Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of internal time consciousness has a reputation for being complex, occasionally to the point of approaching impenetrability. The latter applies in particular to his remarks about what he calls the ‘absolute time-constituting flow’,1 some of which Husserl himself describes as “shocking (when not initially even absurd)” (Husserl, 1991, p. 84). Perhaps it is because many readers of Husserl have found the passages on the absolute flow off-puttingly difficult that they have had fairly little impact, outside the specific field of Husserl studies, on the literature on temporal experience at large—certainly much less so than is the case for Husserl’s analysis of temporal experience in terms of the tripartite structure of primal impression, retention and protention. In a major recent study of temporal experience, for instance, Barry Dainton discusses in detail Husserl’s early attempts to give an account of temporal experience in terms of that tripartite structure, but mentions only briefly later developments that also feature the notion of the absolute flow, commenting that he “find[s] the relevant Husserlian writings obscure” (Dainton, 2006, p. 160). I believe this state of affairs is unfortunate for two reasons. First, there is actually a fairly straightforward way of making sense of the notion of the absolute flow with the help of some theoretical notions familiar from recent philosophical work on perception. Secondly, that way of making sense of the notion of the absolute flow connects directly to two sets of ideas that are still at the centre of current debates about temporal experience. Historically, Husserl is arguably the thinker who explored most thoroughly the possibilities of what is sometimes called an intentionalist approach to temporal experience.2 And what I want to argue is that his remarks about the absolute flow show what happens if one tries to accommodate, within an intentionalist framework, the thought that temporal experience itself necessarily unfolds over time. More specifically, I want to suggest that many of Husserl’s remarks about the absolute flow can be made intelligible, if we understand them as remarks in which he is trying to introduce what can be thought of as an externalist element into his intentionalist view of temporal experience—externalist because it makes how we experience things as being at one time constitutively dependent on how, at other times, we experience them as being. My focus in what follows will be in particular on two recurrent themes in Husserl’s remarks about the absolute flow. They are the two themes that offer perhaps the most obvious initial resistance to interpretation. But they can, I think, be made sense of if we understand Husserl along the lines just suggested. The following two quotations provide representative examples of them: Time-constituting phenomena […] are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them. Hence it also can make no sense to say of them (and to say with the same signification) that they exist in the now and did exist previously, that they succeed one another in time or are simultaneous with one another, and so on. (Husserl, 1991, p. 79) The flow of the consciousness that constitutes immanent time not only exists but is so remarkably and yet intelligibly fashioned that a self-appearance of the flow necessarily exists in it, and therefore the flow itself must necessarily be apprehensible in the flowing. The self-appearance of the flow does not require a second flow; on the contrary, it constitutes itself as a phenomenon in itself. The constituting and the constituted coincide. (Husserl, 1991, p. 88) I will call the claim at issue in the first of these quotes the non-temporality claim. According to it, there is a sense in which the absolute flow is to be thought of as something to which temporal categories such as succession or simultaneity don’t apply. The claim at issue in the second quote I will call the self-appearance claim. The flow is what Husserl calls “absolute subjectivity” (Husserl, 1991, p. 79)—i.e., the form that my awareness of temporal phenomena ultimately takes—but there is also a sense in which it includes an awareness of itself. Or so the claim goes. My plan for this paper is as follows. In the next two sections, I will present two existing accounts of the emergence of, and motivation behind, the idea of the absolute flow in Husserl’s writings. The first is centred on the thought that Husserl’s embracing the notion of the absolute flow marks the point at which he abandons a particular picture of perceptual consciousness developed in the Logical Investigations, which is often referred to as the schema of content and apprehension. The second takes at its starting point the thought that the idea of the absolute flow is meant to block a regress that threatens to ensue if we think of experience as itself a temporal phenomenon. I argue that a possible weakness of these arguments, as they stand, is that they suggest that Husserl arrives at the non-temporality claim and the self-appearance claim by quite different routes. By contrast, in section 4, I outline a reading of the idea of the absolute flow which fares better in this respect. In sections 5 and 6, I subject the idea of the absolute flow, thus understood, to critical scrutiny. In particular, I argue that it is not clear whether Husserl ultimately provides good grounds for favouring the analysis he ends up over a rival, extensionalist, approach to temporal experience.3 Indeed, as I will suggest, it ultimately seems to be the fact that he endorses a form of idealism about time that provides Husserl’s principal motivation for adopting an intentionalist, rather than an extensionalist view. The first of the extant arguments connected to the idea of the absolute flow that I want to consider might be called the schema argument. To anticipate, according to the schema