Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality

4. The Structure of Lived Time

4 The Structure of Lived Time Edmund Husserl (translated by James Mensch) 4.1 The Exclusion of Objective Time1 We should start by making a few general remarks with regard to a phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness. As with all such analyses, this involves the complete exclusion of every assumption, stipulation, and conviction with regard to objective time (with regard to all transcendent presuppositions about existents). Objectively speaking, every experience, like every real being and moment of being, may have its position in a single objective time. The same holds for the experience of perceiving and presenting time to oneself. It may be interesting to determine the objective time of an experience, including the experience that constitutes time. It might also be of interest to investigate how the time that is objectively posited in time-consciousness relates to actual, objective time, that is, to determine whether the estimations of temporal intervals correspond to objective, actual temporal intervals or to show how they deviate from them. These, however, are not the tasks of phenomenology. Just as the actual thing, the actual world is not a phenomenological datum, neither is worldtime , real time, natural time in the natural scientific sense. This includes its sense as given by psychology understood as a science of the nature of what is mental. When we speak of the temporal character of perceived, remembered, and expected objects, it may seem that we are assuming the flow of objective time and studying only the subjective conditions of the possibility of perceiving. What we assume, however, is not the existence of a world-time, of a physical duration, etc., but rather appearing time, appearing duration as such. These, however, are absolute givens. It would be senseless to doubt them. Thus, we accept an existing time. But this is not the time of the experienced world. It is, rather, the immanent time of the flow of consciousness. It is so evident that the consciousness of a tonal process, of a melody that I am now hearing, shows a succession [of notes] that it is senseless to doubt or deny this. Since space and time exhibit well-noted and significant analogies, our exclusion of objective time will, perhaps, be clearer when we draw the parallel with space. The consciousness of space—that is, the experience in which the “intuition of space” as perception and phantasy occurs—belongs to the sphere of the phenomenologically given. Opening our eyes, we 62 Edmund Husserl see into objective space. As a reflective inspection shows, this means that we have visual contents of sensation that found the spatial appearance, this being an appearance of definite things that are spatially positioned in such and such ways. If we abstract from all interpretations that transcend [what is given] and reduce the perceptual appearance to its given primary contents, the result is a continuum of visual fields that is quasi-spatial, but is neither itself space nor a spatial surface. The result is, roughly speaking, a twofold continuous multiplicity exhibiting relations of “alongside,” “above,” “inside,” etc. We find within it lines that meet, enclosing a part of the field, and so on. These, however, are not objective spatial relations. It is, for example, senseless to say that a point of the visual field is one meter distant from the corner of this table here or is next to it or is above it, etc. It is just as senseless to assert that the appearance of a thing has a position in space or any kind of spatial relations: the appearance of the house is not next to the house, nor on top of it, nor one meter from it, etc. Similar assertions hold with regard to time. Here, the phenomenological data are temporal interpretations,2 that is, experiences where what is temporal objectively appears. Moreover, the experiential moments that specifically found the temporal interpretation are phenomenologically given. These are the possible, specifically temporal contents that are there to be interpreted [Auffassungsinhalte]. They are what moderate nativism calls the originally temporal. None of this, however, is objective time. One cannot discover the least thing about objective time through phenomenological analysis. The “original temporal field” is not like a piece of objective time; the experienced now is not inherently a point of objective time, etc. Objective space, objective time, and, with them, the objective world of actual things and processes—all these are transcendencies. Mind you, space and actuality are not transcendent in some mystical sense as “things in themselves.” Rather...