Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

Husserl's Early Time-Analysis in Historical Context

Rudolf Bernet

To cite this article: Rudolf Bernet (2009) Husserl's Early Time-Analysis in Historical
Context, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 40:2, 117-154, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.2009.11006678

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2009.11006678

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 40, No. 2, May 2009

HUSSERL’S EARLY TIME-ANALYSIS IN HISTORICAL

I
Even a fleeting glance at the history of philosophy shows that thinking has
attempted to approach the riddle of time in two main ways. One is oriented
towards the natural phenomenon of the movement of bodies in space; Aristotle’s
analysis of time in the famous Book Delta of his Physics is the classic example
of such an analysis, which understands time as the measure of movement. The
other approach is introspective, grasping time as a property of the human psyche
and its capability for representation or objectivation. It is no accident that this
second way of understanding time found its initial pregnant expression in a text
devoted to the examination of conscience, to self-accusation, to memory —
namely, in Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions. The essential property of the
human mind is temporal extension (“distentio animi”), and although such a
mind is excluded from participating in God’s eternal presence, it can still survey
the course of its own shifting life. Already in Augustine, then, this way of
understanding the temporal extension of the human capability for representation
immediately suggests certain questions about the limits of time, about its
beginning and its origin as well as its end and its completion.
The copy of the Confessions preserved at the Husserl Archives in Leuven
shows that Husserl attentively read Book XI. And this is no surprise, for his
phenomenological description of inner time-consciousness is inspired by the
observations — and implicit presuppositions — of the Augustinian time-
analysis to such an extent that we might even speak of Husserlian “marginal
notes” to Augustine. For Husserl too the problem of time finds its natural home
in the inwardness of consciousness. What is investigated is not only the ability
to grasp something that is present now within the consciously registered
present, but also the ability to remember the past and to expect the future. In
this way the remembered past is always ultimately understood as a past
consciousness and the expected future as a future consciousness.
Philosophical analysis of the different temporal dimensions thereby appears to
be confined to the narrow compass of psychic inwardness. If past
consciousness is still understood as a present consciousness that has become
past, and future consciousness as a consciousness that will become present,
one might even be tempted to speak of a one-dimensional concept of time —
one-dimensional not only because of the dominating role of the consciously
registered present, but also because the temporal flow is still always
understood in terms of the image of a line split into point-like now-moments.

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 On the other hand, however, it is not hard to see a connection between
Husserl’s time-understanding and the approach in Aristotle, although
Husserl’s engagement with the Physics is not as easy to document as his study
of the Confessions. For both Husserl and Aristotle, temporal determinations
such as “earlier” and “later,” as well as “future,” “present,” and “past,” are
predicates of an object moving within an encompassing system of
spatiotemporal locations. The line of continually newly arising now-points
thus functions as the measure of this movement. The irreversible sequence of
these now-points is comparable to the number series generated by repeatedly
adding one to the present number; the movement is accordingly measured by
counting off the number of now’s as a temporal unity: time keeps count, and
at the same time, time itself is counted as a sequence of continually emerging
newer now’s. This Aristotelian insight finds its parallel in Husserl’s theory of
the standing-streaming present. To be sure, Aristotle is more worried about the
mode of being of time and the now than Husserl is. But they do agree that
although time is not an independent entity or (present at hand) object, there
can nevertheless be no time without objects. Time is first of all to be found in
the experience of nature, in the movement and alteration of the things that
surround us. If time itself is then understood as a type of movement, this
occurs by spontaneously seeing it in terms of the movement of physical
objects. Husserl did indeed defend himself against the seductions of such a
comparison, but he was not able to escape completely from the naturalization
or objectification of time-consciousness that it entails.
Yet how is it possible to claim that Husserl’s understanding of time is
simultaneously indebted to both Aristotelian and Augustinian analyses? The
point here is not to deny that lines of historical filiation and systematic
similarity can be traced between Aristotle and Augustine. Instead, what the
question aims at is how Husserl was able to act as a mediator between these
contrasting approaches — one inspired by natural philosophy and the other by
psychology — within the framework of his phenomenology of time-
consciousness. It is likely that Heidegger too had exactly this question in view
when he wrote in his preliminary editorial remarks to “Edmund Husserls
Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins”,2 “What is
crucial is the emphasis on the intentional character of time-consciousness, and
the increasingly fundamental clarification of intentionality per se.” The theory
of the intentionality of consciousness is not only what lends Husserl’s
approach to the problem of time its originality, but also assumes a central place
in Husserl’s progressive improvements of his analysis of time-consciousness.
The phenomena with which Husserl is above all occupied in the texts of
Husserliana X — namely, the perception of an enduring object; conserving
and reproductively recalling past moments of consciousness; and finally, the
consciousness of the unity of one’s own enduring self — are all various

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performances of intentional consciousness. An analysis of time that is
conducted within the framework of a phenomenology of intentional
consciousness overcomes the dichotomy between a “psychological” and a
“physical” analysis of time because intentional lived experience constantly
transgresses the limits of what inwardly belongs to the self and establishes a
relation to something one is conscious of — something beyond the self. This
holds good for all of the forms of time-consciousness just mentioned, and
indeed, holds good without exception. And in perception, the basic
phenomenon of Husserl’s time-analysis, this intersection of inner and outer
shows up in the form of the reference of the psychic or “immanent” time of
perception to the natural or “objective” time of perceived objects.
But a new question emerges with regard to the intentionality of time-
consciousness, one that is far less easy to answer: namely, whether for Husserl
the intentionality of time-consciousness is a separate type of intentional
consciousness in its own right, to be considered alongside, e.g., perception,
empathy, etc., or whether the intentionality of time-consciousness plays a role
in all intentional acts as a non-selfsufficient moment. Closely linked with this
is the further question of whether intentional time-consciousness can become
the object of independent phenomenological research, or whether it can only
come up in conjunction with other performances of intentional consciousness.
Husserl does not give us an unequivocal answer to these questions. On the one
hand, his time-analyses are always carried out within a more encompassing
sphere of problems: in the early texts, he is concerned not only with time, but
with the description of perception, and in the later texts the analysis of time is
connected above all with the investigation of the concept of a person, of the
constitution of social community, and even of a sense of history. On the other
hand, what we find in Husserliana X is precisely an impressive collection of
texts dealing exclusively with a description of the temporal flow, e.g., with the
continual modification of a retained past now. These are necessarily relatively
abstract and frequently formal-mathematical descriptions. Such formal
investigations have led various interpreters to call quite vehemently for a de-
formalization of the Husserlian time-analysis and a transition to a more
anthropologically-oriented understanding of time. As for Husserl himself, it is
at least clear that when he claims that the analyses of time prepare the ground
for all of phenomenology, he never bases this claim on the formal character of
these analyses. On the contrary, for him the analyses of time furnish the (non-
self-sufficient) basis for a phenomenology of perception, fantasy, empathy,
etc. If it is true that time is a foundational yet non-self-sufficient province of
phenomenological research, then it is hard to claim that Husserl sees time-
consciousness as an independent type of intentional consciousness.
Nevertheless, we can still trace out how new forms of intentional
consciousness come to prominence within the framework of the

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phenomenology of time-consciousness, and we shall follow the emergence of
two forms in particular: the intentional direction towards horizonally given
objects on the one hand, and the intentionality of an “absolute consciousness”
that knows neither subject nor object on the other.
In his preliminary remarks to the edition of the time lectures already
mentioned, Heidegger further writes: “The theme pervading the following
investigation is the temporal constitution of a pure sense datum …”. With this
remark, Heidegger puts his finger precisely on the point of departure for
Husserl’s approach to a phenomenology of time-consciousness. To be sure, this
is merely a “point of departure” in the sense of something functioning as the
beginning of a development, not only by serving as its initial formulation, but
above all by providing its historical background. The connection between time
and sense datum to which Heidegger refers would appear to link this historical
background with the tradition of empiricism, which is in fact the case; the
influence of empiricism (and of Locke in particular) on Husserl’s initial
understanding of time is passed along first of all by way of Brentano and
Meinong. A central role in the discussion with Brentano and Meinong is played
by the empiricist thesis that the temporal “present” would have to be identical
with the maximum intensity of the impression, while the temporal “past” would
have to refer to the intensity of the sense data weakening, fading, and eventually
dying away completely. The creative activity of fantasy should then
compensate for the dwindling intensity of the impression. As a consequence,
for Brentano the past is not perceived, but represented in an image instead.
Meinong too holds that grasping temporal duration requires the assistance of
categorial assumptions that transgress the limits of perception. At the same
time, however, Husserl’s critique of these conceptions has to be read as a
progressive departure from the empiricist tradition of time-understanding. And
what this turn away from empiricism signifies more generally is that Husserl is
working out a specifically phenomenological concept of consciousness. Here
too the progressive investigation of the intentionality of time-consciousness
plays an essential role. As we shall see, an important moment in casting off the
empirical concept of consciousness is above all the insight that the distinction
between (pre-intentional) sensation-content and its (intentional) apprehension
is simply not suited for grasping the specific character of inner time-
consciousness. The chronological arrangement of the texts in the second part of
Husserliana X allows us to retrace part of the path that Husserl himself took in
this development. In what follows, I will offer a brief historical survey of the
most important steps that Husserl took along this path.

II
The project of tracing out the most important steps in Husserl’s development
of the problem of time between 1893 and 1911 yields a new schematic division

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of the texts into four different groups, a division that departs from that used in
the “Supplementary Texts Setting Forth the Development of the Problem” in
Husserliana X. Each of these new groups brings together texts that not only
stem from the same period, but share a contentual centre of gravity as well as a
specific manner of treating it. Group 1 includes Texts No. 1 through No. 17.
And the centre of gravity of this group concerns the transition from the question
of the psychological-genetic origin of time to the phenomenological description
of the perception of temporal objects. Most of the texts of this group come from
the time of the publication of the Logical Investigations, i.e., 1900–1901.
Group 2 includes Texts No. 18 through No. 35. These were written in 1904 and
1905, and all arise, directly or indirectly, in connection with the “Time
Lectures” held in February 1905, i.e., the lectures that Heidegger published in
1928 in a version prepared by Edith Stein (see Rudolf Boehm’s “Editor’s
Introduction” to Husserliana X). What is treated in these texts is above all the
suspension of objective time; the perception of an enduring object; and, at least
in inceptual form, an improved theory of recollection as well. The texts
belonging to Group 3 were written between Winter Semester 1906/07 and the
end of August 1909. Texts No. 39 through No. 47 in Husserliana X come from
this period, as do No. 51 and No. 52. The centre of gravity of these texts lies in
the explicit application of the phenomenological reduction to the analysis of
time-consciousness and in the discovery of an “absolute,” non-temporal
consciousness in which all temporal objects are constituted; the theory of
recollection also finds its definitive form in connection with these themes.
Finally, Group 4 includes Texts No. 48 through No. 50, as well as No. 53 and
No. 54. These texts date from the beginning of September 1909 through the end
of 1911. Here the description of “retention” produced within the framework of
the “apprehension – apprehension-content” scheme is subjected to a
consistently carried out critique for the first time, and with the newly
expounded theory of retention, the specific character and function of absolute
consciousness is elucidated as well.
The texts in Group 1 were written between 1893 and 1901, hence during a
period beginning shortly after the publication of Husserl’s Philosophy of
Arithmetic (1891) and ending shortly after the publication of the Logical
Investigations (1900–1901). This period is characterized by Husserl’s
distancing himself from an empirical psychology that proceeds in genetic-
causal (albeit not psychophysical) terms and by his turn to what he calls a
“descriptive” phenomenology — a development that is also reflected in the
texts on the problem of time stemming from the same period (No. 1 through
No. 17). While Text No. 1 (1893) is still devoted to an explanation of the
“psychological genesis” (140)3 of the representation of temporal processes
without challenging the taken-for-granted terms in which the task is posed, the
way in which the question is formulated in Text No. 8 (probably around 1901)