argument, the emergence of the notion of the absolute flow marks a general shift in Husserl’s views about the nature of perceptual experience—as I will interpret it, its upshot is that Husserl comes to embrace (what would now be called) a version of representationalism about perceptual experience, after initially holding a version of a sense-data view often referred to as the ‘apprehension–apprehension content schema’, or simply ‘the schema’. In other words, the schema argument has it that Husserl comes to realise that the schema does not provide an adequate model through which we can account for our awareness of time. Abandoning the schema, however, generates the need for an alternative account of perceptual experience—and it is against the background of this need that Husserl’s remarks about the absolute flow have to be understood.4 The details of the schema are developed in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. According to it, perceptual awareness of an ordinary physical object or event involves two ‘immanent’ aspects: an experiential ‘content’, and an ‘apprehension’ that ‘animates’ that content in a certain way. My being perceptually presented with the relevant object or event just is the upshot of this animation of the content by the apprehension. It is important to emphasise at this point that Husserl’s use of the term ‘content’ is to be sharply distinguished from the way in which that term figures in current discussions in the philosophy of mind. In the latter, the dominant way in which the term ‘content’ is used is to denote what is also more specifically referred to as ‘representational content’. Put briefly, a content, in this sense, is a property of a representation, typically conceived of as the property of the representation having the veridicality or correctness conditions it has. For instance, a common view about perceptual experience at the moment is that it has a content in this sense, somewhat analogously to the way in which a newspaper story, say, might be said to have a content, and that we can characterize the nature of the experience by giving the content it has. Undergoing perceptual experiences, on this representational view of experience, just is one way of representing the world as being certain ways.5 Husserl’s understanding of the term ‘content’, within the context of the schema at least, is very different from the idea of ‘representational content’, as just outlined. Rather, what Husserl refers to as ‘contents’, within the context of the schema, are particular sensory occurrences to which the subject stands in a relation that is more basic than the relation of representation. Thus, the view of experience embodied in the schema diverges from, or at least goes beyond, the view sketched in the previous paragraph, in that it (also) involves an appeal to such sensory occurrences as a necessary part of perceptual experience. As such, the view is perhaps closer to the idea that perceptual experience involves an experience of sense-data, except that Husserl, in contrast to much of the Anglophone tradition using this term, does not conceive of our relation to such sense-data as one of acquaintance. They are experienced not in the sense of being objects, e.g., of acquaintance, but in the sense of being (aspects of) episodes we undergo (cf. Husserl, 2001a, p. 273). Thus, Husserl also articulates the idea behind the schema in passages such as the following: [T]he inkpot confronts us in perception. […] [T]his means no more phenomenologically than that we undergo a certain sequence of experiences of the class of sensations, sensuously unified in a peculiar serial pattern, and informed by a certain act-character of ‘interpretation’ (Auffassung), which endows it with an objective sense. This act-character is responsible for the fact than an object, i.e. this inkpot, is perceptually apparent to us. (Husserl, 2001b, p. 201) The perceptual presentation arises in so far as an experienced complex of sensations gets informed by a certain act-character, one of apprehending or meaning. To the extent that this happens, the perceived object appears. (Husserl, 2001a, p. 214) As Brough (1972, p. 303) points out, we can think of the key idea at issue in these passages in terms of the combination of two theses. According to the neutrality thesis, perceptual experience involves sensory material, or what Husserl calls immanent sensory contents, which “considered in themselves, are neutral with respect to external reference as such, or reference to any particular object” (Brough, 1972, p. 303). The animation thesis, correspondingly, states that external reference or reference to a particular object depends on a second element: the apprehension that animates the content.6 For present purposes, it is the neutrality thesis, in particular, that is of relevance. For the schema argument, in essence, has it that Husserl came to see the neutrality thesis as incompatible with some of the commitments of his analysis of temporal consciousness, and that it was this that lead to the emergence of the idea of the absolute flow. One way of approaching the argument is by asking what it would take to bring experiences of temporally extended phenomena, such as a succession of tones, within the remit of the schema. A fundamental aspect of Husserl’s approach to temporal experience is expressed in the following quotation: Temporal objects […] spread their matter over an extent of time, and such objects can become constituted only in acts that constitute the very differences belonging to time. But time-constituting acts are—essentially—acts that constitute the present and the past. […] Temporal objects must become constituted in this way. That implies: an act claiming to give a temporal object must contain in itself ‘apprehensions of the now,’‘apprehensions of the past,’ and so on …. (Husserl, 1991, p. 41; cf. also p. 239f.) I will call the general view expressed in this