implicitly invoking a concept of duration, or continuity,

beyond the concept of successiveness - the notion of time as a series of points - to

account for the persistence of the One through time. Otherwise we could not speak of the

One as becoming older and younger than itself; if the One is not to break up into a series

of quasi-mathematical temporal points, each indistinguishable from the other except for

position, then the temporal stages of the One at each moment in time must be viewed as

reflecting an underlying identity. This unspoken assumption is, however, itself

problematic: If our conception of time’s passage also involves the notion that time is

continually elapsing, as seems intuitively to be the case, then the One as temporal object

can never be regarded as fully given because there will always be another “one” coming,

another moment or temporal slice of the One coming into existence. This is - perhaps

needless to say – an extremely compromising state of affairs for an entity like the “One”
 !16

to find itself in: it suggests that the One, as the primary, if not paradigm, instance of what

it means to be one, is never itself really “one.” F.M. Cornford, who recognizes that in

order to speak of an object as changing over time we need to be able to conceive of the

object in its temporal entirety, interprets the assumption of time’s flow as implying here

the notion of time as a container.16 This neatly resolves the problem of how to secure the

One’s identity over time by enabling us to treat the whole of time as already elapsed, i.e.,

to view time (perhaps contradictorily) sub specie aeterni. This, I think, is a conception of

time to which we unconsciously subscribe and toward which we naturally tend when the

aforementioned difficulties are pressed. It is also, I would argue, precisely the conclusion

- and clearly recognized by the Neoplatonists as such - which Plato intends his readers to

draw so as to bring out into the open what the notion of time’s passage does (and does

not) commit us to. The notion of time as sheer succession is clearly not sufficient in itself

to capture our intuitive sense of what it means for time to flow but the attempt to remedy

the defects of the original conception by appealing to time as an actually existing infinity

of points merely pushes that conception to its logical extreme: Paradoxically, the

continuity of time’s flow has, as a result, been permanently abolished in favor of a now

infinite series of moments or temporal instants.

On this reading, which I am claiming corresponds to the Neoplatonic

understanding of the text, the second part of the passage in question (151e-152e) now

seeks to address this paradox by focusing on how exactly time passes from one instant to

another, say, from t1 to tn+2. The very notion of time’s divisibility which, as we saw in

16 Francis M. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1939, pp. 186-7.
 !17

151e-152b, implies that there is between any two instants always a third which is older/

younger than the first and younger/older than the second, suggests that there cannot be an

immediately adjacent, or next, “now”, as required by an actual infinity of nows. The

interval between t1 and tn+2 must, then, be a period of sheer becoming, or continuous

duration, so that when the One reaches tn+2, toward which it had been grasping at t1, it is

no longer in the process of becoming older than it was, it is at tn+2 now actually older. By

the same token, the One at tn+2 is now actually younger than it had been during the entire

period in which it was becoming younger than it was at t1. So conceived, the now, as the

indivisible, “timeless” present (cf. the first admission made in 151e-152b), merely marks

a limit in the continuous becoming of the One, much as when a line, drawn perpendicular

to another line, generates a point at their intersection. Thus, far from contradicting each

other, the assertions that (1) the One is becoming older and younger than itself

(151e-152b) and that (2) the One is older and younger than itself (152b-152e) actually

complement each other.

Both horns of the dilemma presented in Parmenides 151e-152e are reflected in

Augustine’s similar-sounding aporia, with the “now” being described in the same terms

as a mathematical point, as something which “occupies no space” [praesens autem

nullum habet spatium, XI. xv(20); XI. xvii(34)] and “lacks extension” [XI. xxi(27), XI.

xxviii(37)] and time being characterized as infinitely divisible: As Augustine points out,

no matter which conventional unit of time is chosen as a measure of its motion or

passage, there is always a third point, or temporal instant, between the two extremes

delimiting that particular unit of time, which serves as the dividing-point between past
 !18

and future, older and newer. “And so between the extremes [which define a century, as

the end-points a line], whatever year of this century we assume to be present, there will

be some years before it which lie in the past, some in the future to come after it” [XI.