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is already unequivocally critical: “Is it not the task of the psychological theory
of time, under the presupposition of the objective time in which psychic
experiences flow, to explain the origin of the subjective representation of
time?” (160). The development from an explanatory psychological analysis of
the origin of representations of time to a phenomenological description of the
perception of temporal objects and temporal forms finds pregnant expression
in Text No. 12 (probably around 1901): “In phenomenology we do not have to
do with objective time but with the data of adequate perception” (169).
Nevertheless, the texts gathered in Group 1 do not merely reflect the
modification of phenomenological method that takes place in the transition
from Philosophy of Arithmetic to the Logical Investigations, but provide an
essential supplement to both of these publications: they document a
consciousness of certain problems concerning time that did not come to
expression — or was even repressed — in these two works. The inadequate
treatment of the problem of time in Philosophy of Arithmetic can be taken as
a symptom. It is a (further) sign that in this work Husserl does not succeed in
offering a convincing presentation of the relation between “psychological and
logical investigations,”4 i.e., between the temporally conditioned process of
colligating and the trans-temporal concept of number. Text No. 1 — which in
the meantime has been published in its entirety in Husserliana XXII 5 — does
make up for this to some extent, especially with regard to the perception of
time, but continues to move within the framework of empirical psychology. In
contrast, in the Logical Investigations, an eidetic phenomenology is already at
work, at least implicitly. Yet the price paid for this advance is that the problem
of time is consistently suppressed. Nevertheless, this suppression cannot really
succeed, if only because there can hardly be a phenomenology of the “acts” of
consciousness without some understanding — even an implicit one — of their
temporal flow and mode of givenness. Moreover, in the Logical Investigations,
Husserl is clearly working with the “idealizing presupposition” of a
temporality that is limited to the simultaneity of currently present moments.
The various acts that are brought into synthetic unity, along with the unifying
act of synthesis itself, all move within a sphere of simultaneity, giving the
impression that such acts are timeless phenomenological givens. This also
holds true for the connection between acts of phenomenological reflection and
the acts they reflect on, or, more generally, for every form of “inner
perception.” It is only in the treatment of “occasional expressions” — as well
as in the account of the continual synthesis, within one sequence of
perceptions, of an object’s multiple modes of appearance — that the course of
the investigation is touched by the wings of time and transfixed, like Jacob
struggling with an invisible angel.
Texts No. 2 through No. 17, which arise around the time of the Logical
Investigations, demonstrate Husserl’s intimate involvement with the problem

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of time during that period, perhaps also testifying to his unease about his way
of proceeding in the latter work. In addition, these texts show that Husserl
initially addresses the problem of time exclusively in connection with the
phenomenological analysis of perception. In this first attempt at a description
of the enduring perception of an enduring object, or of the temporal form of
duration (an attempt that can already be termed phenomenological), insights
emerge that are also of the greatest significance for the further development of
Husserl’s understanding of time. Thus even with these early texts, Husserl is
already breaking away from a prejudice that many of his contemporaries took
for granted — namely, that the mode of givenness of the present is limited to
grasping a now-point (cf. No. 12 and No. 15). Instead, the now has a
“perceptible extension” (168); it is surrounded by a “fringe” (167) or horizon
of the immediately adjacent past and future. Thus the perceptually grasped
present is “not something with the character of a mere point in time” (168), but
a “field” (176) in which the now, the no-longer-now, and the not-yet-now are
encompassed by a “configurational form” (176).6 Husserl is also already
making a distinction between a past that immediately belongs to the perceptual
present and a past that can only be made present once again through
“reproduction” (No. 10 and No. 11). With this, the differentiation between
what will later be called “retention” and “recollection” is already clearly in
play, even though in these early texts retention is still taken as the
apprehension of a modified content and recollection as a type of image-
consciousness.
The theory of the extended present, and especially of “fresh memory” (165)
or retentional intuition of the past, already brings Husserl into conflict with
Brentano, even in these earliest texts (No. 14 and No. 15).7 On Husserl’s
account, Brentano’s understanding of time-consciousness is determined by
three different convictions or prejudices. The first of these is a metaphysical
prejudice according to which only what is present deserves the title of “actual
being.” The second is an epistemological prejudice specifying that only what
is present can be perceived. And the third is a psychologically grounded
prejudice that makes the representation or experience of an object dependent
on a mental content that brings this object to presentation within
consciousness. The results of these prejudices are 1) that a past object is an
irreal object, “is something that does not exist” (172); 2) that a perception of
a past object or of the “process of being pushed back in time” (171) is
impossible; and 3) that both past-consciousness (which is guaranteed solely
through phantasy, rather than being perceptual) and the consciousness of
“temporal change” (171) are a matter of “a quite peculiar change in content”
(171). In these early texts — in contrast to the 1905 time lectures (see
especially §3 of Heidegger’s edition) — Husserl does not really offer an
exposition of the way in which Brentano attempts to give an account of

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original past-consciousness in spite of these extremely unfavourable
presuppositions. Instead, he merely uses Brentano as a point of departure and
opponent in his tentative search for a phenomenological description of
retention, here still called “memorial perception” (173). Texts No. 14 and No.
15 clearly show how the way towards Husserl’s characterization of retention
as apprehension of a modified content is prepared in this 1901 confrontation
with Brentano: “I am inclined to transfer this difference [between an object
appearing as present and one appearing as past] into the mode of
apperception” (174; cf. also 173). The critique of Brentano then naturally
culminates with the refutation of a sensualistic description of the past-
modification (cf. also No. 17).
The texts in Group 2 (No. 18 through No. 35) were written in 1904 and
1905, and thus belong to the context of the time lectures of February 1905.8
The most significant texts from this group are taken directly from the
manuscript of the 1905 lecture course and address the problem of the
perception of temporal continuity, above all in critical discussion of Meinong
(No. 29 through No. 33). The rest of the texts served as preparation for the
lectures as well as subsequent evaluation of their results. Text No. 35, which
was written in Seefeld during the summer vacation of 1905 and analyzes the
temporal presuppositions of identity-consciousness, deserves special mention.
It is striking that the phenomenological investigation of perception takes a
central place in all of the texts in Group 2, even those in which Husserl is
grappling with the structure of recollection. On the one hand, this follows
naturally from the fact that the time lectures form the concluding part of the
Winter Semester 1904/05 lecture course, which had already dealt with the
problem of perception in great detail. On the other hand, what is emerging
throughout this lecture course as a whole is the increasing tendency of
Husserl’s phenomenology to turn towards the investigation of sensuous
experience or of “lower forms of objectivation.”
Husserl’s engagement with Meinong directly or indirectly shapes most of
the texts on “consciousness of internal time” arising between September 1904
and February 1905. In addition to Meinong’s “Beiträge zur Theorie der
psychischen Analyse” (1893),9 it is above all his essay “Über Gegenstände
höherer Ordnung und deren Verhältnis zur inneren Wahrnehmung” (1899)10 —
especially the third section (“Über das Vorstellen und Wahrnehmen des
zeitlich Verteilten” [On the representing and perceiving of what is temporally
distributed]) — that aroused Husserl’s critical reflections (cf. the “Editor’s
notes” to No. 29, 216–19). In these texts Meinong relies on the distinction
between simple and complex objects, and is particularly concerned with
clarifying — both logically and ontologically — the complex objects whose
specific character had been emphasized by Christian von Ehrenfels under the
title of “Gestalt”-qualities (“Über Gestaltqualitäten,” 1890). Husserl’s

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familiarity with these issues was mainly a result of his own research, for he
had already treated them in Philosophy of Arithmetic, and even more
successfully in the Sixth Logical Investigation. But what was new for Husserl
was the way in which Meinong brought the distinction between simple or
sensuous objects and complex or categorial objects into conjunction with
another distinction — that between “temporally distributed” and “temporally
undistributed” objects. An object is termed “temporally distributed” if it
necessarily has a temporal extension and can therefore never come completely
to givenness in one current, momentary grasp. Meinong’s example of such an
object is a melody, and he investigates its mode of givenness with respect to
the question of whether it is possible to perceive a melody — in other words,
whether the melody is a simple object or an “object of a higher order.” This
investigation culminates in the question of whether the perception of a melody
is already included along with the successive perception of successive tones,
or whether the melody is only given at the end of the series of tones belonging
to it — and indeed, in a subsequent, simultaneous survey of all the tones along
with a synthetic representation of their melodic unity. Meinong decides for the
latter solution, arguing above all that successive perceptions would only
suffice for the experience of “classes”, but not for grasping the entire Gestalt
of a “movement” such as that found in the course of a melody. In this way the
melody becomes an object of a higher level, and grasping it requires bringing
a logical representation into play along with the sensuous experience of the
tones. Translated into Husserl’s terminology, the supposed perception of a
melody is for Meinong an act of categorial intuition (“mixed” with the
sensuous).
Husserl agrees with Meinong’s remark that the succession of perceptions of
a current object in no way guarantees the perception of an objective succession
or duration. But the impossibility of sensuously perceiving a melody only
follows from this if one also subscribes to Meinong’s further presuppositions
or prejudices. The most important of these prejudices — one that Meinong
quite consciously opposes to Stern’s assumption of an extended presence-time
— is the limitation of perceptual intuition to the grasping of a point-like,
current object or object-moment. Husserl speaks in this connection of the
“idealizing fiction” of a “mathematical time-point” (No. 29, 225). What
follows from this is, on the one hand, the impossibility of the perception of a
movement: all that can be perceived in a current perception is a current object,
and in the succession of current perceptions, successive current objects are
indeed perceived, but not the succession of these objects. On the other hand, it
also follows from Meinong’s limitation of consciousness to a point-like
present that a movement or melody can only be grasped if all of its successive
moments or tone-components are given simultaneously, i.e., now, and are
encompassed in a current synthetic representation. This then leads Meinong to

