Husserl's Early Time-Analysis in Historical Context

References

• The following text is a translation of a slightly revised and abbreviated version of my “Introduction” to Edmund Husserl, Texte zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), xi–lxxvii.
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• [Edmund Husserl, “Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins,” ed. Martin Heidegger, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 9 (1928), viii–ix, 367–498; reprinted separately, Halle a. d. Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1928–Trans.]
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• Parenthetical references refer to the pagination of Husserliana X: Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966); On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht; Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). The English translation includes the Husserliana X page numbers in the margins.
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• [This is, of course, the subtitle of the original 1891 edition of Philosophie der Arithmetik; see Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten (1890–1901), ed. Lothar Eley (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970); Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003)-Trans.]
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• Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), ed. Bernhard Rang (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 269–302; Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 313–44. [Text Nr. 1 of Husserliana X corresponds to pp. 269–83 of Husserliana XXII, pp. 313–26 in the English ed.—Trans.]
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• On this point Husserl is in agreement with the position already advocated somewhat earlier by L. William Stern, “Psychische Präsenzzeit,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 13 (1897), 325–49; “Psychische Präsenzzeit/Mental Presence-Time” (German/English text on facing pages), trans. Nicolas de Warren, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 5 (2005), 310–51. William James had also pointed out, prior to Husserl, that the present is not to be understood as a knife-edge, but rather as “a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time”—The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890), 609. Husserl had already read James in 1891/92 and above all in 1894, and this quite probably influenced his discovery of the “extension” of the present. It is possible that Husserl never read Stern himself, but knew of his work only through a report by Meinong in the latter's essay “Über Gegenstände höherer Ordnung und deren Verhältnis zur inneren Wahrnehmung,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 21 (1899), 182–272, rpt. in his Abhandlungen zur Erkenntnistheorie und Gegenstandstheorie. Gesamtausgabe 2, ed. Rudolf Haller (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1971), 377–471; “On Objects of Higher Order and Their Relationship to Internal Perception,” in MarieLuise Schubert-Kalsi, Alexis Meinong: On Objects of Higher Order and Husserl's Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 137–208—an essay that Husserl read in September 1904. For Husserl, becoming acquainted with Stern's position probably meant at best nothing more than a subsequent confirmation of an insight he had already had into the temporal extension of the perceptual present.
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• Husserl always refers to Brentano's early time lectures, the contents of which were known to him only indirectly through the reports of older Brentano students, above all Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty, although Stumpf refers to lectures from Winter Semester 1872/73 while Marty refers to lectures from 1868 to 1870. Brentano's faithful student Oskar Kraus emphasizes, in a polemic attack on Husserl's critique of Brentano, that by the end of 1894, Brentano had already given up the positions that Husserl was criticizing between 1901 and 1905. Both the testimony of Stumpf (“Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”) and that of Marty and Kraus (“Toward a Phenomenognosy of Time Consciousness”) have in the meantime become readily accessible in Linda L. McAllister, ed., The Philosophy of Franz, Brentano (London: Duckworth, 1976), especially 135f., 225, 230. Only Brentano's later time-analyses were posthumously published—see Franz Brentano, Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Raum, Zeit und Kontinuum, ed. Alfred Kastil (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976).
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• These “time lectures” form the fourth and concluding part of the lecture course on “Main Topics from the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge” of Winter Semester 1904/05. The first two main topics of this 1904/05 course were published for the first time in a critical edition in Husserliana XXXVIII: Edmund Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), ed. Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giuliani (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004); the third, devoted to a phenomenological investigation of fantasy and image-consciousness, was published in Husserliana XXIII: Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925), ed. Eduard Marbach (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). The fourth main topic, on “The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time,” provided the basis for Edith Stein's reworking, which was then published, with Martin Heidegger as editor, in 1928 (see n. 2 above) under the title “First Part: The Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time from the Year 1905” (= Husserliana X, 3–134). Subsequent research by Rudolf Boehm, editor of Husserliana X, has nevertheless shown that only a small portion of this text actually rests on the 1905 lectures—namely, §§1–6; parts of §§7 and 11; §§16–17 and 19; part of §23; §30; part of §31; §32; part of §33; and §41. On the other hand, Texts Nr. 29 through Nr. 33, related above all to Meinong, undoubtedly do stem from the 1905 lecture course, although they are not taken into account in the Stein-Heidegger version.