xv(19)]. Similarly, “any hour between these [arbitrarily chosen hours] has past hours

before it, future hours after it” [XI. xv(20)]. Not surprisingly, if I am correct in assuming

that Augustine was in fact influenced by the Neoplatonists in this regard, his solution to

the problem of reconciling the two in a consistent image of time’s flow also proves to be

the same, namely, to show how time’s infinite divisibility is possible, given the now’s

lack of extension: here, in good Neoplatonist fashion, he appeals to the life of the soul,

which differentiates itself into, or disperses itself (“distends”) among, acts of sheer

becoming, and calls upon his reader to “see [i.e., acknowledge] how my life is a

distension in several directions” [XI. xxix(39)]. Even in the simple act of attending to my

own speech, “the life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because

of the words I have already heard and into my expectation because of those of which I am

about to say” [XI. xxviii(38)]. At the same time, the implication is that if the soul were

not distended in several directions as result of its falling away from the One and losing

itself in the myriad distractions of temporal successiveness, it would find itself in a state

of beatific identification with God, or the One; thus, insofar as one can unite oneself with

God in the moment - an eternal timeless present, swallowing up both past and future – the

reality of eternity is simultaneity in the present. This is, in fact, how the autobiographical

parts of the Confessions, especially Book VII, are typically read, i.e., as an account of the

soul’s collecting itself in the One after having been “scattered” or “spread out” (both
 !19

translations for the soul’s distentio) among the sensible things of this life – an account

which, in the final four chapters, is then taken to be paradigmatic for the entire created

order, not just Augustine’s own personal experience.17 As we shall see, there is a strong

parallel between the way in which the soul’s distendedness in this life represents a

“falling-away” from the One, as eternal life, and the way in which the absolute flow of

lived experience (Erlebnis) constitutes, for Husserl, a “running-off” from the primal

impression, or “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart).18

III.

In Section IV I shall explain in greater detail how a failed thought experiment

from 1901 convinced Husserl that indexical time-expressions cannot have a generic

meaning independent of the occasion of their utterance, thus introducing an element of

contingency and randomness in what was supposed to be a non-empirical, non-practical

logic of scientific expression. This doomed foundational project, as we shall see, led

Husserl to rethink his original conception of evidence, based, as it had been, on an ideal

of absolute clarity and transparence. As Husserl comes to reflect on his own experience

of what it means to be self-evident with respect to the “now,” he now realizes that the

moment of pure evidence or insight is not given all at once but is approached through

degrees of lesser clarity and comes at the end of a graduated series of perceptions. This

17 So Gary Wills (Saint Augustine’s Sin, New York: Viking, 2003, p. 33) has Augustine express his gratitude
to his Creator in Book I by saying, “You gather me from my own scatterings, after I have torn myself from
your unity and fallen apart into multiplicity,” and Augustine, in Chadwick’s translation, later describes
himself in Book XI as one of “the many who lives in multiplicity of distractions by many things” and who
is “scattered in times whose order I do not understand” [XI. xxix(39)].

18In a similar vein, C.F. Gorman (“Freedom in the God of Plotinus,” New Scholasticism, 14, p. 404)
describes the process of the One’s emanation in Plotinus simply as the “progressive unfolding of reality.”
 !20

realization allows him to embed the ideal notion of absolute evidence within the flux of

temporal consciousness rather than appealing to an external standard, such as that of a

divine consciousness.

Before I proceed, however, to elaborate on this thumbnail sketch, let me address

one objection that might naturally occur to a reader persuaded by Kelly’s claim that

Husserl’s early model of memory (prior to 1907) cannot account for our direct experience

of the past. In Section IV I shall be arguing that, after 1901, Husserl embraces what I

have termed, in acknowledgment of its Neoplatonic roots, an “emanation” theory of time,

explaining the triadic, ekstatic-centered structure of time-consciousness in terms of an

interplay between simultaneity (or the unchanging Now) and successiveness (or

continuous duration). As Brough clearly recognizes, Husserl’s conception of time-

consciousness involves two mutually complementary senses of “oneness”: the One,

conceived as continuous flow, as a “continuous sinking down into the past” (67), which

includes, in its enduring flow, a constant succession of individual temporal positions or

time-points (so-called “objective” time), and the One, as the individual time-point, the

