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Time and the Other: Otherwise than Levinas

David Vessey

Read at Marquette University, Nov. 29, 2001

Emmanuel Levinas is at his most astute when he says of Edmund Husserl that “to speak of consciousness is to speak of time.”[1] Time consciousness, as the most fundamental level of constitution, is the most fundamental level of consciousness. As such, it provides the corrective for all decentering aspects of constitution. As Husserl’s account of constitution becomes less egoic, he intensifies the depth of time consciousness always preserving the possibility that phenomenology can remain a first person investigation. Therefore the fact that Levinas introduces issues of intersubjectivity as the heart of time consciousness shows the truly radical nature of his critique. In this paper I will look at the specific conjunction of time consciousness and intersubjectivity first showing how they arise together in the seldom analyzed 1910-1911 Göttingen Lectures,[2] and then tracing their transformation up to and in the C-Manuscripts.[3] Not only will this give us a better understanding of Husserl, it will help us to understand what is involved in Levinas’ critique.

Part I: The First Account of Intersubjectivity and Temporality: The 1910-1911 Lectures

When we look closely at the development of Husserl’s ideas we find that the concern for intersubjectivity arises concomitantly with his growing appreciation of the need and clarification of the transcendental reduction. Furthermore both the reflection on empathy and the development of the reduction occur concomitantly with extended reflection on inner-time consciousness. Husserl’s account of inner time consciousness is first systematically presented in 1904-05 as the fourth part of a lecture series entitled “Main Topics from the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge.”[4] The first systematic presentation of the phenomenological reduction occurs in the 1907 lectures series “The Idea of Phenomenology.”[5] Finally, Husserl first systematically presents his account of intersubjectivity in the 1910-1911 lectures “Grundprobleme der Ph˛nomenologie.”[6] In a footnote in the 1929 book Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl wrote, “The chief points for the solution of the problem of intersubjectivity and for the overcoming of transcendental solipsism were already developed in lectures I gave at Göttingen during the winter semester of 1910-11.”[7] He also refers to them in similar terms in a 1931 epilogue to Ideas I. “My lectures at Göttingen in 1910-11 already presented a first sketch of my transcendental theory of empathy, i.e. the reduction of human existence as mundane being-with-one-another to transcendental intersubjectivity.”[8] The lectures are interesting conceptually as the first place where Husserl conjointly considers the issues of intersubjectivity and temporality. For that reason they are worth our close attention.

The First Connection Between Intersubjectivity and Temporality: The Problem of Objectivity

There are many issues, which motivate the need for an articulation of the possibility of the awareness of other subjects (what I will refer to from now on in Husserl’s terms as a theory of empathy). The first and most basic of these is derived from the apparent solipsism of the phenomenological reduction. In the second chapter of the “Grundprobleme der Ph˛nomenologie”, hereafter referred to as the “1910/11 Lectures”, Husserl introduces the phenomenological reduction “as the acquisition of the attitude of pure experience [Erlebnis].”[9] In the third chapter, immediately following the presentation of the reduction Husserl takes up the “provisional discussion of some objections to the purpose of the phenomenological reduction.” The first objection, of course, is the objection of solipsism.

Is phenomenological research therefore solipsistic research? Does it restrict the research to the individual ego and precisely to the province of its individual psychic phenomena? Not in the least. … [A] misunderstanding of the particular meaning of transcendence and its exclusion leads to a confusion of psychological immanence (that which is precisely solipsistic) and phenomenological [immanence].[10]

The problem Husserl is addressing is simply one of properly understanding transcendence; this problem of solipsism is not yet explicitly the problem of the awareness of others as subjects. The concern is about how phenomenology may “go above and beyond the domain of the absolute given” in such a way that it can guarantee the scope and objectivity of the content of the transcendental ego.

This is a theme of the fourth chapter where Husserl takes up both time consciousness and empathy. Why these two issues? Empathy is understandable: the subjectivity of the other is given to us, but not directly or primordially given to us in the perception of another person. Instead what is given is the physical body, the Körper. Thus the empathetic appearance of the other as a subject must not be included among the currently presented (the Gegenw˛rtigen), but as the re-presented (the Vergegenw˛rtigen). In time consciousness a similar problem arises: the past events, given to us through memory, are not given to us as the present is. More generally, in both cases we have a situation in which something is given to us as hidden from us; something is made present to consciousness as absent from direct experience.

