Table Of Contenthusserl’s account of our
consciousness of time
husserl’s account of our
consciousness of time
James R. Mensch
marquette stuDies in PhilosoPhy
no. 70
anDrew tallon, series eDitor
©2010 Marquette University Press
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-3141
All rights reserved.
www.marquette.edu/mupress/
founded 1916
library of congress cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mensch, James R.
Husserl’s account of our consciousness of time / James R. Mensch.
p. cm. — (Marquette studies in philosophy ; no. 70)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes.
ISBN-13: 978-0-87462-801-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-87462-801-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938. 2. Time perception. I. Title.
B3279.H94M385 2010
115.092—dc22
2010043000
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
cover art by Jessica mensch.
http://www.jessicamensch.com
contents
Introduction .............................................................................................7
I ~ Predecessors .....................................................................................19
II ~ Husserl’s Account of the Temporal Modes .................................59
III ~ The Temporality of the Perception & the Perceived ....115
IV ~ The Relation of Consciousness to the Ego...............................137
V ~ The Extension of the Temporal Field ........................................183
VI ~ The Tendency towards the Future ...........................................215
VII ~ Embodied Temporality ............................................................247
Bibliography .........................................................................................269
Name Index ..........................................................................................275
Subject Index ........................................................................................277
acknowleDgments
I
would like to thank Professor Rudolf Bernet, the Director of
the Husserl Archives in Louvain, Belgium and Professor Di-
eter Lohmar, the Director of the Husserl Archives in Cologne,
for permission to cite from the manuscripts of the Nachlaß.
In particular, I would like to thank Professor Lohmar for the
many helpful suggestions he made regarding Husserl’s positions on
our apprehension of time. I continually benefited from his insights
during my stay at the Archives. I would also like to express my grati-
tude to Siefried Rombach who read my manuscript with great care
and offered a number of suggestions for its improvement. I am also
grateful to the members of the seminar at the Cologne Archives who
participated in reading Husserl’s writings on time consciousness.
Many of their insights have also found their way into my text. With-
out my wife, Josephine Mensch’s careful proofreading and suggestions
for improving my text, it also would not have reached its present form.
I would also like to acknowledge the multi-year grant I received from
the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada that sustained
the research that resulted in this book. Thanks are also due to the
Erasmus Program in French and German Philosophy, which support-
ed the final period of its composition in Prague.
introDuction
F
ew subjects have so exercised the human imagination as
that of time. Its devouring nature has been religiously de-
picted as the father of the gods, Chronos or Time, swal-
lowing his children. Some of the greatest masterpieces
of literature from Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Proust’s À.la.
rechereche.du.temps.perdu have had time as their theme. In science,
time enters into practically every equation used to mathematically de-
scribe the world. In philosophy, it has been a subject of speculation
from the Pre-Socratics onward. There are three main reasons for such
attention. The first is its all-pervasive character. Everything that oc-
curs seems to require time for its unfolding. The second is its elusive
character. When asked, “What, then, is time?” Augustine admitted, “I
know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I
am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”1 We all have a
sense of time, but the description and explanation of it are remarkably
hard to get hold of. The third is its intimate tie to ourselves. To grasp
temporal relations, we must turn inward, that is, regard our memories
and anticipations. Outside of us, it is always now. Thus the external
perception that directs itself to the world cannot “see” the past or the
future. Neither is present since the former has vanished and the latter
is yet to come. Thus, at any given moment we only outwardly see spa-
tial relations. As Kant expresses this insight, “time cannot be outward-
ly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us”
(KdrV, B37, Ak. 3:52). 2 Thus, I intuit time in its pastness and futurity
through my memories and anticipations; regarding them, however, I
1 Aurelius Augustine, Confessions, trans. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin
Books), 1964, p. 264. Throughout the current work, this translation of
the Confessions will be cited as Confessions 1964.
2 “Kritik der reinen Vernunft (2. Aufl.)” in Kants.gesammelte.Schriften, ed.
Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (KdrV, Berlin:
Georg Reiner, 1955), 3:52. I will throughout refer to this work as the
KdrV, followed by the original B edition page number. The Prussian
Academy edition will be cited as Ak, and will be followed by its volume
8. Husserl’s.Account.of.Our.Consciousness.of.Time
cannot speak of their spatial relations. I cannot, for example, say that
a memory (as opposed to its object) is a given size or is to the left or
the right of another memory. My memories are not out there in space;
they are within me. This rather straightforward observation leads to
a surprising conclusion. As Kant expresses it, “if we abstract from our
mode of inwardly intuiting ourselves ... then time is nothing” (KdrV,
B51; Ak. 3:60).3 Time, in other words, seems to have its intuitable
reality within us. Our consciousness, with its memories and anticipa-
tions surrounding a central now, presents itself as a field of temporal
relations. Thus, to the point that we identify ourselves with our con-
sciousness, questions of temporality are also questions regarding our
selfhood. This means that the continuous interest of humanity in such
questions is also a self-interest. The puzzles of time have been felt to
be puzzles of selfhood.
methoDology
Nowhere is this more the case than with Husserl’s treatment of time.
