Abstract

Husserl's most famous discussion of futurity is his account of protention. This chapter establishes that the traditional understanding of protention as being distinguished from retention only by the direction in which it works (i.e., toward the future rather than the past) is not only insufficient, but threatens to seriously misunderstand both protention and time-consciousness more broadly. Such a misunderstanding leads to serious distortions of the key phenomenological notions of fulfilment and absolute consciousness. Without the positive account of protention suggested in the Bernau Manuscripts and developed in this chapter, any phenomenology focused on constitution risks being constructed on faulty foundations.

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