These intersubjective and temporal extensions “above and beyond the domain of the absolute given” are not arbitrarily selected extensions. They provide the basis for the claim that “going over and above the domain of the absolute given [is a] necessary condition for the possibility of a phenomenological science.”[11] Scientific claims, properly formulated, hold true regardless of time and place. The objects of scientific reflection, be they observable or posited, must contain an objectivity such that they are universally sources of evidence. This is equivalent to the point that if a scientific claim is true, it is in principle verifiable by the same subject at different times as well as by other subjects at different places and times. Since on the phenomenological account of science theories are grounded in the apodictic presentations of the objects under the transcendental reduction, it must be the case that this objectivity is itself preserved under the reduction. Therefore, only if phenomenological experience is verifiable across time and across subjects can it function as a source of scientific knowledge. Since both the object’s temporal duration and its intersubjective character go beyond the absolute givenness of the object (a givenness now to the one ego), it is only if these two presentations of absence are given to us in the phenomenological experience can phenomenology found the sciences, much less itself be a rigorous science.

One could think of the temporal and intersubjective extensions of the given object as being exactly analogous to the extensions of the verifiability of the object across space and time respectively. This, however, would be too simple. There is a crucial asymmetry between the temporal extension and the intersubjective extension of the object. In fact, they are often written with a small o, “objectivity” and a large O, “Objectivity.” Where intersubjective availability is analytically contained in the notion of Objectivity, the temporal extension is a condition for the possibility of objectivity and Objectivity. Consequently while Objectivity implies the possibility of intersubjective verification, it implies the necessity of temporal duration. Everything that can be said to be is constituted in time; only some very select things are intersubjectively constituted. Everything that is intersubjectively constituted is constituted in time, but not everything constituted in time is intersubjectively constituted. Moreover, since empathy is triggered by the appearance of an objectively existing body (a Körper), the alterity of duration (bridged by time consciousness) is a condition for the presentation of the alterity of intersubjectivity (bridged by empathy) and not vice versa. In this sense at least, constitution of inner time is more fundamental than constitution of intersubjectivity. For more on the relation between time consciousness and empathy let us return to the 1910/11 lectures.

Going Over and Above the Absolute Given in the Direction of the Past and the Future: The Theory of Inner-Time Consciousness

What is the situation here with respect to the absolute givenness? … If one wanted to restrict himself to the givenness of the cogitatio as absolute indubitable givenness, that is, as perceptual givenness as it emerges out of the phenomenological reduction and the [phenomenological] reflection during the production of the enduring cogitatio, then all we could ever say is: “this”, but [then too] scientific knowledge, which should here come into existence, would never come to be seen.[12]

Husserl’s point here is that the act of perceiving an object cannot be restricted to an instantaneous now, but instead lasts across a number of sequential “now-points.” Consider the perception of one’s hands and imagine marking the perception in objective time. The perception begins as soon as the hands enter into our field of perception, time point A, and lasts until the hands leave that field of perception (for example, by our looking away, or by their being obscured by something else), time point Z. This event has a duration across passing moments—time point A passes into the past and becomes replaced in the present by time point B which in turn becomes “just now been” as time point C is “still now”—so that it makes sense to say, as Husserl does, that the perception “endures through that which has just now been and that which is still now.” But, Husserl asks, “What is the case with the absolute givenness?”[13] The perceiving persists, but the past now point is no longer absolutely given. In fact, if we restrict the scope of the absolutely given to the now point, we find no absolute perception remains. “The suspending is so radical that we in the end find nothing more to judge.”[14] Thus it must be the case that there is an operation of consciousness analogous to memory that “holds” the object before itself in one durational perception.

What then is the structure of this temporal duration given in perception and what is its source? In a footnote Husserl quickly presents the whole structure.