Now or “running-off mode,” under which all the sensuous material contents of

perception, the “phenomena,” appear. The two “Ones” are intimately related insofar as it

is their ongoing interaction which constitutes what we experience as the passage of time:

“Simultaneity is nothing without temporal succession, and temporal succession is nothing

without simultaneity” (386). Against this, it might be objected that the triad - primary

impression/retention/expectation - represents not merely a terminological improvement

but a real and significant conceptual advance over the original tripartite structure of
 !21

intentionality - Now-perception/primary memory/primary expectation - if only because,

as Kelly argues, “retention perceives…the past of the object…rather than remembering a

past content now,” as happens in primary memory. My response will be that the triadic

interpretation of intentionality, regardless of terminological innovation, remains an

invariant structure in describing how the interplay of the “Now” (or One) with the One

continuous flow generates our sense of temporal passage, and that what has changed

between 1905 and 1911 is merely the underlying model which Husserl invokes to explain

the workings of this schema; but, first, I will have to demonstrate that the disjunction

between the two tripartite models of temporal intentionality is not as radical or absolute,

as Kelly would have us presume. In making the argument that retention, unlike primary

memory, is capable of perceiving the past of the extended temporal object, Kelly, it can

be shown, actually vacillates between two theses - one, which, so far from being

philosophically pernicious, actually offers little latitude for philosophical grievance, and

another, far less innocuous, which, if pursued to its logical conclusion, ultimately proves

to be incoherent. The first thesis involves the claim that Husserl’s primary memory, or the

“primary mode” of apprehension, like the Augustinian memoria, “could only ensure that

a past sensation was still on hand in the now…as past.” The second, more damaging

claim is that “the mode of the present cannot present something as past, but only as

present.”19 If we, as attentive readers, are to identify the confusions to which Kelly’s

argument fatally succumbs, it is important that we distinguish the phenomenological fact

of our experience of pastness - the experiential datum, as it were - from the mechanism

19 Kelly, “On the Mind’s Pronouncement of Time,” p. 251.

 !22

by which Husserl attempts to account for that fact or datum, i.e., the ill-fated schema-

apprehension model of the Logical Investigations. Failure to make this distinction leads

Kelly to find something paradoxical in the otherwise unremarkable fact that past tones

are intuited in the present as past, i.e., as having been or as being no longer. It seems

clear, however, that if a previous Now-stage is to be experienced, or “intuited,” as past,

then it must be given, or presented, as past together with – and in contrast to – the

present. In appealing to the retentional activity of consciousness (and, formerly, to

primary memory), Husserl is attempting to remove from the simple observation that we

can still experience a tone as past, even if it is no longer (in the) present, its apparent air

of paradox. While it is certainly true that the past, precisely in its capacity as past, is

experienced from the vantage of the Now as no longer, this does not by itself imply that

the past is not perceived, or presented, to the originary perceptual consciousness but only

re(-)presented; on the contrary, in a text from 1905, i.e., before his adoption of the

“retention” terminology, Husserl says explicitly that the past is “something

perceived” (41). When, for example, the consciousness of the tone-now passes over into

retention, “this retention itself is …something actually existing”; “it is actually present

itself (but not an actually present tone)” (31). The retention is to be distinguished in this

respect from the tone itself, which “is not really on hand in the retentional consciousness”

(33). Thus Kelly, in ascribing to the early Husserl the belief that “a past sensation was

still on hand in the now…as past,” gets Husserl exactly wrong: more seriously, perhaps,

he contradicts himself by allowing that an elapsed tone can, in fact, be present, or “on

hand,” in the past. If, on the other hand, we take the expression “on hand” at face value,
 !23

without reading into it a metaphysics of presence, the sentences just quoted from Husserl,

express a harmless platitude: we experience the past as not being present. Now it might

be argued by Kelly - discounting, for the moment, the evidence of the 1905 text - that

Husserl’s subsequent use of the retention model alleviates the original difficulty involved

in conceiving of how the past can be perceived in the present and that I have

illegitimately applied a remark intended to discredit the schematic interpretation of

apprehensions to the later Husserl. But the same truism can also be expressed in the

idiom of the three-fold intentionality, Now-perception/primary memory/primary

expectation, as Husserl’s own comments make clear: “Only in primary memory,” as he

writes, “do we see what is past, only in it does the past become constituted – and

constituted presentatively, not re-presentatively,” but Husserl is clear that “consciousness

of the past does not constitute a now,” even if “primary memory is perception” (43). Even

more to the point, Husserl, in a text dated 1904, emphasizes that what has elapsed in

primary memory is “still present…as just past,” meaning that “its being-past is something

now, something present itself” (219).

