Robert Welsh Jordan
<Chapter Two, The Many Faces of Time, edited by John B. Brough and Lester Embree (Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). The pagination of the book is given within the text below in angle brackets.>
Husserl’s transcendental conception of the relation between time constitution and immanent time was still very far off conceptually when he delivered the 1905 Time Lectures. The conceptual framework of his General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology[1] of 1913 maintains that the status of all mental processes (or lived experiences, Erlebnisse) as occurring in the flux of immanent time is achieved through constitutive functions which cannot be authentically understood as occurring in time at all even though they also are bound to be identified as occurring at the present moment in the constituted flux and the flux as occurring to and through the lived body and the lived body as belonging to the life-world. The flux is, therefore, necessarily intended as belonging to world-time. The flux of mental processes and immanent time itself, therefore, are constituted, and the syntheses through which they get constituted do not occur in the flux or in immanent time. Through such synthetic transcendental occurrences, the self makes itself be in time and in the world. Accordingly, the transcendental subject coincides only partially with the subject in the world, but it does so necessarily and <38> can exist only by doing so, by “making” itself be in the world. If vast differences in nomenclature are overlooked, this later position is close in many ways to[2] the one Martin Heidegger was developing when he was engaged in editing the 1905 lectures for their first publication. For the relation of conditioned to conditioning here is mutual; the subject’s constitutive or transcendental functions are dependent upon the given “contents” whose temporal being they constitute. Moreover, there is in truth only one ego, the one that is in the world and is in it at all only by making itself be in time and in the world.
It is a vast improvement over the position of 1905 when Husserl later conceives immanent time to be entirely continuous and to be so through a complex of syntheses that occur as aspects of a single continuous identifying synthesis that enables it passively to constitute the flux of lived experiences as immanent time with its individual temporality or individual time-form, its being in time. Thus, Husserl came to conceive every mind or self to be constituted with its own unique time-form regardless of whether or not any of the lived experience occurring in the flux of immanent time is both doxic and active, i.e., is of a sort which alone can constitute categorial form. The later conception understands the “pure ego” to be a simple unity which this underlying synthesis achieves in a purely passive way so that there may exist egos whose mental lives include not even the obscurest awareness of logical or categorial form.
1. Time-Constitution in the 1905 Lectures and in the Addenda and Supplements from 1905-1910 Published in Husserliana 10
Little if any of that later position is explicitly developed in the 1905 lectures. There Husserl maintains [3] that simultaneity cannot be predicated of the all-at-once of impressions or of the all-at-once of retendings, considered in their own right and so abstractly. Simultaneity can, however, be predicated of what is constituted through primary memory as belonging, for consciousness, to the world. That it <39> be so constituted is as true of perception as it is of the perceived Object.[4] Nothing excludes the possibility that perceiving and perceived be related by simultaneity. Moreover, the perceiving and perceived are both constituted for the ego as belonging to the same world and so as equally actual. However, the time constituting “appearances” of inner time,[5] the continuous retendings, are fundamentally different from those retended moments of impressional consciousness that are the temporal appearances of the noematic object and are constituted as occurring in immanent time.[6] This way of conceiving the relationship between constituted moments of immanent time and the continuum of constitutive retendings foreshadows the way Husserl will later conceive the relationship between subjectivity in its constitutive, transcendental function and what it achieves, the subject’s being in time and in the world. In the interval from 1905 to 1909 there were still several crucial obstacles[7] to be overcome before this later conception could emerge.
In the 1905 Time Lectures there is as yet no reference to a transcendental status of the unification of consciousness or to atemporal synthetic transcendental functions that achieve this unification. The word ‘synthesis’ does not seem to occur at all in the 1905 Lectures; it seems to occur only once in the whole set of writings from 1893 to 1917 on time that are reproduced in Volume 10 of Husserliana. The passage refers to synthesis as being effected by consciousness, e.g., in positing, within duration, identity of what endures [Identität eines Dauernden]; where such identity is not synthetically posited, it is said, there is also no duration but only a flux of contents of which definite non-temporal traits could <40> be truly predicated.[8] Instead of synthesis, Husserl referred to a preimmanent and even prephenomenal temporality being constituted through temporally constitutive consciousness. The “pre-phenomenal” temporality and the temporally constitutive consciousness coincide but can coincide only partially: what is constituted here coincides thoroughly with what constitutes, but what constitutes does not altogether coincide with what is constituted.[9]
It was a misfortune in many ways that the original publication in 1928 of the 1905 time-lectures did more to conceal than to reveal the level that Husserl’s thought on the subject had long since achieved. The lectures do make very clear that it is nonsense to “speak of a time that belongs to the ultimate constituting consciousness”[10]. Yet they avoid this nonsense only by resorting to such expressions as “prephenomenal, preimmanent temporality”[11] that are hardly less absurd within a radically phenomenological framework than a vicious regress of temporalities would be. Husserl’s later way developed apparently between 1909 and 1913 of conceiving the ultimate constituting consciousness in terms of transcendental synthesis was a major advance over the language of 1905 even though it tends to lead many readers into errors about the extent of agreement between Husserl’s views regarding time and those of Kant.
One such misunderstanding is furthered by Husserl’s consistent reference throughout his career to time as a form. He often speaks of time as a form, a time-form of consciousness, or as a form of immanent time. Such locutions easily lead to a sort of intellectualization of “internal time”. The text of the 1928 publication as well as some of the other writings published in Husserliana 10, seem to show that Husserl himself was subject to this intellectualistic error.[12] There, he still insisted that the “time-form” is a categorial form. Categorial form, however, <41> requires acts of logical thought at least in the sense of active apprehension. He maintained, therefore, that temporal form must be differentiated from whatever forms belong essentially to consciousness. Without actions that impart categorial form, i.e., without Objective apprehension, the flux of experiences could have no temporal form at all: “...no enduring, no resting and changing, no being in succession...”[13] This would have meant that consciousness would lack immanent temporal structure altogether unless it included acts of apprehending whereby contents are posited as identical, as different, as present, past or future occurrences[14]. Such a conceit would have much in common with the vitalistic and voluntaristic ways of rejecting Hegelian rationalism that were then, and still are, a major component of Western philosophy. Husserl may actually have held a view of this sort early in his career. If so, he had begun to reject it by 1906-1907.
That any consciousness of time includes an implicit awareness of temporal form however, obscure and confused that awareness may be leads to a disastrous misconception, given Husserl’s conceptual framework and its terminology at this phase in the development of his thought. Later, he will distinguish between doxic or Objectivating lived experiences that are active and others that are in no way active, including some sorts of experiences that cannot occur actively, and he will place what he calls retendings in this last class. In the terminology Husserl begins to employ at least as early as Ideas I active lived experiences whether doxic or nondoxic are the mental processes that are voluntary in the most proper sense while those that are passive are involuntary whether they be doxa or emotions or strivings.[15] However, there is no explicit concept of passive in contrast to active mental processes either in the writings published in Husserliana 10 or in Husserliana 24, that will be discussed in Section 2 below. Instead, what will later be identified as the doxic sphere of mental processes and subdivided into active and passive doxa is referred to globally as Objektivierungen with no explicit distinction between those which do and those which do not “constitute” or “give” their intended object categorial form. The most primitive of categorial forms and the necessary condition for all other categorial formation is simply ‘this’. But here it is as if all belief-phenomena, including perceiving, retending, and protending - all Objektivierungen conferred categorial or logical form.