The perception has a flowing point of original self-presence and in addition a horizon of ‘retentional’ givenness as just-now-past. Likewise on the other side an immediate future horizon of ‘protentional’ givenness. As a perception has run off, so has a mere retention taken its place, which is alive for a while progressively “sinking” in the structure until it is finally completely sunk.[15]

Husserl elsewhere refers to “the flowing point of original self-presence” as the “primordial impression” or the “primordial sensation.” The tripartite structure retention-primordial sensation-protention is the formal structure of all givenness and is the key to his account of time consciousness. Note that the retention-primordial sensation-protention structure itself is never directly given to consciousness, but is only an abstraction realized through reflecting on the necessary conditions for the possibility of a durational awareness of an object. It is merely the formal structure of the extended now (as opposed to the punctual now). In this respect we must keep in mind that all of the formal distinctions are now, and that their differentiation is in terms of different modes of being now. For example the retained object is now in the temporal mode of just having been (soeben gewesen). The present is the only actually current realm.[16]

With this tripartite structure, Husserl accomplishes an extension of the present in such a way that within the phenomenological reduction objects are still given with the durational objectivity to allow for descriptive presentation. Moreover, the rententions make possible recollection which allows us to establish identity over time. As it stands, however, there is a large lingering question. Is the flowing process of time constitution is itself in time? As we noted above, the perception of a temporal object is in fact a process involving the primordial sensation, retention, and protention. Yet all three belong to the extended now simultaneous with the object and simultaneous with one another. But how could the processes and the object be synthesized to appear contemporaneous unless there was a second consciousness that temporally associates the two? Husserl is plagued by a possible infinite regress as long as the process of time constitution itself occurs in time. Husserl takes the only option open to him and boldly claims that

The flow is something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted, but it is not ‘something in objective time.’ It is absolute subjectivity and has absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as ‘flow’; the absolute properties of a point of actuality, of the primal source point ‘now’, etc. … For all this we have no names.[17]

As a final paradoxical touch, since the flow itself is conscious as a unity, it must be the case that the flow constitutes its own unity. This is what he refers to much later as “the paradox that temporalizing at the same time also temporalizes itself.”[18]

Husserl only comes to realize that the flow itself must be non-temporal after 1909, and this realization forces him to change his account of temporal constitution as developed in 1904-05. Originally it was a purely hylomorphic constitution; unformed matter, a hylé, is temporally formed in primordial sensation. The problem is that if the hylé, the sensuous content, is completely unformed, it must be if not outside of time (like the flow), then at least “neutral” with respect to time. But how could something which is not in time be brought into temporal succession by the flow, itself not in time? To the extent it is possible, it must be the case that the past, present and future of the object are, in effect, simultaneously present and available to time constituting consciousness. “But”, he asks, “can a series of coexistent primordial contents ever bring a succession to intuition?”[19] He thinks not. To avoid these problems Husserl modifies the form-content schema of constitution. No longer is the content wholly unformed, but it is pre-consciously temporally formed. There is a pre-constitution of the hylé, or rather in Husserl’s terminology, a “passive constitution” of the hylé which presents the sensations to consciousness already temporally determined. The passive constitution is an accomplishment of the ego (or, “the Flow”), but not an accomplishment of the activity of the ego. We will return to passive synthesis below. Note that it is the reflection on the issues of time consciousness that inaugurates this necessary development in Husserl’s account of constitution.

Going Over and Above the Absolute Given in the Direction of the Other: The Theory of Empathy

Husserl opens the sixth chapter of the 1910/11 Lectures with this reminder.

But now is required an important supplement. Theoretical contents of a science, understood as the complete contents of validity of a science and nature, are intersubjectively unitary. However in the last lecture we had not yet spoken about the intersubjective connection of consciousness, that is to say, not yet spoken about that continual encounter [Erfahrung] of an ego-consciousness to another ego-consciousness.[20]

We noted above that these lectures are taken by Husserl to be significant for providing “[t]he chief points for the solution of the problem of intersubjectivity and for the overcoming of transcendental solipsism.”[21] We also mentioned why it is so important that Husserl provide an account of the awareness of others as subjects, viz., the possibility of the objectivity of the sciences presupposes the possible verification of scientific judgments by other persons. Now let us turn our attention to Husserl’s account of phenomenological empathy in the 1910/11 Lectures.