His account of the consciousness of time is, as we shall see, also an
account of our self-consciousness. As a result, all the riddles, all the
difficulties we have in understanding how we grasp ourselves play
themselves out in Husserl’s analyses of how we come to be conscious
of time. Since these analyses involve working out how time is con-
stituted, these difficulties extend to his conception of our self-consti-
tution. This cannot be otherwise given that the constitution of our
self-consciousness (our self-presence through our memories and an-
ticipations) is also the constitution of the time that is present through
such memories and anticipations. Thus, just as self-consciousness in-
and page number. If the translation is taken from Norman Kemp Smith,
it will be indicated by the initials NKS.
3 This does not mean that outer things cannot be characterized as in time.
“Time,” Kant writes, “is the formal condition of all appearances whatso-
ever.” In this, it is distinguished from space which “serves as the apriori
condition only of outer appearances” (KdrV,.B50, Ak. 3:60). The point
follows because “all presentations … belong … as determinations of the
mind, to our inner state.” This inner state, however, “belongs to time”
(ibid). Thus, when we relate our representations to an outer object, the
object itself assumes a temporal character. We ascribe to it the past we
recall and the future we anticipate even though, strictly speaking, we can-
not outwardly intuit either.
.; Introduction. 9
volves us in the problem of the identity (and difference) of the self that
is conscious and the self of.which it is conscious, so we find Husserl
wrestling with the issue of how far the constituting self is the same
as the self it has constituted and to what extent we must, in fact, dis-
tinguish the two. A further complicating factor is the fact that Hus-
serl’s concept of the self is not static, but broadens and deepens over
the years. Given his identification of the constitution of the self and
that of time, this forces him to revisit and continually revise his ac-
count of temporal constitution. Thus, when his concept of our self-
consciousness broadens to include not just our intellectual, but also
our affective, instinctive and emotional life, our embodiment comes to
play an increasingly important role in his conception of our selfhood.
With this, the question of the bodily basis of our sense of time comes
to the fore. This in turn involves Husserl in a reworking of his account
of how we register, retain and anticipate experience.
As a result of these complications, Husserl’s writings on time-con-
sciousness are varied and uneven. He devoted only a single published
monograph, The.Phenomenology.of.Internal.Time.Consciousness, to the
subject. The compilation of this text is largely the work of Edith Stein.
She compiled it in 1917 from earlier lectures and notes at the same
time that Husserl was busily revising much of this material.4 For the
rest, Husserl’s manuscripts on time-consciousness remained unpub-
4 According to Rudolf Boehm, the editor of Zur.Phänomenologie.des.inneren.
Zeitbewusstseins, Husserl’s original text of the 1905 lectures on time con-
sciousness is “not reconstructable” (“Einleitung des Herausgebers,” Zur.
Phänomenologie.des.inneren.Zeitbewusstseins [The Hague: Martinus Ni-
jhoff, 1966], p. xvii; the text of Zur.Phänomenologie.des.inneren.Zeitbe-
wusstseins will hereafter be referred to as PdiZ). The reason why we can-
not reconstruct the lectures is that Husserl continually replaced parts of
the original. In Boehm’s words: “Husserl fügte diesem Manuskript in der
Folgezeit nicht nur Beilagen und Ergänzungen bei, sondern er schied
sachlich, aber auch einfach formal unzulängliche Teile des ursprüng-
lichen Vorlesungsmanuskriptes aus und warf sie fort und ersetzte sie
teilweise durch gründlichere und zusammenhängendere Ausführungen,
ohne sich allerdings um die unmittelbare textliche Kohärenz der erhal-
ten gebliebenen alten und der eingefügten neuen Aufzeichnungen zu be-
kümmern. Einige der Teile des ursprünglichen Vorlesungsmanuskripts
ergänzenden oder ersetzenden Aufzeichnungen, deren Entstehungszeit
zumindest bis in das Jahr 1911 reicht, wurden der Paginierung eingefügt
oder angeschlossen, andere nur einfach eingelegt” (ibid, p. xviii).