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the phenomenologically implausible claim that a melody would only be
grasped when it has come to an end, and that such grasping would be the
achievement of a subsequent categorial synthesis. But if this were the case, it
becomes completely incomprehensible how any current grasping of all of the
tones simultaneously given could succeed in representing the melodic
sequence of these tones.
Husserl’s own analysis of the perception of a melody appeals first of all to
the insight he had already acquired into the “extension” of the present. It is
nevertheless clear that this actually can and must mean two different things: 1)
in each momentary perception, an objective movement or duration is
perceived by virtue of the retention and protention surrounding the now-
consciousness (No. 30 through No. 33); and 2) the momentary perception is
itself a merely non-self-sufficient part, an “ideal limit” (cf. No. 27, 210), “an
abstractum” (No. 29, 227) within the temporal extension of the perceptual
process.
In his analysis of the enduring perception of an enduring temporal object,
Husserl makes use of the “apprehension – apprehension-content” scheme, now
fully mature and exercising unqualified domination over the
phenomenological characterization of “the consciousness of internal time.”
This scheme comes from the realm of linguistic experience, where a linguistic
sign is apprehended as standing in for the sense or object meant in the
linguistic act. However, Husserl chiefly applies the scheme in the
phenomenological analysis of the perception of the spatial object termed a
“thing.” The division of thing-perception into apprehension and presentive
content is meant to take into account the fact that the entire thing is indeed
meant or apprehended, even though only a part of the thing is presented in
intuitive appearance. In the Logical Investigations (cf. the Sixth Investigation,
§§22, 25–26), Husserl speaks of a mixed form of “representation” or
apprehension of a sensuous content: thing-perception is composed of
distinctly different apprehensions, one of which interprets the apprehension-
content as an appearance (in the proper sense) of the intuitively given side of
the thing, while the other apperceives the apprehension-content as non-
intuitive, as a merely signitive presentation of the hidden side of the thing. This
is exactly the scheme that Husserl uses in the 1905 time lectures in order to
make the perception of the temporal determinations of a (transcendent) object
comprehensible. Here it is first of all a matter of understanding how a current
phase of the perception is able to grasp not only the corresponding current
phase of an enduring perceptual object, but also its past and future phases.
According to Husserl, this phenomenon is to be understood in such a way that
the current perceptual act is built up from distinctly different apprehensions,
one of which is directed through the apperception of the current primal
sensation towards the current state of the object, while the others are related,

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by means of the retentional and protentional apperception of modified
sensation-contents, to the past and future states of the object.
The momentary phase of a perceptual process is accordingly a nexus or
“continuum” of “apprehensions” (along with the “apprehension-contents”
belonging to them) related to present, past, and future phases in the duration
or movement of the perceptual object. Husserl’s term for this perceptual phase
(a phase in which the temporal extension of the perceptual object is
immediately perceived in a single moment) is “intuitive continuum of a cross
section” (No. 33, 232). This cross-section perception of an enduring temporal
object is structured in such a way that the current phase of the temporal object
is emphatically perceived — and indeed, is perceived through the current
apprehension of a current “presenting” apprehension-content — while the past
and future phases of the temporal object are simultaneously co-perceived in
current apprehensions of current but modified apprehension-contents that are
thus no longer sensuously “presenting” apprehension-contents. In the case of
the (co-)perception of a past object-phase, i.e., in the case of retention, this
modified apprehension-content is characterized as a “phantasm” (No. 33,
233). If the momentary phase of the perception is a continuum, then the course
of the perception is consequently “a continuum of these continua, which …
follow on from one another continuously, phase by phase, thereby constituting
the unitary consciousness of the whole temporal object” (No. 32, 231). An
enduring temporal object such as a melody can only be fully brought to
givenness as a whole in an enduring perception. Hence the synthetic
consciousness that connects and unifies the phases of this enduring perception
with one another cannot be understood as a logical-categorial act. Instead,
what is at stake is a continual sensuous “fusion” of non-self-sufficient phases,
each of which already points beyond itself and overlaps other phases (No. 29,
227). And what comes to presentation in this continuity of perceptual phases
is both a new object-now and the temporal recession in which the previously
objective now is pushed back, thereby giving rise to the consciousness of an
objective continuity.
Nevertheless, in these texts Husserl’s analysis of the enduring perception of
an enduring temporal object is still shaped by the theory of inner perception
that he had already previously developed, particularly in the Logical
Investigations. It is only by keeping this in mind that we can understand why
Husserl can claim, as if it were completely obvious, that “since evidently
perception and what is perceived are phenomenally simultaneous …, it
follows that the perception of a temporal object must be a temporal object and
that both coincide as far as their phenomenal extension is concerned” (No. 29,
226). But this seemingly trivial observation is already implicitly placed in
question by the phenomenological analysis of continual perceptual
consciousness that Husserl was carrying out at that time. On the one hand, the

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difficulty is that in comparing the course of the perception with that of the
perceived, Husserl still has no way to characterize the presupposed
consciousness of the “succession” of “momentary intuitions” correctly and
without an “infinite regress” (No. 34, 236). On the other hand, it follows from
the characterization of a perceptual phase as a momentary consciousness of an
objective duration that there are quite essential structural differences between
the phase of the continuity of the perception and the phase of the continuity of
the perceived temporal object. Even the first time-diagrams (No. 31 and No.
34) already make it completely clear that in each of its phases, the course of
perception simultaneously recapitulates and modifies the entire sequence of
tones that have already run off. In the later texts, the more precise analysis of
this constant retentional modification then definitively undermines the dogma
of a linear flow of consciousness, and along with it, the presuppositions of a
postulated structural similarity between the movement of consciousness and
the movement of temporal objects.
This phenomenological investigation of the perception of a temporal object
that endures in constant alteration or non-alteration, and is enduringly given,
provides the centre of gravity of the texts arising in connection with the
February 1905 time lectures. And the main reason why this analysis is
deservedly termed phenomenological is that the temporal determinations of
the perceptual objects are derived from the description of their modes of
givenness, i.e., the temporal determinations of the corresponding perceptual
processes. This phenomenological reduction of object-time to the time of
(lived) experience follows from Husserl’s self-understanding of
phenomenological science in terms of “freedom from presuppositions,” a
principle already developed in the Logical Investigations (see Husserliana
XIX-1, 24f. [Introduction, §7]). In the formulation of Text No. 19 (187f.), this
“reduction” signifies “the complete exclusion of all suppositions with respect
to objective time,” as well as the limitation to what is “phenomenologically
given,” i.e., “what is adequately given in the intuition of time.” In contrast to
the texts of Group 3 (1906–1909), however, here we cannot yet speak of a
transcendental-phenomenological reduction. One clear proof of this is that the
idea of constitution is still lacking in the earlier material: we can only speak of
transcendental constitution when it is possible to take phenomenological-
intentional correlations into consideration, i.e., when the intentional object is
also taken up, as correlate or “noema,” into the field of phenomenologically
“pure” phenomena.
But if this is the case, how was it possible for Husserl subsequently to think
that he can “already find the concept and correct use of ‘phenomenological
reduction’” (237 n. 1) in Text No. 35, written in Seefeld in Summer 1905?
There can be no doubt that the issues taken over from the February 1905 time
lectures are treated in greater depth in this text. The problem of the perception

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of an enduring temporal object now comes into sharper focus in terms of the
question of the consciousness of the identity of the perceptual object.
Compared to Text No. 28, for instance, here Husserl makes a much clearer
distinction between the individual identity of the temporal object and the
abstract identity of the temporal stretch. These objective identities are traced
back to the identity-consciousness that not only accompanies the course of
continually changing temporal fillings, but is explicitly responsible for
synthetically linking together past and present appearances of the object and
relating them to the latter’s identical unity. With this, the objective identity is
phenomenologically converted into an intentional correlate of identity-
consciousness. Nevertheless, a truly transcendental-phenomenological
consideration of constitution is not yet reached here, above all because Husserl
cannot make up his mind to accept the past appearances of the object
necessarily involved in identity-consciousness as “pure” phenomena.
Moreover, the phenomenon of the absolute consciousness within which the
temporal duration of the consciousness of the identity of the enduring object
comes to givenness — a phenomenon that is indeed compellingly brought to
the fore by the matters discussed in this text — is still not explicitly included
in the phenomenological consideration. Among all of the texts of Group 2, No.
35 admittedly comes the closest to the “correct use of ‘phenomenological
reduction.’” Nevertheless, I do not find the reduction truly thought through and
realized there. Perhaps the slight self-deception embodied in Husserl’s
subsequent remark can simply be explained by the fact that Texts No. 36
through No. 38 were written not in Seefeld in 1905, but in 1917 — something
overlooked not only by Husserl when he was assembling the bundle of
manuscripts (No. 35 through No. 38) to which the remark in question refers,
but also by the editor of Husserliana X.
In addition to the treatment of the perception of temporally distributed
objects, the texts of this Group 2 also make yet another essential contribution
to a further issue: namely, to the understanding of recollection. While the earlier
texts from around the time of the Logical Investigations still characterized
recollection as a type of image-consciousness throughout (cf. No. 2, No. 9, No.
10, No. 15), Texts No. 27 and especially No. 18 subject this interpretation to a
radical critique. (This is also the reason why I suggest that Text No. 18 dates
from 1904, and not “around 1901,” as the editor of Husserliana X suggests.)
What “hovers before me” in recollection is the past object itself, not something
else that is merely similar to it. Naturally, the past object isn’t perceived, either;
nothing at all is perceived in the act of recollection, not even an image or sign.
Instead, recollection “reproduces” a perception, and this is why it is the
recollected object itself that appears, while at the same time it still appears as a
past object. The key concept of this analysis of recollection is the act of
reproductive “presentification” or “re-presentation” (No. 18, 186; No. 34, 234),

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which is now clearly differentiated from perceptual “making-present” or
“presentation” (cf. also Husserliana XXIII, Text No. 2(c) [1905]).11 However,
the new theory of recollection reaches its final form only with the introduction
of the notion of “absolute” consciousness in the texts of Group 3 (see especially
No. 45). Here it should merely be mentioned that the texts from 1904/05 also
bring recollection into relation with identity-consciousness (No. 28, No. 35)
and succession (No. 34). Thus it already becomes clear in these 1904/05 texts
that recollection plays an essential role in the phenomenological constitution of
objective time (cf. also the more detailed presentation in §32 of Heidegger’s
edition of the time lectures).
Our Group 3 includes Texts No. 39 through No. 47 as well as No. 51 and
No. 52, all written between 1907 and 1909. The criteria setting the bounds for
this group of texts arise above all on contentual grounds — namely, the
introduction of the notion of “absolute” time-consciousness in the Winter
Semester 1906/07 lecture course on the one hand, and on the other hand, the
critique of the application of the “apprehension – apprehension-content”
scheme to this absolute consciousness, a critique developed only after
September 1909 in the texts of Group 4. The centre of gravity of Group 3
therefore lies with the discovery of absolute consciousness and its preliminary
description in terms of the scheme mentioned, as well as with the task of
bringing absolute consciousness to bear on the theory of recollection, which
now receives its fully mature form. In addition, the texts of this third group
once again demonstrate that crucial moments in the development of the
analysis of time-consciousness are linked with turning points in Husserl’s
thinking as a whole. Thus in the 1906/07 lectures, shortly before the
introduction of the notion of absolute time-consciousness, we find Husserl
explicitly taking into consideration — also for the first time — the
phenomenologically “pure” givenness of “objectivity” as a “correlate” of the
intentional act, as well as the new, transcendental-constitutive characterization
of the “phenomenological reduction.”12 Then after 1908, Husserl explicitly
embraces the idealistic consequences of this theory of transcendental-
phenomenological reduction. And in Text No. 51 (from Summer Semester
1909), this leads to an expansion of the realm of phenomenologically “pure”
givens to include phenomena to which no apodictic validity can be granted.
Likewise, the new theory of retention (and especially of the constitution of a
unitary stream of consciousness) developed between 1909 and 1911 in the
texts of Group 4 is once again closely connected with other phenomenological
issues, and above all with the theory of the pure I and the phenomenology of
intersubjectivity.
We already said that what distinguishes the texts of our Group 3 from those
of Group 2 is first of all the systematic consideration of absolute
consciousness. This is an entirely decisive turn that nevertheless emerges

