Klaus Held
The double meaning in the title of this essay is intentional. The following reflections aim to show how a phenomenology that, in searching for the original idea of a phenomenological philosophy, goes beyond Husserl (and which, in this sense, follows Husserl) must pose the problem of time. I will also touch upon Husserl’s work, but this essay does not “follow Husserl” in the sense of providing an exposition of the problem of time in Husserl’s work.1
The original idea of phenomenology becomes visible when we commence our reflections with the intention that allowed Husserl to discover his own path for thinking. This intention resides in his goal of overcoming the prejudicial biases in philosophy’s vacillation between the extreme one-sidedness of psychologism and that of a pseudo-Platonic objectivism.2
The original insight that set Husserl on this path was the discovery of the phenomenal field of modes of givenness.3 The phenomenal field, the realm of the appearing-of-what-appears, forms a “between”4 that from the start demolishes the Cartesian dualism of an objective outer world and a subjective inner world.5 Thus, neither the “objective time” of events in the world confronting us nor the time that is often supposed to be merely “subjective time” can be the proper theme of a phenomenological analysis of time. Instead, the proper theme is the time that measures the phenomenal field in its fluctuation.6
It seems, however, that as soon as Husserl had gained access to the dimension of the “between,” he immediately blocked it with his Cartesian self-interpretation,7 and this is true as well for his exposition of the problem of time. In the first place, the latter is posed as a problem of “inner-time consciousness” in its “immanence.” Second, the concrete analysis remains oriented toward the consciousness of a “transcendent object.”
These objections are justified, but such a broad-brushed critique is unhelpful. First, I try to make the critique more precise by reorienting Husserl’s original insight in order to prepare a phenomenological analysis of time more in keeping with his aforementioned insight. Next, I outline the approach to such an analysis. Finally, I suggest what this analysis implies for a phenomenology understood, as in Husserl, as a theory of constitution.
The “immanence of consciousness” of which Husserl speaks in the context of his Cartesian self-interpretation is accessible in reflection. This reflection has the basic function of enabling the disclosure of the phenomenal field of modes of givenness. To begin, then, we should recall the simple sense of reflection.
In the prephilosophical attitude, a person apprehends what confronts him as something present “in-itself”—that is, as something existent—while being unconcerned about whether and how it is given or appears from moment to moment. He is, as Husserl puts it, totally infatuated with this in-itself. He skips over its current appearance-for-him, although he is aware, albeit unthematically, of the relativity to himself of what, as an experiencing subject, he encounters. In a broad sense, the in-itself appears before him thematically as an identity. It so appears because it differentiates itself from the multiplicity of its actual or possible modes of givenness or appearance. The superiority of the person engaged in phenomenological reflection over the person in the natural attitude consists solely in his seeing that the identical in-itself, taken for granted in the natural attitude, is a for-him. This is the case because the identity of the current in-itself receives its concrete determinacy only from its relatedness to an actual multiplicity of ways of appearing-for-the-thinker. In the phenomenological epochē, the one reflecting does not participate in the belief in the encountered identity’s being-in-itself, but that does not mean that he holds such a belief to be illegitimate. It means only that he thematizes the manifold of modes of givenness or modes of appearing, which remain unthematized for the person in the natural attitude, in their function of mediating identity.8
It is clear, even from this elementary phenomenological reflection, that the manifold of appearances is the fundamental theme of phenomenology. The discovery—as a consequence of this reflection—of the sphere of appearances can be fruitful insofar as the analysis of individual cases sheds light on the ways in which different manifolds of modes of givenness function as conditions for the natural-attitude encounter of identities corresponding to the experiencing of manifolds and, thereby, for encountering the different “objectivities” (in the widest sense of the term) that are thought of as existent in themselves. Husserl refers to this as constitutional analysis.
In this respect, the manifold of appearances has the character of the “between” mentioned at the beginning, since one and the same appearing functions constitutively as an appearing-of and an appearing-for. As appearing-of, the modes of givenness are the manifold of determinations in which the existent meant as an in-itself presents itself from itself. As appearing-for, they are modes of enacting the experience (understood in the broadest sense) through which the individual who encounters something in the world orients himself toward the identity he encounters. As modes of enactment, the modes of appearance are possibilities for the ability to effect something and, in this sense, they are, as Husserl puts it, “capabilities” [Vermöglichkeiten]. The possibilities for effecting something can also be the present determination’s modes of self-presentation, since in prephilosophical life they are not thematized as subjective potentialities. Rather, they basically act as conditions of identity that remain unthematized. In the passage through these possibilities, unthematized by the agent, the agent focuses [polarisiert] his attention on the identical in-itself.
Insofar as the in-itself is given to an agent only when he steps beyond the sphere of the manifold of appearances and moves toward identity, it may to that extent be called “transcendent.” Were Husserl, in contrast with transcendence so understood, now to designate the sphere of appearance as “immanence,” such a linguistic usage could, perhaps, be justified. However, Husserl does not draw the previous distinction in terms of the difference between the sphere of appearances and the supposed identity. Instead, he makes a Cartesian move and draws the distinction in terms of the difference between the agent and the supposed identity. That is, the dimension of appearing is relocated to the “interior” of the agent and is now called immanent in this sense. Herein lies Husserl’s decisive self-misunderstanding, by virtue of which an unbiased entry into the phenomenal dimension he discovered—and thereby also to the temporality of this dimension—is made difficult and in many ways concealed. The following briefly sketches the mistake in this Cartesian self-interpretation.
By transcending the unthematically functioning phenomenal sphere, the identity that is thematic acquires the character of irreality or ideality.9 It appears as an identity that in principle is never grasped immediately in its determinacy, since the determination in which it presents itself is present in the manifold of the transcended phenomenal sphere. By contrast, the agent is aware—though unthematically—of the coincidence of the appearing-of and the appearing-for in the immanence of this sphere. Therefore, he is anxious to transfer the transcendence of the thematized identity into the immanence of this sphere whose unthematized functioning is indifferent to the self-presenting of the present determination and to the enacting of possibility.10 But in the transition of thematicity into functional unthematicity, the thing encountered loses its character as a thing appearing as an identity that can be secured as something existing in itself. The agent must experience the fact that the thematizing identification and the unthematically functioning appearance can never be brought into alignment. Owing to the unthematicity of the appearing, however, the incongruence itself remains unthematic. Hence, he resorts to a constantly renewed, thematizing identification with which he pursues the functioning appearing. However, he can never overtake it, since this always already anticipates thematicity. In this sense, experiential life is suffused by a pulling [Gespanntheit] in the direction of evidence, a primordial tendency to locate thematizing in the appearing itself, which thematizing, however, precisely thereby withdraws.11 Husserl has this irresolvable pull [Gespanntheit] in mind when he designates intentionality as the basic condition of conscious life experiencing the world.
In the intentional relaxation focused on identity the agent experiences himself as the one who must bear this stretching [Spannung], first of all in activity or spontaneity, wherein he focuses [polarisiert] his attention through the manifold of appearances to an identical in-itself such that he himself emerges as something like an identical anti-pole to the object-pole. In other words, with the constitution of the identical objectivity, a persisting and stable identity of the agent—even if in a different manner from that of the objectivity—is for the first time constituted. This means, however, that the duality of the identity-poles object and ego is by no means the basic situation that phenomenological reflection encounters. It is, therefore, a misunderstanding to conceive the outline of the phenomenological problematic on the basis of the Cartesian difference between the two poles of subject and object. Since the unthematically functioning manifold of appearances is also an enactment of possibilities, one must not conclude that the “immanence” of this sphere must be construed, over against the transcendent identity, as an immanence-in-the-subject. For only in the dimension of the fundamental accord between enactment and presenting-itself can the intentional tension [Gespanntheit] establish itself. In this tension, the subject emerges as a pole of enacting which has the object as its opposite.