Husserl first introduces the topic of empathy in section four, “Empathy and the Foreign Ego”, but the account there presupposes the previous discussions of the lived body (§2: “The Lived Body and the Spatial-Temporal Surroundings” and §3: “The Localization of Experiences [Erlebnisse] in the Lived Bodies”).[22] Through the term “Leib”, or “lived body”, Husserl distinguishes one’s body as one experiences it “from the inside” (so to speak), from one’s body as it is experienced “from the outside.” “Leib” contrasts with “Körper”: one’s body as a physical thing, or as an inanimate object of detached observation. In the lectures Husserl concentrates on the lived body to the exclusion of almost any reference to the physical body.

Husserl says in section two, “Each ego finds itself as having an organic lived body. The lived body is for its part no ego, but instead a spatial-temporal ‘thing’, around which is grouped an unlimitedly extending surrounding world of things.”[23] It is as the center of its experiencable surrounding that the lived body is defined. It is from the point of the lived body—often referred to as the “null-point”—, that the ego extends out spatially and temporally into the external world. The lived body “is always and inescapably there in the actual sphere of perception, it is . . . [the] central organ of the thingly apprehended surroundings.”[24] Thus Husserl calls the lived body the “centering point” of the surrounding world.

All which is not the lived body appears relative to the lived body, and stands in a specific relation to it the ego’s constantly conscious spatial orientation: as right and left, as forwards and backwards etc. In the same way [everything stands in a specific relation to it the ego’s constantly conscious temporal orientation:] temporally as now, as before, <and> after.[25]

For the sake of clarity we should point out that the lived body is not itself a consciousness though it is the embodiment of a consciousness. There could not be a lived body without a consciousness.[26]

With the distinction between the Leib and the Körper, we are ready to move on to Husserl’s account of empathy (as presented in the 1910/11 Lectures). In section four he points out that just as everything in space is related to the centering of the lived body, so too is every other person. What he says there is worth quoting at length.

Every ego finds in its surroundings, and often also in its actually present surroundings, things which it notes as a lived body, however the “own” [eigenen] lived body earnestly confronts it as a foreign lived body to such an extent that to each such lived body must belong an ego, albeit an other, foreign ego (it sees the lived body as “supporter” of the ego-subject, but it does not “see” the experientially discovered foreign ego in the same sense as it sees itself. It is posited in the manner of “empathy”, thus a foreign mental life (Erleben) and foreign character predispositions also become “discovered”; but they are not given, [nor] had with the [same] meaning as the own [ego]). … Every ego composes itself as the relative middle point of the one and the same spatial-temporal world, which, in its undetermined infinity, is the surrounding totality of each ego. For each ego, the other egos are not midpoints, but rather surrounding points; they have according to their lived bodies a varied spatial and temporal placement in the one and the same spatial-totality, or, in the one and the same world time.[27]

Here we have an early statement of what occurs in empathetic awareness of others (without any statement of how it actually occurs). First we are presented with other lived bodies, —to use another translation at this point which makes more sense and does not seem to be begging the question, other “animate organisms.” One finds that these organisms are manifestly not part of one’s own lived body and thus must be foreign lived bodies with their own ego distinct from one’s own ego. This process of perceiving the other’s ego in the other’s body is empathy. How exactly this process of empathy occurs Husserl does not say here but only points out that one knows the other ego differently than one knows oneself. With the awareness of the other ego one is aware of it having those things associated with egohood: a soul, consciousness, character traits, the list goes on.

In addition to the apperception of the other body as a lived body, that is in addition to merely empathizing the existence of the other ego, it is clear that Husserl believes one emphasizes, albeit mediately, the contents of the other ego from that point of view. As he later will repeatedly phrase it, one perceives the contents of the other ego “as if I were there”: “It is as if I were bodily [leiblich] posited from here to there and would bodily [leiblich] govern there through my living possibilities.”[28] “From here” becomes the distinguishing feature of the ego’s own experience, “from there” the mark of the empathized experience.