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from, rather than breaking with, the development leading up to it. For Husserl,
it is still a question of coming up with an appropriate phenomenological
description of the perception of temporally extended objects. The 1904 and
1905 texts that were chiefly devoted to the dispute with Meinong are already
quite explicitly related to a description of the temporal structure of the
perceptual process in which temporally extended objects such as melodies are
grasped. Husserl even goes so far as to posit a relationship of “simultaneity”
between the course of the melody and the course of the perception. With this,
however, a consciousness of the temporal flow of the perception itself is also
presupposed alongside the consciousness of the duration of the perceptual
object — something that Husserl was already occasionally noticing in 1905
(cf. 236). But is this temporal extension of the perceptual process perceived in
precisely the same way as the melody? And what about the further perception
in which the perception of the temporal continuity of tone-perception is once
again grasped in its turn? One can also set forth this state of affairs, which is
already pressing around 1904/05 towards the assumption of a so-called
“absolute consciousness,” as follows. The perception of a temporal object rests
upon so-called “adumbrations” of this object. Yet what is perceived is the
object, not the adumbrations, or more precisely, the object is perceived by way
of the adumbrations. These adumbrations are therefore moments of the
perceptual consciousness — moments that are not themselves perceived, but
nevertheless do belong to the conscious awareness of the object. What exactly
is going on with this particular mode of consciousness in which adumbrations
(or any immanent temporal objects whatsoever) are lived through
experientially? How are the consciousness of the adumbrations and the
consciousness of the perceptual object related to one another? And
furthermore, what about the consciousness in which the consciousness of the
adumbrations is itself experienced — or must we say: perceived?
Husserl already poses these questions quite explicitly in the Winter
Semester 1906/07 lecture course, and answers them by referring to “absolute
consciousness.”13 Absolute consciousness is a “lived experience” of the
components of a perceptual consciousness that intentionally refers to an
object. Husserl already points out that this absolute consciousness or lived
experience of perception is actually no longer consciousness of an object, and
that hence it cannot be called a perception in the proper sense of the term.
Since it is also in the 1906/07 lectures that the idea of phenomenologically
“pure” intentional correlations and the idea of a transcendental-
phenomenological reduction are formulated for the first time, we might claim
that even with the first, still tentative application of the phenomenological
reduction to the issue of the perception of temporal objects, a dimension of
constituting consciousness is revealed that leads far beyond the framework of
a phenomenology of perception.

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 Among the texts of Group 3, it is above all Text No. 39 that follows up on
these insights from 1906/07 by once again taking up and clarifying the
question of absolute consciousness. (However, it is not only contentual
grounds, but also historical grounds — i.e., the reconstruction of the 1906/07
lectures — and material grounds, i.e., handwriting and paper, that indicate a
date of 1909 for Text No. 39 rather than the “beginning of 1907,” as the editor
of Husserliana X suggests.) In this text Husserl proceeds from the new insight
that not only the perception, but also “the perceived as such” is an absolutely
itself-given “pure” phenomenon, and that as a consequence, the correlation
between perception and perceptual object can be analyzed within the
framework of the phenomenological-transcendental reduction. Applied to the
problems pertaining to a phenomenology of time-consciousness, and to the
perception of temporal objects in particular, this yields, on the one hand, the
possibility of contrasting the inner temporality of perceptual consciousness
with the objective time of the perceptual object, differentiating the one from
the other; on the other hand, however, it also yields the possibility of uniting
them in a constituting-constituted relation. But with this, it is not so much a
matter of solving a problem as it is of setting the ball rolling: namely, once
objective time has been phenomenologically traced back to the temporality
that constitutes it (that of the phenomenologically “pure” perceptual
consciousness), the question immediately arises of the consciousness in which
the temporality of this inner time-consciousness is constituted. Husserl’s
attempt at a solution consists, first, in postulating an “absolute consciousness”
of immanent temporal objects; second, in requiring the possibility of a
“reflective perception” of the absolute consciousness; and third, in positing a
pre-objective temporality of this absolute “flow of consciousness” that differs
from the temporality of transcendent and of immanent objects. But one has to
wait for the texts of Group 4 (1909–1911) to find a systematically worked out
phenomenological foundation of these assumptions.
In Text No. 39, the notion of absolute consciousness is introduced through
the analysis of the phenomenologically reduced perception of an immanent
temporal object, namely, an enduring sound. Thus what is confirmed here is
the insight already gained from considering the Winter Semester 1906/07
lecture course, i.e., that Husserl’s notion of “absolute consciousness” does
indeed stand in close connection with the transcendental-phenomenological
reduction, as well as with the focus on constitutive correlations. In this new
context, the enduring sound is characterized as an intentional-immanent,
unitary (individual-identical) correlate of a flowing perceptual consciousness
in which ever new “sensation-adumbrations” are continually apperceived, by
a parallel continuum of “apprehensions,” as appearances of this unitary sound.
The phenomenologically reduced sound-perception thus brings into play a
double concept of “immanence” or of consciousness — the immanence of the

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unitary sound on the one hand, and the immanence of the flow of sensations
and their apprehensions on the other. And the latter “flow of consciousness is
the possible having and apprehending of the sound” within which the
“temporal unity … ‘becomes constituted’” (284). This flow of consciousness
is called “absolute consciousness” because it constitutes the unity of immanent
temporal objects, yet is itself no longer constituted through a further form of
consciousness: “Unity is unity of objectivation, and objectivation is precisely
objectivating but not objectivated. All nonobjectivated objectivation belongs in
the sphere of the absolute consciousness” (286).
Nevertheless, it turns out on closer inspection that this initial, seemingly
convincing characterization of absolute consciousness still contains a number
of discrepancies and contradictions. Thus on the one hand, the absolute,
ultimately-constituting consciousness is simply identified with the perception
of the unitary enduring sound. On the other hand, however, it is also clear that
this perception of the sound is itself a temporally limited enduring process
whose own temporal unity would once again have to be constituted in a further
consciousness — and so in infinitum. Thus the threat of an infinite regress
occurs not only in the constitution of unitary temporal objects, but also in the
characterization of the consciousness of the absolute flow of consciousness
itself. Husserl refers to this as a “reflective perception of the second level”
(286) that is indeed directed towards absolute consciousness, yet
simultaneously objectivates it — and in a certain sense, also fails to grasp it
for this very reason. Whatever level a reflective perception may belong to, it
remains an absolute consciousness only as long as it is not perceived. Given
the received concept of consciousness, however, consciousness that is neither
perceived nor perceivable can only be called “unconsciousness,” and absolute
consciousness would therefore have to be given the strange title of an
unconscious conscious immanence. In the end, Husserl’s distinction between
the temporality of immanent objects and the temporality of the flow of
absolute consciousness is completely unsuccessful. It is not enough simply to
claim that the contents of absolute consciousness do not endure and would
therefore not be “temporal,” in the sense of immanent temporal objects, at all
(cf. also No. 42, No. 44, No. 45). In other words, as long as these contents of
absolute consciousness are termed “apprehensions” and “apprehension-
contents,” there is no distinction whatsoever between the structure of absolute
consciousness and the structure of immanent temporal objects (between, e.g.,
“sensation-adumbrations” on the one hand, and “sensations” and their
apprehension in the perception of an object on the other). It is also difficult to
see why a mediation through presentive apprehension-contents would still be
needed at all if the constituting and the constituted both belong to
consciousness itself as really intrinsic components. We will see in the
treatment of the texts collected in Group 4 that a plausible theory of absolute

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consciousness is only possible if one abandons the “apprehension –
apprehension-content” scheme and refrains in principle from any use
whatsoever of the perceptual process as a model for absolute consciousness.
However, the notion of absolute consciousness in the Group 3 texts shapes
not only the analysis of the perception of immanent temporal objects, but also
the understanding of recollection. The analysis of memory worked out in Text
No. 45 in particular brings to completion a line of development in which at
first the dispute with Brentano, then later the description of memory as an act
of positing reproduction or presentification, as well as the resulting critique of
the characterization of memory as a type of image-consciousness (cf.
especially No. 18), have all played a decisive role. The essential contribution
of the notion of absolute consciousness to the understanding of recollection
consists above all in clarifying the way in which memory and the remembered
belong together — more precisely, in determining both the difference between
the currently actual now and the past now, and the possibility of a current
givenness of the past as past.
Recollection and retention are two essentially different modes in which the
present intentional consciousness is related to the past. In retention, the past is
given immediately, i.e., as a horizon seamlessly adhering to the (perceptual)
present. Moreover, retention is not merely related to a past that was “just now”
present (as Husserl’s somewhat misleading way of speaking might suggest),
but — correctly understood — encompasses the totality of phases of the
absolute flow of consciousness that have already run off. Even a distant, non-
intuitive past still somehow remains “freshly” in awareness due to the fact that
every new retention not only modifies all previous retentions, but at the same
time also implicitly recapitulates the entire chain of past retentions, and to this
extent “carries within [itself] … the heritage of the whole preceding
development” (327). As to the essence of recollection, here too it cannot be
determined from the extent of the temporal distance between the present
remembering and the remembered past. It is in no way the case that as the
freshness decreases and the distance from the present increases, retention of
the past would be replaced of its own accord, as it were, by recollection. There
are recollections of the more recent and the more distant past, and there is no
recollection whatsoever that does not presuppose a retentional “holding onto”
the past present. Nevertheless, in recollection this past is not just something
that we can grasp and are aware of in some way, as in retention; instead, it is
explicitly present “once again,” “anew.” Naturally, it is not present as
something present, but rather is present as a past present. This is also the sense
of the characterization of recollection as an act of “presentification” or “re-
presentation.”
But how can the past become present anew without forfeiting its character
as past? How is the temporal “distance” between the present remembering and

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the remembered past to be preserved despite a certain “simultaneity” of the
remembering and the remembered? As I sit here at my desk remembering, how
can the view from a mountain that I climbed on my vacation be intuitively
itself-given — and indeed, with the explicit consciousness that it is a matter of
the same view that I have already actually seen once before? How is it possible
that I can once again survey, right now, the view I perceived at the time,
shifting my glance from the village in the plain to the ship on the lake, perhaps
even doing so with more explicit attention than I originally did at the time? All
this can only become comprehensible when we take into account the “double”
intentionality of recollection (300). Like every other form of presentification,
recollection is a peculiar encasement (Verschachtelung) of two different lived
experiences, with one contained in the other — namely, the present
remembering on the one hand, and on the other hand, the past experience that
is remembered within it. But this interlacing is not a relationship of founding,
for the earlier perception is merely a non-self-sufficient moment of the present
remembering: the view now stands before my eyes with the consciousness that
it does not fit in with the surroundings of my present reality, here at my desk,
but belongs to the reality of a past perceptual present. This living in two
different realities that are nevertheless both essentially linked with my
consciousness can also be expressed by saying that in the remembering, the
view is indeed actually intuitively given anew, but at a distance, rather than
being something I can seize “in person.” Yet I am not simply dreaming or
fantasizing, for not only does the view stand before my eyes anew, possibly
just as it did at the time, but I also believe that I actually perceived it in
precisely this way at that time. And it makes no sense to doubt that this view
now actually stands before my eyes, intuitively itself-given; all that I can be
mistaken about is my belief that everything really was precisely this way at
that time, just as it now stands before my eyes once again, albeit at a distance.
Husserl has subjected all of these questions (and phenomena) concerning
memory to a careful transcendental-phenomenological analysis. Yet the
general framework within which these investigations move is marked by a
series of preliminary decisions that are anything but obvious for the reader
today. Thus without further ado Husserl characterizes the past as a present we
were previously aware of and memory as the most faithful reproduction
possible of a past perception. With this he not only neglects the necessary and
positive intertwining of remembering and forgetting, but also denies himself
any access to a phenomenology of the historical understanding that lends the
past a sense it did not yet have in original-present experience (and moreover,
a sense that in most cases necessarily had to remain hidden to such original
experience). Husserl’s fixation on inquiring into the conditions for attaining a
memory that is free from deception — his dream of the omnipresence of the
entire life of my consciousness on call and at my disposal at any moment —