Thus, in an analysis of its constitution, the subject is to be explained by the dimension of appearances and not conversely.12 The possibility of the distinction, on the basis of which we reflectively interpret the appearing as the indifference or accommodation of two events—the self-revelation of determination and the enactment of possibility—arises first through the separation of the identity-poles: the entity-in-itself and the agent. This polarization presupposes, however, the dimension of the manifold of appearances, which is transcended in the double-poled positing of identity and which, consequently, intentionally mediates between the poles. Only because the phenomenal field is a constitutive ground and intentional center could its thematizing delineate the concrete path on which Husserl got to the bottom of the prejudicial vacillation between psychologism and objectivism mentioned at the outset.
Husserl’s divergence from the primacy of the dimension of appearance—the Cartesian relocation of the appearing to subjective immanence—can be explained by the fact that he had already allowed himself to be led astray by the reflection whose thematizing of appearing as appearing had to be indubitable. In this reflection, the one reflecting and the subject of intentionality—the agent of the ways of being given as his own capacities—are identical; hence, Husserl could become addicted to the fascination with Cartesian self-certainty and thereby resort to the model of interpreting modes of givenness as cogitationes, their agent as ego cogito and the object-pole as cogitatum. Since only the ego cogito comes into consideration as the bearer of such a fundamental intentional structure, the phenomenological exploration of the phenomenal field must appear as an unfolding of a universal “egology,” and the return to the ground of this field, that is, the inquiry into its temporality, must appear as a progressively deeper egological reflection. Husserl’s original, normative scientific ideal of presuppositionlessness, which he held right to the end, was superimposed on the Cartesian scientific ideal of an ultimate grounding in self-certainty.
On Husserl’s Cartesian view, the problem of time presents itself in the unpublished analyses from the 1930s as a question of, so to speak, a radically ego-focused self-reflection:13 the agent of the appearing tries in a certain way to catch himself in his own activity—in his “I function,” as Husserl says—and thereby discovers that he can always only chase himself in his self-thematizing. In this belatedness (reflection as a retrospective awareness) three things are assumed: (1) the differentiation of the agent from himself, through which he is able to thematize himself—or “ontify” himself, as Husserl says; (2) the unity of the agent with himself, through which he can identify himself with himself in the self-thematization; and (3) the movement of unity-with-oneself in the difference-with-oneself. To begin with the third, Husserl infers from this a pre-objective “flow”: as pre-objective, this flow cannot be a manifold of temporal loci but rather, in accord with the second point, a standing and solitary unity, that is, a present. However, per the first point, since the possibility of self-thematization—the “incipient reflection” (as Brand has aptly put it14)—must be contained in this standing unity, the present is determined at once as something standing as one and as streaming. In other words, it is determined as something that becomes manifold in its motion, as a pre-objective “community with itself,” and in this sense as a “living present.” This should be the primordial form of the egological enactment of appearances and thereby the ground of all constitution.
It seems apparent to me that the living present, so understood, is a reconstruction and not phenomenologically intuitable. The construction itself consists at root in the fact that the aporia of a thinking that wants ultimately to ground itself in the iterated reflection of the ego is elevated to the solution to problems that, so formulated, are insoluble.15 But the aporetics of the living present arises in Husserl’s work only because and so long as phenomenological reflection is misunderstood as a Cartesian attempt at a fundamental grounding in egoicality. The entanglement in this aporetics can be undone in a reorientation of this reflection toward the original phenomenological insight.
This insight already made clear that the identity of the agent is to be explained by the dimension of the appearing and not vice versa. The “depth dimension” of the living present, in which it questions phenomenology in return, is consequently not to be determined primarily as a unity of the “I function,” but as a unity of the dimension of appearing. The identity of the “I function” is first realized in the genesis of a constituting in the intentional opposition to an actively generated identity of an objective in-itself. This opposition, however, presupposes a pre-objective passivity. Therefore, the analysis of the living present as a regressive inquiry into this passivity cannot—contrary to Husserl’s self-interpretation—be a reflection on egoicality. Hence, it would be improper to characterize the primordial time of the living present as a subjective time, which obviously does not mean that it is an objective time. It is rather—as supposed from the beginning—the dimensional character of the phenomenal field itself.
This claim sounds strange given the fact that ever since the Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Inner-Time Husserl expressly declared “inner-time consciousness”—in contrast to objective time—as the theme of the phenomenological analysis of time. In fact, Husserl always portrayed “authentic time” as something subjective, that is, as a form of the “stream” of cogitationes. This subjectivity of time seems initially to confirm itself in the reflection on the living present. Aside from Husserl’s Cartesian self-misunderstanding, however, nothing compels us to interpret the primordial passivity of this present as a weakened activity or spontaneity on the part of the one reflecting on his own living present. If—freed from this interpretation—one understands it as a movement of the unthematized, functioning phenomenal field, then it becomes clear, precisely through the return to the living present, that time as a phenomenological theme is something pre-subjective. Husserl’s analyses of the living present also bring to light that he declares the egoic agent as a standing ego-pole to be something itself genetically constituted.16 With this insight the Cartesian spell is broken; Husserl himself, however, did not further develop the consequences of this.
The following shows how the phenomenological analysis of time, which addressed the consciousness of inner-time, can, as consequence of the last-named insight and in an immanent critique of Husserl’s original disclosure of the phenomenal field, lead to something beyond itself.
The manifold of modes of givenness differentiates itself from every self-identical agent as well as from the identical in-itself in having the character of multiplicity. The constitution of encountered identities should be “explained” by this multiplicity, since, according to Husserl, phenomenology as a theory of constitution that returns to the field of the modes of givenness is “the only actual and genuine way of explaining, of making intelligible.”17 Now multiplicity can only explain identity if it can show that the latter is—in whatever manner—already contained in the former. In accord with the already noted connection of basic phenomenological reflection to the natural attitude’s naïve, straightforward belief in objects, constitutive phenomenology begins with an explanation of the occurrence of an objective, identical in-itself. If the unity of the object (in the widest sense of the word) is now somehow to be made intelligible by the manifold of the phenomenal field, then there must already be unity in this field. Husserl claims that this unity is originally found in nothing other than its dimensional constitution [Verfasstheit], that is, in its temporality. More precisely, the modes of givenness of an identical in-itself are gathered in the unity of a single present correlative therewith. Husserl’s attention is thus turned toward the present as it is understood from his early analyses of time up to his later work.
Accordingly, the fundamental question to be directed phenomenologically to the phenomenal present [Erscheinungsgegenwart] is wherein this unity consists and how it can have a unifying function, first, for the identical in-itself and then, second, for the identity of the agent. How does the identical in-itself obtain its unity from the unity of the present of the field of modes of givenness?
Husserl answers that what confronts us becomes identifiable, that is, first becomes something over against me that I encounter, by virtue of its passage through the present of the phenomenal field. Hence, provided something or other appears to have an objective character for me—that is, appears as an identical something that I, regardless of my enactment, believe to be something existing (transcendent)—it is not directly given in an unmediated present. First and foremost, the remembered and the expected—more generally, things made present [Vergegenwärtigt]—are not given in an unmediated present. For reasons I cannot go into here,18 Husserl cites memory as the primordial form and basic model of making something present [Vergegenwärtigung].
