The Living-Present: Absolute Time-Consciousness and Genuine Phenomenological Immanence

Abstract

Having traced different notions of immanence in Husserl’s works from 1900 to 1907 to 1913, we now enter a roughly parallel development in his notion of time-consciousness.1 It’s helpful to keep in mind that our approach to immanence in Husserl’s writings has been to try to capture the broad range of intentionality and intentional experience. Husserl’s 1905 lectures (collected and edited by Edith Stein and Heidegger in 1928) more than roughly model the view of intentionality presented in the Logical Investigations; Husserl’s writings on time-consciousness from roughly 1908–17 (collected and edited by Rudolf Boehm and translated into English by John Brough) in Husserliana, vol. X, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, by contrast, reveal the need to abandon the model of intentionality from the Logical Investigations that influenced the 1905 model of time-consciousness. One way to understand the development in Husserl’s theory of intentionality—a way that also can and perhaps should be seen as a phenomenological elucidation of genuine phenomenological immanence—is to see it as motivated by his reflections on the consciousness of internal time. John Brough has been explained and defended this way and I shall follow his account in this chapter.