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Time and the Constitution of the Self
Husserl’s
Lectures on Temporalizing Consciousness
1.
The
Continuity of Experience and the Marking Out of Temporal Difference
We take
the continuity of experience and the arrow of time for granted. That which is
now, slips into the past, while the future becomes actualized in the present
vacuum that is left behind. Time flows. The linearity of temporality, its order
of successivity, is the condition of the possibility of any intelligible form
of experience. But, how is the linearity of time itself constituted? Entropy
and the second law of thermodynamics generally serve as the basis for discourse
on the arrow of time in the physical sciences. However, such discourse is
incomplete. A phenomenological description of the arrow of time must aim to
take into account ‘how’ it is given.
Therefore,
phenomenology does not so much concern itself with the objective time of the
sciences, as such. It rather seeks to describe the temporalizing structures of
consciousness and the ways in which Objectivity is constituted in and by the
flow of experience. So, the question becomes:
How is it that consciousness is a continuum?
In the
lectures on time-consciousness of 1905 (and the appendices of 1910),
How is
the signification of temporal ‘difference’ given within experience?
This
question constitutes something like the trunk of a tree. Naturally, it must
turn back upon the root system that nourishes the trunk and the branches above. We may ask some of the
most fundamental questions that announce themselves here in the following terms:
What
problems are associated with the conception of the present or now as a
‘point-like’ moment?
Is the
present distinguished from the past and the future by its immediacy, its presentation?
How is
the present given?
How is
the past given?
What are
the forms of presence of that which has not yet come to pass?
Are we to
understand the future and the past purely in terms of re-presentation?
How is it
that consciousness can differentiate between past, present, and future?
In what
sense is consciousness related to itself in the present as distinguished from
its past and its future?
How is it
that past, present, and future can be present all-at-once without the erasure
of their different temporal signatures?
If
consciousness of difference already presupposes a continuous consciousness, in
what does such continuity inhere?
What is
the relation between the continuity of experience and the continuity of that
which is given?
How is it
that a Thing has continuity through time as-the-same-Thing?
Is time
something distinct from the perception of it?
Is this a
question that phenomenology is qualified to ask?
Is
intentionality, as temporalizing consciousness and the consciousness of temporality, time itself?
In this
dimension, can we actually continue to speak of ‘time’?
Are we
directed to a horizon that is constitutive of time, but irreducible to the
language of time?
How can
we address such an Ur-region or
primordial horizon for which names are lacking?
All these questions are tantalizing. At the same time,
they are familiar. What is exceptional about
2. The
Three Principal Intentionalities of Lived-Time
Firstly, what is important is the way in which
the continuity of experience announces
itself through temporal transition and how objects (in the broadest
phenomenological sense) of perception are continuous through movement, change
and rest. There are three intentional moments in play in the constitution of
the Living Present (lebendige Gegenwart).
1. Primary
impression
2. Retention
3. Protention
Primary
impression is one particular node of the tri-horizonal matrix of the Living
Present. It is the fulfilment of what was a protention and the index to the passing-over of a present-perception
into a retention. It is also the site of the fulfilment, non-fulfilment, or
degree of fulfilment of that which was anticipated as given in the horizon of protention.
Retention is the retaining of
what was once present as it passes over into the past. It is primary memory,
which gives the vertical sinking-down
of experience into the past – a giving of
has-beenness (as a constant background to the present). However, retention
is not simply the retaining of ‘objects,’ it is the retention of a retentional
train. In other words, it is the giving
of the horizon of the past / pastness. Retention is retention of retention: continua of continua. In
this sense, we do not speak of discrete retentions because they are not strung
out side by side along the temporal continuum. They rather embody this continuum. Each retention retains former retentions within itself. This is why the
intentional form that is designated by retention or primary memory is to be
understood in terms of continua of continua.
In addition to understanding that primary memory is
irreducible to the mere retention of past ‘objects,’ there is also another
important sense in which it is irreducible to the retention of that which was
once ‘present’ – as if retention is always first preceded by a present that it
then represents. Retention is not a past perception, but the originary
perception of the past. Retention is an original horizon of the
Living Present. It is not a mere re-presentation
of a former now – a present that has become past. Retention signs itself in the
present as that which has always already preceded it. In these terms, since
retention is an originary intentional horizon of the present, we speak of the
tracing of a horizon that has never actually been present (where the word
‘present’ means that which is now and that which is manifest / visible).
Protention is the giving of the horizon of futurity. It first makes
possible that opening into which objects can be projected as determinate
expectations. In this sense, it is a useful device to distinguish between what
we call expectation and that which we call anticipation. Protention is primary
anticipation and it produces the conditions of the possibility of the
projection of objects of expectation. In these terms, protention is the giving of an open horizon of possibilities. In existential phenomenology, futurity
signifies a vacuum, a lack. And, it is the principally objectless character of
the not-yet that is constitutive of
anxiety.
In these terms, protention is the originary opening of the horizon of
that-which-is-not-yet. It is not merely the projection of a possible present. It
is a primary condition of the possibility of the present itself as overflowing
/ a waiting-towards. Protention gives
the space in which to project possibilities.
The present is not simple. It is fundamentally
complex. The structuralizing interplay of retention,
primary impression, and protention is a primordial intentional matrix, which
traces itself out at the heart of the Living Present. This
dynamical play of negotiation is the unfolding of temporality itself.
3. Memory as
Presentation and Re-presentation
The word
memory conjures up a number of different functions of repetition. It is vital
to be clear about what kind of memory-function we are concerned about when we
use the expression. Husserl distinguishes between two fundamentally different
kinds of memory.
Primary
memory = retention / presentation
Secondary
memory / re-presentation or
presentification.