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ultimately betrays a positivistic horror of the past as the locus of an absolute
and fundamental absence, of an inexorable withdrawal and an irreplaceable
loss. For Husserl it goes without saying that memory is always a matter of a
recollection that makes the past present again, not a matter of turning away
from one’s present life and transporting oneself into (and possibly losing
oneself in) the past.
For Husserl recollection is an intentional act that simultaneously affirms the
difference and the identity of two presents that are intimately united despite
the temporal distance between them. It is also an act characterized by a
peculiar simultaneity in which the same object appears “at the same time” as
past and as now, as absent and as present. This is the paradoxical achievement
of presentification, which breaks through the rigid boundaries of a
phenomenology of internal time-consciousness oriented entirely towards
perception. Nevertheless, the characterization of recollection as
presentification still does not explain 1) how the remembered present has
become past; 2) why the past does not merely remain accessible just
anywhere, in just any way, but is appreciated and recognized by a present
remembering consciousness as being a “part” of itself, despite the temporal
distance; and 3) how it is also still possible to transpose oneself into the
remembered past present in such a way that one is tense with expectation
while awaiting a future that in the meantime has long since become past.
The answer to the first question refers to the accomplishment of retention,
and to the previously mentioned dependence of recollection upon retention.
This retentional consciousness of the past is indissolubly linked with the
consciousness of a currently actual now. Thus retention is nothing other than
a consciousness of the transition or the passing of the now into a no-longer-
now, and this transition belongs neither to the sound heard now nor to the
sound that is no longer now; it is a phenomenon for the absolute consciousness
of the sequence of sounds.
The second question refers to the intimate unity between remembering and
remembered, which makes it possible to overcome the temporal distance
between present and past, transporting the past into a present in which it does
attain intuitive itself-givenness as an identical individual once again, but not
itself-givenness in person. This unitary connection between the present of the
remembering and the past of the remembered can be explained by the fact that
both of them belong to the same flow of absolute consciousness. Both lived
experiences are experienced by the flowing stream of the same consciousness.
It is thus always possible in principle to fill in the gap between present and
past, i.e., to explicate the future horizon of the presentified past step by step
until one arrives at the present in which the act of remembering is taking place.
No matter how far apart the temporal horizons of the remembering and
remembered acts may be from one another, they are still moments of the same

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absolute consciousness, and always remain implicitly in contact with one
another. This all-encompassing unity of the absolute stream of consciousness
is indeed what first makes remembering possible at all — but at the same time,
remembering is also necessary in order to grasp this unity explicitly. One
might even claim (going beyond what Husserl actually says) that the unity of
the absolute stream of consciousness is the phenomenological foundation for
the awareness of the identity of the pure I that is formally presupposed by
memory (one can only recall one’s own lived experiences), yet only attains
intuitive givenness in the explicit performance of remembering.
And the third question formulated above is related to the localization of the
remembered past within the continual flow of lived experiences. We believe
that what we are recalling in the memory is not only the view seen from a
mountain; rather, we are also more or less explicitly remembering what
preceded it (climbing the mountain) and what followed it (reaching for the
water bottle). The temporal localization of seeing the view does not change its
relation to the preceding climb and the subsequent drink from the water bottle,
no matter how far back in the past these lived experiences lie. Thus a system
of temporal locations within which a fixed place is assigned to all immanent
temporal objects is also constituted at the same time as the past lived
experience is retentionally preserved. And both of these — i.e., the
preservation of the identical unity of various past lived experiences within the
flow of constantly shifting temporal adumbrations, on the one hand, and the
constitution of a formal system of temporal locations encompassing these
lived experiences on the other — are accomplishments of the retentional
intentionality functioning in absolute consciousness.
Answering these three questions has therefore led us back to the same
phenomenon again each time: namely, the effective operation of retention in
absolute consciousness. The treatment of this problem also provides the true
centre of gravity for the texts of Group 4.
The texts of Group 4 were written between September 1909 and the end of
1911. Distinguishing these texts from those of Group 3 that likewise stem
from 1909, or even from the “end of August 1909” (No. 52), rests on a
contentually determined criterion — namely, the critique of the use of the
“apprehension – apprehension-content” scheme for the characterization of
absolute consciousness and retention (cf. No. 49), a critique formulated in
September 1909 at the earliest. (In contrast, Texts No. 51 and No. 52 still make
use of this scheme, and this is why they are included in Group 3.) Text No. 50
then takes the critique of the scheme for granted and develops the new theory
of absolute consciousness, with special emphasis on retentional modification.
The dating of this text given in Husserliana X — “between October 15, 1908
and the summer term of 1909” — therefore proves to be extremely
implausible. Group 4 accordingly consists of Texts No. 48 through No. 50

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along with Texts No. 53 and 54. And the issues forming the centre of gravity
of these texts include making the concept (and the achievement) of absolute
consciousness more precise and offering a critique of the application of the
“apprehension – apprehension-content” scheme to retention, as well as
working out a new understanding of retentional intentionality. Texts No. 50
and No. 54 offer the most important contributions to the treatment of these
matters.
Moreover, it is once again informative to establish the connection between
this group of texts dealing with the phenomenology of time-consciousness and
the treatment of other issues in texts from the same period (between the end of
1909 and the end of 1911). The previously mentioned tendency towards
broadening the research domain of transcendental-phenomenological
epistemology continues in these years as well. Apart from the transcendental
elucidation of formal mathesis and the consideration of material ontologies,
there is also a growing emphasis in texts of this period on the analysis of acts
of intuitive presentification. Here the relative shift of interest from the
phenomenology of perception to the phenomenology of memory and fantasy
directly depends on the analysis of time-consciousness. But exactly the
opposite is the case with the theory of “empathy” that is systematically worked
out during the Winter Semester 1910/11 (and in the preparatory texts for this
lecture course).14 Here it is the question of the possibility of the
presentification of another consciousness that allows the question of the unity
of one’s own stream of consciousness to move more and more into the
foreground in the corresponding time-analyses. In the course of these 1910/11
lectures on “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,” Husserl is also occupied
with the problem of the possibility of a phenomenological science of facts.
This is the first time that a systematic connection is at least implicitly made
between time-consciousness and the phenomenological analysis of the
facticity of facts, of the individuality of human persons and of their
membership in the intersubjective community. The development of the
connection between time and intersubjectivity — a link established for the first
time here — will then play an essential role in shaping the transition from a
phenomenology of time-consciousness to the phenomenology of history found
in the texts of the 1920s and 1930s.
We have claimed that both making the theory of absolute consciousness
more precise and coming to a new understanding of retentional consciousness
form the true centre of gravity of these Group 4 texts. In reality, these two
issues can hardly be separated from one another, since here absolute
consciousness is almost exclusively analyzed in terms of its retentional
achievements, and retention is predominantly analyzed as a function of
absolute consciousness. Both the constitution of the unity of immanent
temporal objects within the flow of absolute consciousness and the givenness

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of the unity of this flow itself refer to different yet “inseparable” directions of
retentional intentionality at work in absolute consciousness. The critique of the
description of retentional consciousness as the apprehension of a really
intrinsic, immanent, yet modified sensation-content also yields new insight
into the peculiar temporality of absolute consciousness. The new theory of the
retentional intentionality of absolute consciousness confirms the recognition
of a fundamental difference — one that is both structural and phenomenal —
between the perception of the objects of objective time and the “inner”
experience of the form of temporality proper to consciousness itself.
The application of the “apprehension – apprehension-content” scheme to
time-consciousness is supposed to make it comprehensible how the past and
future states of a perceptual object are simultaneously (co-)perceived within
the current phase of the perceptual act along with the current state of this
perceptual object. The currently actual phase of the perceptual act would then
be characterized as a continuum of apprehension-contents and corresponding
apprehensions, one of which is directed to the object as it presents itself right
now, while the others are related to the past and future phases in the course or
duration of the perceptual object. Husserl offers a pregnant summary of this
theory towards the beginning of his critical deliberations in Text No. 49, when
he poses the question: “Do we have a continuum of primary contents
simultaneously in the now-point and, in addition to this and simultaneous with
it, a continuum of ‘apprehensions’?” (322).
Even apart from the phenomenologically implausible division of a sensuous
perceptual act into a continuum of partial intentions, this theory implies the
further difficulty of understanding how something other than a now of the
temporal object can ever come to givenness within a continuum of current
apprehension-contents (along with a simultaneous continuum of current
apprehensions): “But can a series of coexistent primary contents ever bring a
succession to intuition?” (323). A new stage of the critique is then reached
when the difficulties connected with using the scheme are explicitly related to
the understanding of the constitutive function of absolute consciousness. The
non-temporality of the absolute flow of consciousness is now no longer simply
postulated for fear of an infinite regress, as is still the case in Group 3 texts,
but is subjected to detailed phenomenological investigation. This results in, for
example, the insight that in contrast to the immanent temporal objects (e.g.,
sounds, melody) constituted within absolute consciousness, this consciousness
itself is not a temporal process in which a phase can be expanded into a
continuous succession and in which the flow can proceed more quickly or
more slowly (cf. No. 54, 370). Applied to the retentional intentionality of
absolute consciousness, this means not only that the simultaneity of current
apprehensions or apprehension-contents makes the consciousness of temporal
succession impossible, but also that we cannot talk about “simultaneity” and