<42> One of the earliest texts in which Husserl begins to conceive this critical dichotomy within the class of doxa or Objectivations occurs among the Husserliana 10 texts supplementing those of the 1928 publication and illustrating the further “Development of the Problem”[16]. The editor, Rudolf Boehme, determines that the relevant supplement was written between 1907 and the beginning of 1909, but he also dates this supplement earlier than one (No 44) which asserts quite emphatically that the time-form is categorial[17] .
In the 1928 publication and the 1905 Lectures, however, active and passive doxa are not at all distinguished. As a result, there is no differentiation between Objectivating that does not constitute either logical or categorial form and Objectivating that does constitute categorial form. Thus, in the early writings on time, time-form is misunderstood to be categorial form; and Husserl’s phenomenology would be driven toward a position much like that of Descartes so far as those animals are concerned who do not exhibit logical thought since he also holds that all consciousness that is non-Objectivating, such as emotion and striving, must either be actually based on or presuppose Objectivating acts.
2. Time-constitution in the Introduction to Logic and Epistemology of 1906-1907 (Husserliana 24 )
In a course called “Introduction to Logic and Epistemology”[18] given in the winter semester of 1906/07 Husserl maintains very explicitly that time is constituted only through synthesis; without synthesis there would be no time-consciousness. Currently occurring lived experiences, he maintains, do have their Objective temporal positions, order, extension, etc. These can be authentically predicated of them, viz., through the ideal possibility of a consciousness that would Objectivate the contents as contents and would thereby effect the needed identification. Such “current” experiences are the proper contents that are conceived to acquire temporal and categorial form through acts by which they are apprehended; without such acts they would not be constituted as temporal, would not have temporal meaning for consciousness. Here, time is conceived to be a form of possible Objectivating consciousness but not a form of <43> consciousness per se. In this respect, the position seems no different from that of 1905. The time-form is like identity, difference, multiplicity, and unity in that it, too, can be given only through categorially formative acts of identifying, differentiating, collecting, and positing unity.
Instead of suggesting that the time-form cannot be given without being categorially formed, Husserl should have emphasized here the importance of the distinction between obscure givenness and clear givenness.[19] Husserliana 10, Part B publishes a text (No. 43) in which Husserl says that the analysis of time shows that his previous way of presenting what he means by ‘evidence’ has been vague, that he used the word as if it were synonymous with ‘self-givenness’. One must distinguish after all, he goes on, evidence as insight belonging to judgment, specifically to the judgment that what is judged about is itself there and is given as the judgment asserts it to be, from givenness [Gegebensein] itself. His point would seem to be that the givenness of the time-form be distinguished from predicative and categorial acts whereby it is grasped and explicated; that would have been a point well taken in any case. The categorial acts explicate the content; an act’s doing this involves at least two transformations that should be carefully distinguished despite their interrelations. On the one hand, the “content” acquires through the act meaning that could not otherwise be truly predicated of it: without being otherwise changed, the “content” comes through the act actually to be there for the ego explicitly: for example, it comes to be true that this particular object has been singled out by this particular person’s attention and, perhaps that this person has alleged such and such about the object. This would be a new sense accruing to it through the act. This new fact itself comes through the act to be given to its agent for the first time but given in a way that is necessarily obscure. However, the Object of the act also acquires for consciousness senses which need not at all be new.[20]
During the same period, Husserl tried out, as might be expected, a broadened conception of form, one that would correspond to a more distinct, more <44> differentiated conception of Objectivations.[21] Time, space, thing are forms that are intimately interconnected. These are forms that occur even at the level beneath that of logical form (with which Husserl contrasts them): the level of the primal material and its “blind” primal forms refer to their full unities and generate intuition or simple objectivation [schlichte Vorstellung] of a spatio-temporal world of appearances. They are called blind because even though they are experienced [erlebt], they have no logically, categorially formed sense, mean nothing insofar as they are not explicated, identified, objectified [vergegenstandlicht]. Such forms might be called “the original ontological forms”, Husserl says, and he writes in this connection:
In the Logical Investigations, I spoke on the whole only of the logical forms and called them categorial forms. If categories are understood to be the basic forms of objectivity in abstraction from their varying material then we must differentiate the logical categories and the metaphysical categories (the categories of thinghood) from one another. There remains still the open question whether categories of pre-empirical being (that which people often have in mind when speaking of “consciousness”) are to be placed alongside these <categories of thinghood>.[22]
The context suggests a further distinction between what are here called “ontological forms” and what are called “sensuous forms” earlier in the same section (§ 46) and are contrasted with “thought-forms [Denkformen]”. Sensuous forms would seem to include whatever Husserl has in mind as pre-empirical forms that would pertain to pre-empirical being. Pre-empirical objects would seem to be the sort of quasi-entities that would be intended in the terminology of the Cartesian Meditations by a self having no awareness of mental processes other than those it itself experiences, a self without an awareness of them as appearances of more concrete unities. Such pre-empirical “entities” would belong, for such a self, not to an Objective world but only to a primordial or solipsistic world. ‘Metaphysical categories’ might then be categories appropriate to more concrete objects, and the phrase might in that case refer to an ideal of concreteness.
In the same section, Husserl differentiates between objects produced by thinking [Denkgegenstände] and sensuous objects. The former as well as the mental processes that produce them [ihre Objektivationen] are said to be founded objects. They are founded on the latter, the lower level objects, which are <45> identified as “a certain primal stuff of lived experiences called sensuous”. The time-flux belongs to the primal material of consciousness.[23] Through it sensuous contents and all further contents that are interwoven with them become in an original way one and formed. Time-flux is not Objective time since the latter is constituted only through apprehension [Aufassung], by making sense of [Sinngebung], by identification, all of which Husserl seems still to lump together as categorial acts. The sort of form that sensuous contents have just in belonging to the time-flux is still blind. Yet they do have form that belongs to them as they occur in the time-flux and that is more basic than categorial or logical form. These pre-categorial forms are forms that sensuous contents have as sensations occurring in a unitary sensuous field, a visual field, a tone field, etc. The connexion or fusion of sensations in a sensuous field can and does occur regardless of any categorial formation or apprehension; it is form grounded not in thinking (in the narrower sense of active doxic intending) but in the sensations, more particularly in how they show themselves to belong together generically, grounded in their material likeness [Husserliana 24 292]. In contrast, categorial forms are entirely indifferent to material considerations[24]. The fusion and fusion-forms of impressional content in the several sensuous fields belong to the contents as “moments,” inseparable constituents, of these contents, and they are fundamental to Objectivating space-apprehension. Husserl writes with emphasis,
Thought-forms do not belong inseparably to sensuous contents as if such forms were already spontaneously there eo ipso along with sensuous content! Sensuous form is necessarily there and inherently there with the sensuous contents that are unified by it. Categorial form, on the other hand, accrues as an addition to that which is formed categorially; categorial form can be there and need not be there. And same thing carries over mutatis mutandis to empirically appearing objects and their objective forms.[25]
Husserl does still assert that these precategorial forms are like categorial ones in that they may be but need not be there for consciousness when there is a sensing of the sorts of impressions which will be intended as appearances of a more concrete Object if suitable sorts of apprehendings should occur. Still, against the sort of phenomenalism that is traceable in modern times to George Berkeley, Husserl here maintains that impressions occurring in sensuous fields have their <46> own, inherent spatiality or temporality, have a sort of extension in space or in time that can be given regardless of whether or not the impressions are apprehended, i.e., categorially formed, as appearances of Objective space or Objective time or any Objective thing. Otherwise, Husserl seems to operate during the period 1907-1909 with the same, comparatively undifferentiated concept of Objectivations found in Husserliana 10 and in Logical Investigations.