passage intentionalism about temporal experience. Put briefly, intentionalism about temporal experience has it that the fact that we can have perceptual experiences, e.g. as of movement or change, is to be explained in terms of the idea of a particular intentional structure that experience possesses. Husserl puts this in terms of the idea that temporal experience involves ‘acts that constitute the very differences belonging to time’. This, of course, is where Husserl’s famous tripartite distinction between primal impression, retention and protention comes in.7 Temporal experience reflects ‘the very differences belonging to time’, in the sense intended by Husserl, in so far as it involves an awareness not just of what is present, but also of what has just been, and—to some extent—of what is yet to come. Whilst listening to the three tones do-re-mi played in succession, for instance, my being aware of the re as present necessarily also involves my being aware of the do as just-past and, in some sense, of the mi as yet to come. This, for Husserl, is required for my perception to amount to a perception of the succession of tones, rather than just a succession of separate perceptions of each tone. And ‘primal impression’, ‘retention’ and ‘protention’ are the terms he uses to designate the forms of awareness of the present, the past and the future, that thus form aspects of any temporal experience. We will have further occasion to examine the precise way in which primal impression, retention and protention figure in Husserl’s account. For the moment, the basic point is that the schema, as articulated in the Logical Investigations, seems unable to account for the type of awareness involved, for instance, in retention. The way in which we are aware of the just-past in retention cannot be accounted for on the model of sensory material that is animated by an apprehension. For what could the relevant sensory material be? That, at any rate, is what Husserl comes to think: The just-past tone, as far as it falls into the present time […] is still intended, but not in the sense that it is actually being really and immanently ‘sensed,’ not in the sense that it is there in the manner of a now-tone […] In short, there is a radical alteration, an alteration that can never be described in the way in which we describe the changes in sensations that lead again to sensations. According to its essence, sensation is consciousness of the now. (Husserl 1991, p. 336) Husserl also summarizes the point here by saying that “the now cannot stand before me as not-now, the not-now cannot stand before me as now” (Husserl, 1991, pp. 334f.). Any account of how I come to be perceptually aware of the succession of the tones do-re-mi, for instance, has to acknowledge that, when the re is sensed, the do is no longer sensed, and the awareness of the do as just-past can also not be explained by there being something other that is sensed now.8 As mentioned above, it is the neutrality thesis, in particular, that means that the schema is incompatible with Husserl’s analysis of temporal experience in terms of primal impression, retention and protention. As Sokolowski puts it: the datum cannot be temporally neutral; it has to be a present datum if it is to be around for apprehension and interpretation… And if the datum is present, where do we get any direct awareness of pastness, of the falling into absence which characterizes temporal objects? Consciousness is glutted with the present; the datum is temporally indigestible. (Sokolowski, 1974, p. 146) I have been assuming that the schema, as Husserl developed it in the Logical Investigations, can usefully be understood as a version of a sense-datum theory of perceptual experience, in particular with respect to the element Husserl calls the ‘content’. I now want to suggest that his remarks about the inability of the schema to account for temporal experience can be seen as signalling a move away from a sense-datum theory of perceptual experience to a version of what would nowadays be called a representational view of experience.9 On this interpretation, when Husserl says that, as primal impression passes over into retention, “there is a radical alteration, an alteration that can never be described in the way in which we describe the changes in sensations that lead again to sensations”, he means something like the following. The distinction between primal impression and retention cannot be captured in terms of the idea of a difference in the properties of something mediating my experience, along the lines of the sensory contents envisaged by the schema. Rather, ‘primal impression’ and ‘retention’ simply stand for different, not further analysable, ways my experience is, in virtue of which it can be experience of the just-past as well as the present. This, in essence, is a representational view of experience, associated with contemporary uses of the term ‘content’, which takes as fundamental the idea of experience as having properties that fix a content in the sense of veridicality or correctness conditions for the experience. More specifically, the upshot of the schema argument is to link Husserl’s reflections on temporal experience with such a representational view in two interconnected ways: on the one hand, the claim is that it is his reflections on temporal experience that lead Husserl to embrace the general idea of a representational view of experience, thus understood. Conversely, though, those reflections on temporal consciousness also lead him to add a more specific claim to the general idea of a representational view of experience—namely that, in order to account for temporal experience, the veridicality or correctness conditions of perceptual experience must involve conditions, not just regarding what is present, but also regarding what has just been, as well as (to some extent) what is about to be.10 If this reading is along the right lines, I believe that