How does memory first enable unmediated givenness in the passage through the phenomenal field that Husserl and Heidegger both term “presencing”? The answer can be found in Husserl’s well-known analysis of retention [Retentionalität]. Presencing is intrinsically dimensioned, that is, moved and stretched, such that the consciousness of an absolutely unmediated primal givenness in the momentary Now—the primal impression—is accompanied in the same momentary Now by a continuous implication-nexus of retentions, that is, by embedded near-memories [ineinandergeschachtelten Nah-Errinerungen] in which consciousness at once lets the given unthematically slip away from the primal impression and retains it therein. To more clearly demarcate retention as unmediated memory Husserl refers to memory as “recollection.” By virtue of the capacity of retentionally formed horizons to be awakened, anything that has once confronted me in a presentation can be recalled as an identity. In the constitution of what can be recalled, the ceaselessly proceeding flow of presentations generally congeals into a succession of identifiable Nows. The transcendence of an identical thing, that is, its supposed subject-irrelative existence, rests fundamentally on a making-present [Vergenwärtigung]. That is, this transcendence is conditioned by the fact that the supposed in-itself as such is released from primal presencing, but in this—in the pre-objective field of the unity of primal impression and retention—a temporal index of the present has in a certain way been preserved. In this way, the present contrasts itself in its identity with the manifold of the phenomenal field of presentation and can thus appear in the independence of something existing in-itself. In brief, for Husserl the basic form of the identity of the in-itself is the capacity of the Now to make itself present again, and this, for its part, is an objectification of the form of the present and, by extension, the form of the identity of a current presencing. In this sense, the primordial constitution of objectivity in general takes place in inner-time consciousness.19
And so the decisive question is: what guarantees the unity of the presentation itself? Why is it that presentation always takes place in the present, in regard to which what is made present [das Vergegenwärtigte] can in general appear only as attributable to a determined present and thereby as identifiable?
This question is possible only through a radicalizing of the epoché. In On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), Husserl showed that the condition of the possibility for this question is the occurrence of the identity meant as transcendent in the presentation of the pregiven objective identity. From a constitutive and analytic perspective, to “explain”—in the sense of the previously introduced quotation from Husserl—means, for the constitution of time, to take as a guiding clue what is objectively constituted as an entity in objective time in order to ask how it comes to pass when it—that is, what was presupposed with the choice of the guiding clue as self-evident—in fact comes to pass. The answer to this question belongs in static phenomenology as a “phenomenology of guiding clues.”20 With this question phenomenology still lets itself be guided by the intentionality of the natural attitude. To explain intentional transcending—conceived more radically21—from a constitutive and theoretical perspective means to ask about the sufficient reason for the fact that the phenomenal field can in general be intentionally transcended toward an objectivity meant as in-itself. Genetic phenomenology yields the answer to this question. The radically genetic account may no longer use the objectively intended identity as a guiding clue; instead, the unity that makes possible such an identity must reveal itself purely in reference to the phenomenal field. Thus, genetic phenomenology at root does nothing other than exhibit the origin of intentionality. If the unity of the phenomenal dimension is nothing other than its temporality and if phenomenology in its final form as a theory of genetic constitution is in the end nothing other than the return to this temporality as the basis of the account, then it is manifest that, as Husserl has himself said in Crisis, that “the constitution of every level and sort of entity is a temporalization.”22
If the phenomenal present is to accomplish what genetic phenomenology requires, then the individual presentational presents [Gegenwärtigungsgegenwarten] must in their flowing movement possess some pre-objective unity, that is, a particular determination on the basis of which we can separate them from one another without recourse to the entity-in-itself objectively known in them. According to both the early Husserlian analyses of time as well as the later genetic analyses, the respective primal impression provides them this determination—and thus the givenness of something originally and immediately given in the presentation. This primal impression should form the intersection between the retentional and corresponding protentional (unthematized near-expectant) consciousnesses belonging to the presentational consciousness [Gegewärtigungsbewusstseins]. This consciousness should be centered in the primal impression, that is, its movement should be at once brought to a standstill and unified in this manner.
It is easy to recognize, however, the circularity of this explanation. Husserl understands the temporality—thus, dimensionality in the sense of the primordial, internally moved extension—of the presentation as its form, that is, as that by which the absolute “Heraclitean flux” of the manifold of appearances possesses its unity.23 The constitutively fundamental identity of what is “made present,” of what transcends, is made intelligible by the present understood as a formal unity. Only insofar as this—as a consequence of the presentation—has genetically preserved its formal, that is to say temporal, identity can it appear to consciousness. The formal identity of the present cannot, therefore, be due to the identity of such a material [inhaltlich] determination. Husserl attributes this precisely to primal impression.
In primal impression, a pre-objective, yet nevertheless material (“hyletic”), determination is given to the presenting consciousness. This determination is for that reason declared to be a “datum of sensation.” “Sensation” is there the alias for the oxymoronic pre-objective having of an object. And “datum” is the alias for the “flake” of material identity that from outside “snows” into the mere formality of the pure movement of presencing. Husserl himself saw the untenability of such a theory of data,24 but he still did not abandon the discussion of primal impression in his late manuscripts. He did drop the sensualistic construct of quantizing the hyletic data given to the pure flow of consciousness but not the idea that the presentational flow owes its unity, which brings it to a standstill, to something like a “primal impulse” as a preformation of material determinateness.25
This primal impulse functions, in particular, as a unifier by centering around itself the presentational present, that is, the living, not yet objectified flow of retention and protention. This idea presupposes that within the breadth of the field of the present a limit-point of the most current actuality allows itself to be distinguished. To be sure, it is undeniable (1) that a person reflecting on the present can ask what in this present is, in the strongest sense, actually now, and (2) that a person can reduce any field of presence infinitesimally to a limit point of actuality. Yet with this reduction one always avails oneself—even if, in comparison with the theory of hyletic data, in a more covert form—of the identity of a transcendent object, which identity must first be explained. The Now is itself a traversable continuum and thus is not originally a boundary but a number, as Aristotle had already defined time. For this reason, the reduction to a limit-point of actuality never comes to an end. Only in the Now as the limit of movement can the movement of presentation, as proposed in the theory of the primal impression, be brought to a halt as a unity. One can speak meaningfully of the Now as a limit only in relation to an already objectified temporal duration that one presents as divided into two partial phases wherein the punctual Now marks the place where it is divided. The objective temporal duration, in which such Nows are distinguishable as points in time, constitutes itself first of all in the traversable continuity of the field of presence, while retention makes possible the consciousness of the form of identity of such temporal points. Therefore, in speaking of primal impression, even after the retraction of the doctrine of sensory data, there is already presupposed the first thing needing explication, namely, the original genesis of an “objective” unity.
One cannot avoid a petitio principii even if one says that the primal-impressional impulse starts not with an object existing in objective time but with the agent of the presencing. Since the impulse is supposed to have a unifying function for the present of this presencing, the impulse-giving presencing is for its part utilized as an identical. Hence, instead of the “objective” unity of the object-pole, it is the unity of the ego as an enactment-pole that is now tacitly presupposed. But, as noted earlier, this pole-identity requires a genetic constitution referring back to the present unity of the dimension of appearances. Neither an affection of the presentation by an impression coming from without nor a self-affection by an identity remaining within lends itself to provide its unity qua present.