3. Mental Activity and some of its Relations to Forms it Constitutes.
The concept of form is now far more differentiated than it was in the 1928 publication of the time lectures of 1905. Husserl has not yet introduced the distinction he will later make between Objectivating mental processes that do “constitute” categorial forms and those that do not do so, between doxic mental processes that are pre-categorial and those whose objects are intended, at least implicitly, as being categorially formed. On the other hand, even when this distinction is made in Ideas I, phenomenological time is still referred to as a form, “the unitary form of all mental processes in a single stream of lived experience”[26]. Moreover, the Cartesian Meditations speak of “the form of the continuous inner time-consciousness” and say that every mental process as a lived experience has its own temporality; there “immanent temporality” is said to be the correlate of time-consciousness, and time-consciousness is called the basic form of the all-inclusive synthesis that includes all other syntheses in a single life.[27]
But what is meant by ‘form’ when the concept is extended beyond logical and categorial forms? Isn’t it the nature of a form to be indifferent to its content? In that case wouldn’t all forms, including time-form, be eidetic objects, either formal universals or else eidetic singularities? If temporal form is ideal in its manner of being then doesn’t it have to be fundamentally invariable, as invariable as the cycle implied by such doctrines as Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence? Is this the thrust of Husserl’ transcendental idealism? How and why the answer to these questions is emphatically negative may become clearer if there is greater clarity about how Husserl came to conceive interrelations among active and passive mental processes, categorial and precategorial mental processes, universal and individual forms in his work starting with Ideen I.
<47> a. Ego Dimensions of the Three Basic Classes of Mental Phenomenal.
A mental process of whatever kind is active or actional insofar as an ego to whose conscious flux the mental process belongs takes a position[28] or attitude toward something intended to through that process. Every action of an ego is a turning to and being busied with something; thus, every action makes it true of the ego that it is turned toward and busied with this object whatever the object may be in the relevant case. Noematically speaking, every action makes it true of the object that this individual ego is (was) concerned with it in a certain definite way, takes (took) a certain position toward it. This will be true whether the object is immanent or transcendent and whether it exist or not and also regardless of whether the lived experience through which the ego is engaged is or is not intuitive of its particular object. Husserl classifies theses in which an ego may engage as either doxic or emotional or striving.
To the extent that the lived experience thus engaged in is doxic then, in taking position regarding what is intended through that lived experience, the ego is not only busied with and grasping the object, but the ego’s doing so is said to “constitute” it to be objective in a different sense. What seems to be a single act of adverting to the object makes a difference in several ways in the object’s relations to consciousness or to the self. (1) It comes to be for consciousness more distinct than before which object it is that is, for example, believed in or doubted; how distinctly the ego is conscious of it is a characteristic of the object in relation to the ego. (2) Through the selfsame act, the object acquires for the ego the most primitive of categorial forms (‘this’); it is something distinct for the ego from other objects. (3) The object comes more explicitly to have doxic thetic quality. If the mental process is negative in quality then what is thematized is also posited implicitly[29] by the ego as not existent. If the mental process were positive in quality then what is objectivated would be posited implicitly as existing. Both positive and negative positions as well as doxic positings that are neither can occur in a wide <48> variety of modalities some of which are expressed by locutions employing such words as: probable, likely, unlikely, doubtful, chancy, dubious. Through taking a position, the ego acquires an enduring opinion concerning the object, an opinion that it will have at least until it takes an incompatible doxic position regarding the selfsame object. Even when an ego changes its opinion, having held the former opinion will still go on being given retentively.[30]
The other sorts of theses (endeavors or strivings and emotions) can also occur as actions and not just automatically. Emotions or affects are feelings about something and are positive or negative or indifferent not doxically but affectively toward it. In the last of these cases, the ego turns toward the object through an affective lived experience whereby it is implicitly aware of the object’s indifference so far as value or disvalue is concerned. By engaging in an emotion the ego also acquires a trait that endures in much the same sense as do the traits acquired through doxic actions. The same action confers a trait on its object; by taking affective position actionally, the ego:
(1) actually confers on its object the relational trait that the ego was turned in just this particular affective way to just this particular object under just this description and
(2) implicitly posits an axiotic trait belonging to the intended object insofar as it is something that ought to be or that ought not to be or else is something that neither ought to be nor ought not to be. The affect makes it possible for a personal ego to objectivate the full intentional object of the affect.
Like active emotion, active striving is being busied or concerned with something but being busied with it in a way that cannot objectivate what the ego is busy doing or is concerned to do. Striving, too, can be positive or negative; its goal, its particular theme, is the state of affairs whose actual occurrence or nonoccurrence is the concern of the endeavor or striving. This state of affairs is the being of the theme when the striving is a striving for; when it is striving against then the goal is the nonbeing of the state of affairs that is the striving’s theme. Whatever is striven toward necessarily involves a goal, an attractive <49> possibility intended as one whose occurrence would terminate the striving. The ego’s busying itself doxically or even affectively with a potential state of affairs does not convert the doxic or affective subjective process in which the ego is then engaged into a striving. Even such a comparative affect as preferring that a potentiality occur to its not occurring is not a striving to bring that potentiality about. Only striving for or against the potentiality makes (constitutes) that state of affairs an end. Only when the striving draws the attention of the ego in whose life it occurs and draws it in such a way that the ego engages in and so is concerned to carry out the striving does the striving become voluntary and a trait of the ego. Lack of such a voluntary commitment may be a moral failing and a character flaw. Likewise, lack of a commitment to inhibit, to suppress, or to eliminate certain involuntary strivings may be a moral failing. The end-potentiality acquires through ego engagement the trait that the ego has taken position for this state of affairs. Only so is the relevant state of affairs an end. There is certainly a readily understandable sense in which preferring the occurrence of a certain state of affairs to its non-occurrence is already a commitment to that state of affairs. However, an affective commitment is no more a striving than is the commitment to believe that this kind of object can occur, that it probably will occur under such and such circumstances, or to believe it were better that it occur than that it not occur. Various public officials have been committed in these senses to an efficient system of public transportation along the Front Range of the Rockies from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins ever since my arrival in Colorado more than twenty-five years ago. There is, however, little evidence as yet of any striving on their part to this as an end. Quite a few millions of dollars have been devoted by agencies public and private to Studies of the Problem. The evidence is that the ends involved in these efforts are to avert the appearance of doing nothing about the Problem so as to have funding for the relevant agencies to continue. Indeed, the evidence is all compatible with the hypothesis that the end being pursued is the non-occurrence of a solution to the Problem. Talk advocating equality in employment and university admissions and the like was probably shown to express commitments other than striving ones the moment those employing the locutions rejected the quotas that would have been necessary to achieve equality.
b. The Voluntary and the Involuntary among the Three Basic Classes
The ego’s having taken position is common to all actional mental processes, and active taking position always entails the ego’s choosing among conflicting alternatives, i.e., attractive possibilities. What most properly distinguishes <50> voluntary from non-voluntary mental processes would be not striving but instead how position-taking occurs, whether it occurs attentively or without attention. Taking position more or less attentively or explicitly is characteristic of all ego actions. The distinction between voluntary and non-voluntary mental phenomena should be drawn in such a way that it cuts across the three-fold classification of subjective processes as either doxic, affective or conative; it divides the three classes in a way that coincides with the distinction between actional and automatic (in Husserl’s terms: active and passive) subjective processes.[31] Since mental processes of all three types can occur voluntarily, the moral sphere includes mental processes of all three sorts. It is not the case that strivings alone belong to the province of ethics as practical philosophy.
