Abstract
On Dan Zahavi’s Husserlian account of the subject, the self-temporalization of subjectivity presupposes what he calls an “immediate impressional self-manifestation.” It follows from this view that self-awareness is an inherent power of the one who will be subject, rather than a product of sociality introduced into life from without. In this paper, I argue against Zahavi’s position by going over the development of Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, examining the positions Husserl takes and the reasons that he comes to these positions. Once we reach Husserl’s ultimate account, it becomes evident that Zahavi’s position is untenable.
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Notes
Zahavi (2003, p. 173). Emphasis added.
Zahavi (2005, p. 205).
Zahavi (2001, p. 204).
Zahavi (2004, p. 114). Here, Zahavi is specifically referring to the “aporetic consequences” of such readings for our understanding of time-consciousness, but as we’ll see later on, it’s clear that he links these consequences to “aporetic” positions on subjectivity per se. For the time being, see, e.g., Zahavi (2001, p. 204).
Zahavi (2001, p. 84). Emphasis altered.
It would take a book, at least, to do that (and for this, I’d point the reader to Toine Kortooms’s excellent Phenomenology of Time, from which my account draws extensively).
Brough (2011, p. 32).
Kortooms (2002, p. 89).
Husserl (2001b, p. 87). John B. Brough makes a mistake similar to the error that, as we’ll see, Zahavi makes, when he claims that mere experiencing or Erleben, for Husserl, is already for its own part a sort of pre-reflective self-awareness (see, for instance: Brough, 2011, p. 28, and especially, 1972, p. 304). Of course, Husserl’s “absolute time-consciousness” account does end up resulting in this position, as we’ll see below (p. 19 of this essay). But as we’ll also soon see, this was not always Husserl’s position (which is why early on, Husserl claimed that “there is no difference between the experienced or conscious content and the experience itself. What is sensed is, e.g., no different than sensation” (Husserl 2001b, p. 352), nor will it be the position at which Husserl ultimately arrives, in that his final account leaves room for nonconscious experiencing (ibid., p. 15–19).
For reasons that we’ll examine, Zahavi interprets this claim differently than I have, but for the time being, we’ll assume that Husserl’s words here are straightforward enough.
Husserl (1991, p. 233). This is a point he also makes in earlier works on time, as well as other manuscripts from about the same period (see, for instance, ibid., p. 195–198).
Ibid. (p. 234).
Ibid. (p. 235–239).
Ibid. (p. 37). Husserl writes here, for instance, that “the primary memory of the tones that, as it were, I have just heard… fuse with the apprehension of the tone that is now appearing [my emphasis].” I deal with retention and protention as self-apprehension just below.
Zahavi (2004, p. 111).
Zahavi (2003, p. 168).
Ibid. (p. 164).
The manuscripts that Husserl writes from this time until at least 1911 (see, for instance: Husserl 1991, p. 130–137, as well as fn #20) and possibly later, also advance this position. However, in 1917–1918, as we’ll see below, Husserl substantially alters this account..
Husserl (1991, p. 391–392). This reference is to Husserl’s Text no. 54, which expands upon the account presented in Text no. 39—a text that, as Bernet has discovered (ibid., p. xlv), is from Husserl’s 1909 lectures, thus allowing us to ascertain that the development of Husserl’s account of time-consciousness here at issue began at that time. In any event, the position is well-established by 1911 (as Text no 54, which is from 1911, makes clear).
Incidentally, for the term Längs in “Längsintentionalität,” I use the word “longitudinal” and not John Brough’s “horizontal”—not only because the former is more literal, but also because the term better fits with Husserl’s time-diagrams in Husserliana Band X (1991) and XXXIII (2001c), since there, Längsintentionalität is indicated by the diagram’s vertical lines. (Perhaps this last point is ironic, since the diagrams of my own design that I provide in this paper are rotated 90° from Husserl’s—a disadvantage, maybe, although for what it’s worth, I think that this makes them easier to read for my purposes here.).
Husserl (1991, p. 381–382).
I address this somewhat in fn #19 above. But see, for instance: ibid., (p. 312), from a text written possibly as early as 1907.