Contrary to Kelly, the point is not that Husserl puts forward such “problematic”

assertions, which are, in fact, validated by our experience of time, but that, in the case of

the schema-apprehension model, Husserl’s explanation of how we are able to perceive

the past in the present ultimately breaks down. When Kelly argues that “both theories

[Augustine’s and Husserl’s] trap the modes of apprehension in the now,” he is clearly

echoing Brough’s paraphrase of text no. 49, where, on Brough’s interpretation, Husserl is

to be found arguing that “temporal apprehensions would be powerless to change the

 !24

temporal character of the contents [because these contents are] locked into the

now” (xlviii). The full argument runs as follows: If the temporal apprehensions are to

assign, in accordance with their function, a temporal characteristic like now or not-yet

now (future) or no longer now (past), to the sensuous material content of, say, a tone -

i.e., to its acoustic stuff - it is assumed that these contents must at first be temporally

neutral. Husserl later came to think, however, that the neutral temporal status of these

contents was compromised by the fact that they are “housed” or contained in the current

momentary phase of consciousness before being “apprehended,” so that the very fact that

a past tone is experienced in the present prevents it from being experienced as past. This

corresponds to Kelly’s second claim, i.e., that “the mode of the present cannot present

something as past, but only as present,” an argument which, if we accept Brough’s

interpretation, Husserl took so seriously that it led him to discard the schematic-

apprehension model. To recapitulate: the argument is that insofar as all contents are

present in consciousness now before receiving their temporal determinations, they cannot,

on pain of contradiction, suddenly be allowed to switch their temporal function;

otherwise, the same content would simultaneously be now and not-now. Kelly tacitly

shifts between the two claims, (1) that primary memory can ensure only that a past

sensation is still on hand in the now…as past and (2) that the Now-mode, or Now-phase,

cannot present something as past, but only as present, as if they were identical but, as we

can now see, the first and second claims are most decidedly not making the same point;

on the contrary, they actually contradict each other. On the one hand, Kelly is arguing that

the past cannot be perceived as past precisely because - on Kelly’s mistaken view of the
 !25

schematic-apprehension model - it cannot be present in (and present to) consciousness;

on the other hand, he wants to claim, with Brough, that all contents, including past

contents, are in (or present to) consciousness - before being assigned a temporal

characteristic by the corresponding apprehension - and that this is why the model fails. It

is hard to avoid the impression, on Kelly’s interpretation, that no matter what position

Husserl adopts with regard to the schematic-apprehension model (and Augustine as well,

if we are willing to ascribe to him the same model of consciousness) he simply cannot

win. Again, my argument is that Kelly’s first claim is not problematic for the schematic-

apprehension model at all - or indeed for any model of time-consciousness that attempts

to explain this aspect of our experience - but that the second claim effectively buries it by

making it impossible for it to account for that experience.

The second, retentional “model” of memory which Kelly favors as enabling

perception of the past actually brings Husserl closer to abandoning the notion that any

explanatory mechanism can do justice to our lived experience of pastness, as

encapsulated in the neo-Platonic scheme of enduring present and sheer duration. In fact,

one way of understanding Husserl’s later abandonment of the schema-apprehension

model in favor of a retentional consciousness is that it reduces our present consciousness

of the past to sheer intentionality by obviating the need for the time-constituting

machinery of apprehension- and content-continua, which had tended to obscure the

central phenomenological insight. On the schematic interpretation of intentionality, the

individual phase of an extended perceptual act had been overloaded with continua of

continua, corresponding to the apprehensions and their sensual contents – so much so that
 !26

