The high stakes of temporality

Abstract

As the title suggests, Nicolas De Warren’s Husserl and the Promise of Time is an ambitious book. The author not only offers a rigorous reconstruction of Husserl’s phenomenology of time, but also endeavors to articulate what is philosophically promising about it. While careful reconstruction and interpretation of Husserl’s intricate time-analyses can also be found in other monographs and papers—for example, Kortooms 2002, to cite only the most complete one—an original and strong philosophical statement about why these analyses are interesting to philosophize in the present is something this reviewer has found exclusively in De Warren’s book. It goes without saying that De Warren is not the first phenomenologist to have capitalized on Husserl’s time-analyses. Even a cursory look at the history of phenomenology reveals that virtually every phenomenologist after Husserl was in some way inspired by his work on time-consciousness. Heidegger’s Being and Time or Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (to name but two particularly prominent cases) can be viewed as brilliant attempts to rethink and amplify the notion of temporality originally explored by the founder of phenomenology. However, every single phenomenological work in which a serious effort was made to articulate an original standpoint on temporality is generally characterized by a departure from, or at least a criticism of, Husserl’s approach. In some cases, it has been alleged that Husserl’s discoveries about time-consciousness stand in a sharp tension, if not utter contradiction, with his conception of transcendental subjectivity as the absolute and self-transparent foundation of all further being. Given this background, the novelty of De Warren’s position consists in his thoroughly positive disposition towards Husserl’s achievements. The originality of his conclusions is not achieved via a critique of Husserl but rather via an attempt to spell out creatively the philosophical consequences of his work on temporality. This, however, is not just a