Notes on the Intentionality of Consciousness

I. As a name for a particular movement in twentieth century philosophical thought, 'phenomenology' refers to a sort of thinking that takes what is given, what presents itself to consciousness, as basic. Whatever is so given is a phenomenon. All beliefs, judgments, cognitions, all knowledge about what is not phenomenal are subordinate to the evidence of the phenomenon.

A. Phenomenology in the relevant sense is the investigation of phenomena, when the term is taken more in the sense of Aristotle than in the sense Kant gave it. Whatever anyone is conscious of (i.e., whatever anyone is intentive to) in any way whatsoever is a phenomenon in the sense that is relevant here. God and the socks I am wearing and numbers and the earth and the universe and songs and paintings and Nirvana and drawings and the corners of some odd sphere and cubes and circles and karma and charisma and fate and the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the Sky and diseases and goodness and badness — all are phenomena. For each there is an impressive array of ways in which consciousness of them occurs and can occur. And when you or I experience any such consciousness, each of these objects can be described just as one or the other of us is conscious of it. To be conscious of any of these things is to "intend" it or to be "intentive" to it. To be conscious or to be aware has "intentionality" precisely insofar as it intends anything at all. Phenomenology is the study of phenomena. Phenomena are its field of investigation, and they do not include just what someone actually is conscious of but whatever anyone might possibly be conscious of. The investigation of phenomena, including the investigation of consciousness itself is what these notes are about: phenomenology.

1. Phenomenology describes and analyses phenomena, including the laws in accordance with which phenomena are structured.

a. These laws are phenomena in their own right, and are objects which either are or can be given, intuited.
b. Indeed, the primary concern of phenomenology as philosophical thinking is to investigate the ideal structure of phenomena and essential relations between phenomena.

2. An object is a phenomenon in this sense insofar but only insofar as there can be consciousness of it.

B. Historically considered, Descartes represents a point of departure for phenomenology.

1. Not Descartes' metaphysics nor Descartes' nativism — not at all — but rather Descartes' insight that we have one possible and continuously actual experience which can be a source of knowledge even if — as might well be the case — our senses and even our ability to reason should deceive us constantly, thoroughly, and utterly.
2. That experience (referred to below as immanent perception or primal consciousness) is the experience which each conscious process has of itself. In all of its many forms, in all of its ways of existing, consciousness experiences its own existence. And this self-experience is a perceiving of itself, where perceiving is the sort of awareness to which things existing in time are themselves given.
3. Its self-awareness or being-for-itself is what is referred to when consciousness is conceived to be subjective and is what distinguishes consciousness as something "mental" from whatever is not mental. There is a longstanding tradition which conceives a science devoted to dealing with what is subjective to be a specialized or positive science.

a. Conceived in this way, phenomenology seems to be the branch of Objective science that tries to achieve an Objectively valid understanding of subjective occurrences.
b. Thus, Hegel, e.g., understood his Phenomenology of Spirit to present a science of spirit as a subjective phenomenon, a study of the mind as it appears to itself, as being for itself, as distinct from the mind as it is in itself (i.e., as substance).

II. In contrast, phenomenology in our sense of the word concentrates in a quite different way upon what it regards as the basic trait of that which exists as subjective or as being for itself, viz., the intentionality of consciousness. 'Intentionality' refers to another basic trait of everything subjective, that it is always an awareness of something.

A. This is the sense in which phenomenology takes consciousness as an absolute. Phenomenology does not at all take consciousness to be an absolute (non-relative, non-contingent) being or substance. Consciousness is instead the final, absolute arbiter of all beliefs and all claims to knowledge, including those made by phenomenologists themselves.

1. 'Intentionality' is the name for a universal characteristic of mental life. Any mental life involves — throughout its entire extent — a consciousness of things. Mental processes of all sorts are intentional insofar as each is a consciousness of something. (Usually each is a consciousness of many things. These phrases will be used synonymously: intending to x, intentive to x, conscious of x. Mental processes are, all of them, conscious processes. 'Consciousness' is used here in a broad sense. No mental process and no part of any mental process can be either non-conscious or unconscious in any literal sense of these words.
2. 'Intentionality' is also a common name for individual properties each of which belongs to some mental process. Every mental process has its own individual intentionality.

B. As definitions of intentionality, the above statements are inadequate; as definitions they are either circular or synonymous. 'Intentionality' connotes a primitive concept. A mental process is defined as one that has intentionality. So by themselves the definitions would not help anyone find an intentionality. Luckily, 'mental' is a term in fairly common use and most of the things ordinarily designated as mental are also mental in the sense in which all mental processes are intentional.

C. All of the things Descartes referred to by the common name 'thinking' are mental processes in our sense: seeings hearings, tastings, feelings, lovings, hatings, wishings, willings, inferrings, judgings, speakings, hopings, fearings.

1. Anyone can find examples of these in her own mental life, and any process belonging to one of these classes has intentionality.
2. By comparing processes of the various sorts, we should be able to see the generic similarity among them. Each of us should be able, on the basis of such a comparison, to see the similarity of the various processes as mental processes each of which has an intentionality of some specific sort. This will make clear to each of us what 'intentionality' means. For example:

•seeing is a consciousness of color (but so is judging that a color is being seen);
•hearing is a consciousness of sound (but so is recalling a sound that has been heard);
•tasting is consciousness of flavor (but so is imagining a certain flavor).

In seeing the wastebasket, my intentiveness to the wastebasket consists in the perceiving's being a perceiving of the wastebasket and, more specifically, a visual perceptual intentiveness to the wastebasket.

a. I believe, in seeing the wastebasket, that the wastebasket exists and that it has the qualities which I intend it as having. I believe also that the wastebasket stands in various relations to other things to which I am simultaneously intentive: to other things which I perceive, remember, expect, etc. It might turn out that I am partially or even entirely mistaken in these beliefs. But even so it would still be true that this mental process is intrinsically characterized as intentive to the wastebasket and as intentive to it perceptually and visually.

1. Perceptual intentiveness to the wastebasket is an intrinsic property or quality of the mental process. It is a quality which the process has regardless of whether or not any of the things to which it is intentive also actually exists.
2. It may be best to avoid thinking of intentionality a relation between a mental process and its intended objects. A relation which actually holds presupposes the actuality, the existence of the relata, the terms of the relation. If sense perceiving is thought of as a real relation between what perceives and what is perceived then in a case where we come to believe that the thing perceived never really was there then we shall be forced to claim that the mental process was not in actuality a perceiving.

(a) However, this conclusion goes totally against the descriptive facts: what I remember is my past seeing of the wastebasket and believing in its existence, and this is so despite the fact that I have now canceled my belief in the wastebasket, despite the fact that belief in it has ceased to be among my abiding beliefs.
(b) "I was deluded or under an illusion," I say, but I was deluded or deceived only because the mental process I experienced and now remember had characteristics of visual perceiving. This fact will not be changed when I now come to the conclusion that no wastebasket was actually there. This, at least, would be Husserl's contention.
(c) Most American commentators have missed this point, interpreting intentionality instead as a relation. But when intentionality is interpreted this way then Husserl's so called bracketing or disregarding of real relations between the mental life being described and other things is bound to seem absurd — as if he proposed to disregard, at least in the case of sense perception, intentionality itself.
(d) Such commentators, when otherwise sympathetic toward Husserl, have often rejected "bracketing" as a methodological procedure in their phenomenology and have tended toward a "realistic phenomenology" — meaning one which operates strictly within what Husserl calls "the natural attitude."
(e) They usually interpret the perceptual noema (see below) representationally, i.e., as a representative sign for the actual or real object.

III. BASIC TYPES OF INTENTIVE PROCESSES. The intentiveness of every mental process can be classified in a variety of ways some of which will be discussed in this and succeeding sections. The present section will treat primarily what Husserl calls the positionality of mental processes. He holds that there are only three species of positionality.

A. Every mental process intends its object either doxically (cognitively), affectively (emotionally), or conatively ("strivingly"): mental processes are either beliefs, emotions (affects), or strivings. Corresponding to these three distinct types of intentiveness are three types of traits or characteristics of intended objects.

B. These terms (doxic, affective, conative) with their qualifying adjectives (positive, negative, neutral) refer to mental processes insofar as they exemplify what Husserl often referred to as "thetic quality" or "positional quality". All mental processes have a quite determinate thetic quality. Each mental process of any of these kinds involves taking a definite position (its "positionality") of some definite sort toward the intended object. Through each mental process, the mind to which it belongs acquires a trait that it did not previously have: having believed in the object, disbelieved, questioned it, etc.; having liked, loved, disliked, been indifferent to it, etc.; having striven to bring it about, or to avoid it, or to use it; etc. Sensory perceiving, e.g., always has doxic thetic quality; it always is in some way a believing or disbelieving. Normally, sensory perceiving and perceiving in general believes in what is perceived.

C. Belief that is simply certain of what is believed in is primary. Other ways of taking position doxically toward something believed in are modalities or modalizations of simply certain (proto-doxic) belief. <Note that this in no way implies that such beliefs are true; what warrants belief is not certainty about what is believed but its being given as it is believed to be.> On the other hand, Husserl does seem to be acknowledging here the traditional empiricist notion that all non-perceptual (non-intuitive) ways of being conscious of objects of a given kind refer back to perceptual (intuitive) consciousness of something of that kind. The terminology refers here more to the order of genesis or origin of uncertain, negative, or otherwise modalized beliefs than to their epistemic status.