the phase was in danger of “containing,” or swallowing up within itself, the temporal

object it intended. By isolating an absolute time-constituting flow within consciousness,

however, Husserl was later able to reconceive intentionality as a relation between phases

of absolute consciousness rather than as a relation between those perceptual acts

constituted by this absolute flow and their temporal objects, thereby emptying absolute

consciousness of all material contents. As a result, retention becomes simply the direct

and immediate awareness of the past as it becomes past; it “really contains consciousness

of the past tone” – and, as Brough emphasizes, “nothing else” (l). As is well known,

however, the notion of an absolute consciousness or transcendental ego does not come

without its own difficulties, this time centering on the possibility of constitution rather

than apprehension, but in their own way no less severe. Thus, although neither of the

mechanisms which Husserl chooses to underpin his notion of intentionality ultimately

proves satisfactory, what is common to both is the Neoplatonic image of time as a lived

duration - a continuum of “nows,” emanating from, and approaching as its ideal limit, a

beginning-point, the “generative point” (26) corresponding to the Now-perception or

primal impression. Whether it is the apprehensions which are thought to “continually

blend into one another,” terminating in an apprehension that constitutes the Now (41), or

whether it is the absolute “impressional” consciousness of the extended perceptual act,

which is portrayed as constantly flowing in a continual modification of the same primal

“source-point,” the phenomenon itself - as opposed to the models invoked to explain it -

is not in dispute. Phenomenologically, then, it would appear that the best we can do is to

restrict ourselves to describing our sense of time’s passage, and Husserl himself seems to
 !27

acknowledge as much when he characterizes the absolute flow as a dimension of

consciousness for which “we have no names” (382).

IV.

My own interpretation, which takes as its starting point Husserl’s work on logic in

the Logical Investigations, is based on a reading of Husserl’s early corpus by the

contemporary German philosopher, Manfred Sommer,20 but, in its emphasis on the

primacy of evidence and the evidential warrant for our perceptual beliefs, is consistent

with a line of interpretation opened up by Emmanuel Levinas and David Levin. 21 For

Husserl, the science of pure logic, to whose development he sought to make a

contribution, was intended to provide the missing evidential warrant for those deductive

steps which, in straying away from the immediately given, are subject to lapses in clarity

and self-evidence. Given Husserl’s ideal of absolute evidence, the contemporary practice

of logic as a purely technical discipline had to appear deficient insofar as individual steps

in the deductive process were executed blindly or mechanically without the practitioner

being able to account for the truth of his deductions or to explain the reasoning behind

them.

On this view, logic, as a demonstrative science, is that on which we rely in

passing from the absolutely evident - what is obviously and trivially true – to what had

previously been unknown. By using logical relationships, however, to establish new

truths, science not only adds incrementally to our knowledge but also imports unclarity

20 Manfred Sommer, Husserl und der frühe Postivismus. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1985.
21Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (trans. A. Orianne).
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973, and David Michael Levin, Reason and Evidence in
Husserl’s Phenomenology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
 !28

and obscurity into all known scientific results. Husserl’s project, then, was to uncover the

meaning, or sense, of those logical relationships, which accounted for the undeniable

success of deductive reasoning as a practical, or technical, discipline. At this point, it

might well be asked why it is necessary to employ practical logic at all, if it is pure logic

that legitimates or grounds practical logic, conceived as a system of rules or directives for

thinking soundly and consistently. Why not employ pure logic from the start rather than

subjecting oneself to the tedious process of founding the one on the other?

The answer for Husserl is that the human subject combines a capacity for both

finite and infinite consciousness. The finite side of man’s consciousness requires symbols

and mechanical operations to compensate for his inability to perform extended logical

and mathematical tasks; the infinite side of man’s consciousness corresponds to his

ability to entertain absolute evidence in the form of ideal or fixed meanings. Now, in

keeping with the requirement that each inferential step away from the immediately given

be self-evident, Husserl insists that such logical terms as essentially occasional

expressions, i.e., expressions like “I,” “this,” and “now,” be - at least ideally or in

principle - replaceable by so-called “objective” expressions that do not owe their meaning

to the accidental circumstances of the particular speech situation. To permit the use of

terms whose referents depend on the occasion of utterance would otherwise be to admit

precisely the kind of radical contingency into deductive science that Husserl is trying to

avoid. In the case of the term “now,” specifically, this means that there must be an

infinite, adequate perceptual series that corresponds to the way in which an infinite or

divine consciousness perceives the passage of time; by contrast, a finite consciousness

