Abstract
This paper examines the problem of how experience is constituted as a temporal object through the lens of Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness. The aim of this paper is to stress three significant aspects of Husserl’s approach: his rethinking of the “apprehension-content” scheme, his clarification the position of inner time-consciousness within the system of transcendental phenomenology, and his answer to the question of whether the temporality of experience is constituted at the very moment of experience or subsequently by reflection. After a critical review of the development of Husserl’s analysis of these issues, this paper proposes an account that combines various elements from the development of Husserl’s thinking in connection with Husserl’s later thought.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay is based on the draft for my presentation in the conference titled “Consciousness and the World” which was held in Tongji University of Shanghai on May 2–3, 2016. I appreciate Prof. Ka-wing Leung’s invitation and the detailed comments of Dr. Li-Qing Qian.
- 2.
This movement was brought about initially by Merleau-Ponty. In the Phénomenologie de la Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945, pp.175–9) he criticized Husserl’s scheme as bad intellectualism which can touch directly the raw material independent of action. At the same time he responded positively to Husserl’s footnote in the Lecture of Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness that not all constitutions have this scheme (ibid., p.178).
- 3.
cf. Hua X, p. 171f. Brentano, however, soon abandoned this understanding and later held a view similar to Husserl.
- 4.
Müller’s translation: a “distinctional part in the modified sense” is an expression which can lead to misunderstanding. What is modified is not this part itself but the part which is combined with it.
- 5.
Here, I am using the word “Gegenstand” in order to express the entity in the world. By contrast Brentano’s word “Objekt” does not mean the opposite of subject and real entity in the world, in the modern sense, but content that the mind posits and is neutral to its existence, in a Cartesian or scholastic sense (Brentano, 1973, pp. 180–1). Confusingly Husserl often adopts this word, especially in the phenomenology of time-consciousness.
- 6.
In terms of “double intentionality of retention” and in terms of “double fulfillment of protention” cf. Kortooms (2002, pp. 158–168).
- 7.
See Zahavi (1999, chaps. 5 and 7). I think nevertheless that, since the pre-reflective self-awareness without apprehension works everywhere on all acts of experience, it doesn’t enable to describe the total stream of consciousness easily. In my opinion the pre-reflective self-awareness has quite a little distinctness and it can give evidence only to rough and general statements. Act of consciousness should instead be described mainly based upon correlation of noesis-noema, by grasping what is gotten from the description about the noematic side as determinations constituted by the corresponding acts and by attributing these constitutions to functions of acts in the noetic side. The analysis of the absolute stream of consciousness should also follow this procedure by starting from the constituted time (noematic time) back to the constituting stream. Therein, I think, demonstrative consideration should be also needed and one can hardly clarify the structure of absolute stream only by description.
- 8.
In Bernau Manuscripts Husserl argues that the past experience far distant from the present arises within the actual present, namely about so to speak passive recollection, called “recollection coming to mind” (einfallende Erinnerung) (Hua, XXXIII, p. 361ff). This moment of experience has no time-position and is constituted as time object by being reflected and given the position “at that time”.
- 9.
Here, the phenomenology of intersubjectivity or the phenomenology of verbal/nonverbal expression is a necessary tool to continue this investigation. In order to confirm my past experience, it is not sufficient to examine my consciousness from a first-personal point of view. Physical evidence or witness is also helpful for this task. How these can justify a belief in one’s memory, how and to what extent they support or contradict the appearance of my experience, ought to be investigated.
References
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Murata, N. (2019). How Is Time Constituted in Consciousness? Theories of Apprehension in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Time. In: de Warren, N., Taguchi, S. (eds) New Phenomenological Studies in Japan. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11893-8_2
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