1. The intentional correlate of a proto-doxic mental process would be the being-character (doxothetic character) "being (or existence) pure and simple".
2. Corresponding to the doxic modalities would be a correlative possible being, doubtful being, being probable.

a. These modalities of being (ontic modalities — possibility, probability, etc.) contain in their meaning a reference to simple being.
b. By virtue of this reference of the doxic thetic character to the root form of belief there is made possible a tendency toward proto-doxic belief: I tend to identify what I now perceive in this room with what I saw here last week and to identify it with simple certainty. "A perceived object stands out there at first as a plain matter of course, a certainty. Suddenly we are doubtful whether we have not been made the victims of a mere illusion…or else that which appears preserves its ontical certainty, but we are uncertain with regard to some one or other of its sets of qualities.{ID1 (HUA3) m214-215} "

(1) Husserl appears to be simplifying his analysis here, for there are other contexts in which simple certainty seems to be out of the question so far as external or sensory perception is concerned: "To the extent that perception itself is mixed with what is not perception, to this extent perception itself is still doubtful. However, if it is a matter of immanent content and not of empirical materialities <realities [Dinglichkeiten]>, then duration and alteration, coexistence and succession are completely and entirely to be realized in perceptions and often enough are so realized. {PIZ (HUA10, PITC) §41; see also LI}"
(2) The latter passage seems to present Husserl's considered opinion; and it implies that no perceptions of transcendent material things are simply certain since all such perceptions are mixed in the specified way. In such perceptions strictly perceptual, intuitive intentiveness is "mixed" with non-intuitive intentiveness.
(3) To explain this, it will be necessary to clarify the way the terms intuition, experience, and perception are being used.

A. Any object intended to will have a variety of manners of givenness. Manners of givenness are the ways in which intended objects are there for consciousness. The color of the table that I see is given originarily. {For an extended discussion of being perceived as a way of being intended and as a manner of givenness see Heidegger's Basic Problems… (Heidegger, BP pp. 1-76)} There is no more adequate way in which the color could be given: the color is there for my consciousness in the most original way in which a color can be given. But the appresented determinations of the table are not given in the most originary way possible. {for the meaning of 'appresented' and 'apperceive' see V. B below} They are there for my consciousness no less than the color is, but the intentiveness to them includes a reference to potential mental processes in which they would be given more originarily.

B. Husserl uses the term 'manners of givenness' to refer to the ways in which consciousness is intentive to objects even when the object in question is not currently itself given but is being intended in some non-originary manner .

1. When I am apperceiving the currently unperceived legs of the table, my anticipating the way they would appear from some other perspective is called a way in which they are "given" to or there for me right now even though they are not actually given. Similarly, the way I believe they would appear and perhaps do appear to someone else from some other perspective is also a way in which they are there for me right now and so is called a way in which they are "given" to me. The intended object of any consciousness at all must have some "manner of givenness". For every sort of intended object there is some manner of most originary consciousness. For some sorts of intended objects the most originary manner of givenness falls far short of any genuine givenness at all; this state of affairs obtains, for example, for all mental processes other than my own.
2. Husserl's somewhat confusing and peculiar way of using this phrase is at least partially vindicated in that his use is probably meant to emphasize that making the nature of an object distinct is a matter of activating more original ways of being conscious either of that object or of objects of the same kind. Judgments concerning real objects of kinds such that things of that kind can be neither experienced nor quasi-experienced {for the meaning of this term see VII.B.2.b below} would be judgments whose meaning could not be made distinct at all.
3. A "thing in itself" that has not only never been given in fact but never could be given would be, for Husserl, a material absurdity. Phrases referring to such objects would seem to be phrases having no meaning that can be made distinct.

V. Intuiting, intuition [Anschauen, Anschauung] of individual objects. 'Intuiting' and 'intuition' are here used to designate: perceiving, remembering, or clear anticipating; but they may also be used to designate any clear fantasy (i.e., neutral) modifications of these: quasi-perceiving, quasi-remembering, quasi-anticipating. {See VII.B.2 below.} Every intuition that is clear, i.e., every intuition through which the ego pays attention to what is being intuited, provides evidence for the essential possibility of the intuited object.

A. Intuitings of all these sorts Husserl calls "individual intuitions", i.e., intuitings of something intended to as individual where 'individual' applies exclusively to actual objects in contrast to eidetic objects {see VII.B.1-VIII below}.

1. Perceiving and remembering (as contrasted with their fantasy modifications) are empirical intuitions of an individual object. These are intuitions in a widely accepted traditional meaning of the term, in a meaning that would (or could) be accepted by Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, or Kant, for example. <This is true for the most part yet is still something of an exaggeration. There is a crucial and basic disagreement between Descartes' use of 'perception' and its use by Locke and his antinativist followers; Locke defined the term in such a way as to include in the concept the concept that whenever a mind perceives it also notices. So defined the word would denote only perceptions that are clear in Descartes' terms. This difference is behind virtually all of Locke's extensive arguments against "innate" ideas. The quarrel between nativists and anitnativists has always been largely a matter of this conceptual difference. It has never entailed an issue of more than historical significance.>
2. What characterizes them as intuitings is that each brings its intentional object to givenness.
3. What characterizes perceiving as a special case of intuition is that in any perceiving the individual intentional object is brought not just to givenness but to originary givenness [originäre Gegebenheit]. Perceptual consciousness occurs insofar as what is perceived is itself given, but it is also conscious of this individual object as originarily given, i.e., given in person, given as it were in the flesh, given or presented now, as the perceiving occurring {ID1 §3}.
4. Empirical intuition (=experience) provides, when it is clear, evidence not only for the possibility of the individual object intuited but for its actuality as well. Experiences include perceiving and remembering.

a. Clear perceiving is evidence for the present existence of what is perceived. It is also the most originary evidence for the individual thing, its nature, and its existence.
b. Clear remembering is evidence for the past existence of the remembered if (and only if) it be a remembering of that individual thing as past perceived, as having been perceived.
c. The noun 'experiencing' may be used to designate any intentive process whose character is such t`t something intended to as individual by the process is presented in person. Such a process is experiential with respect to the relevant individual thing and those of its determinations which are themselves presented in and through the process in question.

B. Not all of the determinations that the object has as it is intended need be presented in an experiencing of it. To say that an object is experienced is not to say that it is presented in its entirety. In many, indeed in most typical cases where something is experienced it is intended as having more to it than is strictly speaking presented. In such cases we may distinguish between the strictly presented part of the thing and the parts or aspects which are not strictly presented.

1. The intended determinations which are not strictly presented are that object's appresented properties. What is strictly presented is apperceived as a (one-sided, partial) appearance of a thing which has determinations that do not themselves appear in this perceiving of the thing.
2. Apperception of transcendent things is a function of consciousness, a performance on the part of consciousness.

(a) It is a kind of apprehension through which the sensing of what is given (e.g., the color of the table) acquires the sense of being a perceiving (an inadequate, incomplete one) of something Objective and transcendent (i.e., non-immanent). What is given in the sensing acquires the sense 'appearance' of something Objective.
(b) Experiencing any object that is both an individual and a transcendent entity (Object) always involves such transcendent apperception.

C. To come back to the point made in section III. B., it is clearer now what is meant by Husserl's claim that all perceptions of transcendent actual entities are mixed and, therefore, dubious.

1. Such perceptions are necessarily apperceptive. The perceptually intended thing is perceived to have determinations which are not themselves perceived. The intentiveness to them is positively doxic (they are believed in) but the belief in them cannot be simply certain (proto-doxic). The seen color of the table, could be — in Husserl's opinion — intended protodoxically, but even the co-intentiveness to the color's status as an appearance of the table is not protodoxic but is rather modalized, e.g., problematic, questionable, probable.

a. The appresented determinations (its unseen legs, for example) are intended and intended as being actual now but are not themselves intended perceptually. They are there for the consciousness of the table. They are intended to as objects of potential perceivings that are now anticipated as potential future perceivings of the same thing (the table), future perceivings of it from other points of view.
b. The present perceiving thus involves an implicit belief that further perceptual experience of the table will show it to be "truly" as it is now intended to be. But nothing guarantees that the present anticipations will be fulfilled (confirmed) by the course of future experience. <The thing as it "truly" is would be the thing adequately given, given in such a way that all of its intended determinations are perceived at once (are given in an originary way) — the thing intended in such a way that all of its determinations are actually given and none are merely "potential". It is clear that the transcendent Object in this sense is an ideal, one which may be more or less adequately actualized (approximated as it were but never fully actualized. {See LI#6, Chapter 5 and the entry "Absurd, the" in the "Husserl Notes" on this Web site.}>

2. Experience of any thing intended to both as actual and as transcendent with respect to the mental life in which the experiencing occurs is always and necessarily "mixed"; it always involves apperception and modalized doxic thetic characters as well as protodoxic thetic characters.