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“current contents” in absolute consciousness at all: “The flow of the modes of
consciousness is not a process; the consciousness of the now is not itself now.
The retention that exists ‘together’ with the consciousness of the now is not
‘now,’ is not simultaneous with the now …” (No. 50, 333).
It follows from this more precise characterization of the non-temporality of
absolute consciousness that absolute consciousness cannot be understood in
the same terms as a perception of the temporal determinations of transcendent
objects, for their structures are not parallel. Any possible transfer of the
“apprehension – apprehension-content” scheme to the description of absolute
consciousness is accordingly undermined. Correctly understood, the non-
temporality of absolute consciousness has the result, first, that it cannot be
composed of temporally localized contents given in it, and second, that the
postulated distinction between intentional (i.e., apprehensions) and non-
intentional (i.e., sensation-contents) moments of this absolute consciousness
lacks any phenomenological foundation. The now of a sound is not constituted
by a current primal impression that — as a pre-intentional, really intrinsic
content of absolute consciousness — would still depend on an apprehension
for its intentional reference to the sound-now. The primal impression does not
consist of anything like a sound: it is not a “sense datum,” but the sensing of
the sound. Thus the primal impression is the pure intentional consciousness of
the sound-now; it is the pure actuality of absolute consciousness. Likewise,
retention is the absolute consciousness of the sound-past, and there is no need
for something in the really intrinsic, pre-intentional contents of absolute
consciousness to stand in for the past sound. The sound we are aware of
retentionally is “a modification that is no longer a primary content in the sense
of something actually present …. On the contrary, it is something modified: a
consciousness of past sensation” (No. 49, 324). And this new characterization
of primal-impressional and retentional intentional awareness of the sound also
avoids the infinite regress within time-constitution that results from the
application of the “apprehension – apprehension-content” scheme to absolute
consciousness.
Absolute consciousness is pure intentionality. Yet with the treatment of the
retentional intentionality of absolute consciousness, the question immediately
arises of what kind of intentionality is really at stake here. If this retentional
consciousness can no longer be understood as the intentional apprehension of
a modified but nevertheless present sensation-content, then there is no longer
any compelling reason to term this retentional past-consciousness a
perception. Husserl is clearly aware of this, and in Text No. 54 he begins to
speak of retention as a unique form of “presentification” or “reproduction.”
Naturally, Husserl still wants to maintain the distinction between retention and
recollection (cf. 376). But the tendency to distance retention from perception,
and to bring it more closely in line with the structure of an act of

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presentification (with its double intentionality), is unmistakable (cf. 380).
Retention is a currently actual past-consciousness belonging to absolute
consciousness, a past-consciousness in which — similarly as with recollection
— both a past immanent temporal object and a moment of absolute
consciousness having constituted it (a moment that has now flowed away) are
intuitively given. In contrast to recollection, however, the retentional
presentification does not let the past run off anew; it is not a reproduction of
what has already flowed away, but a constantly modifying consciousness of
this very flowing off away from the present and constantly sinking further into
the past. As a moment of the non-temporal actuality of absolute consciousness,
retention naturally has no duration either — unlike the act of recollection, it is
not an immanent temporal object. Instead, retention is a primal recalling that
makes recollection possible, not only by holding on to what is to be recalled
as it sinks into the past, but also by contributing to the constitution of the
present remembering itself as an immanent temporal object.
However, the unique double intentional direction that is characteristic of the
retentional presentification of the past does not fully become clear until we
turn from the consideration of a currently actual primal impression (and the
currently actual retention joined to it) to the analysis of the flowing continuity
of retentional consciousness. Namely, it is only in the flow of retentional
consciousness that the constitution of the unity of the immanent temporal
object that is sinking (along with its temporal location) into the past, on the
one hand, and the constitution of the self-appearance of the unity of the
flowing absolute consciousness, on the other hand, both take place. Since each
currently actual retention necessarily depends on a currently actual primal
impression, then this flow of retentional consciousness is also necessarily
linked with the living, streaming present of ever newly emerging primal
impressions. When primal impression 0 passes over into primal impression 1,
then “together” with this primal impression 1, there also arises a retention 0
related to primal impression 0. Yet despite this interweaving of the flow of
retentional consciousness and the flow of primal-impressional consciousness,
there are essential structural differences between the two flows. This
difference is ultimately derived from the fact that primal impression is a
consciousness of the present, while retention is a consciousness of the past. It
follows from this that the sequence of primal impressions can still be
represented, if need be, in the form of a horizontal line, while the sequence of
retentions breaks open this linear flow, spreading out into a sequence of
present retentions and a sequence of the continual “sinking away” of
successive present moments into the past (cf. the diagrams 365 and 330f.). In
reality, however, the continuity of retentional consciousness does not merely
give rise to the splintering of the absolute flow of consciousness into two or
more lines, as represented in these diagrams: since each new retention is not

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merely related to the preceding retention, but through this to a retention lying
still further back, and so forth, each retention presentifies the whole of the
course of absolute consciousness that has already flowed off — and does so in
the form of a retentional “encasement” (Verschachtelung). And if each
retention encompasses the entire course of consciousness in a movement of
stepwise mediation, then a diagram using concentric circles or a spiral is a far
better way to present a graphic display of the continuity of retentional
consciousness than is a diagram consisting of a nexus of straight lines fanning
out from one another. Each new retention ripples through the whole of time-
consciousness like a stone cast into the water; each newly arising retention
shifts the entire system of pasts encased in one another, just as a tree growing
from the centre displaces its previous rings. Or in a more prosaic image,
retentional consciousness is like a greedy cow (or other ruminant) for whom
new nourishment is never lacking — but who lacks the possibility of
discharging itself of what has already been consumed.
Continual retentional consciousness is thus a movement of constant yet not
linear modification. At the same time, a consciousness of the flow of primal
impressions that have already run off also arises within this retentional
continuum: since each currently actual retention is linked with a currently
actual primal impression, retention 1 is both retention 1 of primal impression
1 and retention 1 of retention 0 of primal impression 0. Even more
importantly, both retention and primal impression are forms of intentional
consciousness related to immanent temporal objects. What we are aware of in
retention 0 is not merely the presence of a just-past primal impression 0, but
also the temporal object 0 (now just-past) constituted through primal
impression 0. What we are aware of in retention 1 is then not only primal
impression 1 along with retention 0 of primal impression 0, but also the now
just-past temporal object 1 along with temporal object 0, which has already
receded still further into the past. In the transition from retention 0 to retention
1 we are therefore (subsequently) aware not only of the transition of primal
impression 0 into primal impression 1, but also of the transition of immanent
temporal object 0 into immanent temporal object 1.
Thus the continuity of retentional consciousness displays a double
intentionality in which what comes to intuitive givenness is the non-temporal
flow of absolute consciousness — the transition from primal impression 0 to
primal impression 1 — on the one hand, and on the other hand, the temporal
sequence of immanent temporal objects given across and through the absolute
flow of consciousness. The term Husserl uses for the intentional direction of
the continual retentional consciousness running “along” the flowing absolute
consciousness is retentional “Längsintentionalität” — “horizontal
intentionality” (379f.). What comes to “self-appearance” in this “horizontal”
intentionality is the flow of absolute consciousness, both as the unitary form

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of the flowing, and as the flow of ever new primal impressions that flow away
and sink into the past. And the term Husserl uses for the retentional
consciousness that runs across and “through” the self-appearance of the
absolute flow of consciousness, and is directed towards the sequence of
immanent temporal objects constituted within this flow, is retentional
“Querintentionalität” or “transverse intentionality” (380).15 More precisely,
what comes into view in this “transverse” intentionality is not only the
sequence of individual temporal objects, but also any individual immanent
temporal object continually sinking further into the past. And what is
constituted when the sound-moment moving further and further away from the
present is retentionally held fast, along with its temporal position, is both the
unity of the individual immanent temporal object and the identity of its
temporal position. In retentional transverse intentionality, the absolute flow of
consciousness constitutes the individual temporal objects, along with the
system of temporal positions pertaining to them; in retentional horizontal or
longitudinal intentionality, absolute consciousness appears to itself, although
only subsequently — and even then, not as an object, but as a non-temporal
flow of pure intentional actuality.

III
The “Supplementary Texts” in Husserliana X reach their systematic
culmination with this determination of the self-appearance of the absolute
flow of consciousness. At the same time, Husserl brings to a (provisional)
conclusion a train of thought in which he visibly distances himself from
certain prejudices that had marked his initial approach to the
phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness. What is particularly
significant is the distance between an analysis of the properties of
spatiotemporal objects that is still conducted in terms of the model of thing-
perception, on the one hand, and the retentional self-appearance of the flow of
absolute consciousness on the other. The time-constituting flow itself is no
longer a temporal object; it cannot be perceived, and can never be immediately
grasped at all, but is only grasped retrospectively. Moreover, the constitution
of unitary temporal objects in this absolute flow of consciousness does not
take the form of a perceptual process that is split up into apprehension-content
and apprehension, but takes place in the continuity of retentional
presentifications. Thus the self-appearance of the flow and the constitution of
(immanent) temporal objects go hand in hand: they are two “inseparable”
aspects of the retentional intentionality in which the flow of consciousness
subsequently recapitulates itself — and its intentional objects — in a
constantly modified manner. The intentionality that is proper to both of these
forms of retentional consciousness arises from the tension between present
and past. Nevertheless, retentional intentionality does not bridge the gap

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between them; instead, it confirms the inexorable (self-)loss of presence. The
continuity of retentional consciousness is a differentially iterative process in
which both subjective self-consciousness and objective time-consciousness
emerge, after the event, from the constantly modified retentional withdrawal
in which absolute consciousness moves away from itself. And with this, the
difference between the linear time of objects and a consciousness of this time
— a consciousness neither “in” time nor having time “in” it — does not rest
upon an original identity, but on the endless self-differentiation of the absolute
flow.
However, we must not gloss over the fact that the theory of the non-
temporality of absolute consciousness (and its self-appearance in the
retentional “horizontal”-intentionality) that is set forth in these texts still
leaves much that needs to be clarified. And the resulting open questions,
obscurities, and irresolvable aporias are not confined to the time-analyses that
Husserl himself carried out in these later years, but have left their mark on the
treatment of the problem of time in the further development of the
phenomenological movement.
The first of these issues is the relationship between primal impression and
retention. On the one hand, Husserl is clearly concerned to establish the
primacy of the currently actual primal impression. Retention is a mere
appendage or relic, a “comet’s tail” preserving the memory of the past glory
of the shining present (cf. 377f.). On the other hand, however, the primal-
impressional present of absolute consciousness necessarily requires retention
in order to become present itself, after the fact and as marking the boundary of
the previous retentional stretch. Thus rather than the primal impression being
preserved “within” the retention, the two are actually separated in an original
form of “externality” in which each pole presupposes the other, yet neither can
be derived from the other. Husserl also characterizes this absolute
consciousness’s present as a flowing nexus of “being-all-at-once concerning
one moment” (Momentan-Zugleich) and of “being-all-at-once-concerning
temporal extension” (Zeitstrecken-Zugleich) that makes it possible to grasp
both objective simultaneity and objective succession (374f.). But this involves
Husserl in a further problem — namely, that constituted, immanent time is
presupposed in the phenomenological characterization of the absolute
consciousness that constitutes this time.
Husserl does continually emphasize that this absolute consciousness is
“nontemporal; that is to say, nothing in immanent time” (334; cf. also 369).
Yet he immediately finds himself compelled to add the following admission to
this claim: “We have no alternative here but to say: This flow is something we
speak of in conformity with what is constituted …. For all of this, we have no
names” (371). Of course, that for which we have no names is not automatically
nothing just because we cannot name it, and it is not a mere construction just