The second form is what we might call common memory –
although there is nothing common about it when one begins to examine the
multiple forms that it may take. However, it falls into the category of re-presentation, which distinguishes it
from primary memory.
Primary memory or retention gives the has-been, the horizon
of pastness from which retained objects can stand out precisely as past objects. Retention is not a past perception. It is a present-perceiving
of the ‘pastness’ of that which is past.
In these terms, retention is not a reproductive
intentionality. It is an originary giving.
The presentness or immanence of protention is similar
to that of retention in the sense that it is the present-anticipation of that which has never actually been present.
Both intentionalities are forms of presentation and not re-presentation (in any sense of substitution or reproduction).
It is vital to understand that Primary Impression is
not synonymous with the consciousness of the Present itself. The Living Present
means a waiting-towards (protentional
/ projecting / futural), whose structure is regulated by its having always already-been-waiting (retentional /
projected / past). All three intentionalities are present-perceptions of different horizons of temporality. The
Living Present (lebendige Gegenwart)
is constituted by the interplay /
intertwining of these three intentionalities. This weaving of transversal
intentionalities provides the horizon and the frame of time in the constitution
of memory as re-presentation.
The secondary or re-presentative
form of memory is what we usually refer to when we speak of remembering as an
act of evocation, e.g., I now remember such and such a moment…
This secondary form of memory is an ‘act.’ Primary
memory, in the form of retention, is not an act as such. It is pre-egologically
constitutive of what we call acts. All acts are intentional, but not all
intentionalities are acts.
The
consciousness of the duration of ‘things’ must not only involve the retention
of the same thing that one is perceiving in the present, it also necessarily involves
the retention of ‘the passing-away’ of its moments as they slip away from the
present.
In other words, the principal function of retention is
not so much about retaining previous present moments as the retaining of the
retaining: the consciousness of the
passing-over of the present into the past. Memory means that there must be
memory of remembering. This is not a doubling as such, which would lead to an
infinite regress – it means that the memory of events must also involve the
memory of their passing-over into
memory. This is the tracing out of ‘continuous-alteration,’
which gives successivity.
Retention
is a double intentionality that constitutes the extendedness / duration of
temporal objects on the one hand and, on the other, it constitutes the
extendedness / duration of the ‘flow’ of experience itself. The first is a
transversal intentionality (Querintentionalität) that is essentially
intertwined with the second (Längsintentionalität)
longitudinal intentionality of retention. It is this second intentionality that
has the most significance here, since it actually gives the flow itself (where pastness is always already a constant
background of the flow). Therefore, what is given is a ‘continuum’ of lived /
living experience. Both intentionalities always already imply one another since
the consciousness of the temporal necessarily coincides with the
temporalization of consciousness itself. While the transverse intentionality is
directed towards the immanent temporal object in its extendendness, thus
cutting across the direction of the flow, it is the longitudinal intentionality
that gives the flow itself – thus, we find a movement of sinking-down, which
marks off the passage of time, thereby providing the horizon of the extendedness
of objects as they are stretched out within the flow. We find a kind of scan of
the past that permits the recovery of past moments all together without
annulling their differences in relation to one another. In other words, just
because these past moments are retained as ‘no-longer,’ this is not a generic
leveller or a kind of compression. It does not mean that they share the same
temporal positions as one another in the past as simply past. An
intuition may involve the re-actualization of different past moments in such a
way as to make them appear ‘simultaneously.’ However, this does not cancel
their respective temporal positions in relation to one another in the past. The
record of their duration is still on
hand. They were originally experienced as periods of duration that had their
own positions in relation to the life-project as a whole. So, even though they
can give themselves to an intuition simultaneously (after all, their recall
does not necessitate that one go through the same degree of duration,
successively) they do not lose their respective temporal indices. Even when
different moments are given up to one’s noticing regard all-at-once, their
independent temporal signatures are still, to some degree, attached.
The play between primary impression and retention also
involves a certain kind of forgetting. This is the other meaning of what it is
to experience the passing-over of
primary impression into retention.
In sum, retention, primary impression, and protention
are fundamentally intertwined components of the unfolding of the present. The
living Present, as Merleau-Ponty said, is like a ‘bulb of time.’ Its contours
are made up of the horizons of past, present, and future. As always, when we
adopt the phenomenological orientation, we have to be aware that we are not
speaking so much about ‘objects’ as the horizons
of objects, the contextualization of
their content.
Temporal signification is not simply added to objects. It is the tracing out
of the condition of the possibility by which they stand-out in the first place.
Time is the structuralizing of their presence – the unfolding of the contours
of their presencing. However, since it is always Other to presence (not simply non-presence), there is also a sense in
which the word time is inadequate to the task of naming this pluridimensional
temporalizing.
4.
Primordial Flux
The
inter- intra-play of these longitudinal and transversal intentionalities is
that which constitutes lived-experience at the most primordial level. Husserl
calls this dimension of temporal constitution, Primordial Flux. The expression
refers to the proto-region that is constitutive of time as we know it. However,
it is not time, itself. Neither is it that which can be said to be ‘in’ time
(since it is not a process that can be said to have duration). It is an Ur-region for which names are lacking –
a flux that is constitutive of time without being reducible to the same set of
significations.
All one can really say is that this
dimension is the extendedness of consciousness
itself – the fundamental form of its being as
intentionality. It is intentionality in its most primary and general
structurality. This is why Martin Heidegger maintains, in his editor’s
introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology
of Internal Time Consciousness, that intentionality remains the name of a
problem.
However, this is not a problem in the sense of
something that needs to be surmounted. Rather, it raises the urgency of a need
for a return to a project that is far from being exhausted.
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