 !29

can at any point in time be only directly aware of the current “now” but not of any past

nows. But it seems the meaning of “now” is fixed and well understood independently of

the occasion of utterance, i.e., that there is a generic meaning of “now” that embodies the

general phenomenological character of being directly aware of the object one sees. Hence

the need for an infinite consciousness.

As already indicated, Husserl recognizes within a year’s time the inadequacy of

his proposed solution, and on December 20, 1901, Husserl makes the following note to

himself:

God’s infinite consciousness embraces all time “at once.” This infinite
consciousness is nontemporal….For him < for God > there is no past,
present, and future. But < even for him > there is a past, present, and
future relative to any single point. Time is the form of the infinite
consciousness, as infinite, adequate perceptual series. The divine
consciousness is the ideal correlate of objective time and the objective
world and world-evolution. (180) 22

The problem here is that Husserl, with his stipulation that the divine consciousness be

able to distinguish past, present, and future relative to any arbitrarily chosen point in the

perceptual series unwittingly reintroduces the contingency and arbitrariness that the

appeal to a divine consciousness was originally intended to eliminate: for the divine

consciousness to choose a point, regardless of which, to serve as a boundary between

before and after, is for it to choose “this” over “that,” and insofar as this type of indexical

22I have slightly modified Brough’s translation here, reading “any single point” for “each point” in the
fourth sentence.
 !30

reference necessarily entails contingency, it raises the specter of an infinite regress.23 As a

consequence, Husserl concludes that there can be no Idea of time, i.e., of the “now” in the

Platonic sense. Having failed to secure an objective meaning for the indexical expression,

“now,” he is left without any means of resolving the duality of finitude and infinitude in

human consciousness or of explaining the objective possibility of absolute evidence in a

way that would make the project of a “pure logic” meaningful.

The solution on which Husserl has settled by 1905 no longer interprets absolute

evidence as the achievement of a single temporal instant but now understands it to be

inextricably bound up with our finitude, i.e., with a series or continuum of retentional

sensations or profiles that manifest the primal sensation (Urempfindung) with varying

23Up to this point, I have been following Sommer’s exegesis fairly closely but the reader should be aware
that Sommer is not as explicit as I am here in spelling out what exactly is faulty in Husserl’s understanding
of the divine time-consciousness, which he dismisses as patently absurd. The argument, as I see it, is
simply that the divine consciousness, as Husserl initially conceives it, cannot do the work expected of it
because the distinction between past, present, and future is not intrinsic to time, which is pure succession.
This is less a commentary on the limits of divine consciousness than it is on the nature of time, which does
not in and of itself break up into past time, present time, and future time; in other words, the radical
contingency of indexicals like the “now” cannot be overcome by referring to God’s judgment on – or, better
said, perception of – this undifferentiated series, as Husserl had first thought. As a consequence - and this is
Husserl’s main point – there would seem to be no way to admit the treatment of indexicals into formal logic
and/or the scientific study of language. In his thoughtful review of Sommer’s book (Husserl Studies, 7(1),
1990, 59-67), James G. Hart fills the aforementioned lacuna in Sommer’s argumentation in a different way,
namely, by pointing out that Husserl, in attempting to be faithful to both the finite and infinite sides of
man’s consciousness, would appear to be impaling himself on either horn of the following dilemma: If, in
fact, divine, or infinite, consciousness “is free of all occasionality or indexicality and contingence,” it would
seem to preclude that “consciousness of the flow of time” which is the very hallmark of human
consciousness; if, on the other hand, human consciousness must per definitionem “be tied to the
indexicality of each point of the time flow,” then it can “no longer be [considered] divine” (p. 62). As
should be clear from the preceding, I do not think that this gets Sommer’s admittedly enthymematic
argument right. For one, it shifts the main thrust of the argument, which appears to be making a point about
the nature of time, to a presumed inability on the part of human consciousness to reconcile time and
eternity; this is, moreover, inconsistent with Hart’s stated interpretation of Sommer, who, he argues, sees
Husserl as beset at this juncture in his career with “disappointment that it was not possible to conceive a
‘godly consciousness’” and as beginning “to develop a new view of God” (p. 62). Most importantly, this
reading misses the connection to what Hart elsewhere in his review (p. 59) very astutely recognizes is, on
Sommer’s reading of Husserl at least, “a Neo-Platonism from below.” It is the failure of Husserl’s original
conception of the divine side of human consciousness, which, according to Sommer, ultimately leads
Husserl to embrace an alternative conception of time-consciousness similar to “the late Neo-Platonic
thinking of Iamblichus” (p.64). This is the view, already half-limned here with respect to Augustine, which
assumes that “intellectual time and the time of sense-perception come into contact at one place, the Now:
Through this [Now] we have past and future whereas the intellectual time is nothing other than extended
eternity” (Sommer, p. 233).
 !31

