Phenomenology Of Time-Consciousness Research Articles

The origins of sedimentation in Husserl's phenomenology

AbstractHusserl is the philosopher who transformed the geological metaphor of sedimentation into a philosophical concept. While tracing the development of Husserl's reflections on sedimentation, I argue that the distinctive feature of Husserl's approach lies in his preoccupation with the question concerning the origins of sedimentations. The paper demonstrates that in different frameworks of analysis, Husserl understood these origins in significantly different ways. In the works concerned with the phenomenology of time consciousness, Husserl searched for the origins of sedimentation in the field of subjective experience, and more precisely, in impressional consciousness. By contrast, in the later works concerned with history, he maintained that the origins of sedimentations lie in the field of historical past that stretches beyond the reach of individual experience. Building on the basis of these resources, I argue that the Husserlian concept of sedimentation has three distinct components of senses: static, genetic, and generative. In the static sense, sedimentations are modifications of retentions and necessary conditions of recollection. In the genetic sense, sedimentations are necessary for the formation of types, habits and moods, and as such, they shape present experiences. In the generative sense, sedimentations refer to what consciousness inherits from the historical tradition.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

TIME AND ITS INDETERMINACY IN ROMAN INGARDEN’S CONCEPT OF THE LITERARY WORK OF ART

The time of the literary work of art is a schematized aspect of the represented objectivities of the literary work. Roman Ingarden’s analysis of the time of the literary work extends upon Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness but nevertheless remains consistent with it, insofar as within a literary work as well as actuality, an objective time or literary objective time is constituted from an experience of temporal objects (or in the case of the work of art, represented objectivities). The time of the literary work of art is experienced through its represented objectivities and depends on an already existent concept of objective time. (We conceive of the time of the literary work of art as a variant of actual time.) The time of the literary work, however, gains an indeterminacy, as the author of the literary work is able to manipulate our experience of time within the literary work by predicting how the reader will concretize its events, characters, and objects with respect to time. I use Alain Robbe-Grillet’s representation of the centipede in La Jalousie as an example of the possible manipulations of time, explicable through Ingarden’s analysis of time in the literary work of art.

Temporal updating, behavioral learning, and the phenomenology of time-consciousness.

Hoerl & McCormack claim that the temporal updating system only represents the world as present. This generates puzzles regarding the phenomenology of temporal experience. We argue that recent models of reinforcement learning suggest that temporal updating must have a minimal temporal structure; and we suggest that this helps to clarify what it means to experience the world as temporally structured.

Reperceiving the Future

The future is an aspect of time and like clock time tends to be taken for granted unquestioned as an experience. There is a tendency for both futurists and management scientists inadvertently to adopt a first-order paradigm. In this article, I introduce a second-order approach in which the presence of the decision maker is acknowledged. In this approach, the phenomenology of time consciousness provides a basis for expanding time into a present moment with richer dimensionality, enlarging linear causality to a set of multiple influences on the present moment, some of which originate in aspects of what we call the future. We need to extend the scope of futures methods by considering the interaction between agency and uncertainty. High agency combined with high uncertainty is not yet well supplied with appropriate methods. In this region, the act of reperception is fundamental; algorithmic decision methods are out of their depth. In this different paradigm of time, anticipatory systems are crucial. Practice needs the capacity to navigate in a constantly shifting landscape that distinguishes three qualities of the future symbolized as three horizons. One is the future as seen from the dominant present situation. The second is a future desirable emergent states. The third is a future that holds the powerful and turbulent dilemmas between the other two and requires the navigation skill of the decision maker as an anticipatory system. At the core of this anticipatory system is a multidimensional future consciousness with the capacity to see into the future through different lenses of awareness in the present moment.