Doxic volitions do not differ from those of the other two classes only in that they exemplify modalities of believing and are specifically directed intentionally toward the being, the ontic status, of their theme. They are also distinguished in that they alone Objectivate what they thematize. Where the ego engages in a doxic intending, the ego’s adverting to the theme is a grasping of the theme, of the object through its objective sense. Such a grasping Objecitvates the theme. By doing so the act distinguishes the theme from other objects thereby “constituting” the theme for the ego as ‘this’ particular object. In objectivating its particular theme, the act does not, however, grasp or objectivate the individual form of this particular object. No constituting objectivates what it constitutes, not even when the constitution occurs through a doxic mental process. Doxic acts all do whereas non-doxic acts do not grasp (monothetically thematize) something the way it must be grasped if any logical act such as predicative judging is to be performed on or about it.[32]
<51> Every non-doxic act[33] has an intentional object in two senses: first, the theme of the founding doxic consciousness and second, the full intentional object that includes the theme peculiar to the founded non-doxic consciousness; the two are intertwined within the unity of a single cogito. The ego is here turned to the theme of the non-doxic consciousness but is busied with it in a way that does not grasp it and so does not allow an immediate predicative judgment about it. In this connection, Husserl formulates the principle:
Every act in the pregnant sense is governed by a way of heeding [Modus der Achtsamkeit]. Wherever the act in question is not a simple <doxic consciousness of an ontic state of affairs [Sachbewustsein]>, wherever a further consciousness that “takes-position” toward that state of affairs is founded in such a simple consciousness, the <ontic state of affairs [Sache]> and the full intentional Object (e.g., the “<ontic state of affairs>” and “value”) split as do, respectively, heeding and having-in-one’s-mental-regard.[34]
The conditioning doxic awareness involved may be but need not be itself voluntary. The example Husserl discusses at greatest length in this context is an actional valuing that is founded on an actional doxic thesis. Both the doxic thesis and the co-functioning affective thesis, which enfolds the doxic one, occur in the mode of actionality. When such an objectivating intending does found a being-turned-valuingly-toward what is objectivated then it occurs as a different mode of heedfulness (grasping) from the mode in which an otherwise similar heeding occurs when it does not found a valuing. A voluntary affective consciousness occurs necessarily as a single unitary cogito in which the affective intending is intertwined with the doxic intending which founds and conditions it.[35] The unitary cogito that enfolds the founding and founded theses as moments of itself is what Husserl terms the “archontic” thesis. The unitary archontic thesis he designates according to the classification of the higher or highest founded member. If a valuing founded in this way did not itself serve in founding a further more complex whole then the archontic thesis it serves would be classified as valuing or affective. He emphasizes that founded unities as simple as the one just discussed would be rare if they actually occur at all.[36]
<52> It is important to differentiate among the traits that are constituted for us through volitions between those that are subjective-relative in that they originate through mental processes and, on the other hand, traits that need not be subjective-relative in this way even though they are constituted through subjective processes.
(a) The properly subject-relative traits result from alterations in the objects which bear them. They are, therefore, strictly correlative to events in the history and “internal tradition” of some monad or community of monads.[37] Such traits belong to the realm the conventional or of ν́ομος.
(1) There is, for example, a class of objective and ontic traits that belong to their bearers due to the activities of human beings. These include the whole class of traits distinguishing what is sometimes called “material culture.” That phrase seems usually to refer to physical (sensuously perceivable) things that have been physically altered where the transformation wrought on them was the goal of a more or less voluntary striving.
(2) But many mental traits also result from a variety of subjective processes, including all of the character traits originating from actional mental processes. When the existence of such a mental trait is the goal of a voluntary striving then it is as much an artifact as any component of material culture.
(3) The subject-relative mental traits have a variety of correlated moments of noematic objective sense that are neither properly physical (sensuously perceivable) nor properly mental[38] such as: is familiar to P, is accepted by P, is liked by P, is believed by P, is an end for P, is someone’s end, is denied by someone, is disliked by someone, is desired by someone, is believed by someone, is believed by all P’s of type T, is loved by all, is customary in culture C.
(b) On the other hand, there are traits that relate in quite a different way to the ego-actions by which they are constituted. There is a class of objective traits constituted for an ego originally only through actions of its own yet not at all dependent on them in the same way as traits of class (a). These differently conditioned traits include many states of affairs which Husserl calls formal. <53>
His most explicit discussions of members of this class concern moments of categorial form in an object’s sense. These he differentiates from real (material, sensuously perceivable) determinations[39]. The other, non-categorial members of this class of objective traits are in this respect like the categorial ones. The actions which constitute members of this class are, in Heidegger’s terms explications or interpretations [Auslegungen] of their thematic object, no matter what they may also generate. Traits of this class do not originate in the subjective processes which are said to constitute them. Instead, the actions that bring them to the fore, make them explicit, make the consciousness of them more distinct. The relation of such a trait to the action that constitutes it is quite like the relation of a properly subject-relative trait to an action by which it would be Objectivated. That it has not been grasped, monothetically thematized does not make it somehow less factual, less actual.
4. The Objectiveness of Formal Traits
Every founded action can be understood to explicate the horizon of meaning belonging to the noematic objective sense implicit in the theme of its founding noeses. When I count the pencil leads in the plastic container I find in my desk drawer, my counting includes such moments as retentive consciousness of an objectivating of the felt and seen piece A, a protentive consciousness of holding A in my mental grasp while I go on to Objectivate B and a protending of further holding A in grip throughout subsequent phases of the counting as well as protending that I shall stop when all the leads in the little box have been reckoned. It also includes a retending of all this as I go on to reckon piece B by objectivating B while maintaining my grip on A and protending keeping both B and A in my mental grasp while going on to objectivate C; and it will involve reckoning with D and E in the same sorts of ways. This single polythetic collecting action not only objecitvates A, B, C, D, and E successively but constitutes the collection of graphite pieces; it confers upon the collection its individual collection form (“these five”), constituting an embodiment of the formal universal “pentad.” The collecting does not objectivate either the set, “these five,” or the formal universal. An objectivating of the now pre-constituted pentad confers the form “this pentad” <54> on it but neither constitutes the pentad nor confers the pentad-form though it does “constitute” the set these five. The objectivating of a pentad is a necessary foundation for turning to, grasping, and objectivating the formal universal “pentad.” This latest objectivating gives the ego the most original cognition of “five” that is possible for it. This is really all that can be plausibly meant by saying either that the collecting or that objectivating this pentad constitutes a formal universal originally. Here, ‘originally to constitute x’ and ‘to enable original cognition of x’ are synonymous phrases, where cognition of x is always a grasping of x and cognition of x is never the initial consciousness of x. Original cognition of a universal, even of a formal universal, is never the initial consciousness of it. Collecting makes possible the original (i.e., genuine, authentic[40]) cognition of sets and of the formal universals they embody; and the collecting includes an antecedaneous, automatic, passive, and receptive consciousness of the formal universals embodied by the sets it constitutes. If saying that collecting constitutes formal universals connotes more than this then it would probably be better to say no such thing.