it can give us an initial handle on at least one of the ingredients in Husserl’s idea of the absolute flow, i.e., the thought that the absolute flow is not itself in time, as articulated in the non-temporality claim. Note that the schema presents an account of perceptual experience on which the basic categories needed to elucidate the nature of perceptual experience are themselves occurrences in time: acts of apprehension, and the sensory occurrences that they ‘animate’. This is precisely what generates the problem with the neutrality thesis. By contrast, on a representationalist view of perceptual experience, temporal properties apply (if at all) to the vehicle of the experience, whereas retention, primal impression and protention, understood along representationalist lines, are properties of the experience having certain sorts of representational content (in the sense of correctness or veridicality conditions). As such, they are not to be construed as datable occurrences, and the relation between them is not a temporal one.11 In section 5, below, I will suggest that there is an important respect in which the schema argument, as just sketched, perhaps does not go far enough, and that there is more that may be said about the non-temporality claim. But I think the principal idea behind the schema argument is correct, viz., that the non-temporality claim has to be seen within the context of Husserl coming to embrace a version of representationalism, after initially adopting a version of a sense-datum theory of experience. On this view, retention, primal impression and protention are to be understood as representational properties of experience that our perceptual awareness of temporal objects turns on. As such, they have to be distinguished from properties of the experience understood as the (concrete) vehicle of that awareness. Let me now turn to an argument that attempts to make sense of the second type of claim that Husserl makes about the absolute flow, i.e. the self-appearance claim. One theme that Husserl returns to again and again throughout his writings on time-consciousness is the threat of a certain type of infinite regress (cf. Kortooms, 2002, pp. 129ff.). The key thought behind what I will call the regress argument is that the idea of the absolute flow, and in particular the self-appearance claim, encapsulates Husserl’s response to that threat. The kind of regress worry that Husserl has in mind is expressed in passages such as the following: Every temporal appearance, after phenomenological reduction, dissolves into […] a flow. But I cannot perceive in turn the consciousness itself into which all of this is dissolved. For this new percept would again be something temporal that points back to a constituting consciousness of a similar sort, and so in infinitum. Hence the question: How do I come to know about the constituting flow? (Husserl, 1991, p. 116) The worry, as it is articulated here, takes as it starting point the idea that temporal experience is itself a temporal phenomenon.12 When I hear the tones do-re-mi played in succession, my experience of hearing them is also an occurrence that itself unfolds over time (we will return to this idea, and how exactly it figures in Husserl’s thought, in the next section). But if I want to know what makes it possible for me to be aware of temporal phenomena such as the succession of tones, reflectively attending to my experience as it unfolds in time itself will not help. For such attention itself exploits the structures that make it possible for me to become aware of temporal phenomena, rather than making manifest what they consist in. Or so the thought behind the regress argument goes. Dan Zahavi, who has perhaps done the most to promote the regress argument, puts the key idea as follows: If the duration and unity of a tonal sequence is constituted by consciousness, and if our consciousness of the tonal sequence is itself given with duration and unity, are we then not forced to posit yet another consciousness to account for the givenness of this duration and unity, and so forth ad infinitum? (Zahavi, 1999, p. 68) On Zahavi’s reading, Husserl’s remarks about the absolute flow have to be seen in the context of a wider concern with the nature of consciousness. The thought is that there must be a form of self-awareness inherent in conscious experience that is not itself a matter of such experience being given as an object of awareness. With any conscious experience, such as my experience of do-re-mi sounding in succession, I can, of course, become reflectively aware of my undergoing the experience as well as being aware of the succession of the three tones themselves. However, this reflective ability cannot explain what it is for the experience to be a conscious phenomenon in the first place, on pain of the regress sketched by Zahavi. Rather, there must be a feature of the experience itself that grounds my ability to reflect upon it. As Zahavi argues, this line of thought leads Husserl to the idea of a ‘pre-reflective self-awareness’ that the experience possesses. He writes: When Husserl claims that the intentional act is constituted in inner time-consciousness, he is not saying that the act is brought to givenness by some other part of subjectivity. Inner time-consciousness is the pre-reflective self-awareness of the act, and to say that the act is constituted in inner time-consciousness simply means that it is brought to awareness thanks to itself. It is called inner time-consciousness because it belongs intrinsically to the innermost structure of the act itself. […] This internal consciousness is not a particular intentional act, but a pervasive dimension of self-manifestation, and it is exactly this which precedes and founds reflective self-awareness. In short, Husserl would claim that to have an occurrent experience, e.g., a perception of a flowering apple-tree, is to be aware of the experience. But this