Time and Formal Authenticity: Husserl and Heidegger

Abstract

Husserl’s transcendental conception of the relation between time-constitution and immanent time was still very far off conceptually when he delivered the 1905 Time Lectures. The conceptual framework of his General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology 1 of 1913 maintains that the status of all mental processes (or lived experiences, Erlebnise) as occurring in the flux of immanent time is achieved through constitutive functions which cannot be authentically understood as occurring in time at all, even though they also are bound to be identified as occurring at the present moment in the constituted flux and the flux as occurring to and through the lived body and the lived body as belonging to the life-world. The flux is, therefore, necessarily intended as belonging to world-time. The flux of mental processes and immanent time itself, therefore, are constituted, and the syntheses through which they get constituted do not occur in the flux or in immanent time. Through such synthetic transcendental occurrences, the self makes itself be in time and in the world. Accordingly, the transcendental subject coincides only partially with the subject in the world, but it does so necessarily and can exist only by doing so, by “making” itself be in the world. If vast differences in nomenclature are overlooked, this later position is close in many ways to the one Martin Heidegger2 was developing when he was engaged in editing the 1905 lectures for their first publication.