Having collected my pentad of 0.7 mm. diameter graphite cylinders, these five, I have the potentiality to take cognizance of their individual collection form; that is to say, it has been constituted for me. No other set is or could be these five. They are, to be sure, no longer intended as they were before: not a single one of the graphite cylinders had, for me, beforehand the formal characteristic “member of these five.” But each one in acquiring this characteristic for me as part of the fully concrete object of my consciousness of it enters harmoniously into a synthesis in which it is identified as the selfsame object that was intended before, during, and after the collecting. Each has thus acquired for consciousness the sense <55> “being a member of these five and having been so all along.” There was and is nothing about them as objects of retentive consciousness to exclude their being or having been members of this pentad ever since the most recent of them has existed. If that possibility were excluded, they could not now be intended as the self-same pencil leads. They would then motivate a numerically distinguishing synthesis, and so we should have more than a pentad. A strange and Humean result: their being just this pentad of objects and no more would be a fiction! However attractive to nominalists such a conclusion may be, the truth it discombobulates is just that its being a member of this pentad could not be derived analytically from any one of the cylinders as object of retended consciousness prior to my projecting the possible collecting action: that is after all what is meant in saying that the identification is, in Husserl’s sense, synthetic. “Being a member or a pentad” is a founded and acquired sense for the ego. But this does not mitigate against its being an actual trait. There is no sensible or plausible consideration that speaks against our conceiving the collecting to be an explication not just of each cylinder’s external horizon of meaning but of its Objective relational properties.[41]
The exact same sort of analysis can be carried out for the formal universal “this.” Singling out objects for attention, grasping and objectivating them, can legitimately be thought to explicate genuine differences rather than to generate an altogether new order of object. Such categorial actions do generate meant or alleged differences. Moreover, alleged differences do often enough turn out to be founded objects that are also groundless.[42] They do so, however, only insofar as it turns out that other allegations would have been genuine. There are no grounds whatsoever for the sort of dualistic position proposed by voluntaristic and vitalistic metaphysicians such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the one hand and Bergson, James, and Dilthey on the other[43] who maintain that conceptual <56> thinking (cognition) generates a phenomenal world that is a groundless construct maintained due to its utility for “enhancing life” or for promoting survival of a will to live or enhancement of a will to power. As the counterpart to the phenomenal world thus conceived, whether holistically or atomistically, such dualisms postulate a pre-objective chaos variously called The Will, The Vital Impetus, Pure Experience, the Booming Buzzing Confusion, the Incommunicable, That Whereof I Cannot Speak.
Indeed, phenomenology finds no grounds even to recognize the far more modest claim that the consciousness of plurality arises only through polythetic acts.[44] What a collecting constitutes originally is a definite plurality, such as the individual pentad “these five graphite cylinders.” But ‘definite plurality’ is not just a redundant expression for ‘plurality’. Everything indicates that there is a “lived experience” of plurality. Indeed, a consciousness of plurality would seem to be part of the foundation for the polythetic act of counting itself. Except as what is referred to obscurely by the locutions of certain thinkers, an inconceivable, pre-objective, incommunicable nonentity is unknown to the phenomenology of either Husserl or Heidegger.
5. Doxic and Non-Doxic Ways of Explicating
For recent thought, the most important, most cited, and perhaps most often misrepresented of Heidegger’s teachings is that predicative judging, “apophantical” explication as he terms it, is a mode of explication and that it has arisen from a different form of explication, termed “concern [Besorgen],” that is not predicative and seemingly does not constitute as having categorial form what <57> it explicates. What it explicates are relations of utility or serviceability for a purpose. As relations they embody formal universals. Moreover, this sort of explication occurs through a step by step procedure, and so it constitutes syntactically the relations it reveals[45], making them accessible to apophantic explication which will either explicate the full intentional Object of the striving in an authentic way or will misinterpret it. Striving for ends and choosing means for achieving them is a polythetic mental process no less than are step by step doxic acts. There are non-doxic polythetic mental processes as well as doxic ones. Moreover, the non-doxic conscious processes, whether mono- or polythetic, are strictly analogous to monothetic and polythetic doxic acts. There are conative and affective conjunctions, disjunctions, etc. which parallel the doxic ones.[46] The non-doxic affective and conative polytheses he <Husserl, that is> mentions are all such as would have members homogeneous in thetic quality (all affective or all conative), and the examples would seemingly all be formed step by step and so be syntactically formed unities whether axiotic or practical.
When Husserl introduces[47] the term ‘polythetic synthesis,’ he uses it to refer to the opposite of continuous identifying syntheses, such as the primal synthesis generating the unity of a single flux of consciousness. The adjective ‘polythetic’ could just as well be applied to certain articulated synthetic unities which need not be effected in successive mental processes. There seems to be good reason to extend the term ‘polythetic’ to all founded noetic unities[48] such as the consciousness of anything good or of anything useful. In founded mental processes such as valuing, both conditioned and conditioning processes occur enfolded within a single archontic consciousness which is their synthetic unity. It would not be inappropriate, therefore, to consider affective or evaluative consciousness polythetic even in its simplest possible occurrences. In that case, the founded valuing consciousness would explicate or interpret, in the sense discussed above, the full intentional object of its doxic foundation. Although this full noematic object will always be intended doxically, its horizon of meaning could be closed only arbitrarily if at all. There are no grounds at all for believing <58> that its objective sense includes only components whose original manner of givenness is doxic.
6. Identity of the Time-Form as Categorial Object with the Time-Form Passively Constituted
Such considerations help make explicit some analogous features of categorial Objects that might otherwise be overlooked. Turning to something and thematizing it actively and doxically is polythetic just as an emotion toward it would be polythetic. Actively to Objectivate x is monothetically to intend a unity already constituted polythetically in an implicit way. Whatever active monothetic consciousness takes into a simple thesis has been pre-constituted polythetically. This is exactly the way the concept of “monothetic act” is introduced in Ideen I (§ 119). However, such a simple thesis can never precede all polythetic consciousness of what it grasps. As founded acts such simple theses are a particular kind of polythetic consciousness. Like all polythetic consciousness, any such monothetic intending may be said to interpret its object, and insofar as it interprets authentically it explicates the object as it truly is. The occurrence of any monothetic act necessarily involves a synthesis whereby what that act thematizes “simply” and what is intended by a different mental process whether thematically or not are automatically identified. The act interprets the object as being the self-same one in both cases, and there are cases in which this interpretation is authentic, i.e., explicates or makes distinct what is true of the object.[49]
It should be clear then that even when a plurality is categorially formed as ‘these five’ the set thus “constituted” may well be an authentic explication of a previously given plurality. It is in that case no conceptual construct that either is or might be a mere fiction of the intellect. The set can be and can evidently be something discovered within the world. Similarly, when the temporality, the “time-form,” of consciousness (or of anything else for that matter) is categorially formed, as it is in all judgments about it, the form that is thus constituted may well be an authentic explication of a form that occurred and was passively “constituted” and that continues to be similarly constituted regardless of all categorial formation. The chances that interpretations of it will be inauthentic are seemingly greater by far.
<59> The chances of misinterpretation might have been considerably lessened had Husserl been less consistent in referring to time as if it were a form. This way of discoursing about time makes a sort of sense yet risks a lot of error. ‘These five’ can also be said to have a form; they are a pentad. They embody an eidetic singularity and exemplify a number of formal universals, and they, accordingly, satisfy a number of eidetic laws. Quite the same sorts of things can be said about the phases of immanent time, beginning with “they have a definite form or structure”. But their temporal structure is as temporal and actual, individual and unique as they themselves are in spite of the many essential laws they satisfy through that structure, and none of this is true of any eidos be it formal or material, universal or singular. Nothing is going to change this state of affairs, as Husserl very well knew not even the most elaborate system of reductions and abstractions.