One is also aware of the other ego as having its own surroundings of which one is a part. It is this awareness which is involved in the constitution of Objectivity, for now one can see oneself not as standing at the center of all space and time, but as belonging to a shared spatial-temporal world the things of which are accessible from different points other than one’s own. As Husserl says, everyone shares one spatial-temporal totality. This is the point at which the objective time (as well as objective space) becomes constituted. In a supplement to the 1910/11 Lectures he directly speaks to “the identification of the time of the own [consciousness] and the foreign consciousness.”[29] Since one encounters the other as “now”, but also as conscious, thus as encountering us in its “now”, one associates the nows together as belonging to one and the same objective time. Furthermore, then, the empirical world of things is temporally organized according to this empirical, objective time. In a much later manuscript he writes,

I experience Others and, naturally, with regard to myself, I have self-experience. I discover that ‘in my now I experience the other’ and his now. I discover my now and his now existing in one, so also my appearances and his, my appearing [object] as obtaining for me and his [as obtaining for him], but both as the same.[30]

Still we have yet to see how exactly Husserl claims the process of empathy appears under the transcendental reduction. Husserl notes that empathy belongs to the class of re-presentations [Vergegenw˛rtigen] along with “recollecting [Nacherinnerung] and anticipating [Vorerinnerung] and every other type of remembering [Erinnerung].”[31] Empathy shares a similarity to recollection in that it is making present an ego that is not directly given to perception. The difference between recollection and empathy (besides the fact that the recollected egos could include one’s own ego) is that in empathy the presented ego is presented as being here and now, while in recollection the ego is presented as having been, as past. Empathy shares this “here and now” character with perception, but it differs from outer perception in that the other ego is not directly given to consciousness. Here lies the difference between a presentation (Gegenw˛rtigung), and a re-presentation (Vergegenw˛rtigung). In this respect empathy is closest to apperception.

An apperceptive presentation occurs in conjunction with a direct presentation as the presentation of that which is absent from direct presentation. In every experience of a physical thing one has, apperceived in the perception, the determinate aspects of the object hidden from view. These apperceptions often can be made present and verified by moving the object or taking up another viewpoint towards the object. Of course the case of empathy is different since what is being apperceived is unverifiable in direct experience. Yet, Husserl shows how on the analogy of our awareness of ourselves as both a lived body and a physical body we apperceive other physical bodies as connected to lived bodies and therefore subjects. Thus there is an account in the 1910-11 Lectures for how one would move beyond the given towards the other.

Part II: The Transition to the Later Account of Intersubjectivity and Temporality

This account of empathy as analogous apperception along with the account of inner time consciousness was what was required to ground the notion of Objectivity necessary for the founding of the natural sciences on the basis of a more rigorous phenomenological science. Indeed it would have been sufficient had Husserl not slightly, but significantly, altered the phenomenological project itself. While writing the Ideas II (in 1912), Husserl shifted his account of givenness. In 1911 it was enough to describe the way a thing appears to consciousness ignoring the process by which the object first becomes that particular object over against others that are noticed and the reason it is constituted the way that it is. Husserl came to realize, however, that since some objects draw our attention instead of others, it must be the case that they are already constituted prior to their coming to our active awareness. In a sense they must be pre-constituted by the transcendental ego for itself. This is another form of passive synthesis, a version of which we encountered earlier in the revised account of the structure of the temporal constitution of objects.

Pairing

Returning to Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity, he must supplement his description of analogizing appresentation[32] with an account of the passive constituting process that founds the analogy. This process he calls ‘pairing.’ For Husserl’s account of pairing we must turn to Meditation Five, §51 of the Cartesian Meditations—“‘Pairing’ as an Associatively Constitutive Component of My Experience of Someone Else.”[33] There pairing is presented as one of the two “primal forms” of passive synthesis. Association is the form of all passive synthesis, but association itself can take on one of two forms: identification or pairing. Identification is what occurs when one perceives something, a plant for example, then blinks and yet still perceives the same plant. The perception has been interrupted, yet the object itself is held to be identical across the interruption. In pairing the associative criterion is not identity, but unity through similarity. Two objects are recognized as belonging together in virtue of some degree of similarity. Thus two plants may be apperceived as paired. Notice that by no means is pairing a passive synthetic function restricted to the domain of intersubjectivity. Rather, it is “a universal phenomenon of the transcendental sphere.”[34] Moreover it can extend from two to a plurality of objects.