D. So far only material objects have been used as examples in discussing individual transcendent objects. However, the adjective phrase 'individual transcendent' is by no means equivalent to 'material'. I am conscious of something transcendent whenever I am conscious of it as not being an immanent part of my mental life. The consciousness of something as both individual and transcendent is often a consciousness of mental processes. among the transcendencies to which my mental life is intentive are some which are not purely material (purely physical, purely real). Some transcendent Objects are intended as psychophysical. This needs to be emphasized since there is a strong tendency, even among phenomenologists, to think (or perhaps better, to speak unthinkingly) of the class of transcendent Objects as including only physical objects. However, minds other than my own are transcendent with respect to my own. And all eidetic objects {see VIII below, especially H. 2} are non-mental; no eidetic object is a constituent of my mind or of any other mind (whether divine, angelic, human, or brute).

1. Among the material things that I apperceive are some which are apperceived to be the physical parts of psychophysical beings. The mental components of any one of these are apperceived — they are not strictly presented. The apperceiving of other minds and other mental processes than my own Husserl refers to as empathic apperception or simply empathy. The mental aspect of another — whether the Other be intended as a brute or as a person — is never perceived as such, and, thus, it is never strictly presented. Nevertheless it makes perfectly good sense to speak of my perceiving another person. If we are going to admit that the table can be and is perceived in spite of the fact that some of its determinations are not perceived then we can equally well speak of Others as being perceived even though their mental components are not strictly perceived. Husserl emphatically rejects the terminology of Hume, who concludes that the table is a fiction and that the consciousness of it is imaginative and who also concludes that the concept of any mind is − if a mind would be other than a set of instantaneously existing coexistent "perceptions" − is a fiction generated by imagination.

a. As I stand here, my mental life is presented to me in immanent perception {compare section VI. B. below on reflective perception}, in primal consciousness. It is so presented whether I pay any particular attention to it or not.
b. But since you do not perceive my mental life at all, you cannot pay attention to it intuitively, i.e., in a way that would be a strict perceiving of it. Note that this does not prevent your paying attention to it though it will probably be more instructive to pay attention to what I am saying. But since you do not perceive my mental life at all, you cannot pay attention to it perceptually or experientially in the strict sense of those words. Your attentiveness to the mental constituents of myself would be not perceptual but "apperceptual".
c. A precisely analogous situation obtains — at least so far as I can tell — with regard to my consciousness of your mental life and the mental processes in it.

VI. Each of us has, therefore, at least one potentiality which the others do not have. Each has the potentiality to reflect on her own mental life. This potentiality is that of attending to and occupying herself with the ongoing presentive experience of the mental component belonging to that psychophysical entity who she is. The mental process which would result from actualizing this potentiality would be an example of active reflecting, that is, of introspecting.

A. Introspecting, active reflection is reflecting in the strict, the narrow sense of the word. In this narrow sense, reflecting is a mental act (an exigent mental process {see the entry "act [v. handeln]…" in "Husserl Notes" on this site} through which I attend to some part or aspect of my own mind. 'Act' in the strict sense of the word is a term for a specific class of mental processes rather than for the entire class of mental processes as Husserl used the term in LI. In this strict sense of the word, a mental process is an act if and only if it is a process in which the ego is engaged with, is occupied by, is busied with something no matter what and no matter how (doxically, emotionally, conatively). The acts which occur in my mental life are those mental processes through which I am busied with one or with some of the objects intended to through the mental process in which I am busied.

1. To the extent that I turn to a mental process, engage in it, and become busied with some object to which that process is intentive, the mental process becomes an an act.
2. In his Logical Investigations (1900-1903), Husserl used the term 'Akt' with a much broader denotation. In that sense, the word applied to any actual mental process at all (as contrasted with merely potential mental processes). So, in the earlier works any mental event in which something happens or in which something gets done is called an act, and no terminological distinction is drawn between active and passive mental processes.

B. Now, in any mental act, the ego will be busied with something to which that act is intentive and will be busied with it either straightforwardly or reflectively. An act in which the ego is busied straightforwardly we shall call a straightforward act.

1. The ego is busied straightforwardly if both of the following conditions are fulfilled.

a. The ego is busied with something intended to as outside (transcendent to) her mental life and outside herself qua ego.
b. She is busied with this transcendent something without regard to its being intended to in her mental life

2. The ego is busied reflectively if any of the following conditions are fulfilled.

a. The ego is busied with her own mental life or with some part or quality thereof.
b. She is busied with herself as an ego or with some part, quality, or property of herself as an ego.
c. She is busied with something intended to as transcendent by the mental process in which she is engaged and is busied with this something as something intended to in her life.

3. Note that introspective acts, i.e., reflective acts, may be either original and perceptual or non-original and non-perceptual. They must be carefully distinguished from the sort of non-actional, involuntary immanent perception that is included in every mental phenomenon. {For an account of some of the ways in which such involuntary immanent perception occurs see section VII and sectons IX and X below.}

VII. As a science, phenomenology tries to start out from reflective acts, especially reflective perceivings, — that is, actional experiencing of things mental or of transcendent things as phenomena, of transcendent things as they are intended to in an experienced mental life.

A. In ordinary reflecting as it occurs in everyday life, the person reflecting goes on accepting other things besides what is reflectively experienced as actually or as possibly existent or non-existent — just as one does in straightforward activities.

1. One goes on accepting or taking for granted other things as existing and having their real spatial and temporal loci in the real world and having as well real relations to other things, including relations to oneself and to oneself as reflectively perceived. People reflecting in the ordinary way accept the lives they reflect upon as existing under and even as dependent upon real conditions in their environment.
2. The acceptance of, the belief in such relations, taking them for granted, colors one's attitudes towards what one reflectively experiences.

B. If I am to observe and describe the reflectively experienced mental life purely as it is given, just as it is in itself, then I ought also to try to dissociate myself as a pure psychologist from my habitual acceptance of other things and of real relations between these other entities and the life reflected upon. As phenomenological psychologist I ought to refrain from accepting (either as actually or even as possibly existent or non-existent) anything other than the mental life that I experience reflectively. This refraining from acceptance, this dissociation which I am to effect is what Husserl calls psychological phenomenological epoche [ε̉ποχή]. {HUA1 15, 130; HUA3 63ff.; HUA5 141, 145, 276; HUA6 154, 239, 243, 265; HUA8 65; HUA9 341; HUA10 336}^[1]

1. Such a restraint clearly involves a restriction upon the phenomenological psychologist's subject matter. This is a restriction of the investigator's interest to "phenomena", to things as they appear or would appear. <Note that this does not imply that phenomena are ideas or that phenomena are ideal or eidetic {II below, especially H. 2} objects. Husserl emphasizes that many phenomena, including all actual objects, are not eidetic objects although some phenomena are eidetic objects and all eidetic objects are phenomena in his sense of the word.> Through effecting epoche, the phenomenologist reduces her subject matter, her field of investigation (the noematic correlate of her phenomenologically investigating consciousness) just to what is reflectively experienced, purely as it shows itself to be. Thus, phenomenological restricting or restraint is also a reducing of the theme of inquiry: psychological phenomenological epoche and reduction.

a. Psychological phenomenological reduction is an effect of the psychological phenomenological epoche. Psychological phenomenological reduction primarily concerns the phenomenologist's subject matter. As psychological phenomenologist, the ego's initial interest is reflective. The psychological phenomenological epoche has the effect of reducing the objects of one's possible reflection to what Husserl calls their psychic purity. The mental life I reflect upon is of interest to me only as it is in and for itself — which here means just that mental life is of interest only as it shows itself to be. The other things to which this mental life is intentive are of interest purely in their status as things to which this mental life is actually or possibly intentive: transcendent things things that are not genuine parts of the mental life that is reflectively given, are reduced purely to their status as objects for intentive processes that do or that could occur in this life.
b. Another effect of psychological phenomenological epoche is that it institutes and sustains a psychological phenomenological attitude, an habitual attitude directed exclusively things which are or which would be objects of one's possible reflectings.

2. A further general phenomenological procedure consists in actualizing reflective quasi-experiencings of some presented feature of this mental life. Reflective quasi-experiencing involves quasi-experiences in which the mental life or some feature of it is quasi-presented as being different from what it is presented as being. This procedure is what Husserl calls free variation (varying, in fantasy, a phenomenon that has been experienced) or fantasy variation. <Note that the procedure here is no longer a matter of introspection. Whereas phenomenological procedure does begin introspectively, the method is no longer a matter of reflective experience once the reflectively perceived phenomenon has been imaginatively varied. The variation on the experienced phenomenon is still a phenomenon but is not one intended as actually occurring and so is not intended as being reflectively experienced. {See VI.B.3 above.}>

a. Free variation is carried out as a way of making distinct that certain kinds of features will and must invariably belong to phenomena of a certain kind that is under investigation.
b. 'Quasi-experiencing' designates any intending such that

(1) what is intended to is such that if it were genuinely experienced it would occur in time and
(2) is intended to as if it were presented in person (as if it were intuited).

c. Any experience that one fakes or feigns to oneself very distinctly, a make believe experience would be a quasi-experience. Having a distinctive term is desirable so as to avoid confusions that might easily arise here. When I quasi-experience the Botticelli Venus floating through the door on her scallop shell, I am not deluded and am not hallucinating. It is not an illusory perception; it is not an actual or genuine perception at all: I don't believe she is there and I do not even try to believe in her however much and genuinely I may admire her. As a phenomenological procedure, quasi-experiencing is carried out in order to bring out the general characteristics of mental processes of a certain kind. The aim is to bring out, e.g., that which is invariant in all sensuous perceivings.