7. Finiteness and the Constitution of the Retended-Protended Difference
So, with many caveats, every stream of consciousness may more or less legitimately be said to have a time-form and even, if one presses the point, to be that structure; certainly, that individual time-form could not otherwise be at all. The time-structure of any stream of consciousness and of any “monad” is definite. This essay will attempt to ward off one more interpretation of that structure that is here taken to be inauthentic. Whether Husserl ever shared this conviction and exactly when he began to if he did is unclear. The issue concerns just how definite and how extended the temporality, the individual time-form of consciousness is. More specifically, in what sense does the individual time-form extend into the future? Is necessitarianism (whether deterministic, predestinationist, causal, teleological, or simply logical) as an interpretation of the temporality of consciousness authentic? ‘Necessitarianism’ is used here as a name for the doctrine which William James called “determinism” in his justly celebrated essay on the subject.
Husserl’s position on this issue is ambiguous. As late as his Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory of 1914[50], he seems to have taken necessitarianism for granted as an implication the “universal dominion of logic”[51]. His necessitarianism was seemingly of a logical rather than a causal or teleological sort. It seems to have been based simply on his taking for granted a “standard” <60> rather than a “deviant” interpretation of the principle of excluded middle; he simply assumed its equivalence with the principle of bivalence: that every judgment is either true or not true is assumed to imply that every judgment is intrinsically either true or false. On this assumption, every question that could be put regarding the future, no matter how detailed and no matter what the subject, must already have either a simple positive or negative answer; every judgment about future behavior must already be either true or false. The future is perfectly determinate in every conceivable respect. By 1921, however, he regarded this as a highly questionable assumption common among logicians operating as positive scientists.[52] The Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) does not assert that there are judgments that are neither true nor false but does assert quite clearly that truth or falsity is not inherent in any judgment.
It cannot even be said that, in the strict sense of the word, a claim to truth is included in the proper essences of judgments; and consequently it is incorrect to account this claim-concept part of the judgment-concept from the start. Subjectively stated, it is not necessary for the judger to co-objectivate truth, whether intuitively or emptily In their own essence, then, judgments have no claim whatever to truth or falsity.[53]
So whether a proposition be true, false, or neither true nor false depends upon considerations other than those of the logic of truth. Such consideration would surely include the particular nature of the state of affairs judged about, and the truth value of any statement about future events insofar as they are contingent on the actions of persons will have to be ‘neither true nor false’ if it is to be true that <61> the persons in question could have acted differently. That is at least one sense in which how persons exist would be radically contingent.
Without at least phenomenal contingency, no temporal differences other than earlier and later could be constituted. Consciousness of the three dimensions in Heidegger’s terms, the “ecstases,” of time requires consciousness of contingency. Husserl’s analyses of time that have so far been published establish very well the continuity of the present with the past, just as they meant to do. But this tends to leave out of account exactly how the differences between past, present, and future are experienced.
If the temporal structure of consciousness is distinguishable at all from its content then it is surely distinguishable only abstractly. Unlike formal eide, inherently temporal individual structure is not and cannot be indifferent to its content. All individual content has its individual formal traits. The temporal structure of any mental process is unique to it and is not anything eidetic or ideal. The original experience of any constituent of the stream of consciousness can occur only when that constituent is occurring, and necessarily does occur whenever the constituent either will be or is or was occurring. The individual time-form of the constituent and of immanent time as a totality individuates the constituent even in the absence of changes in the internal horizon of meaning belonging to what the ego is aware of through the constituent. Individual temporal form cannot be given even obscurely for consciousness, i.e., cannot be “constituted”, except through identifying and distinguishing and associative syntheses that occur in primary passivity. These are syntheses whereby the given has for consciousness meanings such as might be expressed “given now as it was anticipated” or “given in some ways as anticipated but louder” or “to be retended in a continuum of retendings already occurring”. Phases are not discrete,[54] despite being sharply distinguishable from one another.
When a perceiving ceases, it has no impressional now-phases but only retended now-phases, only phases that were now-phases. However, whatever is impressional is also retended though it is not the case that every retended phase is now impressional even though Husserl does not make this point clearly. Properly understood, the “precedence” of the impressional over the retended is “logical” rather than temporal: it is no mere artifact of Husserl’s time-diagram that every point on the horizontal line representing impressional consciousness is also a point on a vertical descending line representing retentive consciousness. It is not the case that a sensuous impression must already be given in order that very <62> slightly later the sensing of it can first begin to be sensed internally; nor is it true that impressional consciousness must occur without temporal form in order then very slightly later to acquire temporal form. That it occur is a necessary condition for its being retained and for the retention through it of its correlate, the impression sensed. There is no need, however, that the impression already be over: there is no need, that is to say, that it have occurred in some pure perception unsullied by memory.
When now protended future constituents of protended future immanent time come to be given, they integrate as continuously with the retended past phases as formerly present phases have done. Must there not be such a thing as the future and must there not be perfectly determinate truth about it, just as necessitarians, the vast majority of thinkers perhaps including Husserl in the philosophical tradition, have held? Phenomenology can answer, “Emphatically not!” even without resorting to the vitalistic notion that genuine flux is fundamentally unstructured, unformed. On the other hand, phenomenology does need to address Bergson’s central question: What difference does time make?
Despite the thorough continuity of once future and now retended nows, the sharp distinction between the has-been and the not yet is no mere abstraction introduced by conceptual thinking. It is utterly contingent that anything at all be given, that synthesis of what is retended to what is now given impressionally, can occur at all. Transcendental syntheses as here understood are not independent of what is given in time even though they are not themselves temporal. Heidegger is quite right in emphasizing the finitude of the entity who makes itself be in the world through such syntheses. The being of the self in its transcendental status is no less contingent than that of the self in the world.
Though the ideal of perfect fulfillment, of a mental life that is purely intuitive, be unactualizable, the ideal of the Absurd[55] is not to be excluded. The Absurd would be the complete frustration and cancellation of all anticipations, making it impossible that any further projecting occur at all, and further synthetic unification of a flux of immanent time would cease to be possible. This would be an abrupt and sharp termination (Heidegger’s “ownmost possibility”) of the monad or of Dasein, and it could occur and could have occurred at any time.[56] Any phase that has run its course could at any time have terminated without running off as it did, and immanent time as a totality also can terminate and could have <63> terminated at any time. Lived experience of contingency and finiteness is, therefore, not restricted to the experience of voluntary or spontaneous mental processes, but can be constituted entirely passively.