degrees of clarity. On this view, the absolute evidence represented by the primal

impression is never experienced directly, i.e., as just one sensation among others, albeit a

much clearer one; each of these sensations is embedded as part of a continuum of profiles

or adumbrations of the one primal sensation and in such a way that they all refer back to a

sensation that is pure and unadumbrated, and that, as such, is experienced as always

already having filled the “now-point.” In this sense, the primal impression stands in the

same relation to its retentional counterparts as the ideal color “red” stands to a continuum

of different shades of red or a mathematical limit stands to a convergent series of

numbers: “There is a continuum that ascends towards an ideal limit, just as the continuum

of the species red converges towards an ideal pure red” (41). With this notion of a primal

sensation or impression, Husserl manages to preserve the absolute character or ideality of

the “now” in a way that simultaneously allows for the possibility of a knowledge based

on pure evidence and reconciles man’s finite nature with the divine spark or infinitude

associated with absolute evidence. The flow of internal time-consciousness is no longer

grasped in terms of individual now-moments but as a continuum of retentional sensations

which presuppose the primal sensation as their absolute beginning – “beginning” to be

understood here in a logical, not a temporal, sense. In language starkly reminiscent of

Augustine and the Neoplatonists in general, the entire continuous flow of lived

experience – as constituted through the retention of retentions – is now conceived as

“streaming forth” under the unchanging form of the primary impression, or “living

present,” which is itself “the simple and pre-temporal ‘there’ of my vitality [Lebendigkeit]
 !32

in general.”24 The primal impression is “not this now and now that other, but always all,”

and the sheer absolute flow to which gives it rise is – in the purest and most literal sense -

just life happening.

V.

The preceding reflections strongly suggest that some form of the emanation

theory of time may be an inevitable consequence of discarding the notion of time as a

Platonic Idea, leaving us with no conceptual apparatus or mechanism for explaining,

much less illuminating, the notion of absolute temporal flow. The German philosopher,

Hans Blumenberg, has observed in this connection that all philosophies at some stage

have recourse to what he calls “absolute metaphors” to express what, on pain of

contradiction, cannot be discursively formulated.25 If so, we need not be unduly

discomfited by Sokolowski’s observation that “even calling the process of inner time a

‘flow’ is metaphorical.”26 For one, the reasons for this failure of linguistic expression –

why, baldy stated, “we have no words” to describe the absolute time-constituting flow –

are, within the context of Husserlian phenomenology, easily understood: If the “final

whole” for which phenomenology is the search - the living present - is also, as

Sokolowski claims, “the place where parts are engendered for the first time,” then there

are no more fundamental formal structures in terms of which this phenomenon - the part-

whole relation that characterizes the interplay between different phases of absolute

24
Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transcendentalen Ich bei Edmund
Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, p. 73.
25Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1998, and
Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor of Existence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.

Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
26
University Press, 1974, p. 158.
 !33

consciousness - might be explained. In keeping with this - and perhaps even more

importantly - the application of the part-whole schema may be said to suffer from a

process of increasing “dis-analogization,” such that the roles played by part and whole,

while recognizably similar for the perception of an objective thing and for the “inner”

perception of acts and sensations, must be radically different in a situation where the

whole first generates its parts and the parts emanate from this primal whole. Again, if it is

a fair characterization of the phenomenological reduction to say that in it we are trying to

catch the primal impression in the act of lapsing into retention just as it is being swept up

and recapitulated in a new primordial impression, then it is not surprising that the

categorial framework of part-whole should be less than adequate to the task since the

“passing” which we are trying to grasp is more basic than any single part of the temporal

flow, i.e., than any single pairing of impression and retention.

In light of this, the aspiring phenomenologist - taking a leaf from the philosopher

of science’s book - might be better advised to simply classify the primordial phenomenon

of absolute inner time as one of Sellars’ “unexplained explainers,” rather than looking for

a mechanism to account for its continual flow, and move on. This may seem to leave the

phenomenologist of inner time with little to do. Actually, as the contemporary researches

of G. Lakoff attest, the real work of descriptive analysis has hardly begun: The solution to

the epistemic dilemma glossed above is, as Lakoff acknowledges, not to look further

down, but to look around among the other “basic conceptual metaphors,” as Lakoff calls

them, that make up “the common conceptual apparatus shared by members of [our]
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culture.”27 If Lakoff is correct in maintaining that “the basicness of a metaphor is its

conceptual indispensability,” it should be possible to demonstrate that indispensability by

showing how the basic metaphor of “absolute flow” connects up with the other basic

metaphors in our conceptual scheme, and, in working out the interrelations among these

metaphors, we should be able to recognize how the metaphor of “absolute flow” is

enmeshed in our form of life. The linguistic enterprise described is a strictly empirical

one, based on hypothesizing structural mappings across conceptual domains like “time”

and “life,” and is subject, as such, to corroboration through supporting evidence or

invalidation by counterexample. As is perhaps true of any research program in its

incipient stages, the approach pioneered by Lakoff is, at this point at least, more valuable

for the questions it throws out than for the actual problems it has solved. As so far

pursued, that research suggests that the basic metaphor TIME MOVES may be connected

to the notion of flow through another basic metaphor, LIFE IS FLUID. This is, of course,

consistent with the conception of life as sheer flow or duration, which, as we have seen,

Husserl derives from reflections of a decidedly Platonic character. Lakoff, however,

associates the fluidity of life, like that of time, with “the power or vitality evident in the

living person,” so that the juxtaposition of these two absolute metaphors raises the

question of whether the absolute temporal flow is to be conceived as an eternal streaming

or whether time’s flow, as the measure of a single human life, is subject to the declining

fortunes of increased age. Another topic I regard as amenable to further research centers

on the question of how the cultural model THE PASSAGE OF TIME PLAYS A

27George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 51.
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CAUSAL ROLE IN EVENTS OF CHANGE relates to the basic metaphor TIME

MOVES. An exhaustive answer would involve identifying the many different ways in

which change, in all its variants, is perceived in this culture (and perhaps in others) as

being caused by the passage of time. Finally, Lakoff believes that our understanding of

the basic metaphor TIME MOVES is fundamentally influenced by the incontrovertible

fact of our embodiment so that the typical image of time’s movement, which has us

located at the present and facing toward the future with the past at our back, actually

permits of two versions: in the one we, at the present moment, are moving toward the

future; in the other it is the future which is moving toward us. Thus, according to Lakoff,

the traditional image of time as a moving now can be misleading insofar as it is

indifferent as to which part of time is actually moving, stipulating only that the future

must be ahead and the past behind. Phenomenologically, it remains as yet an open

question whether we ever experience the future as rushing forward to meet us (and if so,

under what circumstances) and whether this image of time moving toward us sometimes

provides us with a more compelling description of how we experience time’s “flying” -

for example, when we are hastening to comply with a deadline. These are interesting

questions in themselves, from both a linguistic and anthropological standpoint, but

Lakoff’s approach to the phenomenon of absolute temporal flow recommends itself all

the more, if, as I have tried to argue here, the stream metaphor constitutes an irreducible

assumption of any emanation theory of time, one beyond which it is impossible to think

or question.

Metropolitan College of New York

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New York, New York