2. Having adopted a psychological phenomenological attitude, I reflectively find and observe sensuous perceivings going on in my mental life. I can freely vary these in certain dimensions. I can observe that which is similar and that which is invariant in seeing different objects, hearing different objects, smelling them, tasting them, touching them. My phenomenological purpose in all these varyings is precisely to bring out that which is invariant or that which is essential to a mental life as such or to a mental process of some particular kind or to mental lives of a particular kind or sort.

a. Reflective experiencing involves an accepting of what is reflectively perceived as actually existent. Analogously, reflective quasi-experience involves quasi-accepting of the intended object as actually existent. But the phenomenologist's interest is an interest in the experienced mental life and particular processes in it not as actually existent objects but as essentially possible objects.

(1) Accepting something as actually existent involves an accepting of it as possibly existent. {See also VIII.D.1 below.} (Quasi-accepting of it as something actual involves quasi-accepting of it as possible.)
(2) One can disregard one's acceptance of an intended object as actually existent, even when the object is one reflectively perceived. One can restrain oneself from one's accepting the object as actual and from pursuing the interests one normally has in this object or in objects of this kind. Even so, the object can still be accepted as essentially possible. This sort of refraining is what Husserl called eidetic refraining or eidetic epoche. Here what I restrain myself from qua phenomenologist is acceptance of the object as actual; I restrain myself from positing this object or any other as actually existent.

(a) This does not prevent my investigating what it means to believe something to be existent or what it means for something to be intended as existent or even what it means to know something to be existent.
(b) It does mean that I shall be concerned in the investigation only with the believing, the being intended, or the knowing as possible occurrences.

(3) The effect of such restraint is, on the one hand, eidetic reduction
(4) And the restraint institutes, on the other hand, an attitude in which I am, as phenomenologist, interested in the reflectively experienced mental life or some component of it not as something actual but as something possible, and I am interested in these matters in order to establish by free variation what is essentially possible, impossible, or necessary for mental lives in general or for mental processes of a certain kind or sort.

VIII. PHENOMENOLOGY AS A PRIORI SCIENCE. Eidetic phenomenology — whether considered psychologically or transcendentally — seeks to establish eidetic laws about which mental phenomena of a specified sort are essentially possible, which are essentially necessary, or which are essentially impossible. Eidetic phenomenology seeks laws that would enable us:

A. to decide which universal judgments about minds or mental phenomena are bound to be true;
B. to establish limits to the range of statements that can be true about minds or mental phenomena;
C. to establish that certain statements about minds or mental phenomena could not possibly be true.
D. EIDETIC PHENOMENOLOGY AND TRADITIONAL DISCUSSIONS OF SYNTHETIC A PRIORI JUDGMENTS. Insofar as it is an eidetic science, phenomenology seeks to establish that certain universal propositions have no possible exceptions. Any universal proposition having no possible exceptions is an a priori proposition or judgment in certain traditional philosophical terminologies, such as that of Kant, for example. The characteristics of a priori propositions as Kant defined them are 1) that they are universal in form and 2) that they are necessary (also called sometimes 'apodictic' or 'apodeictic', but this is something of a misnomer), i.e., are necessarily true. That they are necessarily true means that they could have no exceptions, not just that there are no exceptions in fact or that there are none so far as we know. An a priori proposition is true of all possible members of the class or of the classes to which it applies; that is what is meant by saying that such a proposition is true universally.

1. If all actual cases must also be possible then necessary truths will hold for all actual cases of the relevant kind.

a. To this extent, a priori truths have factual relevance even though they are not empirical (are not a posteriori). Alleged a priori truths are subject to falsification by clearly experienced counterinstances as well as by clearly fantasied counterinstances.
b. However, knowing that a universal proposition, P_u, is analytic (knowing that the denial of P_u is non-self-consistent) is not the same as (is not synonymous with) knowing that P_u is true for all possible objects of a certain kind. Therefore, if P_u is known to hold for all possible cases of a certain kind then this is knowledge that P_u is not just a priori but synthetic as well.
c. In traditional terminology, judgments for which there is evidence that they have factual relevance are called 'synthetic'. That a statement of alleged fact (i.e., a proposition that is alleged as applying to actual cases) satisfy (be consistent with) all a priori propositions (a priori laws) is a necessary condition for its being true.

(1) So long as mathematical propositions, such as the parallel postulate within Euclidian geometry, are considered from the standpoint of pure mathematics, they are not being advanced or alleged as factually relevant or synthetic; instead, they are alleged just as standing in some definite relation (such as that of implying or being implied by) to other propositions in the relevant mathematical discipline. Indeed, when one speaks of "pure" mathematics, what seems to be meant is that the propositions being called pure are being considered without regard to any possible factual relevance: they are being considered analytically, just with regard to their meaning within the relevant mathematical discipline.
(2) On the other hand, if there are a priori propositions that are synthetic then, given that some statement of alleged fact, call it S_f, is inconsistent with such a synthetic a priori law, S_f does not satisfy the conditions for possible truth, i.e., S_f belongs to the class of statements which cannot possibly (ever, under any circumstances) be true.

(a) That is to say, if some statement or belief is held or asserted or alleged as being not only a priori but synthetic then this way of asserting a proposition to be a priori entails a claim that there can be no facts with which it would be inconsistent. Hence, the allegation that a certain proposition, P_u, is both a priori and synthetic will be shown to be false if it is subject to falsification by observed facts. Facts whose true description would be inconsistent with (would contradict) proposition P_u would prove it false.
(b) Is there some sort of evidence which would prove conclusively that a proposition has been truly alleged as both a priori and synthetic? Probably not, evidence that strong would show p to be necessary, universal, and apodictic; see point A above.
(c) Is there non-empirical evidence to support the assertion that some propositions are both a priori and synthetic? Yes, there is. If it were not possible clearly to imagine a state of affairs whose description would be inconsistent with a certain universal proposition P_u then that impossibility is evidence favoring the assertion that P_u is true. However, it is nevertheless very far from being apodictic evidence that P_u is true. It is not empirical evidence however. It is not empirical because

(i) a posteriori propositions can be falsified only by cases actually observed, not by cases that are merely imagined cases, no matter how clearly they are imagined.
(ii) Synthetic a priori propositions, on the other hand, can be falsified by clearly imagined cases as well as by actually observed cases.

E. Contrary to widely held views, whether there are a priori propositions has little to do with

1. whether anyone believes that S_f is not true, much less
2. whether anyone is certain that S_f is not true and also has nothing whatsoever to do with
3. whether anyone believes the a priori statement (P_u) which S_f contradicts.

F. It also has no clear connection with belief that any of the concepts in terms of which synthetic a priori judgments are framed are innate.[2]
G. If Husserl were to insist that some of his psychological or philosophical theories are synthetic but are not empirical (a posteriori) this would seem to be equivalent, in traditional terminology, to insisting that they are synthetic a priori theories.

1. His insisting on this would not imply that the theories being referred to are true.
2. That they are true is not something of which those who assert the theories as both synthetic and justified by nonempirical evidence must be certain in order to be consistent.
3. What it would imply is that the theories in question are asserted as being based on evidence which is held to support the claim that the theories are not just true for all actual cases but for all possible cases.

H. CONCERNING THE TERMS 'EIDOS' AND 'ESSENCE'. In ordinary Greek use, the noun 'eidos [εἷδος]' (pl. eidé) was used to express: seeing, sight, <visual> appearance or looks of; shape, figure; plan of action; form, sort, kind, species (when distinguished from genus).

1. Plato coined it for a special although highly ambiguous meaning. {See VIII. F and note 2 below.}
2. Husserl introduced the Greek word in German spelling as a common name for objects of a sort which he also called 'Wesen' — translated into English in some contexts as 'essence' or 'nature' (as in "human nature"), in others as 'being'.

a. In most contexts in which he uses 'Wesen' as a technical term, 'essence' is the better translation; in such contexts, das Wesen von x translates best as 'the essence of x'. {See the entry "essence [Wesen]" in the "Husserl Notes" on this site.}

(1) In such contexts, the phrase would designate the particular essence or quiddity (whatness) of the thing in question, as contrasted with its being actual or being possible.
(2) In this sense of the word, no two things have the selfsame essence — no matter how alike the two things may be, and no genuine component of one object's essence is also a genuine component of another object's essence.

b. In other contexts, the same phrase 'essence of x' designates just part of an object's whatness.

(1) In this sense, 'essence' or essential nature' is contrasted with the adventitious, contingent, or accidental characteristics belonging to the object's whatness. This contrast is defensible however only where some component of the object's essence in sense a. above is chosen as reference and as exemplifying a definite set of essences in sense c. below; it then makes sense to ask which components of its essence in sense a. are necessary or essential to the object's being a example of that set of universals. Otherwise, the traditional differentiation of essential from non-essential (accidental) traits is spurious.
(2) No two objects have the same essence in this sense of the word either.

c. In still other Husserlian contexts, the same phrase may designate neither all of nor any part of an object's whatness but rather a set of universals that the object exemplifies through its own peculiar and unique whatness.