The phenomenological analysis falters here, because it either orients itself directly toward the relation to the object or, at the very least, remains indirectly oriented toward it through the presupposed idea of the enactment-pole that can appear only opposite an object. Labeling the genetically original presencing as “pre-objective” does not help, as its present unity—however hidden it may be—is derived from an impulse in an original impression or a self-affection, or it is never problematized as a unity at all. Consequently, we can make headway only if we succeed in exposing the presuppositions by which the construction of a primal impression or self-affection imposes itself and by suitably replacing them.
The introduction of a pre-objective identity-impulse is necessitated by the fact that the unity that grants priority to the movement of presencing is conceived as something distinct from this movement; the form of “Heraclitean” flowing and its affective-impressional-hyletic content as what stands in place are distinguished. Accordingly, it appears one can continue the analysis fruitfully only if one does not make this distinction.26 On the other hand, the distinctions between form and content and between standing and streaming are attempts to comprehend more precisely the difference between unity and multiplicity in relation to the present of presencing. Nor should one deny this distinction, for on it rests the distinguishability of modes of givenness and the objective in-itself. To account for the identity of the phenomenal field’s in-itself, the analysis must show a unity-in-the-moved-multiplicity for this field itself and thus determine more precisely the “vitality [Lebendigkeit]” of the phenomenal present.
The distinction between unity and multiplicity, which phenomenological reflection at first seeks to grasp in the distinctions between form and content or standing and flowing, conveys itself in the “vitality” of the living present and in this sense disappears therein. But it reappears in a different way as the difference between form and content. The living present, in which the present shall constitute itself genetically and to which the transcendent owes its identity in the making present, must, as the genetic ground of this plurality, differentiate itself from the presents capable of making present these plurals; that is, it must be uniquely one. From a phenomenological point of view, however, this cannot mean that, in its uniqueness, it would be only a notional, reconstructed principle of possibility. And it is not such a principle, since at every moment we experience the fact that in every one of the many phenomenal presents in which the world confronts us, one appearing—the unthematic concurrence of the enactment of possibility and the self-manifestation of an existing determination—is operative. The one and only dimension of this single concurrence is the living present. Thus, one must say that this unique present governs or permeates the many presents in some way. The many phenomenal presents differentiate themselves through the multiplicity of self-presentations of each different determination, that is, through their materiality [Inhaltlichkeit]. Consequently, it seems that the form of the present must be the uniquely single present as distinct from this materially conditioned difference. Accordingly, the difference between unity and multiplicity in the phenomenological analysis of the present is inescapably to be grasped with the help of the reflective concepts of “form” and “content.”
Nevertheless, should the completely untenable notion of a primal-impressional, primal-affective impulse or presentational center be held at a distance, it is still advisable initially to verify separately that both the form and the content of the presentational field possess the posited character of unity-in-multiplicity. This further analysis, therefore, must first thematize the unique present as the form of the many phenomenal presents, and it will have to make clear that the constant “continuum” of the flowing multiplicity in each phenomenal present can also be understood without recourse to something like primal impression as a standing unity. Second, we must investigate how the particular individual presents differentiate themselves materially and in this way form unities. The problem of understanding them as a unity-in-multiplicity arises with respect to their materiality as well as their form. That is, these unities are no longer to be relocated into a primal-impressional, primordial point of origin, whereby their unity is determined under an abstraction from the flowing manifold; rather the task is to show just how the identity of the content encompasses this multiplicity. It must come to light through this double verification of concrete unity-in-multiplicity for the unique living present and the many particular presents that the problematic, reflectively conceived distinction between form and content, which has hitherto been retained, becomes obsolete: insofar as there is nothing other than unity-in-multiplicity on both sides, they must coincide.
First, the form of the continuous stream in the individual present must itself be determined as a unity. Hence, making no use of the auxiliary structure of the primal-impressional, presentation-centering original point entails abandoning the tripartite Husserlian articulation into primal impression, retention, and protention. By all appearances, the latter two remain—the keeping-hold-of that allows things to slip away and the closing-in-on that keeps things at a distance. Still, the formulations, with which we attempted to paraphrase what Husserl meant by the terms retention and protention, show that the terms (as understood by Husserl) are related to the centering, “actual” Now of primal impression. The retentional holding-on is a holding fast at the place of this Now, and protentional closing-in-on is a drawing into the place of this Now. And this Now is equally the relational place where the retentional letting-slip-away and the protentional closing-in-on are accomplished. It is not done, therefore, with a simple amputation of the primal impression; the movements that Husserl has determined as retention and protention must be otherwise interpreted.
Coming and going, the two characteristics of time, are experienced in the present itself in the form of retention and protention; in the consciousness of internal time, we are aware that the present of our presencing itself has a twofold slope: the transitoriness of the lived Now presents itself both as a constant depletion and as a constant advent. Husserl has in fact connected these two experiences of time with one another in the intersecting point of the primal impression, but he also separates them precisely by the manner of their connection. To speak figuratively, they appear as two radiating beams going in opposite directions but with a common origin. This image is also suggested by Husserl’s choice of words. It is no accident that the two compounds with -tention remind us of the basic word in Husserl’s phenomenology: “intention.” If one understands retention and protention in some form—even as a “preformation not yet making objective”—as modes of intention, and thus, as a mode of transcending self-unfolding (tendere) of the pole of enactment toward an identical in-itself, then from the start they will be ineffectual for the determination of the phenomenal dimension in its genetic originality. The tendere referred to with this concept can, in any case, also be otherwise understood: as the tension [Gespanntheit], that is, the dimensionality of the present, in which intentionality first emerges. Then retention and protention suggest that the dimension of appearing is in itself extended—stretched, as it were—in two ways, namely, insofar as the slope of its transitoriness-in-itself is as much a coming as a going. It has, therefore, the character of ambiguity.
Since Husserl described retention and protention as preformations of intention, he needed something like a primal impression as a relational pole for their directionality, and he distinguished their opposed directions by it. The presentational consciousness encompasses such protentional and retentional sectors. Thus, Husserl was unable to see that the movement of the phenomenal field, which appeared to him as retention and protention, could not properly be distinguished by such sectors of differently directed awareness. Rather, it is equivocal in its transitory entirety. The present appearing as a whole has in itself a countermoving extension. Husserl could not recognize this countermoving character, since he obscured the possibility of an unbiased description of the phenomenal field by importing, in a moment of Cartesian self-misunderstanding, the double polarity of the agent and the identical in-itself.
That Husserl misunderstood the inherently countermoving dimension of the present of the appearing reveals itself more precisely in the way he interpreted retention and protention as primary memory and primary expectation. As a letting-slip-away-in-the-holding-on-to, retention should found forgetting, and as a holding-on-to-in-letting-slip-away, it should found recollection. The secretly guiding model for this entire interpretation is the attentiveness that an agent devotes to an object in question. Forgetting and remembering are basically construed as attentiveness that is, respectively, diminished in its grade of intensity or newly heightened. The corresponding metaphors are “sinking” and “waking.” Everything that has passed through a present is, as retained, “available”; that is, latent memory is the basis of forgetting. A footnote in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time betrays the fact that Husserl thinks this way. In the footnote Husserl, in reference to the factual “limitation of the temporal field,” says: “idealiter a consciousness is probably even possible in which everything remains preserved retentionally.”27
But with this, the double phenomenon of remembering and forgetting is fundamentally misunderstood. If one wants to lay down a founding relation between these two, then one must say exactly the opposite—that forgetting founds remembering. For it is only because the field of presence is fundamentally and not just factually limited that consciousness can return “again” to the content of a presentation. In this limit is reinforced the circumstance that what already appears in the presentation escapes, slipping into hiddenness. While what appears escapes, it can for the first time appear out of the resulting distance as something withdrawn and thereby capable of being objectively recalled.28 It is not a coincidence that the designation for what is historically identifiable, the “epoch,” has the fundamental sense of stopping, inhibiting, or restraining—thus, a withdrawing. A familiar phenomenon is that, in departing, that is, in a withdrawing, what confronts us first truly comes to givenness.29 The original movement of withdrawal productive of unity-in-discontinuity is the genuine ground for the fact that “the time of history, our own as well as our common history, in which we live and experience, [has] not the form of a continuous event as a succession of results in an uninterrupted causality.”30 This is not seen in Husserl’s notion of retention: precisely in the withdrawing-into-unavailability—thus, in the movement that makes possible the discontinuity of forgetfulness—lies the condition for the possibility of a memorial holding-on-to.