But what exactly does it mean that two things “belong together?” One possibility is that they are both recognized as falling under the same general category of objects, say plants, and thus what applies to the category applies to each of them as well. In this manner one can apperceive properties of one or the other even if those properties are not themselves directly given to us. In the case of another person, one would recognize him/her as, like oneself, belonging to the category of persons and, as such, having a physic life (although that inner life is not directly evidenced). If this were the case, however, Husserl would have a problem; according to his account of empathy one becomes aware of oneself as a person only after one encounters other egos. Moreover, on this interpretation of ‘pairing’, the awareness of the other as a subject would amount to an inference from a judgment (the judgment “we are persons”). Although there is nothing said in the Cartesian Meditations against this interpretation, elsewhere Husserl is quoted as saying that in pairing

there is a fusion [Verschmolzenheit]. … Each object is given not only as the unity of its own constitution, but as having the meaning of the other object carried over upon it. The similarities are not universals, nor is there anything like conceptualization here. The similarities are there, in the object.[35]

Rather than a matter of judgment, we have a constitutive unity. The meanings of the two objects are, in the words of the Cartesian Meditations, “overlaid” on each other. This occurs in such a way that both objects are immediately appresented with the meaning of the other (“in so far as the moments of sense actualized in what is experienced do not annul this transfer through the consciousness of ‘difference’”[36]). Thus Husserl can say that it is not a matter of introducing the “Überhaupt ”, [37] but of there actually being given “there, in the object” the meaning of the other object.[38] Through the apperception on the basis of the “passive synthesis” of pairing one acquires the concept of other subjects. This acquisition furnishes the possibility of perceiving the objectivity of objects complete with the implicit condition that they be potentially available to other subjects. We have, across the alterity of intersubjectivity, gone beyond the domain of the absolute given.

Static and Genetic Analysis

It is hard to speak of revolutions in Husserl’s writings—certainly there is nothing even analogous to Heidegger’s “turn”—but there are, over fairly closely limited stretches of time, significant changes in focus and direction of Husserl’s phenomenological investigations. The shift to genetic phenomenology as a necessary supplement to static phenomenology was such a change. The concerns of genetic phenomenology first appeared in 1914-15 though it was not until 1918 that they explicitly became a fully integrated part of phenomenology as such. They never appeared in published form until Formal and Transcendental Logic in 1929.[39] What is at stake in genetic analysis is the origin of the forms of constitution. When Husserl moves away from completely active egoic constitution to the passive constitution of the hylé, the whole character of the phenomenological method must be revised. It is a basic principle of any phenomenology which aims to become a rigorous science—and Husserl’s project never changed in this respect—that the reduction must lead to the possibility of the explication of the basic acts of constitution. Consequently, phenomenological analysis must lead beyond the ego to the source of the constitutions—the flow in its structural forms on one hand, and the hyletic constitution in its structural forms on the other; to absolute consciousness and to the origins of passive synthesis.