Compare, for instance, the double-intentionality described below (made up of longitudinal- and transverse-intentionality), with the one Husserl describes in (1991, p. 312–313), whose two connected intentionalities constitute “immanent temporalities” and “objective time,” rather than the Urstrom and “immanent temporalities.” That Husserl perhaps already leans towards developing the latter position, however, is hinted at when he writes: “that every experience possesses intentions directed towards its context is certain, and this belongs to its constitution as a temporal unity. But I am in doubt about how this should be understood and whether full clarity prevails here in every respect.”
Husserl insists, of course, that these two levels or aspects of consciousness are necessarily connected despite their being distinct: he thus writes, e.g., that “two inseparably united intentionalities, requiring one another like two sides of the same thing, are interwoven with each other in the one, unique flow of consciousness” (ibid., p. 393). As Brough points out, however (Brough 2011, p. 31), Husserl later speaks of a “radical demarcation” (Husserl 2001c, p. 122) in this respect—although surely, Husserl overstates his position a little bit in such passages, probably simply to stress the point he is trying to make.
Incidentally, Zahavi argues that this isn’t what Husserl meant in his 1909 lectures—although he concedes not only that this is the most common interpretation of them, but also that, in his L-Manuscripts, Husserl eventually reached the position I’m describing anyways (Zahavi 2004, p. 100). Now the fact that Husserl appears to advance this position in 1909, and then definitely does later on, surely indicates it was his 1909 position also. Nonetheless, as I indicate on p. 2 above, such worries are ultimately irrelevant to my purposes in this paper.
Husserl (1991, p. 392–393).
Ibid. (p. 393).
Ibid. (p. 391–392).
Ibid. (p. 393).
Ibid. (p. 77).
Zahavi (2003, p. 166–167).
For just the reason that I noted when, above, I questioned Zahavi’s notion of an “irrelational” self-consciousness.
Please note that the layout of this and all subsequent diagrams do not visually represent the ongoing dynamic of temporalization, i.e., how the “now” gets “pushed back” and retained as new “nows” come to pass. Doing so is irrelevant for my present purpose, since I’m only interested here in an analysis of the manifestation of the “now” of conscious life, and like Zahavi, I don’t think this happens only after it passes and gets retained.
Husserl (1991, p. 394). Emphasis added.
Ibid. (p. 393).
A point Zahavi often makes (for example: Zahavi 1999. p. 70–71), and that greatly helps to motivate his position, as we will see below.
Husserl (1991, p. 123).
Husserl (2001c, p. 3).
Ibid. (p. 224).
Zahavi (2004, p. 104).
Zahavi (1999, p. 69).
Ibid. (We will see, though (below, p. 17–18 and 20–21), that the “established view” cannot be an accurate recounting of Husserl’s thought on temporality if it does not recognize the major alterations in Husserl’s position later on, in the early’30 s).
Ibid. (p. 70).
Ibid. (p. 71–72).
Ibid. (p. 87). This is precisely the same in substance as the claim I quoted to begin this essay (Zahavi 2003, p. 173).
Zahavi (1999, p. 70).
Zahavi (2005, p. 15).
Zahavi (2003, p. 173).
This difficulty is somewhat akin to one of Husserl’s great worries in many of his absolute time-consciousness texts—whether or not the retentionally and protentionally given content is inherent—since a continuum comprising inherent and non-inherent contents seems impossible. See, for example: Husserl (2001c, p. 220).
“Inner time-consciousness… is an ecstatic unity of presencing (primal impression) and absencing (retention-protention),” Zahavi writes (Zahavi 2003, p. 82).
Zahavi does recognize, although without meaning to contradict his account of an “impressional” or “irrelational self-awareness,” that “we consequently end up with the insight that pre-reflective self-awareness must be conceived not as a static self-identity but as a dynamic and differentiated openness to alterity” (Zahavi 1998, p. 221)—differentiation, of course, implying relation or apprehension. Thus, when Zahavi follows up this recognition with a critique of Manfred Frank’s competing “irrelational” account, claiming that Frank is unable “to explain how this completely irrelationally self-present subjectivity can simultaneously be in possession of an inner temporal articulation” (ibid., p. 222) we can be excused for wondering if the same can be said for Zahavi’s account of an only “partially” irrelational self-manifestation.
Husserl (2001c, p. 38). All of the translations of this text that follow are mine.