The movement of appearing, of presentation, consists in this withdrawal. At the same time, however, the inner extension has the opposite character, which comes to the fore in Husserlian protention, but, again, only in a distorted way. Regarding protention, it has often and rightly been shown that Husserl at root understood this movement only as inverted retention, and correspondingly, that he once explicitly designated pre-anticipation as inverted memory.31 What gets lost here is unmistakably the peculiarity of the future, its surprising character. One says that the novel, in its unavailability, does not lend itself to the kind of anticipation one has concerning a reliable memory. But with this objection the critique still falls short; it still appears to be the case that what-is-held-on-to, thanks to the continuity of the retentional holding-on-to, is reliably available to our holding-on-to, whereas there is no such continuity as a bridge to the future. The entire idea is off kilter. As already shown, it is not the continuity of a retentional holding-on-to but rather the withdrawal that makes possible the discontinuity of forgetting that builds the bridge to the past. It is precisely this withdrawal that also deprives us, in another way, of the possibility of knowing our way around the available future.
Husserl was unable to bring the surprising character of arrival in the phenomenal present into his analysis for the same reason that he misjudged the withdrawing character of this present. The slipping-away—understood as a withdrawal in contrast to its formulation as a consciousness of a retentional continuity—pervades the entirety of the presenting. It makes possible in equal measure the original connection to the past in forgetting and remembering as well as fundamental uncertainty in the face of the future. From this slipping-away we can now distinguish an arrival that, once again, is understood only inadequately by protention, but which likewise determines the entirety of the phenomenal present. When the withdrawal makes the entirety of the appearing unavailable—and precisely thereby makes the past “available” via the original forgetting, to wit, makes it identifiable out of the distance—this entails that the appearing as a self-presenting, a realizing of determination in the light of a self-revelation, fundamentally occurs in the countermovement to the continually waiting withdrawal, the departing into darkness, the self-occluding. This being the case, the appearing as a self-revelation is to be characterized as a constantly unexpected arrival, and in this respect Husserl’s critics are right when they say that Husserl in the theory of protention has missed the future’s originally surprising character, the irresolvable novelty or unexpectedness of the originary character of the advent of presencing.32
The appearing’s proper movement, or dimensionality, lies in its countermovement of the appearing with the withdrawal. The appearing occurs not only in the countermovement but as withdrawal’s countermovement. The dimension of the phenomenal present—as first formulated—not only has the character of ambiguity, but it first and foremost gives dimension to the phenomenal field.33
As dimension, the appearing is a present. The guiding question was how this, as a form, possesses its unity-in-multiplicity. Insofar as the explanation was, with the assistance of the notion of primal impression and its implications, which remained hidden in Husserl, consistently held at distance, there came to light the actual unity through which the phenomenal present is a dimension: the countermotion of withdrawal and emergence of determination. The original, “formal” multiplicity of the appearing is a duality, namely, the contrariety of emergence and withdrawal. The relation between these opposites is itself one, and as extension it builds within itself the place of the phenomenal field.
But with this result the initial question is not fully answered. The question was not only about the unity of a unique phenomenal present but also about how a phenomenal present isolates itself from other phenomenal presents as a particular unity. This question remains open, because the individual phenomenal presents apparently differentiate themselves through their respective contents and because there arises the task of showing the unity-in-multiplicity for the content of the presencing, a task that up to now has only been shown with respect to its form.
The unsuccessful attempt to determine the particular phenomenal present through a primal-impressional point of origin or limit-point of the Now as a unity rests upon the fact that the objective directedness, which should initially be explained by the pure appearing, is secretly vindicated by it. To avoid this mistake, it is advisable, in contrast to Husserl’s analysis of the consciousness of time, not to start solely with experiences that possess the character of “having an object” sensu stricto. These are all kinds of perceptions. Since the intentional relation of agent—mode of givenness—identical-in-itself is present in these, Husserl made them the exemplar for phenomenological analysis. Because perception is, in the widest sense, a theoretical comportment, many critics of Husserl, from Heidegger’s analysis of the tool in Being and Time to Hans-Ulrich Hoche’s attempt at a purely noematic phenomenology, have pursued the path of orienting phenomenological analysis primarily toward praxis.
Certain (though not all) actions by themselves display present unities—as Hoche, drawing on challenges from linguistic analysis, has argued34—such that the attempt always to narrow the field of presence into an infinitesimal limit-point proves to be artificial, and the question about the “actual Now” proves to be senseless. This observation is valuable. It is to be examined only in two ways: first, what consequences does this have for the determination of the present of the appearing? If this observation bears no fruit for a philosophical explanation of appearing, then it is phenomenologically meaningless. Hence, one could certainly infer also that the phenomenological thematization of appearing does not have the universal philosophical meaning that is here ascribed to it. Whether this conclusion is unavoidable depends on the answer to the second question: does the return to everyday talk about actions suffice to explain satisfactorily the unity of the present that they possess? If it becomes apparent that a recourse to the present of appearing is necessary, then—at least in this respect—the universal significance of the phenomenological problematic is confirmed.
According to Hoche, it is primarily goal-oriented or fruitful actions that, in our everyday understandings of them, display for a speaker’s consciousness a satisfactory determination of the present.35 The question as to whether such actions can be analyzed into partial actions that would then be “really Now” proves itself in common speech to be only an apparent problem because the artificial question about an action’s divisibility arises only when we speak abstractly of “action” in general and do not, by contrast, speak of a concrete action to which belongs a determinate “result” or “standard outcome,”36 to which corresponds a “rule” easily followed in the unadorned action.37 I can become clear about this rule in the reflective, verbal account I give in a determinate situation to a dialogue partner or myself.38
With these observations, the rug is certainly pulled out from under a “Now-point theory” of action.39 But this does not fully answer the question regarding what delimits a concrete action as a present unity. Each “result” or “standard outcome” of a concrete action can, as even Hoche admits, be understood (1) as a goal that along the way to realization is achieved by preceding partial goals or means, and (2) as just such a partial goal or means. So, judged not only from a reflective standpoint, but even for the naïve agent, every action can contain partial actions as independent natural unities, or can itself be contained as a partial action in a more comprehensive action. Thus, the present range of an action, and therewith its unity, comes about when the agent—whether in the naïve, nonobjectivating compliance with a rule or in the objectivating reflection on the action is irrelevant40—cuts, as it were, the means-goal hierarchy. And this depends, as Hoche notes,41 on the particular situation.