self-awareness is not itself a separate experience in need of yet another awareness. The self-awareness of the experience is an internal, nonreflective, irrelational feature of the experience itself, and thus the regress is stopped. (Zahavi, 2003, p. 168) As expressed in this passage, the regress argument might be decomposed into two claims. One is the claim that accounts of the nature of consciousness quite generally have to recognize a level of pre-reflective self-awareness. The other is that Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness can provide an account of what such pre-reflective self-awareness consists in.13 This latter idea is spelled out in more detail in the following passage from Zahavi: [E]ach retention preserves not only the preceding conscious tone, but also the preceding primal presentation. That is, the actual phase of the flow retains not only the tone, which has just been, but also the elapsing phase of the flow. In short, the retentional process not only permits us to experience an enduring temporal object—it does not merely enable the constitution of the identity of an object in a manifold of temporal phases; it also provides us with temporal self-awareness. Whereas the flow’s constitution of the duration of its object is called its Querintentionalität, the flow’s awareness (of) its own streaming unity is called its Längsintentionalität […]. Although the latter carries the name intentionality, it would be a decisive misunderstanding of Husserl’s theory if one were to identify it with a type of object-intentionality, since Husserl’s account of Längsintentionalität is, in fact, an analysis of the pre-reflective self-givenness of consciousness. (Zahavi, 2005, p. 68) The particular feature of Husserl’s analysis that Zahavi highlights in this passage is one that Husserl himself describes by saying that the absolute flow possesses a “double intentionality” (Husserl, 1991, pp. 84ff. & pp. 120ff.). On the one hand, it involves an awareness of a temporal object, such as the succession of tones. Husserl calls this dimension of the intentional structure of the absolute flow its transverse intentionality. Apart from transverse intentionality, however, Husserl also claims that the absolute flow exhibits horizontal intentionality. By this he means an intentional directedness, in retention, not just towards the just-past tone, say, but also towards the awareness of the tone in primal impression. More specifically, I am aware of the tone itself as just-past only because am aware of the primal impression of the tone as just-past, and it is in this sense that I am, as Gallagher and Zahavi (2010, sec. 3) put it, “co-aware of my ongoing experience” when I listen to the succession of tones. Thus understood, the regress argument clearly provides for a reading of Husserl’s remarks on the absolute flow that makes sense of what I have called the self-appearance claim. But it also comes at a price. For it situates the self-appearance claim within the wider context of a general approach to consciousness, and connects it with a commitment to the idea that consciousness is to be explained in terms of the notion of pre-reflective self-awareness. There are at least two reasons why one might find the regress argument, thus understood, less than persuasive, given the role played in it by the notion of pre-reflective self-awareness. One problem lies with the notion of pre-reflective self-awareness itself. It has often been regarded as obscure, or the idea that it could explain our ability to become reflectively aware of elements of our conscious mental life has been thought to have an air of vacuousness or circularity about it. In the current context, one way in which this worry might perhaps be sharpened up is by asking what exactly the ‘non-objectivising’ intentionality involved in horizontal intentionality consists in. On the face of it, this notion seems to be in at least as much need of further elucidation as the idea of pre-reflective self-awareness. Thus, it is not clear how much further illumination we gain from trying to make sense of the latter in terms of the former.14 Secondly, however, I think there is also a worry as to how exactly the regress argument is meant to provide a motivation for the self-appearance claim. The trouble, more to the point, is that the regress argument threatens to divorce the motivation behind the idea that the absolute flow involves an awareness of itself from the role the absolute flow is meant to play in explaining our perceptual awareness of temporal phenomena. What has emerged as crucial in the above discussion is that the absolute flow, as described by Husserl, displays a feature that allows it to be seen as involving a type of self-awareness that does not involve conscious reflection. That feature is that the absolute flow, as thus described, involves both horizontal and transverse intentionality. In short, what the regress argument tells us is that the absolute flow must display this feature in order to serve as a suitable foundation for self-consciousness. Understood in this way, though, there is crucial dimension of the question as to why the self-appearance claim holds that, intuitively, the regress argument fails to engage with. Specifically, the regress argument, thus understood, is silent on the grounds for thinking that, in the case of temporal experience, transverse intentionality does indeed rest upon horizontal intentionality—i.e., that experience can only be intentionally directed towards temporally extended phenomena in so far as it is also intentionally directed toward one’s own past (and, to some extent future) awareness of these phenomena as they have unfolded and will unfold. There is a sense in which the latter claim is simply taken for granted in the regress argument, in order to then provide the basis for identifying the absolute flow as the point at which the epistemic regress stops, and for giving