Ibid. (p. 27).
Ibid. (p. 20). As I parenthetically indicate in my explication of this passage, it is not, to be precise, that as the so-called new core-data arises, it arises retaining a past experience that “just so happens” to have protained it; rather, what Husserl discovers here is that the new core-data actually does retain the prior experience only because it fulfills the prior experience’s protention as it arises, or put otherwise, because the conscious life of which it is a part had, in its earlier experience, already protained it or was awaiting what was to-come of itself. Husserl thus writes that retention of earlier experiences is “eo ipso given with… fulfillment,” which “bears in itself retention of the preceding:” see, e.g., ibid., (p. 25).
This point strikes the editors of the Bernauer Manuscripts as especially important in the text: see ibid., (p. xlii).
Zahavi (2004, p. 113–114). Prior to this objection, Zahavi also objects to Husserl's continued adherence to a “two-level” account of consciousness in his Bernauer manuscripts. We’ll see below, however (p. 17–18), that the development at issue finally allows Husserl to jettison the two-level model, so this objection can be discarded.
Zahavi (2004, p. 113).
This is quite unfortunate, I think, for surely no one today has done more to bring the problem of the now’s manifestation to light than has Zahavi; and yet when he comes across an account of this that appears to resolve many of the problems facing other accounts of temporalization that rightly worry him, but without posing an irrelational consciousness, Zahavi does not seem interested in following it up.
Husserl (2001c, p. 62).
Or rather, to find a non-question begging one (since prima facie, once again, Zahavi seems to argue in the passage I’ve quoted that self-fulfillment cannot possibly account for a conscious life’s consciousness of its own “now” given that only an irrelational consciousness could do that—the latter being problematic premise).
Ibid. (p. 29).
Since intentional activity always comes to pass as a sort of striving for fulfillment, in fact, we can reasonably assert that the “mediated-immediacy” this presupposes is the most fundamental of all phenomenological facts.
Heidegger (1988, p. 266).
For instance: “the activity of the ego is protentionally directed, into the future, immediately and in complicated projections with future acts to be performed. Now fulfillment has come to pass, thus the ‘earlier’ act authentically fulfills itself, although it is now still living in the mode of holding-on [or retaining]” (Husserl 2006, p. 268). All translations of this text are mine See also: Kortooms (2002, p. 259–260, 262, and 268).
The notion of “wakening” is a crucial one in Husserl’s C-Manuscripts. This leads to questions of the nature of the “non-egoic” experiences that, continually, get “woken” or brought to consciousness, precisely by the self-protentional “striving” that “continuously leads to realization,” and thus, “continuously awakens a new striving” (Husserl 2006, p. 350–351; quoted in Kortooms 2002, p. 255–256). I will examine this matter below..
Zahavi (2001, p. 140). The use of this phrase occurs in Zahavi’s text in the context of a discussion of the work of Sartre, in which Zahavi attempts to demonstrate that on Sartre’s account, just like Zahavi’s own, subjectivity does not ultimately depend on such an encounter..
Zahavi addresses the “linguistic-pragmatic” position—which he names in the very subtitle of Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity—in Chapter VII of that work (Zahavi 2001). His dismissals of “deconstructive readings” are generally less in depth.
Zahavi makes it clear in Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity that Husserl maintained this position even until works of the’30 s, despite his regularly evolving views on temporalization and self-constitution. It may be the case, though, that later in his life, his reflections on time-consciousness led him very close to rejecting this position, as in, e.g., Husserl’s B I 21 manuscript (currently unpublished)..
Husserl first recognized something of the sort in Bernau, speaking of the hyletic as “collected”—“aufgefangen,” (Husserl 2001c, p. 13)—precisely since he first recognized self-fulfillment there. But as we’ll see below, the point becomes more crucial still in Husserl’s C-Manuscripts.
Husserl (2002, p. 181). This passage, which I have translated from Husserl’s German, was written as part of Husserl’s C-Manuscripts, but was published in Husserliana Band XXXIV prior to the 2006 publication of the other C-Manuscripts. Obviously, here Husserl means “authentic” (“eigentliche”) in a literal sense (“actual,” etc.), and not the special Heideggerian one. This is also quoted in Kortooms (2002, p. 264) (he uses “proper” instead of “authentic”).