Rhythm and Transformation Through Memory: On Augustine's Confessions After De Musica

ABSTRACT I read the whole of Augustine's Confessions (not merely book XI) as an extended essay on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, understanding the Confessions as a performative text—as a text that enacts or performs the very content it describes. The key to this reading lies in a careful study of Augustine's use of psalms and hymns in his work, centered upon “Deus, creator omnium.” This hymn not only appears in book XI but forms an important structural element (as referenced also in books IV, IX, and X); it plays a similar and significant role in Augustine's De Musica as well. Through his interpretation of the performance of “Deus, creator omnium” in De Musica, Augustine presents a highly sophisticated notion of rhythm that discloses a nonlinear account of time essential to my reading of book XI of the Confessions; memory comes to be understood as illuminating not only the past but also the present and future. Moreover, the centrality of rhythm in De Musica allows us to understand how the structural whole of the Confessions is organized rhythmically, performing a “beginning” that serves as origin only retroactively, through relation or proportion to the end.

Revisiting Michael Snow’s Wavelength, after Deleuze’s Time-Image

Abstract Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) is one of the most written about avant-garde films. It has served as “a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played out,” as Elizabeth Legge put it in a book-length study of the film, whose recent publication testifies to the continuing relevance of the film (Legge 2009). This paper takes Annette Michelson’s article, Toward Snow, one of the first and most often cited encounters with Snow’s cinema, as its point of departure (Michelson 1978). Michelson sees the film as a reflection which reveals the cinema as a temporal narrative medium. Drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness, she argues that this reflection on the medium is at the same time a reflection on the structures of consciousness. However, the paper also draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze, whose two-volume study of the cinema has opened up new possibilities for thinking about time and the cinema (Deleuze 1983, 1985). The paper is not an interpretation of Deleuze. It appropriates and puts to work his idea that the cinema is not essentially a narrative medium; but a medium that disrupts linear time, making visible a non-chronological dimension of time, which fragments the subject and exposes it to liminal situations. Wavelength, I argue, reverses the flow of time, to make visible an abyss at the heart of time, which shatters the unity of the subject

An Absence that Counts in the World: Merleau-Ponty's Later Philosophy of Time in Light of Bernet's “Einleitung”

In his “Einleitung” to Edmund Husserl’s Texte zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), translated for the first time in this volume, Rudolf Bernet convincingly argues for an alternative order and grouping of Husserl’s early texts on time — texts originally published as “Supplementary Texts” (Part B) in the critical edition of Husserl’s Time Lectures in Husserliana X: Zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917). Most significantly, Bernet situates these texts within the context of the development of Husserl’s phenomenology and brings to light not only their philosophical import but also their limitations and blind spots. By means of Bernet’s re-reading and reconstruction, Husserl’s early analyses of time come to reveal tendencies and directions of thought that are otherwise obscured by the organization of the Time Lectures themselves. As is now well known, the “Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time” (originally published in 1928 and republished as Part A of the critical edition in 1966) were edited by Edith Stein and nominally by Martin Heidegger and juxtapose texts from different periods of Husserl’s thought on time between 1893 and 1917; this collage effectively masks the philosophical and terminological shifts within Husserl’s phenomenology of timeconsciousness. What is masked is precisely that “unthought-of element” of Husserl’s analyses that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was to find so productive; this is Husserl’s constant self-questioning and rethinking of earlier positions, the divergence and revision that reveal his thought as a process in the making. In taking up and re-ordering the “Supplementary Texts” from Husserliana X, Bernet’s “Einleitung” makes visible the stakes implicit in the movement of Husserl’s thought on time, both in the continuities upon which it insists and in the transformations it enacts. The “Einleitung” reveals reiterations but also differences within Husserl’s own thinking of time; it exposes the articulations, hesitations and sometimes even the worries that make the concepts central to Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness — concepts of retention, primal impression and absolute consciousness — what they have become for us. As Bernet notes, Husserl’s time-analyses have been a generative, albeit contested, ground for later French phenomenologists for whom the critique of these analyses has constituted an indispensable point of departure in their own thinking of time (“Einleitung,” lxiii). Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a curious case

Consciência do tempo e temporalidade da consciência husserl perante meinong e brentano