More concretely, however, this means that the situation tells me what counts for me as a current goal, that is, what appears worthwhile in my concrete action, what in the widest sense appears as good. Hence, the unity of an action depends on this appearing-as-worthwhile. The thematizing of appearing is, however, the subject of phenomenology. In perception and all intentional acts that build upon it or can be interpreted according to its model, the appearance of what is meant as identical occurs as the appearing of an entity. It takes place as an appearing-as-existing. In actions, by contrast, there occurs an appearing-as-good. Therein, something aimed at or something worthwhile—thus, a goal of action in the broadest sense—is thematically given as an intentional identity. The phenomenal field, however—corresponding to the aspects, perspectives, the self-presenting views, and so on in the perceptual model—shapes the situation that unthematically motivates the action. More precisely, it shapes the modes of “affective” being-involved or being-concerned in the transition through which it comes to a setting, a holding firm, a modification, or a canceling of the goals of action.
The being-involved mentioned above—that is, the entire field of affect, if one wants to hold on to the misunderstood, traditional title—is in fact an appearing, a showing-itself, a revelation of determinateness, and is so as the accomplishment of possibilities. This was Heidegger’s great discovery in Being and Time concerning this field, achieved against the traditional interpretation of the truthlessness of affects. Heidegger conceived the phenomenal character of this field as disclosedness [Erschlossenheit]. This disclosedness, which is “moodful” in the broadest sense, indicates the shape of that appearing in which action is constituted.42 Thus, one finds here the material determinateness to which the current actional present owes its unity.
This determinateness would now be distorted—precisely as the formal determinateness of the individual present—if one were to understand it from the outset as something intended as an identity, that is, understand the goal of action as an “object.” This does give the concrete, individual action its content, but this content constitutes itself in the pre-objective material nature of the respective “moodful” disclosedness. Thus, the question is, in what does this have its pre-objective unity? To whom does each current mood owe its determinateness?
When we methodically and strictly deny recourse to objectivity, the only remaining response is that particular moods find their determining boundaries exclusively in one another. Whatever receives its determination purely from a difference existing in some relation to a second, and not through some sort of relation to a third, stands in contrast to this second thing; the being of A is then defined through the not-being of B and vice versa. Consequently, all particular moods must allow determination as variants of a primal polarity of opposed moods, and to this corresponds the result in the phenomenal field: if moods give rise to the concern that originally motivates action—that is, sets it into motion as an act—then they can only have this “effect” because in their horizon this or that appears as detrimental or beneficial to life. This horizon, however, must itself be determined by the polarity that is in this way objectified. This means that in the moodful disclosedness, the movement of vitality manifests itself in switching polar states. Life as an overall condition is considered a bridge between birth and death. Accordingly, the polarity of states, between which vitality moves as a crossing over, can be determined only by birth and death. The incline of this crossing is ambiguous: ascending from birth and descending into death. Let the one mode of the disclosedness of vitality be designated as natality,43 the other as mortality. Under the first mode fall all the moods in which the movement of life appears in the light of levity, facility, renewal, awakening, freshness and the like. Under the second form [we find] the moods in which the same movement is experienced as a descent, heaviness, pressure, depression, and so on.
The bipolarity of moodful appearings itself provides the particular presents their original material determination (and this means unity), and it is, of course, by virtue of this that in each case a definite mood prevails in whose horizon a particular goal of action and, thereby, concrete unities of action can constitute themselves. Admittedly, the prevalence of one mood over its polar opposite requires elucidation. It could seem to mean that such states simply follow upon one another, extrinsically alternating. But this notion already presupposes the delimitability of the respective presents from one another, and it is this that must first be explained. The fundamental question is, through what does the particular present consolidate itself into a unity.
The answer results from the fact that states that are determined only by their opposition to their opposite cannot, as already emphasized, limit one another merely externally in the sense that the termination of state A in the sequence of time is the beginning of state B. They must also determine one another internally; that is, the presence of state A in its entire inner extension or tension [Gespanntheit] is nothing other than the copresence of the opposing state and vice versa. Thus, the external sequence of these states is only an overturning of the inner relations of polarity between their presence and copresence, which governs all moodful presents. Every such present has the basic character of the ambiguity of its bipolar moods. The change of presents results from the fact that in each case one side of the ambiguity presses itself forward and the opposing side pushes back. But precisely therein does the copresent side retain its copresence such that it, for its part, stands ready to press forward. The inner unity of the phenomenal present consists in this tension. This is the inner extension, the movement as a unity-in-multiplicity. In short: the dimensionality of disclosedness—of the appearing as present.
This already implies that the discussion of the question concerning the inner material unity of any phenomenal present leads to the same goal as the previously discussed question concerning the inner formal unity of the individual phenomenal present. The answers agree not only in [asserting] that the tension between two opposed sides of an ambiguity constitutes the dimensional tension of the unity of the present. The two sides themselves turn out—not yet in words but arguably in accordance with the matter at hand—to be the same on both paths of thought. When this is made visible, then the task originally posed is accomplished: the distinction between form and content in the determination of the phenomenal field as present is overcome.
The formal ambiguity of the phenomenal present consists in the countermotion of emergence and withdrawal. These designated the slope, opposed in itself, of the traversing motion of the movement of the presentation. Such an opposition of the slope of movement, however, is also uncovered with the bipolarity of moodfulness. The movement here proves itself to be that of a life characterized by both natality and mortality. The material as a continual repetition of birth, as a life movement determined as a becoming born anew is nothing other than—in a formal treatment—the movement of the arrival of the unexpected new. And the reverse movement of withdrawal is life as perpetual death—as a fading into darkness before which the light of emergence withdraws from determination as light.
The determination of both sides of the ambiguity initially meant “formally” and their determination in a material conception coincide. Thus is the dualism of form and content, which should account for the distinction between the unique [that is, formal] and the particular present, overcome in phenomenology at its root, namely, in the concept of the phenomenal present. But this does not yet eliminate the duality of unity and multiplicity. It must also survive, since the phenomenal present is experienced in the singulare tantum of uniqueness and in the plurality of particular presents. This difference is explained by the fact that the living phenomenal present is, as an inner extension, a unity-in-multiplicity. As such, it can be interpreted in two ways:44 If it is interpreted as a unity, then it appears as a state—that is, the opposed moods stand out against one another as abiding unities, which means that the “Heraclitean flux” of the inner countermotion congeals, resulting in many particular presents. If, conversely, the inner extension is interpreted as a plurality, then it appears as movement. However, in comparison to the sequence of states, this is experienced as the only thing persisting in this change.
The model to which the analysis was oriented changed in the transition from the formal (A) to the material (B) consideration. The results of the first consideration were attained in starting with Husserl’s model of perception—even if not strongly committed thereto. The results of the second consideration arose from the orientation to everyday behavior, as selected in their full significance for phenomenological analysis for the first time by Heidegger in Being and Time. When the same determination of the phenomenal present results from both approaches—as was shown here—then two plausible inferences may be drawn. Either the convergence of results was possible because theoretical presencing (thus, in the widest sense a perceptual-like presencing) is a derivative mode of the practical (or vice versa) or because both ways of presencing in the phenomenal present have their common root in a third thing—which has been offered here: the common root is moodfulness [Gestimmtheit].