8. Finiteness and the Givenness of the Retended-Protended difference: Immanent- and World-Temporality
On these last points, the phenomenology of Heidegger seems to be a far more adequate extension of Husserl’s account of the consciousness of immanent time. Moreover, Heidegger’s way of conceiving temporality led him to a position that may be very remote from Husserl’s view that immanent time and Objective time are different in structure. It seems very likely, however, that Husserl’s concept of the life-world would have led him in the 1920’s toward something akin to Heidegger’s concept of the relationship between immanent time and world time. Be that as it may, the differences between their accounts of time are otherwise perhaps not so very great. An account quite like Heidegger’s can be reached from Husserl’s analysis. As he understood such matters, protention will not to the extent that it is simply certain in its anticipation discriminate between what can be and what will be. To that extent, consciousness would harmonize with the thesis of necessitarianism: there would be no question whether what can occur but has yet to occur will occur. But this agreement is an illusion. Protending or anticipating would be simply certain if at all then only so far as it concerns the anticipated as a possibility. However, whether the protended will happen is a question not just of possibility but of fact. As matters of future fact, what is anticipated are what Husserl terms “problematic possibilities”. Problematic possibilities are in question as to their factuality. Questioning, interrogation, arises only where there is inclination or attraction toward a certain protended thesis (regardless of whether the thesis would be doxic, affective or conative), where something speaks for a certain thesis, but where there is also attraction toward one or more alternative theses where the alternatives are intended as mutually exclusive. Indeed, Husserl often uses the phrases ‘problematic possibility’ and ‘attractive possibility’ interchangeably. Interrogative intention is the intention, to decide for one of the attractive members of such a set of alternatives. Interrogation, questioning, arises only where attraction and counter-attractions, for and against which something speaks, are in counter-play.[57]
<64> Only where there is such interrogative intention does it make sense to speak of uncertainty. Only here does it make sense to speak of being inclined one way or another.[58] In the language of Heidegger’s phenomenology, this would mean that the only possibilities about which the ego cares are the problematic ones; these are the ones for which Husserl reserved the term ‘potentialities.’ Ego acts are always motivated after all, and Heidegger appears to maintain that the initial acts which caring motivates must be ways in which the self or Dasein is or would be busied conatively with things; in Heidegger’s terms, the self’s initial comportments must occur in the form of “concern.” Heidegger also insists that the ego is necessarily anxious over its potentialities. Each of them is threatened; each might go unfulfilled. Worse still, they are all ways in which the ego would exist, and there is the possibility of that not any of them will be fulfilled. The possibility of what Husserl had called the Absurd is not excludable; the Absurd involves, in Heidegger’s terms, the possibility of the impossibility of further being in the world at all.
On top of that there is also anxiety in the Sartrean sense, where which of the possibilities is fulfilled in case any are depends upon a taking of position. The choices Dasein makes are comportments through which Dasein makes it impossible that certain persons, who Dasein could otherwise have become, be in the world: its choices make it impossible that Dasein exist as any of the other persons who it could otherwise have been. By doing so, Dasein’s choices make it possible for (enable) Dasein to exist as one of the persons it projected that it could have become. Dasein’s choices make it be in the world; they do so as necessary, not as sufficient, conditions for being-in-the-world. Dasein’s choices, the self’s ways of assigning itself to possibilities enable it to be in a world which is not the world it would be in had it, as it genuinely could have, made different choices. Heidegger’s way of emphasizing the intentionality of the personal self’s consciousness make it clear that the world can no more be indifferent to Dasein than Dasein can exist without being in the world. By making itself be in the world, Dasein makes the world exist.[59] Which world becomes actual is not decided independently of Dasein and is no more a matter of necessity than Dasein’s own <65> future self is. The temporality of Dasein and of the world are one. So far as one can speak legitimately of a mode of being of the world, the world’s way of being is also Dasein’s; to explicate the self’s way of being as “existence” in Heidegger’s technical sense of the word is to explicate the world’s temporality.[60] Dasein’s understanding of its own being is a way in which the world’s temporality is there for it: is both generated and given; and would make authentic explication of the world’s temporality possible.
NOTES
[1]:Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, tr. Frederick I. Kersten (The Hague; Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1982 (cited hereafter as Ideas, Book I, where the citation is by page number, the numbers will be followed in parentheses by the marginal pagination, which corresponds to the pagination of the original 1913 publication. See especially §§ 81-86.
[2]:It could and probably did serve as Heidegger’s point of departure though the positions probably are in the end different in several important particulars; see §§7-8 below.
[3]:Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), translated by John Barnett Brough. Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938. Edmund Husserl, Collected Works (English), vol. 4 (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991) [cited hereafter as Collected Works 4, where the citation is by page number, the numbers will be followed in parentheses by the marginal pagination, which corresponds to the pagination of Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana Volume 10 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966 cited hereafter as Husserliana 10)].
[4]:When the word Object is spelled with an initial capital here and in the remainder of this essay, it corresponds to the German Objekt while it will correspond to Husserls Gegenstand when spelled with lower case initial letter. All other nouns, verbs, etc. that are clearly related to these words will be treated in the same way orthographically. The two words are probably not quite interchangeable even in Husserls writing before 1913. In Husserliana 10 and Husserliana 24 with which this and the next section will be principally concerned, as in the Logical Investigations and in most of Husserl’s writings, ‘Objektiverung’ and related terms seem usually to refer to consciousness insofar as it takes the form of belief or of its various “modalities”, i.e., to what will come to be called “doxic” consciousness. ‘Vergegenständlichung’ and its related terms seems on the other hand to refer to something that consciousness in all its forms, whether doxic or not, does.
[5]:Represented by vertical descending lines in the familiar diagram.
[6]:Husserliana 10 369 ff. (Collected Works 4 380 ff.).
[7]:The ones that will be treated below are largely additional to those threats to coherence that arose from the incomplete editorial efforts that led to the 1928 publication. See John B. Brough’s “Translator’s Introduction” to Collected Works 4, page XV.
[8]: The passage occurs in the “Addenda and Supplements to the Analysis of Time-Consciousness from the years 1905-1910” [Husserliana 10 296 (Collected Works 4 307), which is a transcription made in 1917 or later after Edith Stein had begun to work on organizing and revising the manuscript. There seems to be a very good chance that the word was not in the manuscript itself which apparently is no longer extant. See the editor’s introductions to Collected Works 4 (XII ff.) and Husserliana 10 (XIV ff.) The word also occurs quite without context and as a paragraph in its own right at p. 296.
[9]:Husserliana 10 83 (Collected Works 4 88).
[10]:Collected Works 4 83 (Husserliana 10 78).
[11]:Collected Works 4 88 (Husserliana 10 83).
[12]:See especially Husserliana 10 296 f. (Collected Works 4 308). The passage is said by the editor, Rudolf Boehm, to belong to a group of manuscripts written between 1907 and 1909 [p. 269 (Collected Works 4 279) fn. 1]. The intellectualistic error that is being traced here was partially corrected, however, in a lecture course of 1906-1907, published in Husserliana 24 - as will be shown in § 2 below.
[13]:Collected Works 4 308 (Husserliana 10 297).
[14]:Husserliana 10 295ff. (Collected Works 4 306ff.).
[15]:See § 3. a below.
[16]:Supplement No. 41, Husserliana 10 292 f. (Collected Works 4 302 ff.).
[17]:Husserliana 10 296 f. (Collected Works 4 308).
[18]:Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen 1906, comp & ed Ullrich Melle. Husserliana, Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 24 (Dordrecht; Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1984) cited hereafter as Husserliana 24 273.
[19]:The difference is implicit in Descartes' differentiation of clear from unclear perceiving. Attentiveness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for a perceiving that was previously unclear (was obscure) to become clear. Being attended to is both a necessary and sufficient condition for something that is intuited in an unclear (obscure) way to come to have been intuited clearly. See René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Part I, Principle XLV, page 237 in Volume 1 of the translation by E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931)
[20]:See pages <47-55> below.
[21]:Husserliana 24 293.
[22]:ibid. 293 f.
[23]:ibid 290 f.
[24]:ibid. 292.
[25]:ibid.
[26]:Husserliana 3 196 (marginal 161).
[27]:Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser, Husserliana 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), §18.
[28]:To take a position [Stellungnahme] is the essential characteristic of what Husserl would call a performed or actualized thesis. [Husserliana 3 256].