Abstract In the first part of this paper we try to show how the discussion of Meinong’s distinction between distributed and undistributed objects was crucial for Husserl’s thinking about the phenomenology of time consciousness. The criticism of Meinong’s thesis that the representation of a distributed object (temporal object) is an undistributed act is presented as the central point for the development of Husserl’s own thesis about the perception as a continuum of continua and about consciousness as an unitary flux of temporal phases. In a second part, we move to Brentano’s theory about original associations in the constitution of the “presence-time”. Brentano’s position about the function of phantasy as the origin of our representation of time is refused by Husserl and, as a result, the structural composition of time consciousness in phases of primal-impression, fresh memory (later “retention”) and immediate expectation (later “protention”) appears as the core form to the intuition of the present and the constitution of time. In a last section, we follow Husserl’s revision of his own analysis of fresh memory in order to understand his final position about retention as a primitive form of Vergegenwärtigung.

Husserl

I am going to examine a problem which Edmund Husserl claimed threatened to stymie his entire phenomenological enterprise. question of how a temporally extended melody can be given to consciousness served as an extremely challenging and disconcerting puzzle, the explication of which spurred on a key development in his mature philosophy. I will discuss how a few philosophers before and after him (Augustine, Brentano, Meinong, Broad) have dealt with this same conundrum. Husserl's answer will be examined in order to situate it amongst the most contemporary ways of addressing the issue of time-consciousness and of perception in general. Primary Sources By far the most important event for scholars investigating Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness was the publication of Husserliana X: Zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1966), edited by Rudolf Boehm.1 This critical edition of the earlier Vorlesungen zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins2 supplemented by additional material on the subject, which surfaced primarily at the Husserl Archives where it was then comprehensively dated, is an irreplaceable tool for the student attempting to flesh out the development of Husserl's ideas on this topic. 1928 publication itself, edited only superficially by Martin Heidegger, is really little more than a somewhat confused jumble of Husserl's lectures and notes cut up, drafted, and given order (in a decidably unchronological manner) by his Freiburg assistant Edith Stein a decade earlier. This original publication, translated into English by J. S. Churchill as Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,3 easily deceives its reader. Husserl only pushed for its release upon being presented with a manuscript of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Positions incompatible with each other appear side by side, the evolution that took place in Husserl's thought and the vocabulary he used to express it being completely ignored. John Barnett Brough's translation enables English speakers for the first time to access Husserl's writings on time-consciousness directly and within the context of his overall philosophical development. 4 Puzzle Under Examination What was it about the cogitatio of time that so occupied Husserl's attention from the years 1893-1928? Beyond the wonder5 and mystery6 generated by his fascination with the topic as described in lectures given during 1906/7, and the arduous labors he deemed necessary for any who would be successful in unlocking its treasureS,7 Husserl writes that he came to view his entire phenomenological endeavor as threatened by the flow of time. From the transcript of one often overlooked gem embedded within Husserliana X (No. 51 taken from a 1909 lecture at the University of Gottingen entitled The Problem of Time in the Considerations Fundamental to Phenomenology)8 we read the following: All asserting, consequently, is a matter of indifference; we really cling only to the this-there!, which at any given time is the sole thing about which we should be permitted to speak. And, of course, our whole reflection up to this point would be affected. We might have carried out the exclusion of nature, but if one also requires of us the exclusion of that transcendence that is inherent in memory and retention, then at the end we find ourselves in the moment in which we began. It is indeed easy to see that we have presupposed a certain validity belonging to memory and retention. tug of doubt leads still further in other respects. What about the actually present phenomenon, about the consciousness that is actually carried out and about the viewing directed at it?9 And then: These doubts seem to touch even phenomenological perception. Every grasping of an enduring phenomenon also implies retention in company with the grasping of the duration. Should we therefore say that only the absolute now is something actually given and free from the problem of transcendence, and that even the least extension into the past-which surely belongs essentially to duration-is problematic? …

Suggestions towards a revision of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness

Suggestions towards a revision of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness

Towards a Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness in Music

Towards a Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness in Music