(1) Each such universal or complex of universals is a Wesen or essence.
(2) In this sense of the word, more than one object can be "of" the same essence, i.e., can exemplify or instantiate the same essence.

I. Husserl anticipated the confusion that would result from these meanings of 'Wesen', and he tried to lessen them by introducing a sharp terminological distinction between sense H.2.c and senses H.2.a and b above.

1. He decided to introduce the use of 'Eidos' as if it were a German and to restrict its use to designating just the universal essences exemplified by objects. He stated quite explicitly that he did this to reduce the risk of misinterpretation by making his terminology less equivocal than that of his Logical Investigations.
2. The same terminological innovation would enable him — he said — to retain the concept Kant had expressed by the word 'Idee' while keeping a clean differentiation between all universal essences whether material or formal on the one hand and, on the other hand, what he would now be referring to as Ideen [ideas, ideals]. Some of the things to which he applies the latter term are not eidetic objects at all but instead are real objects.
3. If this reading of Husserl is correct then his endeavor to achieve greater precision was largely futile. The point has been so pervasively overlooked that the following passage should be studied closely, keeping in mind that every constituent of a real thing, including every one of its constituent forms, would be an ideal in the Kantian sense and would not be anything eidetic at all {ID1 (HUA3) m312-313}:

Just as the thing is an ideal [Idee] so is each of the attributes belonging to its essential content and, above all, each of its constituent "forms," and this is so from <its> regional universe right down to the lowest order unity to which it belongs. More precisely:
In its being as an ideal [in seinem idealen Wesen], the thing is given as res temporalis…
…res extensa…
…res materialis…unity of causal relations…Even in respect of its specifically real components what we meet with are ideals <which here would be real individual essences, not eidé whether formal or material>. All components of the thing-ideal [Dingidee] are themselves ideals <real individual essences>, each involves the "and so forth" of "endless" possibilities.

J. Whatever he may have meant by calling his philosophy a transcendental idealism, Husserl does not seem to have agreed with the widespread idealistic notion that real things have ideas as their constituents.

IX. Intentive synthesis and the consciousness of inner time. Husserl's description of time consciousness entails a field theory of memory and of anticipation that is the analog of field theory in sensory perception. We do not look at everything that we see, nor do we listen to everything that we hear. We also do not recall everything that we remember, nor do we expect everything that we anticipate. What I recall stands out for me within a field of experiences some of which may be remembered with comparable or greater clarity but most of which are less distinctly remembered, most of which are indeed remembered with far less clarity. Something quite analogous is true of the experiences that I now expect. To emphasize the intentionality of time consciousness, Husserl refers to whatever is anticipated as being protended whether it is actively expected or not. Similarly, he refers to whatever is remembered as being retended whether it is actively recalled or not. Thus we get something like the following scheme.

I do not now recall all of the things retended. I do not now expect to recall all of the things retended. There are, among the things retended certain things that I have recalled before. These are retended; they include things that, when I think about it, I expect that I shall be able to recall if I try. If I tried to arrange these in sequence, there would be gaps, very extensive ones. Try as I may, I can not fill all of the gaps. Nevertheless, it has happened before that I succeeded in recalling something that previously I had been unable to recall despite great effort to do so; this fact is now retended. So the group of things that I expect to recall does not form a set having as members only those things that I have been able to recall. There is for me an indistinct horizon of further potential recollections; beyond this horizon are the things which may yet come back to me. Such things, to the extent that they are there for consciousness at all are there as past objects of retentive consciousness. If they are not now there for consciousness at all then we shall have to resort to magic in order to explain how I should ever have been able to recall any such thing. The alternative would be to assert some causal interaction between, for example, brain and memory. In some unknown manner, the brain causes me suddenly to remember something which was before not there for consciousness at all.[3] That retentive consciousness cannot be described in the same vocabulary as would be correctly employed in describing whatever neurophysiological conditions this sort of consciousness may depend upon does not however imply that retentive consciousness requires no such conditions. Pointing out and insisting upon this distinction isn't meant even to suggest such a thing although it is all that would be meant here by insisting that that the conditioned and the conditioning are not "the same", and that is enough for our purposes to establish that they are not identical. Descartes did indeed show something of importance however gravely he may have misunderstood and misrepresented what was discovered. {See also the preliminary characterization of phenomenology that is given the title "Why not Naturalism…?" on this site.}

A. The currently occurring phase of any stream of consciousness is intentive in a variety of ways, including but by no means limited to the following ways.

1. Each phase is impressionally conscious (such as S₀for the phase occurring at time t₄ in the diagram below) of the concurrent phase of one or more sensory fields (in this case a moment T_n of silence in the auditory field).

2. Each is retentively conscious of a continuum of earlier phases as having been constituents of the self-same stream of consciousness. In the diagram segment S₀R₁ represents retentive consciousness (primary memory) of the continuum of impressional consciousness represented by T₁T_n 3. Each is protentively conscious of a continuum of later phases as phases which would be constituents of the self-same stream of consciousness. R₀S_-1 represents protending (automatic, primarily passive anticipation) that occurred at t₃ of a continuum of coming phases (represented by T₁T_n).
4. Each is automatically identified to be a phase which has been protended in the now retended continuum of earlier phases.

a. The phase represented by the ascending vertical T4 is automatically identified with what has been continuously and automatically anticipated (protended) through now retended (S₀O₄) protendings such as those represented by R₀S_-1, R_-1S_-2, R_-2S_-3, R_-3S_-4, etc.
b. That phase was protended at each earlier phase to be a phase that would be retentively conscious of each of those earlier protendings.
c. That phase protends coming phases to be phases that will be retentively aware of their earlier phases, including the t₄ phase itself, just as its retended phases protended it.

5. What is experienced in each current phase is automatically differentiated from or assimilated to what has been anticipated in the continuum of retended phases to be a current noematic object.

a. The technical term noema or noematic object is used only to designate something which some lived experience (called a noesis or noetic process) is conscious of, no matter in what way.
b. It is clear from points IV.A.1-4 that every noesis is necessarily included among its own noematic objects in a variety of ways, including but not limited to the following ones.

B. Insofar as it is aware of itself as having been protended. It is aware of itself, assimilated to and differentiated from the noemata of the now retended phases in which it was protended — as to be retended in each of a continuum of currently protended phases (should any members of that continuum become actual).

1. Each current phase identifies itself as the previously anticipated successor of the continuum of earlier phases and as something that would retain its identity in a continuum of later phases.
2. Each phase involves an awareness of its fixed and unalterable temporal locus in a single continuously changing stream of consciousness.
3. The unity of the stream of consciousness is continuously "reestablished" <synthetically (see below)> in each of its phases.

C. Every experience, any consciousness whatsoever, necessarily involves such a unity of impressional, retentive and protentive consciousness. All consciousness or awareness of any sort at all belongs to the unity of a single, temporally unified stream of consciousness.
D. The unity of any single stream of consciousness Husserl called "the pure ego." By so designating it, he apparently meant to indicate 1) that being such a unity is both sufficient grounds for speaking of every lived experience as belonging to an ego and 2) that being such a unity is a necessary condition for the existence of any ego whatsoever.

1. Every experience whether it be a worm's, a mollusk's, or a mammal's is intrinsically temporal and belongs to a stream of consciousness. The worm's, the mollusk's, the insect's, or the mammal's awareness, however primitive it may be, necessarily belongs to an ego in the minimal sense connoted by the phrase, "the pure ego."
2. Every pure ego — whether human, angelic, piscine, canine, or equine — necessarily exists through a stream of consciousness and so through retendings and protendings pertaining to a stream of consciousness.
3. To state the matter from the (transcendental) point of view of phenomenological philosophy: an ego can exist only by making herself exist in time, that is, by temporalizing herself.

X. The diagram we have been using provides a model of the temporal structure of any possible stream of consciousness. Husserl's term for this structure common to all possible streams of consciousness is 'temporality'.

A. One result of the account so far given of the temporality of consciousness is that the stream of consciousness is continuous and uninterrupted throughout the ego's existence. No gaps can occur in retentive memory.