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because it cannot be phenomenologically grasped solely in terms of itself. We
can nevertheless be sure that when we cannot avoid a metaphorical mode of
expression, whatever is being “named” in this way is not directly and
immediately accessible. If absolute consciousness can essentially only be
categorized in terms of the immanent-objective time constituted in it, then it
can hardly be claimed — even in an ontological sense — that this
consciousness is an “absolute” ground such that “nulla re indiget ad
existendum.” Instead, the phenomenology of time-consciousness forces us to
the opposite conclusion: namely, that time-constituting consciousness cannot
exist without the distinction between this consciousness and the time
constituted in it. Once again it turns out that what is termed “absolute”
consciousness of time is pure difference — retentional difference from itself
as self-presence, as well as difference from the time of immanent objects that
it constitutes. Thus it is the phenomena themselves — the very phenomena
Husserl analyzed — that depart from his preconceived concept of
phenomenology.
On the final page of Husserliana X, Husserl makes a desperate attempt to
bring these wayward phenomena back to the straight and narrow metaphysical
path, dreaming that “there is, in addition, an ultimate consciousness that
controls all consciousness in the flow” (382). This ultimate consciousness
would thus have the privilege of freeing itself from any entanglement with the
iteratively differential movement of the flow; it would not simply limp along
behind a continually withdrawing consciousness of time, but grasp it
immediately in attentive perception. When he awakens from his dream,
however, Husserl has to realize that he cannot get rid of the reality of the
difference: the only way to escape the infinite regress is to characterize this
ultimate consciousness as an “unconscious” consciousness, thereby
surrendering to a difference that threatens the autonomy not only of “absolute”
consciousness, but of time-consciousness as a whole. To phenomenological
thinkers after Husserl, however, this threat to the phenomenology of time-
consciousness appeared as a way out of the endless aporias of a reflective-
theoretical phenomenalizing of a time that in the end still remains out of view.
Heidegger’s new analysis of the unity of temporal ekstases, as well as the
ensuing critique of the epistemological approach in Husserl’s theory of time-
consciousness, has unmistakably left its mark on later phenomenological
thinkers. Such thinkers are constantly taking exception anew to the
metaphysical presuppositions of an internalization of the phenomenon of time
in a subjective consciousness that represents objects. And in connection with
this, an alternative way of understanding time is recommended — although a
development can be traced in which this alternative existential approach is
replaced with analyses of time inspired by ethics and linguistic philosophy.
But even this step beyond Heidegger is still essentially propelled by the

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pragmatic frame of reference of Heidegger’s early work. Thinkers like Lévinas
and Ricœur are not deterred by the difficulty that Husserl had already
complained of — namely, the difficulty of finding an appropriate name for the
event of time — but concentrate on the articulation of time in action-related
linguistic forms such as verbs or narratives. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty,
Lévinas, Derrida, and Ricœur all also contrast Husserl’s concept of the present
as a primal source with a concept of difference — which is likewise easily
recognizable as a legacy of Heideggerian philosophy.
Although a direct influence of the Husserlian phenomenology of time-
consciousness on the development of Heidegger’s own understanding of time
can practically be excluded, there are nevertheless points of correspondence
between Husserl and Heidegger, despite the vehemence of Heidegger’s
critique of Husserl’s subjectivation of a time described as a linear flowing-
off.16 Both of them proceed from temporal predicates such as “then,” “at that
time,” and “now,” and both of them try to work out a phenomenological
analysis of the connection between constituted time and constituting time.
Like Husserl, Heidegger too distinguishes three levels of time, referring to
time (Zeit), temporality (Zeitlichkeit), and Temporality (Temporalität) in his
lecture course of the Summer Semester 1927.17 And Heidegger’s analysis of
constituted time is also initially oriented in terms of the conventional
differentiation between the temporal dimensions of present, past, and future,
as well as the correlative modes of comportment — making-present,
remembering, and expecting. But with this, the analogies are largely
exhausted, since the efforts of Heideggerian thinking are directed precisely
towards a progressively radicalized attempt to break away from the “vulgar”
pre-understanding of time to which Husserl remained true to the bitter end of
his aporetic dissolution. Thus Heidegger’s new approach does not merely
concentrate on emphasizing the unity, intertwining, and co-originality of the
different dimensions of time, along with an action-oriented understanding of
time; rather, what is at stake is also, and above all, deepening the notion of
intentionality and thinking time as transcendence. This transcendence,
however, is not to be understood as an objectivating intention transcending the
consciousness that gives rise to it, nor is the terminus of this transcendence to
be understood as a (present at hand) object. Instead, transcendence is an
(ontological) horizon out of which entities can first be encountered at all. And
with this single master-stroke, Heidegger is attempting not only to dodge the
subject-object dichotomy, since it fails to do justice to the phenomenon of
time, but also to give the old question of the origin of time a new sense.
Transcendence is accordingly “ecstatic temporalizing,” and time or “tempo-
rality is itself the self-unifying ecstatic unity in ecstatic temporalization.”18
Hence “temporalization” (Zeitigung) and “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit) do not
refer to a relation where the former is understood as a psychological origin or

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as a transcendentally constituting source and where the latter concerns
essentially objective entities; rather, these terms serve the philosophical
characterization of the understanding of being as a whole. Time and being
belong together: temporality is not only the condition of possibility for
Dasein’s concernful comportment towards intratemporal entities, but also the
condition of possibility for Dasein’s understanding of its own being. Even the
understanding of the meaning of being as a whole and of its difference from
all of the various entities is likewise only possible within the horizon of
“Temporality” (Temporalität). Thus there is a huge contrast between Husserl
and Heidegger, and perhaps an unbridgeable distance, for in his ontologization
of the problem of time, Heidegger eventually goes so far as to identify time
with the ontological event of unconcealment. To be sure, we can already
ascertain a similar interest in ontological questions in Husserl’s “Bernau
Manuscripts.”19 Yet for Husserl, ontology remains a theory of objects. Thus an
ontological analysis of the “absolute” time-constituting consciousness implies
a (reflective) objectification of this consciousness, running the risk of being
untrue to the characterization of such consciousness as difference. Perhaps no
other thinker has taken this tension between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s
phenomenology of time as seriously as Eugen Fink (nor has anyone had a
harder time bearing up under it). And this is perhaps the true reason why Fink
was not able to complete the edition of the “Bernau Manuscripts” that Husserl
had entrusted to him.
It was above all the French phenomenologists who subsequently carried on
the confrontation with Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness that
Heidegger had set in motion. What links these thinkers in their analysis of
time, regardless of the independence of their respective points of view, is their
critique of the presuppositions of Husserl’s time-understanding. They all take
exception to characterizing the current moment as the original mode of time
(and ultimately, the sole being-bestowing mode); they all turn against a linear
characterization of temporal modification; and they emphasize that this
modification has the character of an original difference that a reflective
philosophy of consciousness can never catch up with. It is worthy of note that
this critique of Husserl seems to represent an indispensable step for all of these
phenomenologists, despite the fact that their paths soon part company from
there. And an even greater tribute to Husserl’s phenomenology of time-
consciousness can be seen in the fact that in their critique of Husserl’s
methodical and systematic self-understanding, these thinkers nevertheless rely
on phenomena already discovered by Husserl himself.
In Merleau-Ponty, the critique of Husserl’s phenomenology of time-
consciousness is to be found above all in the later work, in which — under the
palpable influence of Heidegger — the analysis of perception and of embodied
consciousness recedes in favour of ontological and linguistic issues. While the

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discussion in Phenomenology of Perception is still in agreement with the
Husserlian time-diagram upon which it comments,20 the critique predominates
in the posthumous manuscripts and working notes published as The Visible
and the Invisible. In the latter work Husserl’s diagram is said to present a linear
conception of time,21 and its fundamental merit to lie in the analysis of
retentional modification. This analysis is, however, criticized for its all too
strongly marked preference for an abstract concept of the present that is not
able to do justice either to the continual “shrinking” of the temporal
perspective or to the problem of forgetting the past.22 In truth, the present could
never be brought into coincidence with itself, but would be “difference,”
“transcendence”: “even the Urerlebnis involves not total coincidence, but
partial coincidence, because it has horizons and would not be without them
….”23
Despite justifiable reservations with regard to theories of lineage in the
history of philosophy, it is tempting to see the thought of Lévinas as
continuing that of Merleau-Ponty on the one hand and as providing an
essential source of inspiration for Derrida on the other. In any case, such a
classification does have a certain validity when it is a matter of Lévinas’
understanding of time and his critique of Husserl’s analysis of time-
consciousness.24 Like the early Merleau-Ponty, and in contrast to Heidegger,
Lévinas sees the close link made between time and sensibility to be the
greatest merit of Husserl. In “Intentionality and Sensation,” he tells us that
Husserl’s “absolute consciousness” would be the locus of an insurmountable
distance “between the sensing and the sensed,”25 and thus the origin of
intentionality as well: “The mystery of intentionality lies in the divergence
from … or in the modification of the temporal flux.”26 And as the origin of the
transcending intentionality, “absolute consciousness” itself would be yet
another kind of intentionality — not an objectivating intentionality, but an
operatively functioning intentionality, an “event,” or more precisely, the “after-
the-fact” event of conscious grasping: “Consciousness of time is not a
reflection upon time, but temporalization itself; the after-the-fact of realization
is the after of time itself.”27 Regardless of this transposition of time-
consciousness into a sensibility that is always already split off from itself,
however, Lévinas concludes that Husserl’s analysis of time displays clear
traces of an overbearing transcendental consciousness, whereas genuine
diachrony is reached only when the responsibility for the other expels the self
from its own self-possession.
There is also favourable mention of the connection Husserl established
between time and sensibility, as well as of the discovery of difference in the
primal event of temporal modification, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond
Essence. But here too Lévinas’ critique is once again directed towards the
claim that consciousness can abrogate temporal difference within the self-

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contained identity of the self. Husserl is said always to attempt to recuperate
the fleeing difference, the insurmountable distance of the present from itself,
through conscious retention and recollection and to take possession of it
again.28 In contrast to the earlier work, Lévinas opposes the analysis of the time
of consciousness not only to the diachrony of ethical responsibility, but also to
the time of language — more precisely, of the verb. While Husserl still thought
that language could play no role in a philosophical analysis of time because
suitable “names” for the temporal events are lacking, Lévinas emphasizes that
the essence of language does not at all lie in naming. Instead, the verb would
be the basic function of language; the verb would be time, and time would be
the verb of being: “The temporal modification is not an event, nor an action,
nor the effect of a cause. It is the verb to be.”29
Derrida’s critique of the time-understanding emerging from Husserl’s
philosophy of consciousness radicalizes the rejection of an autonomy of the
present that Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas had already formulated.30 For Derrida
too the present is instead difference, uncontrollable auto-affection, and
distance mediated by space as well as by the (written) sign. Instead of an
origin it is a “trace” or an “originary supplement.” However, Derrida radically
places in question the possibility of genuinely overcoming the metaphysical
understanding of time. The focus of Derrida’s critical confrontation with
Husserl concerns the characterization of the tension pervading the unity of
primal impression and retention. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida attempts
to show (in close connection with the wording of the Husserlian text)31 that
there can be no primal impression without retention, no self without its
difference from an other, no presence without absence:
… the living now, produced by spontaneous generation must, in order to be a now and to be
retained in another now, affect itself … with a new primordial actuality in which it would
become a non-now, a past now — this process is indeed a pure auto-affection in which the
same is the same only in being affected by the other, only by becoming the other of the same.
… The living present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of
a retentional trace. It is always already a trace. … Being-primordial must be thought on the
basis of the trace, and not the reverse.32
The context of this quotation makes it clear that this trace has to do with a
moment of indissoluble materiality that contaminates the purity of the auto-
affection just mentioned, thereby blocking any annulment of the différance of
primal impression and retention by recouping it in a dialectic relationship.
Derrida sees this as a further proof of his thesis that there can be no self-
presence without the mediation of (linguistic) signs: “The fact that
nonpresence and otherness are internal to presence strikes at the very root of
the argument for the uselessness of signs in the self-relation.”33 Just as the
“nonpresence” of the retentional past belongs to the “presence” of the primal
impression, so also would the empirically existing linguistic sign necessarily
belong to the pure signification of an (ideal) linguistic expression. If there is