I should note, also, that Husserl does continue to hold on to the notion of a “second-level” absolute time-consciousness in many of his earlier C-Manuscript texts, although in the later texts he begins to question, and ultimately discard, this notion. From what I can tell, the development fully comes to fruition around July of 1932, when Husserl writes his C 7 manuscript. For more on this manuscript, see my work “‘Yes, the Whole Approach is Questionable, Yes, False:’ Phenomenology and the New Realism,” set to appear in the upcoming special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy on the proceedings of the 2017 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy..
(Husserl 2006, p. 183).
Husserl (1970, p. 170–172).
Things stand no differently for the presentation of a sensation as an “object” by the peculiar sort of reflective act that focuses on it (which, for what it’s worth, is an act that is rarely ever accomplished anyways, except perhaps by psychologists and visual artists).
Husserl (2006, p. 198).
On the relation to the Urstrom of the “act-retention” and “act-protention” of the egoic “act-life” (or Aktleben: ibid., 254), or what Husserl will call the “streaming conscious life” (strömende Bewusstseinsleben: ibid., p. 123), see, e.g.: ibid., (p. 282ff).
Ibid. (p. 269).
Ibid. (p. 309).
For instance, Husserl writes that “the [primal] streaming as such does not temporalize;” rather, via “consciousness-of… my own being as temporally existing,” the “self-temporalization of this life takes place” (ibid., p. 118–119). Or as Kortooms puts it: “one has to assume a hyletic process in the primal stream without the constitution of time yet taking place” (Kortooms 2002, p. 179).
Husserl (2006, p. 122).
Ibid. (p. 149).
Ibid. (p. 183).
Zahavi (p. 221).
Zahavi (p. 220).
Husserl (2006, p. 184–185).
He writes, further, that “the hyle remains foreign. It is a domain in me which escapes my control. It is a facticity which is passively pre-given without any active participation or contribution by the ego” (Zahavi 1998, p. 214).
A great deal turns on this conflation: for once Zahavi makes it, he is then compelled to claim—and in fact, does claim—that sentient life in general is self-conscious; according to Zahavi, infant human beings must possess self-conscious subjectivity, as well as all other higher mammals and, evidently, many other types of animals as well (Zahavi 2014, p. 29–30). Zahavi claims this, despite the fact that, as he himself recognizes, empirical evidence seems to indicate the contrary (ibid., p. 26–30, 198–202), a difficulty he tries to dissolve by pointing out just how “thin and basic” his notion of self-consciousness actually is (ibid., p. 29–30). Yet an account of self-consciousness as “thin and basic” as Zahavi’s ends up including experiences having nothing at all to do with a self or ego, and thus, fails to describe the phenomenon of self-consciousness accurately.
Husserl (2001a, p. 19).
Heidegger (1995, p. 255).
Which is not necessarily to say that Husserl was fully able to grasp the significance of the position that emerges in his C-Manuscript analyses. Nevertheless, this, I believe, is more or less what he means by the “universe of [conscious] ‘inactivity’” (Husserl 2006, p. 183)..
Heidegger (1995, p. 239).
Husserl (2006, p. 309).
Ibid. (p. 189). Husserl, of course, uses abgehoben to indicate an experience’s “rising up” to consciousness, but also uses Abhebungen to speak of hyletic “prominences.” Because of the possibility of terminological confusion—which possibly led Husserl astray in his Lectures Concerning Passive Synthesis—he thus distinguishes between hyletic and egoic “prominence” in his C-Manuscripts—see for example: ibid., (p. 188–196).
Ibid. (p. 18).
As I’ve just indicated, Husserl evidently realizes in his C-Manuscripts (as well as other late works) that ultimately, temporalization is a matter of self-responsibility, or of our striving to remain consistent with a “constant total telos,” as Husserl puts it (ibid.). See, e.g.: ibid., (p. 17–23—Husserl’s C 2 no. 7 manuscript), and, on the relationship of self-responsibility to the non-reflective constitution of objective being, ibid., (p. 21).
Zahavi (2003, p. 171).
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Coate, M. Time, or the mediation of the now: on Dan Zahavi’s “irrelational” account of self-temporalization. Cont Philos Rev 51, 565–591 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9439-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9439-7