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• [See “An Essay Concerning the Theory of Psychic Analysis,” in Marie-Luise Schubert-Kalsi, Alexis Meinong (see n. 6 above), 73–135—Trans.]
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• [See “On Objects of Higher Order and Their Relationship to Internal Perception,” in Ibid., 137–208—Trans.]
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• [Both “presentification” and “re-presentation” are often used to translate Vergegenwärtigung (Brough's translations of the time manuscripts in question and of Husserliana XXIII use “re-presentation”; “presentiation” is sometimes also used by other translators), while both “making-present” and “presentation” are often used to translate Gegenwärtigung—Trans.]
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• Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Vorlesungen 1906/07, ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984); Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/07, trans. Claire Ortiz Hill (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008).
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• Cf. Ibid., §§42ff.
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• Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil: 1905–1920, ed. Iso Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), Texts Nr. 5 and Nr. 6 (and the relevant Beilagen); The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911, trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006).
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• [James S. Churchill's translation of the Stein-Heidegger version of the time lectures, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964), §39, uses “longitudinal intentionality” for “Längsintentionalität” and “transverse intentionality” for “Querintentionalität”; for Brough's reasons for following him in the latter case and departing from him in the former case, see pp. 85 n. 9 and 86 n. 11 of the Brough translation. Husserl's spatial metaphors are meant to capture two sorts of constitutive accomplishments simultaneously carried out by one and the same flow of consciousness: 1) the flow constitutes its own unity in the flowing continuity of retentions-of-retentions, while 2) the continuously enduring immanent temporal objects are constituted in and through this flowing unity. But what the “directional” character of the spatial metaphors really refers to is the direction of the phenomenological “look”: one can look “along” the unity of the flow that is both continually “prolonging” itself and preserving the reticulation of retentions as a whole, or one can make a ninety-degree shift, as it were, in order to look in a different direction, focusing on the enduring immanent temporal objects intended in each phase of the flow—Trans.]
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• Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Zeit bei Husserl und Heidegger,” Heidegger Studies 3/4 (1987/88), 89–104.
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• Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975); The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982)—[see 384f. for Hofstadter's remarks on rendering the Zeitlichkeit/Temporalität distinction in English–Trans.].
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• Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, ed. Klaus Held (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 266; The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 205.
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• Edmund Husserl, Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewußtsein (1917/18), ed. Rudolf Bernet and Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
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• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 477f.; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 417f.
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• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 248; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 195.
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• Le visible et l'invisible, 227, 248f.; The Visible and the Invisible, 173, 194f.
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• Le visible et l'invisible, 249; The Visible and the Invisible, 195.
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• Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Lévinas’ Critique of Husserl,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82–99.
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• Emmanuel Lévinas, En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1967), 153; Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 142.
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• En découvrant, 156; Discovering, 145.
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• En découvrant, 154; Discovering, 143.
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• Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence, 2nd ed. (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 41; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 32.
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• Autrement qu'être, 43; Otherwise than Being, 34.
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• Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Is the Present Ever Present? Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence,” trans. Wilson Brown, in Husserl and Contemporary Thought, ed. John Sallis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983; rpt. of Research in Phenomenology 12 [1982]), 85–112.
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• Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), especially 67ff., 93ff.; Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), especially 60ff., 83ff.
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• La voix et le phénomène, 94f.; Speech and Phenomena, 85.
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• La voix et le phénomène, 74; Speech and Phenomena, 66.
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• Paul Ricœur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 97, 110.
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• Phénoménologie de la perception, viii; Phenomenology of Perception, xiv.
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• Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit I (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 125; Time and Narrative 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 83f.
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