1. Our descriptive psychology shows continuity between impressional consciousness and retentive consciousness. What was originally given and what is retended is bound to be one rather than numerically different; they are not juxtaposed sequentially as earlier and later. Moreover, what is retended is still given, exactly as much so as it ever was. Without having to be recalled at all, it can give rise to emotions and to strivings distinct from those it initially inspired, including strivings not to recall it. Phenomenological descriptive psychology indicates that the concepts, in traditional epistemology, of intuitive knowledge and of what is intuited are in need of revision.
In the tradition of Descartes and Kant as well as in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill, intuitive knowledge is restricted to perceptual knowledge. Only the so-called internal and external senses were admitted to give non-demonstrative knowledge. For Descartes, Hume, and Kant alike what can be known is limited to just what can be either deductively proven or intuited. And what can be intuited coincides with, is limited to just what can be sensed or perceived. What can be sensed or perceived must exist when and only when it is perceived so that whatever is given (or in any case whatever can be given clearly) is given only as it is now perceived. <The phrase 'clearly given' is not redundant; this has historically often been ignored for polemical purposes very often, but even Husserl sometimes loses sight of the fact and its importance, especially when writing of how what is retended recedes into the past; what is diminished thereby is however not the givenness of the retended but its exigency> Hence, there could be no intuitive knowledge of the past, strictly speaking. Intuitive awareness is awareness whose object is itself presented or given, as in the case of perceiving. When psychology separated from philosophy and was established as a positive science, it took with it these and other then prevailing prejudices.

a. But continuity has now been established between perceiving and remembering on the one hand and, correlatively between the perceived and the remembered on the other hand.
b. What is intuited or given to consciousness is no longer restricted to what is being perceived to exist now but includes all past and now retended phases of the stream of consciousness, each with its own retended phases. The past phases, each with its manifold intentionality, are still given through now occurring and continuously occurring retentive intentionality. <Thus, the answer to the question that perplexes neurologist Oliver Sacks {in The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), page 146, lines 18-23} may well be that what makes these remarkable recollections possible is the continuous givenness through primary memory of the self's entire experiential history.>

(1) Necessarily, the ego's entire past is still given, however obscurely or confusedly.
(2) What any given ego is acquainted with (in the terminology used by Alfred Schutz, the ego's "stock of knowledge at hand") therefore includes the totality of the ego's earlier lived experiences. Each of them is given to primary memory.
(3) Each of them is, therefore, accessible in principle to recollection or secondary, exigent memory. The temporality of consciousness makes it possible that a person recall even very remote experiences and recall them at least as vividly as they were actually experienced. In this connection, I call your attention to some remarkably relevant cases reported by Oliver Sacks.

(a) Even so open-minded an investigator as Sacks is not quite free of the bias whereby memories get identified as dreams and hallucinations, even when they are clearly recognized to be more vivid than currently occurring perceptual experience. To stay in line with pseudoscientific biases when dealing with very vivid recollection the neurologist gets caught up in professionally familiar locutions about dream, hallucination and imagination even while acknowledging that what is being referred to are never phantasies but are always memories "of the most precise and vivid kind" and include the emotions that were included in the past experience. {Sacks, op. cit. 132} Related naturalistic biases lead the neurologist to treat retention of experience that is achieved through associative synthesis as if it were an "almost perfect" achievement by "the brain" — as in the presentation of the Mrs O'M. case {ibid. 137:19-138:4}. Prevalent biases quaintly find that sort of talk to be a lesser mystification than the dualism of Descartes' closer followers; the now prevalent naturalistic biases are no better founded however than the dualistic ones. Both sorts descend from the ontology of substance, from which they dangle rootlessly.
(b) The case of Mrs O'C. that Oliver Sacks describes {ibid. 132-134} illustrates very appropriately how vivid and detailed the primary memory underlying recollection is. Mrs O'C. was awakened in the middle of the night to loud and clear sounds of songs and dances that she had heard in Ireland during her childhood there. Now that she was very much awake and alert, the music continued. It had not been a dream. It was three nights in the old people's home where she was a resident before she slept through without being similarly awakened. The music she heard quieted gradually and she was able to converse in-between episodes, and these intervals increased until she heard the music only briefly a dozen or so times a day. An electroencephalogram was taken, the patient being asked to lie still without speaking and without singing silently to herself. She was to indicate by moving a finger when she was hearing the music. It was heard three times during the two-hour session. Each time sharp spikes and waves in the graph indicated events in the temporal lobes of her brain showing that seizures were occurring there. This confirmed the hypothesis of Hughlings Jackson, established by Wilder Penfield, that temporal lobe seizures are the invariable physiological basis of 'reminiscence' and experiential hallucinations. In this case a brainscan showed that a small thrombosis or infarction had occurred in part of the patient's right temporal lobe. The sudden reminiscence of Irish songs in the night resulted apparently from a stroke. As its effects waned so, too, did the musical recollections. Asked three months later whether she missed the music, Mrs O'C replied, "It's funny you should ask that,' she said with a smile. 'Mostly, I would say, it is a great relief. But, yes, I do miss the old songs a little. Now, with lots of them, I can't even recall them. It was like being given back a forgotten bit of my childhood again. And some of the songs were really lovely."
(c) {ibid.} Wilder Penfield, Sacks reports, localized the neurological basis for such hallucinations in the brain's temporal lobes, and was able to evoke very precise, detailed 'experiential hallucinations' by gently stimulating seizure-prone areas of the cerebral cortex during surgery on fully conscious patients. Doing so would result instantly in intensely vivid hallucinations of tunes, people, scenes, which would be experienced, lived, as compellingly real…described to those present in fascinating detail…" Sacks takes this to confirm Hughlings Jackson's hypothesis that "There is (1) the quasi-parasitical state of consciousness (dreamy state), and (2) there are remains of normal consciousness and thus, there is double consciousness…a mental diplopia."

(1) first, the person's more or less "normal" conscious life during which "hallucinations" are occurring and which includes the subject's recollective consciousness as well as the retentive consciousness without which recollection would not be possible.
(2) second, the noematic correlate of the person's recollective consciousness: the past experiences have some feature or features which are now salient.

d. Under some circumstances the ego whose current life is continuing can become preoccupied almost exclusively with the remembered past and be concerned almost entirely with it rather than with present events. Oliver Sacks also reports {ibid. 153-155} the case of a young Indian woman of nineteen years, admitted to hospice with left side weakness and numbness and having occasional seizures owing to an unremovable brain tumor. During her seizures, she did not lose consciousness. She had temporal lobe seizures that brought on a state in which she had a dreamy look and reported a dreamy sort of feeling. What she experienced during the seizures became gradually less vague, more definite and more concrete. She experienced landscapes, homes, villages, gardens — recognizing them to have been known and loved in her childhood. As weeks passed these experiences became more and more frequent, engrossing, enthralling until Bhagawhandi was absorbed in them for most of each day.She was nevertheless conscious and composed; when approached as was sometimes needed, she was responsive and courteous and lucid. There was a general feeling that she should not be disturbed beyond what was needed. Dr. Sacks reports, "Once, just once, I said, 'Bhagawhandi, what is happening?' 'I am dying, she answered, 'I am going back where I came from you might call it my return.'"

B. A crucial aspect of the temporality of consciousness is the identity of the stream of consciousness (and so of the ego) throughout a mental life of continuous change. Continuity between the presently perceived and the remembered is a given fact. It is not a fact that need be established by logical analysis of what is itself given although logical analysis of the given can readily establish it since the state of affairs that whatever is given is also remembered is also given. This would hold even of my last sensations should what Heidegger referred to as my eigenste Möglichkeit [ownmost possibility] homologate, namely, the possibility that would terminate my existence, making it impossible that I continue be in any sort of world at all. {See the entries "death, being towards", "Absurd_(Husserl)" in the Heidegger Notes on this Web site.} Considered this way sensory data are by no means fictitious whereas those are very much in the right who maintain that sensory data such as would occur without being remembered and then be remembered subsequently if at all are mythical theoretical constructs. It seems to me entirely possible that Husserl believed in such fabulous creatures in spite of himself when he framed his conception of hyletic data in ID1. For hyletic data would be genuine yet non-intentional components of the flux of consciousness, components that do not refer by their nature beyond themselves. From alleged data of that sort, belief that the same sound as was just heard is now continuing cannot be established by logical analysis. Like Kant before him, Husserl may have allowed himself to be seduced, as Kant had before him — by excessive admiration for Hume's seeming tough-mindedness, his Critical rigor — into thinking that there can be no impressional consciousness of temporal continuity, that the impressional is only instantaneous and therefore discrete. Although he be mistaken in considering, as Kant did, temporal continuity to be other than impressional, Husserl is far from mistaken in asserting that the givenness of time requires various intentional and so mental functions, including retending and protending. Its being there even for the most basic and primitive consciousness, its being constituted [konstituiert] in Husserl's peculiar sense of that word (in contrast to its being there for actional consciousness, in contrast that is to its being grasped, objectivated, explicated, exigent), is an accomplishment [Leistung]. <I should recommend, following suggestions by Dorion Cairns, that phenomenologists not follow Husserl's misleading tendency (in which he is not very consequential) to reserve the term 'spontaneous' for active, exigent mental phenomena. It were far better to use 'spontaneous' as a term whose opposite is 'inert' (rather than using it as Husserl tended to do so that its opposite is 'passive'). Thus used, all mental processes, whether active or passive, are spontaneous, and the mental has about it nothing of the inert. The phrase 'spontaneous mental process' would then be redundant.> The occurrence of that accomplishment entails intentive synthesis.

