In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 A Brief Account of Husserl’s Conception of Our Consciousness of Time James Mensch Husserl’s texts on time consciousness are among the most difficult he penned. He devoted only a single published monograph, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, to the subject.1 The editing of this text is largely the work of Edith Stein, who compiled it in 1917 from earlier lectures and notes, her task being complicated by the fact that Husserl revised this material even as she worked on it.2 For the rest, Husserl’s manuscripts on timeconsciousness remained unpublished until the beginning of this century. The two chief sources of this material are Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), which Rudolf Bernet and Dieter Lohmar edited,3 and Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, edited by Dieter Lohmar.4 As even a cursory reading of the lectures and these manuscripts reveals, Husserl’s method is exploratory and tentative. Descriptive passages are interwoven with thought-experiments. These often consist of speculative endeavors to bring some systematic clarity to the descriptions. Husserl’s depiction of his method in the Bernau Manuscripts is quite telling. He writes: “As in this treatise, so generally: we bore and we blast mineshafts in all possible directions. We consider all the logical possibilities to catch sight of which of these present essential possibilities and which yield essential impossibilities, and thus we ultimately sort out a consistent system of essential necessities” (BM, 189). Given these facts, a selection of representative texts cannot hope to present the subtlety and richness of his analyses. It will also necessarily exhibit lacunae in presenting the essentials of his thought. To ameliorate these difficulties, I shall begin by giving the broader background of his thought. Then, I will link his texts to present his basic position on how we become conscious of time. 3.1 The Phenomenological Epoché In the first of these texts, “The Exclusion of Objective Time,” translated in chapter 4, Husserl begins with an early version of his phenomenological epoché. This epoché is described as an exclusion: in his words, “the complete exclusion of every assumption, stipulation, and conviction with regard to objective time.” (section 4.1). This exclusion is demanded by the 44 James Mensch nature of phenomenological analysis. Broadly speaking, the subject of this analysis consists of our convictions regarding some matter. Husserl’s question is: what is the evidence that we have for such convictions? Adopting James’s (and Hume’s) radical empiricism, Husserl seeks such evidence in our experience.5 As a phenomenologist, he takes this experience as the phenomena (i.e., the appearances and connections of appearances) that found our convictions. The exclusion of these convictions along with “every assumption” and “stipulation ” concerning what we are trying to verify is, then, simply a matter of investigative procedure. As Husserl’s student, Roman Ingarden, expressed it, the suspension of our convictions allows us to avoid the error of the petitio principii.6 Logically, this is the fallacy of assuming, as part of one’s demonstration, the conclusion that one wants to establish. Phenomenologically, we commit this error when we confuse the evidence for some thesis with the thesis itself. Suppose our thesis is that we are seeing a spatiotemporal object—in Husserl’s example, the copper ashtray on our desk (see section 4.2). We reach over and pick it up and turn it in our hand, viewing it first from one side and then another. As we do so, we experience a flow of perspectivally arranged visual appearances. We sense its weight and texture as we handle it. We also smell the remains of the ashes on it. All these experiences convince us that it is, indeed, an ashtray. They are the evidence for our conviction. To state the obvious, the ashtray itself is none of its appearances. Visually, it appears perspectivally. But these appearances do not themselves appear perspectivally. We cannot turn a perspectival view of an object about the way we turn an object.7 Regarded phenomenologically, the object is simply the referent of the series of appearances through which we grasp it. Now, the point of the epoché when we apply it to the conviction that we are seeing the ashtray is to suspend our positing of this referent so as to regard the appearances through which it appears. It is, for Husserl, to examine the validity of our interpreting these appearances as appearances of the ashtray. If we...

Share