Husserl is unsuccessful in penetrating to this root, in construing the dimension of appearing discovered by him as a primordially attuned disclosedness. Husserl scarcely suspected that what he called the “living” present is not only the unity of standing and streaming, of nunc stans and nunc fluens but also in the literal sense “living,” namely, in the sense of moving between birth and death in the inner extension of life. Hence, he treats the problems of birth and death, as well as sleep, in a manner that must be characterized as insufficient. He has devoted a great deal of attention to these themes in the C-Manuscripts and other later texts—influenced, perhaps, by his reading of Being and Time. But, if I am correct, he basically never progressed beyond the recognition of birth, sleep, and death as limit-problems. Husserl in his late period basically still thinks of the unique, single living present in terms of how it is evinced in the already cited texts from Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time: as an “ideal” infinite continuum of holding-onto. The factual ruptures and eclipses in this continuum—its origin out of an archaic obscurity in birth and its immersion again into such obscurity in death—appear as limits toward which the decline of the brightness of the appearing in consciousness asymptotically approaches. And this, despite, on the other side, Husserl’s recognizing with increasing clarity that the absolute of consciousness—we might more appropriately say, the unique phenomenal present—is a fact.45 Since Husserl did not recognize the meaning of moodfulness,46 he could not figure out that in sleep, in the mortality of withdrawal, and in the natality of emergence of determination, the phenomenal present has dimension not merely as a factual outer limit but in its inner movement or extension.
Still outstanding is the answer to the question about the way in which the phenomenal dimension in its primordially countermoving unity can function genetically as the ground of intentionality. It is to be remembered that intentionality for Husserl is in no way—or even in the first instance—a static relation, which we declare with the statement that “consciousness is consciousness of something.” Intentionality means primarily a “teleology,” as Husserl says. That is, it means the agent’s being-out-for [Aussein], mediated by the phenomenal field, the possession of identity and the inevitable tension between unmediated appearing and having an object present in this being-out-for. Teleology so understood occupied Husserl more and more during his lifetime, and in the end it came to constitute in Crisis a predominant theme extending from the elementary forms of world-disclosedness to the scientific objectification of the world.47
The condition for the teleological-intentional restlessness [Hingespanntheit] toward unity must in general lie, in a strict sense, in a pre-objective and pre-egoic tension [Gespanntheit], that is, in the countermotion of the phenomenal dimension in its moodfulness. This extension as motion has the character of unity-in-multiplicity. In this relation of unity and multiplicity, therefore, a connection in accordance with which the plurality presses toward unity must prevail.
The original multiplicity lies in the dual movement of self-withdrawal or mortality and the arrival-of-determination or natality. In the countermotion or ambiguity in which these two sides are complementarily dependent on one another (the copresence of the one side in the other), neither side has primacy. However, if we attempt to determine the entirety of the countermovement as a whole in which the two sides form a complementary unity, then natality or arrival will be prevalent. For what occurs in general in the phenomenal present—whether determined in its particularity through the predominance of mortality-disclosing or natality-disclosing moodfulness—is always the advent of determination. Even in disappearance, in the transition into forgetfulness, an appearance nevertheless still always occurs. The obscurity of withdrawal and the light of the emergence of determination are, on the one hand, imbalances [Einseitigkeiten] complementarily dependent upon one another, of which light is not “positive” in the sense that the obscurity can be determined according to the metaphysical tradition only as stéresis, privatio of light. On the other hand, light as the single whole of complementarity itself still possesses a primacy that we linguistically recognize, for example, when in dating things we reckon nights as days.
The teleological tendency I questioned earlier results from the fact that in the particularity of states of disclosedness or moodfulness, the manifold of the phenomenal present manifests itself. Were the agent fixed only on the manifold, that is, if his life moved only in a blind alternation between one-sided moodful states, then he would be not a human but an animal, which, according to Nietzsche,48 is tied to the moment and thus cannot “act” in the genuine sense, but is led by instinctual drives that trigger the particular states. By contrast, the human can preemptively plan and freely remember. This means, however, that the human rises above the one-sided moodful states in the execution of the countermovement itself, that is, of the appearing as appearing. Thereby, his life, like that of the animal, runs its course between birth and death. Thus, the human itself must always execute the transition into being human. What he must achieve in the process is the reflection of simple natality existing one-sidedly in opposition to mortality—and he must achieve it as natality. Hence, the human exists in the phenomenal present in such a way that he acts out this transition from simple natality or emergence to its reflection.
That this achievement—and thus being human—occurs is philosophically only an additional fact. However, the human already becomes aware of this pre-philosophically. This occurs in the primordial feeling of wonder considered by philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. This is no bipolar, one-sided moodfulness; rather, it is that moodfulness in which rising above bipolarity occurs. In it the predominance of birth as birth or arrival as arrival discloses itself, that is, the countermotion itself as a unity that is not one-sided. Wonder declares itself in the surprise that “there is something rather than nothing.” In wonder it comes to light that appearing occurs in the contrary motion—more precisely, it takes place as a motion contrary to withdrawal. With this, a continuation of the phenomenological analysis of time, not only in the spirit of Husserl’s original insight but also beyond it, leads to, among other things, the result that the basic affectivity constituting human existence is not anxiety but wonder.49
Without having formulated this insight in this way, Husserl’s exposition of intentionality is nevertheless directly based on the consequences of this insight. The prevalence of natality as natality means that the phenomenal present is disclosed to the human as its agent in such a way that in it is a pre-objective movement from the multiplicity to a unity. In a being that, despite being unchained from the moment, undergoes varying one-sided states of disclosedness, this tendency must lead to the objectification of an identity. The unity of appearing as appearing can appear for such a being only insofar as it presents itself as something unaffected by and outlasting changing states, as an in-itself or identity. This is the genetic origin of the identity-in-itself out of—in Husserl’s terms—the “primitive teleology” of a presentation. In regard to the sense of this teleology, Husserl, in his late period after writing the Bernauer Manuscripts, more and more clearly awarded to protention a priority over retention.50 Therein, however, was prepared the recognition that protention—as I claim—is something entirely different from upside-down retention. The teleological pull toward unity determines the movement of the “living present” of the phenomenal field.
A consequence of this situation is a relative justification for maintaining the primacy of perception in Husserl’s analyses. Husserl elevates perception to the basic analytic model as the kind of presentation in which the tendency toward unity, on the strength of which the human agent transcends the field of modes of appearance toward objective identity, is most visible. The purely disinterested perception—that is, a perception not influenced by a one-sided moodfulness—is for Husserl obviously pre-philosophically related to wonder, in which the unity of appearing as appearing emerges. This unity transcends the one-sidedness of polar moodfulness. To this extent, Husserl’s orientation toward aísthesis and theoría, which he shares with the tradition begun by Plato and Aristotle, remains unsuperseded.51 However, insofar as this orientation blocks the view of the phenomenal field in its countermoving dimensionality, it requires—as demonstrated—supplementation by a new orientation toward the praxis that is rooted in moodfulness.
Translated by Robin Litscher Wilkins
NOTES
This essay first appeared in Perspektiven der Philosophie, Neues Jahrbuch 7 (1981): 185–221.
1. Cf. Lebendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik (The Hague: Martinus Mijhoff, 1966), and the literature mentioned in its bibliography.
2. This has been made clear by, among others, Elisabeth Ströker in her introduction to Edmund Husserl, V. Logische Untersuchung (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1975), xvii–xx, and Paul Janssen’s Edmund Husserl: Einführung in seine Phänomenologie (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1976), 32, where Janssen appropriately says, “Husserl found his philosophy in the attempt to critically master two extreme standpoints.”
3. Jan Patočka too has clarified this in his groundbreaking essay, “Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer asubjektiven Phänomenologie,” Philosophische Perspecktiven 2 (1970): 324, 328.