There are two types of passive synthesis, appropriately called “first passivity” and “second passivity.” They can be distinguished by the pole of the noetic-noemic (the ego-object) relation on which they predominately operate. First passivity is the passive synthesis of the hylé —the material of constitution—which usually takes the form of kinaesthetic constitution. Second passivity is the passive synthesis of the ego—the form of constitution—which generally takes the form of the sedimentation of habitualities.[40] First passivity is noemic; second passivity is noetic. Notice that each form of passive synthesis is a result of a concretization of the ego prior to the ego’s “awakening” (we could say following Husserl’s later terminology). The first passivity points to the ego’s concretization in space, in a body. Only as a body does one have a world, for it is through the kinesthetic sensations of the lived body that the ego as possibly active, and as an I-can, realizes its environment. The passive constitution of the kinaesthetic consciousness functions to provide the structure of the egoic interrelations to the world.[41] The second passivity points to the ego’s concretization in time. It is only in virtue of the ego being here at this time—both at this time of the ego’s waking life, and this time in history—that the ego has the habitualities that it does. Of course, then, since the sedimented habitualities themselves motivate constitution, the ego’s temporal concretization (born into a body) affects its constitutional structures. This spatio-temporal concretization, an essential characteristic of the ego, is the ego’s finitude. Kinaesthetic constitution can be analyzed using static phenomenological reconstructions, but more is needed for an analysis of sedimentations. In these cases Husserl must not merely concern himself with the forms of the appearances, but also the forms of the processes of the origin of the appearances. This calls for the necessary supplementation of static phenomenology by genetic phenomenology. “Static” phenomenological analysis operates at the level of experience itself. “Genetic” phenomenological analysis presents the essential structures of these motivations gradually “unbuilding” and “reconstructing” the various constitutional strata. Husserl adopted a stratified picture of constitution in which there are ascending levels each level constituted on the basis of the previous level according to the structures of “motivation” (teleologically guided by reason).[42] If there is a stratum in which the ego is empathetically aware of others, this awareness must be “motivated” at the preceding level. It is apparent, then, that the account of empathy by no means exhausts Husserl’s account of the nature of intersubjective relations. In addition to the empathetic relation, Husserl presents us with the intersubjective relation between egos as members of a community—egos “not simply next to one another, but rather with one another”[43]—and this membership is most present in passive synthesis.

Part III: The Later Account of Intersubjectivity and Temporality: The C-Manuscripts

It would appear at first glance that the constitution of an intersubjective community is not a difficult problem for Husserl once we have the empathetically founded intersubjective relation. The “we” simply arises as a consequence of understanding others and ourselves as human beings. Moreover, just as the world itself is perceived as extending in space and time, so too could the “we” be perceived as extending beyond the spatial-temporal limits of the experiences of the individual ego. Thus the ego stands in a species wide community including those persons who died long before the concrete ego was born and those people who are yet to be born. Unfortunately it is not that simple. There are two specific problems that required a dramatic rethinking of the account of empathy in its basic form preserved from 1910 to 1929. Both have been foreshadowed by the brief discussion of genetic phenomenology above.

First, the ego constitutes itself as not only having a world but also belonging to the world. This twofold nature of the ego was recognized very early on by Husserl and parallels the situation of the ego being both the origin of temporalization and itself temporalized.[44] Husserl can explain this dual characteristic by putting the constituting ego outside of the world and outside of time (respectively). However there is a third relationship of constituting-belonging: the ego is both the source of the community of ego subjects, and belongs to that community. Husserl could approach this problem in an analogous way to the other problems by claiming that the ego in its function as constituting the intersubjective community of “monads” is outside of that community. In fact one might want to claim that this is what “the sphere of ownness” was meant to accomplish. But we should remember that the sphere of ownness is an abstraction, and that the ego, although formally solipsistic, is materially determined by the passive sedimentations of its habitualities. These sedimentations themselves arise out of an intersubjective world, thus, importantly, there is no actually non-intersubjective realm from which the ego can constitute itself as belonging to the intersubjective realm. As Husserl says, “The ego itself is ultimately constituted in the intersubjective sphere, so that it can truly be said that each monad implies and presupposes all the other monads.”[45] He also writes, “I am only who I am as that which bears in myself the Other ego and all other egos,”[46] and “the I only exists in a We.”[47] How the ego, always only existing in a we, constitutes that very we is going to be difficult to explain.

The second roadblock to a simple account of the constitution of the ‘we’ emerges from the fact that the concretization of the ego in time through birth is an indication of the necessary finitude of the mundanized ego. Husserl in his later writings takes up this issue of the essential finitude of the ego (most likely as a result of the Heidegger’s spreading success) and runs across a substantial problem of reconciling it into his transcendental schema. While Heidegger takes it as an uncontroversial starting point, Husserl must give an explication of the process of the constitution of the ego as finite. This is tantamount to an explication of the necessary occurrence of the mundanizing birth and death of the ego. The significant problem is that the ego is not directly aware of either of its birth or its death. Husserl writes, “My death as a worldly phenomenon can only be constituted for me when I experience the death of Others. … The death of Others is the death that is constituted prior to this. Just so in the case of the birth of Others.”[48] In fact one is only aware of death as one of our possibilities through an analogizing self-apprehension based on the experience of others being born and dying. In this respect it is similar to the constitution of oneself as a human being, but in another respect it is manifestly different. The finitude of the ego belongs to the constitutional essence of the ego. Thus to the extent that others are required for the constitution of the birth and death of the ego, others are constitutionally necessary for the very existence of the ego in its constituting capacity. This ontological dependence on others is a much more radical dependence that previously presented in his writings. Thus Husserl writes that “the highest of all questions . . . are the ‘metaphysical’: they concern birth and death, the ultimate being of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ objectified as humanity.”[49]

