Husserl’s Phenomenological Time and Time-Consciousness: Editor’s Notes

How can time as such become a theme of philosophical inquiry? What is the phenomenology of time? Does phenomenology, as Edmund Husserl conceived it, have the resources to investigate the functioning of time? How is the phenomenology of transcendental time-constituting consciousness even possible? How accurate is Husserl’s account of the temporality of the stream of consciousness? To what extent and in what respects did Husserl’s theory of absolute time-constituting consciousness manage to resolve “the most difficult of all phenomenological problems?”¹

The essays in this special issue of Quaestiones Disputatae seek to address issues pertaining to these and related controversies, through engagement with phenomenology as a tradition, or as a field, precisely in its transcendental significance.

The volume opens with the article “Augustine and Husserl on Time and Memory,” in which Nicolas Fernando de Warren provides a critical examination of the problem of time in Augustine’s Confessions and Husserl’s phenomenological thinking. Although Husserl explicitly refers to Augustine’s influential treatment of time and the soul in Book 11 of the Confessions in framing his own phenomenological analyses, this paper explores substantial differences between these two approaches in the context of Husserl’s proposed solution to Augustine’s dilemma of experiencing the “incomprehension of time.”

In “Husserl’s Diagrams and Models of Immanent Temporality,” Horacio Banega clarifies the way in which Husserl applies his formal ontology to the constitution of immanent temporality. Banega reconsiders Husserl’s definition of time as a “one-dimensional orthoid multiplicity” (Hua X:99) and proposes that the best interpretation of Husserl’s diagrams is to consider them as applying to a spherical surface. He gives us an example of such an application and claims that it is more adequate to the lived experience of immanent time.

Based on some reflections found on Husserl’s C-manuscripts, Luis Niel’s article “Time, Reduction and Intentionality: The Path toward the Disclosure of the Intentional-Primal-Tension ‘I—Not-I’” focuses on the methodical path toward the disclosure of what he calls the “primal-intentional-tension” (PIT) as the differential relation between the I and the Not-I, at the most fundamental level of the constitution of time. Niel argues that the method of the reduction and its radicalization enables one to understand the difference between act-intentionality and stream-intentionality. This method also leads one both to the discovery of the operating and unthematic, transcendental dimension of experience and to the disclosure of the multiple phenomenological dimensions and, by means of a radicalization, of the living present as a primal-mode of transcendental life.

In his first efforts to understand time-consciousness early in the last century, Husserl virtually ignored the ego. In his final reflections on temporal experience, however, the ego assumes a critical role as both founding and founded. John Brough’s essay “Some Reflections on Time and the Ego in Husserl’s Late Texts on Time-Consciousness” attempts to sketch some of the dimensions of that role, with particular attention to its relation to the living present and the primal flow of time-constituting consciousness.

In his contribution “Embodied Temporalization and the Mind-Body Problem,” James Mensch addresses the “hard problem of consciousness,” that is, of the mind’s relation to the body, by showing how it follows from Kant’s making time an object of internal perception and space an object of external perception. Mensch demonstrates the importance of Husserl’s analysis of time consciousness for overcoming this division.

In “Sharing Our Time with the Time of the World,” Martin Möhlmann examines the theme of transcendental solidarity as coconstitution of consciousness and world. He proceeds by exploring the idea of an original transcendence at the heart of Husserl’s phenomenology of time. In his attempt to elucidate this idea, Möhlmann focuses on phenomena such as awakening from sleep in order to understand how consciousness is first motivated by the world to constitute both it and itself.

In the article “Phenomenological Temporality,” Bernhard Obsieger addresses the structure of the temporality that is experienced in time-consciousness. He tries to show that it...