4. Cf. Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), 172, 184.
5. Cf. Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus,” 331–332. Heidegger’s thought readily settles in the aforementioned realm, as Tugendhat (Der Wahrheitsbegriff, 262), in my opinion, rightly observed. Therein lies its inner relation to Husserl’s original insight and its genuine phenomenological character, which Heidegger himself claimed for his thought; cf., for example, even in the late period, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 48, 90 [translated by J. Stambaugh as On Time and Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 42, 72].
6. In the same sense, cf. Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus,” 331.
7. Cf. Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, 69–70.
8. This, according to Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus,” 328, is the meaning of the epochē.
9. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. P. Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 174 [translated by D. Caims as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 165–166], and Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 174 [translated by J. Scanlon as Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 133–334].
10. Cf. E. Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, ed. W. Szilasi, Frankfurt a. M.: V. Klostermann, 1965), 35 [translated by Q. Lauer as “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 109]. With regard to the whole problem, cf. Antonio Aguirre, Genetische Phänomenologie und Reduktion (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), §25, 132–137.
11. Cf. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 92–93.
12. The connection that is here only sketched is developed in more detail in my “Husserls Rückgang auf das phainómenon und die geschichtliche Stellung der Phänomenologie,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 10 (1980): 89–145. This essay discusses phenomenology’s inner relation with the concept of appearance in Protagoras, Plato, and the ancient skeptics. This is more precisely explained in a later essay; cf. Klaus Held, “Die pyrrhonische Skepsis aus phänomenologischer Sicht,” in Geschehen und Gedächtnis: Die hellenistische Welt und ihre Wirkung; Festschrift für Wolfgang Orth zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. J.-Fr. Eckholdt, M. and S. Sigismund (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2009).
13. These are contained for the most part in the C-Manuscripts in the Husserl Archives, but they can also be found in other manuscripts, the most important of which I have specified in my Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). After the publication of the present essay, the C-manuscripts were edited by D. Lohmar; cf. Edmund Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, 1929–1934: Die C-Manuskripte (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2006).
14. Cf. Gerd Brand, Welt, Ich und Zeit: Nach unveröffentlichten Manuskripten Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), 61–62; see also 74.
15. With this formulation, I quote a relevant oral critique by Ulrich Claesges, which he voiced in view of the treatment in part 3 of Lebendige Gegenwart where I attempt to solve the aporias of the living present in connection to Husserl.
16. In the same sense, cf. already Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 100–101 [translated by D. Cairns as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 66].
17. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 171 [translated by D. Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 168.]
18. Cf. Ludwig Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1963), 200–201, and my essay “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität und die Idee einer phänomenologischen Transzendentalphilosophie,” in Perspektiven transzendentalphänomenologischer Forschung, ed. U. Claesges and K. Held (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 58.
19. For more on the entire problematic, cf. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 64–69 [translated by J. Brough as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 66–71), as well as my Lebendige Gegenwart, 31–32; and Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 191–192 for the most important citations.
20. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Zweiter Teil: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 1921–1928, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 41.
21. Cf. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 109 [75].
22. Husserl, Krisis, 172 [169].
23. This expression recurs frequently in Crisis.
24. Cf. Husserl, Krisis, 127 [125].
25. Husserl alludes to Fichte’s “incomprehensible impulse” in Phänomenologische Psychologie, 487. [Held incorrectly refers to p. 287; the supplementary text containing the reference is not included in the English translation—RLW.]
26. Ludwig Landgrebe says the same in “Reflexionen zu Husserls Konstitutionslehre,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 36 (1974): 475–476.
27. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 31 [32].
28. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kleine Schriften III (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972), 232.
29. Gadamer, 232.
30. Ludwig Landgrebe, “Meditation über Husserls Wort ‘Die Geschichte ist das große Faktum des absoluten Seins,’ ” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 36 (1974): 122.
31. With respect to this entire problem, cf. Lebendige Gegenwart, 39–43.
32. My identical critique in “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität,” 58–60. was also meant in this way.
33. A conception of the countermovement of the phenomenal present is further developed in my “Zeit als Zahl: Das Pythagoräische im Zeitverständnis der Antike,” in Zeiterfahrung und Personalität, ed. P. Rohs (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 13–33.
34. Cf. H.-U. Hoche, Handlung, Bewußtsein und Leib. Vorstudien zu einer rein noematischen Phänomenologie (Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag, 1973), 279–281.
35. Hoche, 324.
36. Hoche, 322.
37. Hoche, 297.
38. Hoche, 298–299.
39. Hoche, 280–282.
40. Hoche, 297–299.
41. Hoche, 298–299.
42. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1957), 137 [translated by J. Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 133].
43. With this concept I incorporate a suggestion from Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 374 [357] (cf. all of §72) and a thought from Hannah Arendt’s Vita Activa oder vom anderen Leben (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1960), 15–16, 165–167, and Über die Revolution (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1974), 270–272. H. Saner has also taken up the idea of natality in “Memento nasci: Vorbemerkungen zu einer Philosophie der Geburt,” in Überleben und Ethik (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1988), 242–244.
44. For a more precise analysis of the possibility of this doubled perspective and of the connections developed in the foregoing passage, cf. my Heraklit, Parmenides und der Anfang von Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Eine phänomenologische Besinnung” (Berlin: deGruyter, 1980), 299–300.
45. Cf. above all Landgrebe’s last work. In addition to the already cited essays, in this context, see “Facticity und Individuation,” in Sein und Geschichtlichkeit: Festschrift für K.-H. Volkmann-Schluck (Frankfurt a. M.: V. Klostermann, 1974), 275–277; and “Die Phänomenologie als transzendentale Theorie der Geschichte” Phänomenologische Forschungen, no. 3 (1975): 22–24.
46. The significance of mood for Heidegger’s development of phenomenology beyond Husserl is further discussed in my “Die Endlichkeit der Welt: Phänomenologie im Übergang von Husserl zu Heidegger,” Philosophie der Endlichkeit, ed. B. Niemeyer and B. Schütze (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992); and “Grundstimmung und Zeitkritik bei Heidegger,” in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, ed. O. Pöggeler and D. Papenfuss (Frankfurt a. M.: V. Klostermann, 1991).
47. On this point, cf. Guillermo Hoyos, Intentionalität als Verantwortung: Geschichtsteleologie und Teleologie der Intentionalität bei Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). For more about the fundamental meaning of teleology for the final form of Husserlian phenomenology, cf. also my “Gott in Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie,” in Philosophy Phenomenology Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, ed. C. Ierna, H. Jacobs, F. Mattens (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010).
48. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. K. Schlechta (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1954), 1:211.
49. For a phenomenological interpretation of wonder, cf. my “Krise der Gegenwart und Anfang der Philosophie: Zum Verhältnis von Husserl und Heidegger,” in a special edition of Studia Phenomenologica 3 (2003): Kunst und Wahrheit: Festschrift für Walter Biemel zu seinem 85. Geburtstag, ed. M. Diaconu.
50. Cf. also my “Phänomenologie der ‘eigentlichen Zeit’ bei Husserl und Heidegger,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik 4 (2005): 251–273 [translated as “Phenomenology of “Authentic Time” in Husserl and Heidegger,” in On Time—New Contributions to the Husserlian Phenomenology of Time, ed. D. Lohmar and I. Yamaguchi (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 91–114]. In this essay, I have taken up the reflections of the present text in new ways and, I hope, have brought them a considerable step forward.
51. Husserl himself indicated this connection, which leads from wonder regarding perception to scientific theory, in the Vienna lecture from which Crisis originated.