1. As an accomplishment through intentive synthesis, the consciousness that something presently given is identical with something previously given is termed synthetic. No logical analysis of the prior fact − not even one done by a Supremely Perfect Logician − would have revealed that it would be identical with the now given fact. That identity can be and often is itself given nonetheless and is apodictic. It could not be other than as given even though this apodictic state of affairs is thoroughly temporal and the proposition that it is so is not a universal proposition at all. It would be a material absurdity to allege that it has no possible exceptions and is therefore true necessarily. The proposition would accordingly be both apodictic and non-analytic and contingent (non-necessary), neither its truth nor acquaintance with its truth need depend upon any argument a posteriori.

a. We may say that insofar as I perceive or, more precisely, apperceive presently occurring sounds to be prolongations of previously heard sounds there is occurring a synthesis by virtue of which the present sound and the previous one are identified as moments of the self-same enduring sound and so are apperceived to be appearances of the one enduring sound, just as they and the sound are given to be. There is here neither an allegation nor an implication that the synthesis is a necessary condition either for the sound to be or for it to be just as it is given. And there are no grounds for alleging either that the sound non-existent or that it might be other than it appears (is given) to be.
b. In a quite similar way, the present hearing would be identified synthetically as a continuation of hearing the self-same sound in the sound sequence (E, C, T on the diagram).

(1) Similarly, the presently occurring retending (R₁S₀) of a just past phase (R₀S₀) in hearing the sound would be synthetically identified with a retending just now (at t₃) protended (R₀S_-1) in that just past phase.
(2) Something similar would be true for each on-going mental process. Each on-going now phase would be identified with a phase just previously protended in a now retended phase of the self-same stream of consciousness.

(a) By virtue of its temporality, present phases constantly identify themselves as phases of a single stream of consciousness whose past phases are now retended.
(b) Thus, the unity (pure ego) of the stream of consciousness is constantly generated and regenerated synthetically (in the "constant now").
(c) Consciousness or the ego thus generates itself continually (and spontaneously, in our terminology) as the latest phase in that stream of consciousness whose earlier phases are currently retended and retended as having protended the current phase.
(d) Throughout the duration of any stream of consciousness (pure ego) there occurs a continuous identifying synthesis which achieves (constitutes, generates) that single unitary ego and stream of consciousness as a single "mind" while differentiating it from other objects.

(i) From other objects such as the sounds and auditory field phases in our example. The sound is synthetic unity of a multitude of appearances whether past, present or potential. The sound is a unity of such temporally fixed appearances and enduring qualities; such a unity Husserl would call the Object sense of that noema which is correlative to the hearing of the sound. Any one single thing can be intended as similar and even identical throughout a multitude of changing (i.e., qualitatively different) appearances, and the same is true of the intended qualities of any thing.
(ii) If something is to be understood to be physical then it must be taken to be the unity of a multiplicity of changing appearances, to be something that might be perceived, remembered, anticipated, imagined, judged, etc. And variegated appearances are, in the case of any physical object, qualitatively very different. The self-same thing is intended to be visible, tangible, audible, shaped, heavy, heavy enough to drive a sharp stake into the ground, not heavy enough to drive a dull stake, etc.

XI. Identifying and distinguishing (or differentiating) synthesis is the most fundamental sort where individual objects are concerned.

A. If we imagine two visually presented physical things, a red sphere and a red cube, for example, the seeing of them, the apperceiving of the colors, will necessarily involve a numerically differentiating synthesis.

1. That is to say, each thing will be intended as self-identical and as not identical with the other.
2. But the two are not intended merely as non-identical. They are also intended as more and as less similar and as more and less dissimilar — the extremes being perfect likeness and perfect dissimilarity − in diverse ways.
3. There will be a consciousness of various relations among the two objects, and this will be so in the case of any co-intended objects. The relations are such that the objects are intended as non-identical and as quite alike, more or less alike, or utterly heterogeneous. This is a matter of associative synthesis, which necessarily involves at least three distinct syntheses.

a. An identifying synthesis of each object as a single self-same unity.
b. A numerically differentiating synthesis of the two as not identical.
c. The numerically differentiating will invariably be the basis for a qualitative, assimilative synthesis.

(1) The one thing is presented as being over here, the other as being over there at the same time. The one's being this-here conflicts with the other's being that-there. The two cannot be identified; there is a consciousness of numerical difference.
(2) But each of the two is not just an "it", a something. Each is a something definite. The determinations of the one are not those of the other. The qualities of the one are over here; those of the other are over there. The qualities cannot be identified any more than the things themselves can be identified.

(a) The intended sense or meaning of each is "transferred" (Husserl says, speaking very metaphorically) to the other. The two senses, having been "transferred" provide the basis for a synthesis, not of identity but of likeness or similarity. <What the verb 'to transfer' refers might just about as well be referred to using some form of 'to compare'; the risk of misunderstanding would be just as great in either case. What is being referred to is clearly a happening or event that does not occur in time but one which enables there to be awareness, consciousness of the temporal and of time. The referent is one about which it makes no sense at all to ask when it occurs. Coining phrases like 'constant now' or 'standing now' or 'primal now' as Husserl and others have done may tend to lead the user as well as her audience over from the metaphorical into the fanciful. It may well be better simply to abide with the metaphor. What is being referred to is what Husserl and others, myself included, also call "transcendental" {see also section XII below}. Much ink, paper, and breath and even a fair amount of thought has been expended in wondering whether there can be anything transcendental at all. I shall let the matter rest in pointing out that were there no such occurrences there might well be temporal events but none of them would be or could be given. Curiously, Immanuel Kant and his followers did affirm transcendental occurrences while nevertheless denying that any impression of temporal continuity can occur {see X. B. above}. We shall not be following them down that path; it does not lead to any clearing. Kant did however make clear to the followers of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume that the association of ideas which rightly played so large a role in the admirable thinking of those three could not sensibly be conceived to happen in time. In that tradition, the effect has for the most part been elimination or minimization of discourse about things mental from what there passes for philosophy. Down that path is an enchanted forest whose spooks one tries to coax into a fabulous vessel that would then be called "Language".>

i) The sense of the sphere, being transferred to the cube, is partially "confirmed" and partially "canceled".
ii) There will be confirmation and a consciousness of likeness so far as color is concerned.
iii) So far as shape is concerned there will be cancellation in that the shapes are heterogeneous.

a) There will be consciousness of the cube's shape as other than that of the sphere and of the sphere's shape as other than that of the cube.
b) But there will be confirmation in that each has a shape and each shape is at least roughly three dimensional.

(b) If the surfaces of both shapes are merely seen without being felt and if there is nonetheless a consciousness of them as having a texture then this consciousness points back to earlier, now retended presentations of the same thing or of something similar to it as presented both visually and tactually at the same time.

i) There is "transfer of sense" not only between things simultaneously presented but also
between the past presented and the now presented.
ii) There is an ultimate general principle involved in the notion of transference of sense and assimilative synthesis.

a) The sense which anything is intended to have is automatically transferred to everything else that is intended and is either confirmed or canceled (annulled).
b) So far as possible, we will intend each object as like everything else, and there must be some motive for believing in dissimilarity.
c) There is also an automatic tendency to identify. Unless there is some motive for intending two things, we will intend one.

B. These basic sorts of syntheses enable us to understand something of how the future horizon of mental life is protended from phase to phase.%%

1. Any current intentive process points to a horizon of potential intentive processes. These are processes that may become actual later. This horizon of possible intentive processes (lived experiences) includes sets of lived experiences that are both potential and mutually exclusive so that actualization of one member precludes actualization of the others.

a. The intentional horizon of any actual (now current) process encompasses its protended intendings. These make up its future horizon, the future courses which, it is anticipated, the mental life or stream of consciousness can take.
b. There is also a horizon of unactualized potentials, the ones which were potential in previous moments. These are unrealized and now unrealizable potentialities that were protended in past and now retended nows.

2. The protending of futures and of alternative futures is motivated. <Motivation here refers to if-then relations as they are found in mental life.>

a. In the present, the past is retended with its determinate retended content and patterns of content.

(1) These include patterns whose members co-exist and
(2) patterns whose members are spread out over time.

(1) As a result, there are intended similarities among particular past processes and between them and particular present processes
(2) But there are also similarities between past phases of the mental life as a whole: similarities between past circumstances in inner time.

3. The present phase with its objective sense and contents enters into assimilative synthesis with past phases.

a. Thus, phases now protended are anticipated as phases which will be like the ones that have followed past phases similar to the present one.
b. The present includes intendings for which similar intendings are retended and these latter are retended as having been followed by phases of particular sorts. Some of them have been followed repeatedly by phases of a particular sort. Among these are some that have been followed consistently by phases of a particular sort. Others have typically but not consistently been followed by a certain sort of phase. Still others were rarely followed by phases of a particular sort.
c. The phases now protended are protended as about to go on in a manner similar to that in which phases have gone on which followed phases similar to the present phase.

XII. THE TRANSCENDENTAL AND THE WORLDLY STATUS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND OF THE MIND. Pure psychology leads to descriptions of phenomena that cannot be adequately understood as occurrences within the world of actual entities. {See also section XI. A. 3. c. (2) (a) above.} Impressional consciousness, retending, and protending make up the temporal order of the flux or stream of consciousness. This fixed order of inner time is there for consciousness as a product of identifying and discriminating syntheses among the phases of mental life. These syntheses make it both possible and necessary that consciousness exist in time. In the moment and for the moment, consciousness makes itself exist in time with a definite and unalterable past and a definite range of possible futures.

A. Thus it appears that the consciousness of time makes time exist for consciousness while it makes itself exist as an occurrence taking place now, in the time that consciousness itself is constituting. Here there is a seeming paradox.