[29]:Genetically considered, the sort of “implicit” positing referred to here and in passing throughout this and the next two paragraphs appears not to be an eidetically necessary characteristic of all actional mental processes of various doxic and non-doxic kinds discussed in these paragraphs. Hence, it is not an eidetically necessary trait of all the monads in whom such processes occur. Instead, it is itself subjectively relative, varying, according to definite eidetic laws, depending upon the type of monad in whom the relevant actional mental process occurs. For this reason, it is an eidetically necessary trait of any monad in whom it does in fact occur.
[30]:This is how the ego acquires on the one hand an individual and eventually a personal history that changes only in the sense that the ego “grows older,” to use Schutz’s term, in such a way that all subsequent experience is synthetically unified and continuous with its already retended history and on the other hand an enduring but changeable character in something closely akin to the sense of Aristotle and John Stuart Mill (see Robert Welsh Jordan, “Husserl’s Phenomenology as an ‘Historical’ Science” in Social Research 35 (1968) 245-259. Position-taking is what makes for human history.
[31]:Many passages suggest that Husserl held a different view. These list willing along with cognition and emotion as a class of subjective process. That the view being presented above nevertheless has Husserl’s authority is indicated when he writes (1), “every act aims at or intends a goal which is immanent to it and that it is intentionally directed toward. This goal is what we call the act-theme” and (2) that every striving and, therefore, every intention can take on the form of willing, i.e., the form of voluntary perceiving (observing), remembering, producing, valuing, etc.; see Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, Husserliana Volume 9, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962) cited hereafter as Husserliana 9 411, 413 and Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 1908-1914, Husserliana Volume 28, Ulrich Melle, ed. (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988) cited hereafter as Husserliana 28 112 ff.
[32]:Husserliana 3 82 (marginal 66).
[33]:And every founded doxic act as well.
[34]:ibid. 83.
[35]:ibid.
[36]:Husserl may well have had in mind here the possibility that a monad as a whole is unified by a single archontic thesis. In that case, he would probably follow Leibniz and Fichte in conceiving this ultimate, archontic thesis to be conative.
[37]:A monad’s internal history and tradition would include the whole unity of its internal time, its automatic as well as its actional subjective processes.
[38]:See Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 24 446f. (English 314).
[39]:Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band, Zweiter Teil, Untersuchungen zur phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Texte der 1. und der 2. Auflage ergänzt durch Annotationen und Beiblätter aus dem Hand Exemplar, Husserliana Volume 19/2, Ursula Panzer, ed. (The Hague, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984) cited hereafter as Husserliana 19/2 715 (6th Investigation § 61).
[40]:The German is eigentlich and carries much the same meaning for Heidegger as it has here and in most other Husserlian contexts. The signification is elaborated in Husserliana 9, Appendix XI (1926) 412 fn. 1; see also Chapters 3-5 of the 6th of Logical Investigations (Husserliana 19/2 596-656). The ego’s being-with-the-intentional-object [bei-dem-intentionalen-Gegenstand-sein] is ambiguous since its being-with may be either an unfulfilled anticipation or actually fulfilled. Being with in the mode of actual fulfillment is authentic being-with. Being-with in the anticipatory mode would then be inauthentic being-with. As long as any fulfillment at all is outstanding, an actus is anticipative and so is inauthentic. The passage to which this one is a marginal note explains that the ego’s being interested in objects is to be taken etymologically as inter esse, i.e., to be in the midst of entities. The English Phenomenological Psychology. Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925, trn. John Scanlon, presents only the main text (234 pp.) of Husserliana 9 and omits some 240 pages of important supplements and appendices not otherwise available in English, including Appendix XI.
[41]:Husserliana 24 274
[42]:Misinterpretations, inauthentic explications (false statements, miscounting, invalid reasoning, etc.) would seem to generate members of the class of inauthentic, merely subject-relative objective traits. Though Jones falsely believes the night of May 29, 1984 to have been a night when black stealth helicopters hovered over his home, it still remains true of his home that it is inhabited by someone who believed it to have been subject to that sort of surveillance. Such explications generate a unity belonging not to the world but to the absolutely inclusive class, the class of all objects, which necessarily includes itself.
[43]:A number of Husserl’s texts written prior to 1913 seem to indicate commitment to such a dualism. A prime example is found in Husserliana 24 (244-247). On the other hand, the same lecture course goes on to demonstrate as was shown above that pre-Objective forms of temporal and spatial extension are given with the very impressions themselves. And similar points are made in the lectures on “Thing and Space” of 1907 (Husserliana 16).
[44]:Phenomenology proper would exclude in that case the corruption of Alfred Schutz’s work that seems sometimes to occur when it is rendered into English; this happens, for example, in the following passage with disastrous effect. SCHUTZ: Das erlebende Ich erlebt die Erlebnisse seiner Dauer nicht als wohlumgrenzte und daher isolierte Einheiten, wenngleich es sie as solche in den reflexiven Blick zu bringen fähig ist. [Alfred Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie, second, unaltered edition (Vienna: Springer, 1960) 78 f.]. TRANSLATORS: We have already exposed the fallacy that intended meaning is an isolated lived experience (Erlebnis). As long as consciousness remains a pure stream of duration, there are no discrete lived experiences [Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trns. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Northwestern University Press, 1967) 75]. The emphasis in the German text is Schutz’s.
[45]‘Reveals’ is the term used by the McQuarrie-Robinson as well as the Stambaugh translation of Being and Time to render Heidegger’s enthüllt, for which A. Hofstadter employs ‘unveils’ in translating The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.
[46]:Husserliana 3 297f. (251f.).
[47]:Husserliana 3 293 (246).
[48]:The extension has the authority of Husserl himself in comments of 1916 on the passage under discussion. See Husserliana 3, Appendix XXIII, 410f.
[49]:Husserliana 3 295 (248).
[50]:Husserliana 28 83.
[51]:Husserliana 3 291 (244 f.) and §147 and Husserliana 19/2 26 ff.
[52]:Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (i918-1926), ed. Margot Fleischer, Husserliana 10 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966) 102ff. (see also 446). The passage indicates that Husserl did indeed seriously question the positivistic assumption of traditional logic that all judgments are “decidable”. However, it did not appear in print until 1966 and so was not available to Suzanne Bachelard in 1957 when she asserted the opposite A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, trn. Lester Embree [Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968], 128-129). On the other hand, Bachelard did overlook some passages in Formal and Transcendental Logic that weigh heavily against her claim, such as the one quoted immediately below.
[53]:Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, ed Paul Janssen, Husserliana 17 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 203f. English translation: Formal and Transcendental Logic, trn. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 196 (marginal: 174).
[54]:Husserliana 10 296 (307).
[55]:Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen (Husserliana, Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke, Volume 19/2), ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers: 1984) 655 ff. (Sixth Investigation §39).
[56]:Compare Robert Welsh Jordan, “Das transzendentale Ich als Seiendes in der Welt,” Perspektiven der Philosophie, 5. Band (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1979) 201-205.
[57]:Analysen zur passiven Synthesis aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918-1926), Husserliana Volume 11, ed. Margot Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 43.
[58]:ibid. 42.
[59]:Although world exists only insofar as Dasein exists by fore-casting a world [The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988) 168 (237 f. in Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Marburg lectures of the summer semester 1927), Gesamtausgabe 24, ed. f.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975)], what Heidegger calls “nature” does not require that there be a world or Dasein [ibid. 175 (249)].
[60]:Basic Problems 166, 270, 296 f. (Gesamtausgabe 24 236 f., 383, 420 ff.).