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no pure (i.e., momentary-immediate), completely intuitive and inward self-
presence, then there is also no pure-intuitive thinking, no linguistic expression
that completely fits the thought, no adequate understanding of linguistic
statements and texts. And once the sanctuary of presence as an absolute
belonging-to-oneself is breached, it is no longer possible to ward off the
conquest of philosophy by the infinitely multifarious figures of difference.
In his early essays on Husserl, Ricœur is interested above all in the
connection between time-consciousness and egological self-consciousness.
What he sees as most questionable is the way in which Husserl thinks he can
characterize time as an infinite horizon of shifting givens on the one hand, and
on the other hand as an egological totality encompassing the flow of
consciousness.34 Although Ricœur is clearly following Kant in developing this
problem, readers today will also be struck by the systematic kinship with
Lévinas’ critique of the totalitarianism of self-consciousness. In his later work
Time and Narrative, Ricœur then undertakes a broadly conceived confronta-
tion pitting phenomenology of time (Augustine, Husserl, Heidegger) against
what he calls a “poetic” approach, which he already finds in, for instance,
Aristotle’s Poetics. The structure of narrative — which is on the one hand
manifestly at work in fictional literature (and is correspondingly valued by
contemporary literary criticism), yet on the other hand is renounced by
historians belonging to the “école des Annales” and by most scientific models
of historiography — thereby comes to serve as a guide for a new philosophical
understanding of time. For Ricœur’s hermeneutical approach, the conflict
between a phenomenologically experienced time and a narratively recounted
time can accordingly only turn out in favour of the latter. Thus already in
Volume 1 of Time and Narrative, Ricœur openly admits his rejection of the
Husserlian phenomenology of time-consciousness. Just as Merleau-Ponty’s
remark concerning “the impossibility of a complete reduction”35 is intensified
in Derrida’s claim that the reduction is completely impossible, so also does
Ricœur simultaneously summarize all previous critique of Husserl’s time-
understanding and raise the stakes still further when he writes, looking ahead
to the fourth part of his work, as follows: “This impossibility of a pure
phenomenology of time is what has to be demonstrated. By a pure phenol-
menology I mean an intuitive apprehension of the structure of time …. In this
sense, the endless aporias of the phenomenology of time will be the price we
have to pay for each and every attempt to make time itself appear, the ambition
that defines the phenomenology of time as pure phenomenology.”36
Translated by Elizabeth A. Behnke

References
1. The following text is a translation of a slightly revised and abbreviated version of my
“Introduction” to Edmund Husserl, Texte zur Phänomenologie des inneren
Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), xi–lxxvii.

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2. [Edmund Husserl, “Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins,”
ed. Martin Heidegger, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 9
(1928), viii–ix, 367–498; reprinted separately, Halle a. d. Saale: Max Niemeyer,
1928—Trans.]
3. Parenthetical references refer to the pagination of Husserliana X: Edmund Husserl, Zur
Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm (Den
Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966); On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht; Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1991). The English translation includes the Husserliana X page numbers in
the margins.
4. [This is, of course, the subtitle of the original 1891 edition of Philosophie der
Arithmetik; see Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten
(1890–1901), ed. Lothar Eley (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970); Philosophy of
Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from
1887–1901, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003)—
Trans.]
5. Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), ed. Bernhard Rang (Den
Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 269–302; Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic
and Mathematics, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1994), 313–44. [Text Nr. 1 of Husserliana X corresponds to pp. 269–83 of Husserliana
XXII, pp. 313–26 in the English ed.—Trans.]
6. On this point Husserl is in agreement with the position already advocated somewhat
earlier by L. William Stern, “Psychische Präsenzzeit,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und
Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 13 (1897), 325–49; “Psychische Präsenzzeit / Mental
Presence-Time” (German / English text on facing pages), trans. Nicolas de Warren, The
New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 5 (2005),
310–51. William James had also pointed out, prior to Husserl, that the present is not to
be understood as a knife-edge, but rather as “a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of
its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into
time”—The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890), 609. Husserl had already read
James in 1891/92 and above all in 1894, and this quite probably influenced his
discovery of the “extension” of the present. It is possible that Husserl never read Stern
himself, but knew of his work only through a report by Meinong in the latter’s essay
“Über Gegenstände höherer Ordnung und deren Verhältnis zur inneren Wahrnehmung,”
Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 21 (1899), 182–272, rpt.
in his Abhandlungen zur Erkenntnistheorie und Gegenstandstheorie. Gesamtausgabe
2, ed. Rudolf Haller (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1971), 377–471;
“On Objects of Higher Order and Their Relationship to Internal Perception,” in Marie-
Luise Schubert-Kalsi, Alexis Meinong: On Objects of Higher Order and Husserl’s
Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 137–208—an essay that Husserl
read in September 1904. For Husserl, becoming acquainted with Stern’s position
probably meant at best nothing more than a subsequent confirmation of an insight he
had already had into the temporal extension of the perceptual present.
7. Husserl always refers to Brentano’s early time lectures, the contents of which were
known to him only indirectly through the reports of older Brentano students, above all
Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty, although Stumpf refers to lectures from Winter Semester
1872/73 while Marty refers to lectures from 1868 to 1870. Brentano’s faithful student
Oskar Kraus emphasizes, in a polemic attack on Husserl’s critique of Brentano, that by
the end of 1894, Brentano had already given up the positions that Husserl was
criticizing between 1901 and 1905. Both the testimony of Stumpf (“Erinnerungen an

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 Franz Brentano”) and that of Marty and Kraus (“Toward a Phenomenognosy of Time
Consciousness”) have in the meantime become readily accessible in Linda L.
McAllister, ed., The Philosophy of Franz Brentano (London: Duckworth, 1976),
especially 135f., 225, 230. Only Brentano’s later time-analyses were posthumously
published — see Franz Brentano, Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Raum, Zeit und
Kontinuum, ed. Alfred Kastil (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976).
8. These “time lectures” form the fourth and concluding part of the lecture course on
“Main Topics from the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge” of Winter
Semester 1904/05. The first two main topics of this 1904/05 course were published for
the first time in a critical edition in Husserliana XXXVIII: Edmund Husserl,
Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), ed.
Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giuliani (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004); the third, devoted
to a phenomenological investigation of fantasy and image-consciousness, was
published in Husserliana XXIII: Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein,
Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus
dem Nachlass (1898–1925), ed. Eduard Marbach (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980);
Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). The fourth main topic, on “The Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time,” provided the basis for Edith Stein’s reworking,
which was then published, with Martin Heidegger as editor, in 1928 (see n. 2 above)
under the title “First Part: The Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time from
the Year 1905” (= Husserliana X, 3–134). Subsequent research by Rudolf Boehm,
editor of Husserliana X, has nevertheless shown that only a small portion of this text
actually rests on the 1905 lectures—namely, §§1–6; parts of §§7 and 11; §§16–17 and
19; part of §23; §30; part of §31; §32; part of §33; and §41. On the other hand, Texts
Nr. 29 through Nr. 33, related above all to Meinong, undoubtedly do stem from the
1905 lecture course, although they are not taken into account in the Stein-Heidegger
version.
9. [See “An Essay Concerning the Theory of Psychic Analysis,” in Marie-Luise Schubert-
Kalsi, Alexis Meinong (see n. 6 above), 73–135—Trans.]
10. [See “On Objects of Higher Order and Their Relationship to Internal Perception,” in
ibid., 137–208—Trans.]
11. [Both “presentification” and “re-presentation” are often used to translate
Vergegenwärtigung (Brough’s translations of the time manuscripts in question and of
Husserliana XXIII use “re-presentation”; “presentiation” is sometimes also used by
other translators), while both “making-present” and “presentation” are often used to
translate Gegenwärtigung—Trans.]
12. Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Vorlesungen 1906/07,
ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984); Introduction to Logic and
Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/07, trans. Claire Ortiz Hill (Dordrecht: Springer,
2008).
13. Cf. ibid., §§42ff.
14. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass.
Erster Teil: 1905–1920, ed. Iso Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), Texts Nr. 5
and Nr. 6 (and the relevant Beilagen); The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From
the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911, trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2006).
15. [James S. Churchill’s translation of the Stein-Heidegger version of the time lectures,
The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1964), §39, uses “longitudinal intentionality” for

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 “Längsintentionalität” and “transverse intentionality” for “Querintentionalität”; for
Brough’s reasons for following him in the latter case and departing from him in the
former case, see pp. 85 n. 9 and 86 n. 11 of the Brough translation. Husserl’s spatial
metaphors are meant to capture two sorts of constitutive accomplishments
simultaneously carried out by one and the same flow of consciousness: 1) the flow
constitutes its own unity in the flowing continuity of retentions-of-retentions, while 2)
the continuously enduring immanent temporal objects are constituted in and through
this flowing unity. But what the “directional” character of the spatial metaphors really
refers to is the direction of the phenomenological “look”: one can look “along” the
unity of the flow that is both continually “prolonging” itself and preserving the
reticulation of retentions as a whole, or one can make a ninety-degree shift, as it were,
in order to look in a different direction, focusing on the enduring immanent temporal
objects intended in each phase of the flow—Trans.]
16. Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Zeit bei Husserl und Heidegger,”
Heidegger Studies 3/4 (1987/88), 89–104.
17. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975); The Basic Problems
of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1982)—[see 384f. for Hofstadter’s remarks on rendering the
Zeitlichkeit/Temporalität distinction in English—Trans.].
18. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz,
ed. Klaus Held (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 266; The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 205.
19. Edmund Husserl, Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewußtsein (1917/18), ed.
Rudolf Bernet and Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945),
477f.; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1962), 417f.
21. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard,
1964), 248; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 195.
22. Le visible et l’invisible, 227, 248f.; The Visible and the Invisible, 173, 194f.
23. Le visible et l’invisible, 249; The Visible and the Invisible, 195.
24. Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Lévinas’ Critique of Husserl,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Lévinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 82–99.
25. Emmanuel Lévinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J.
Vrin, 1967), 153; Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and
Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 142.
26. En découvrant, 156; Discovering, 145.
27. En découvrant, 154; Discovering, 143.
28. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, 2nd ed. (La Haye:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 41; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 32.
29. Autrement qu’être, 43; Otherwise than Being, 34.
30. Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Is the Present Ever Present? Phenomenology and the Metaphysics
of Presence,” trans. Wilson Brown, in Husserl and Contemporary Thought, ed. John
Sallis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983; rpt. of Research in
Phenomenology 12 [1982]), 85–112.

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31. Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la
phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), especially
67ff., 93ff.; Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), especially 60ff., 83ff.
32. La voix et le phénomène, 94f.; Speech and Phenomena, 85.
33. La voix et le phénomène, 74; Speech and Phenomena, 66.
34. Paul Ricœur , Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard
and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 97, 110.
35. Phénoménologie de la perception, viii; Phenomenology of Perception, xiv.
36. Paul Ricœur , Temps et récit I (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 125; Time and Narrative 1, trans.
Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), 83f.

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