1. The temporalizing consciousness makes itself temporal, makes itself be in time. It is as if the process of producing something (time) made itself be part of its own product, as if the automobile plant were itself part of the automobile being produced.
2. To put the same thing somewhat differently, the continuum of retention and protention is present in each moment of the flux of consciousness. Yet this same continuum constitutes the flux of consciousness relative to this present moment.

a. The whole stream can exist for consciousness only insofar as there is retentive/protentive consciousness of the stream. Yet this synthetically unifying consciousness necessarily interprets itself as one moment in the stream of consciousness.
b. The consciousness which constitutes this flux as its intended object constitutes itself in the intended flux: the noesis is constituted in the noema.
c. The flux of mental processes constitutes the world as it is for the flowing consciousness. At the same time, the flux is for itself a process occurring in this world of which it is consciousness.
d. The consciousness which is the theme of our investigations is necessarily constitutive of the world but also is necessarily intentive to itself as one component among others occurring in the intended world.

(1) The constituted object of the consciousness of internal time is the temporal flux of subjective processes.
(2) It is the essential nature of these processes to be intentive to the world and to themselves as occurring in the world.
(3) Thus, the constituting consciousness necessarily constitutes itself as occurring in what it constitutes (the world) as a component thereof.

B. Existence as part of the world is a status which consciousness necessarily confers upon itself. Thus, the status of the flux of consciousness as something within the world is a secondary status which it necessarily gives itself.

1. On the one hand, the flux is something generated on the basis of the temporality of consciousness; it is something constituted.
2. On the other hand, consciousness generates or constitutes its own existence as belonging to the world.
3. The generative or constitutive status of consciousness is the more fundamental status; it is the foundation for the existence of consciousness in its worldly status. This however neither entails nor supports any claim that consciousness occurs in its more fundamental, its transcendental status independently of its worldly status, much less a claim that the former occurs before the latter.

a. The status of constitutive consciousness as occurring within internal time is a secondary status, a status which it confers upon itself.

(1) Constitutive consciousness has a pre-temporal as well as a pre-worldly status. Being temporal and being worldly are senses or meanings which consciousness confers upon itself necessarily, i.e., meanings which it necessarily intends itself to have.
(2) Temporality and worldliness belong to the meaning of any possible consciousness, of anything mental whatsoever.

XIII. The case of musician Clive Wearing as reported in the segment "Life without Memory" of The Mind a PBS series as edited at Colorado State University.

A. Wearing is a gifted conductor of Renaissance classical music and himself a singer. It is alleged that a portion (the hypocampus) of his brain has been destroyed through a viral infection.

1. He has episodes during which he is unable to recall events in his recent life. During such episodes, it is reported that he has no recollection of previous events.
2. He maintains a "diary" during some of these episodes; it consists of either disjointed or loosely connected statements with frequent mention of his love for his wife, Deborah.

a. Early in a new episode, he greets his wife, whom he clearly recognizes, passionately. He reports not remembering her earlier visit on the same day during which she reports having brought him coffee. He recalls nothing of this visit and denies that it occurred.
b. She shows him the "diary", and he denies having seen it before and having written it although he acknowledges recognizing the handwriting as his own.
c. He becomes very agitated and angry when Deborah Wearing presses him to explain how he can recognize her without having known her before and how the diary can be in his handwriting if he did not write it.
d. He is perfectly able to function still as conductor. He becomes disoriented again, however, upon reaching the end of a composition he has just conducted.

1. The female voice-over, seemingly Mrs. Deborah Wearing, asserts that Wearing lives at a moment with no past and no future.
2. This agrees with the suggested description by the male commentator who seems to be portrayed as an expert <neurologist? psychiatrist?>. He asserts that Wearing has lost the highest form of memory. <Note, however, that the expert does not describe Wearing as having lost all forms of memory. So the material presented in the segment belies its catchy title; PR trumps science. Psychology at Colorado State University is such jive!> The form of memory allegedly lost is said to be that which relates the self at present to the past and enables the self to project (anticipate) the future.

a. There seems to be an implication that if this sort of memory is lost then the self will not be related to the past and will be unable to project a future. <This interpretation seems clearly at odds, therefore, with Wearing's continuing ability to conduct large ensembles in performing complex musical compositions.>
b. The mental function that Wearing has lost is said to be what probably distinguishes humans from other animals. This suggests that the speaker agrees with those who believe that universal ideas are mental constructs. The reasoning would be that anticipating the future requires the formation of general concepts of similarities between sequences of remembered occurrences.

C. Husserl's or Ortega's anti-nominalistic position leads, on the other hand, to no such conception of projecting the future as a "higher" mental function. On the contrary, it insists that no mind constructs general or universal ideas.

1. The term 'concept' is reserved for the consciousness or awareness of universal ideas. The most basic or primitive concepts are not constructs since constructs would presumably require some sort of higher level mental activity.

a. To be aware of a similarity between A and A' does not, however, require any such higher level constructive activity.
b. Instead, the consciousness of similarity requires only that a general idea be given to (intuited, however obscurely by) the mind to whom A and A' are given as similars.

2. The notion that some sharp line separates animals who are aware of general ideas from animals who are not aware of any is a fiction generated by a certain sort opposition to acknowledging that there are universal ideas.

a. Any mentality at all requires a stream of consciousness and so requires that there be retention of experience and anticipation of coming experience. So, any mentality at all requires

(1) obscure consciousness of general ideas, which takes the form of
(2) consciousness of similarities

b. However, this condition can be met by even very primitive forms of animal life (insects or mollusks, for example) if meeting it does not require

(1) that the animal form or construct a universal idea and so does not require
(2) that the animal have an active or explicit consciousness of the universal ideas exemplified by the similars it is aware of.

[1]{The following account is based largely upon the article "Epoché́" by Ulrich Claesges in HWP, vol. 2, 594-596.} In ordinary Greek ε̉ποχή meant to stop or to halt or to hinder as in "to stop running" or "to stop speaking". It seems to have been introduced as a term in philosophical discourse by the skeptics of the Pyrrhonian school who used it for an attitude to be adopted upon failing after intense effort to achieve an insight as to which of competing philosophical views is the true one. The attitude was conceived to be a "keeping to oneself" [ε̉πέσχεν] and was thought by them to bring the "peace of mind in which happiness was to be found". Epoché́ seems to have been thought of as "taking no judgmental position" regarding dogmatic doctrines; it would lead to an enduring skeptical attitude. The term seems to have been taken over from the skeptics into the vocabulary of the later or new Academy (third century B.C.) by Arcesilaus. Here, the term came to mean "withholding" or "restraining" assent to a presentation [to something apparent, φαντασία] <later, an "idea" in the sense of Descartes or Locke>. With this early epistemological use, the term entered into the vocabulary of the Stoics where restraint was also to be exercised with respect to emotions. This use seems already to have involved something like the modern notion that any judgment is first and foremost a set of ideas toward which the mind takes up an optional, (more or less) voluntary position such as assent, denial, or neither affirming nor denying. The Stoics also held that assent to judgments is a precondition for all praxis, and they concluded that morality requires one to assent only to such "ideas" as are absolutely certain and to exercise epoché with regard to all other "ideas" and so refrain from acting on them. Although many, many critics and commentators try to read most of this prehistory of the term into Husserl's use of it, what Husserl clearly took over from all this is just that epoché is a restraining of or refraining from a certain belief or thesis. He rejected the notion implicit in Locke and Descartes that some sort of nondoxic understanding (conceived to be pure perception) of a set of ideas is basic to all belief. And he rejected (after about 1910 or so) the notion that actional or exigent (voluntary) judgment underlies all emotion and striving. He thus denied in works published after LI that emotion and striving always entails at least a vague and obscure consciousness of categorial form.

[2]This is perhaps the most significant way and perhaps the only significant way in which Husserl's views affirming universal ideas resemble those of Plato. Husserl absolutely denies that any such ideas are innate as Plato would have done had any such perversion been invented back then. Both Plato and Husserl held emphatically that acquaintance with ideas, including universal ones, is acquired through intuition, through their being given. The two disagree completely however as to when and how such intuition occurs. The differences may have a great deal to do with reluctance on Husserl's part to rely on mythical explanations. That sort of reluctance had a great deal to do with nativist perversions of Plato's doctrine. Plato's willingness to indulge mythical thinking led him to speculate that there is an inborn acquaintance with not just some but with all eidé. Husserl however maintained that the notion that all ideas are or have been known is quite groundless if eidé are not dependent in any way at all upon anyone's being acquainted with them.

[3]The engram is a fine example for magical entities of this ilk, "An engram is the residual trace of an adaptation made by the organism to a stimulus. The mental process due to the calling up of an engram is a similar adaptation; so far as it is cognitive, what it is adapted to is its referent, and is what the sign which excites it stands for or signifies." So say C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards {The Meaning of Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953) 53}, who trace the concept to Semon writing in Die Mneme.

passive or automatic (no or less attentiveness, no or less ego involvement)	active, actional, exigent (more attentive, more ego involvement)
to see	to look at
to hear	to listen to
to retend	to recall, to recollect
to protend, to be protentive to	to expect