Both of these questions about the essentially intersubjective constitution of the ego can be brought together in a broader methodological problematic. In one form of genetic phenomenology we trace back the sedimented structures of the constituting ego to its original past acts. Notice that this aspect of genetic analysis is different from that which investigates through the levels of constitution since this former activity is legitimately historical, while the latter is not. To differentiate between these two forms of genetic analysis (one historical, one transcendental) we will, following Husserl, call the first “generative” and the second genetic. Thus generative tracing involves historical reconstructions. Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant writes:

This problem leads naturally to the transcendental problem of childhood. The approach to this problem is by the way of investigating the way in which my childhood is given [to] me. I find that, although formally my past extends without end, it becomes quite empty beyond a certain extent. Knowledge of the earlier periods of my life-in-the-world is necessarily obtained from society, either from persons who remember my childhood or from observation of others who are now children.[50]

Here we have the convergence of the problem of a pre-empathetic intersubjectivity implicated in the ego’s second passivity (in its habituations) and the problem of a necessarily intersubjective constitution of our awareness of our most own-most originating acts.[51]

Generativity and Intersubjectivity

Husserl responds to this situation by positing a second intersubjective relationship that is not itself based on empathy, but on “generativity.”[52] In an important 1932 manuscript Husserl presents the full account of intersubjectivity. First returning to the standard account of empathy, Husserl claims that “‘coincidence’ with the other in the constitutive originary level, so to speak, [occurs] before the world is constituted as [the] common world for myself and others and eventually [before the world is constituted] as the world for all.”[53] He then reiterates the way in which the lived body of another ego is analogously appresent to my ego, and how a spatial-temporal coincidence arises between the “primordialities.” From here he turns to the familiar comparison of recollection and empathy.

I experience community with the other in empathetic appresentation, as a parallel of recollection. When recollection begins, the continuity of my past out of my constant self-coincidence, out of constant retention is already there, presupposed, underground.[54]

For the first time, however, he extends this feature to empathy claiming that “When empathy kicks in, somehow the community, the intersubjectivity is already completely there and empathy is then merely a disclosing accomplishment.”[55] Thus, empathy does not constitute intersubjectivity, it discloses it already there. This pre-empathetic intersubjectivity, what Husserl in typical late manuscript fashion calls “Ur-empathy”, is going to be the “generative” relationship one has with others which forms one’s pre-reflective identity. This is the relationship to others in one’s pre-given “world.”

All egos exist with one another in coincidence, in the infinite.... We stand in the tradition, through others we become otherwise, assuming their personal character [Personales], necessarily reconstructing it within us. [Considered] generatively: not only is the empty, formal, monadic-egoic structure passed on, but the character traits as well: How is that? With the awakening of the new monad the parental habituality is awakened or pre-awakened; but the new monad has a new hylé and the parental [monad] its own habituality. Everything merges in sedimented transfer and “mixes” together.[56]

The reception of the other through the form of the passing on of our parents’ habitualities also applies to the reception of the social structures into which the ego is born. One is born into the world already rich with meanings. The consequence is “generative intersubjectivity”—the intersubjective relationship between a subject and those other subjects that are pre-egoically and pre-actively formative of the subject. What are sedimented are not merely retentions, but traditions. Or, alternatively put, the structures of the sedimented retentions are themselves sedimented through the traditional world, the “Heimwelt”, to which the ego belongs.[57]

This addition of generativity as an intersubjective component of the monad allows Husserl to develop the finitude of the ego in both space and time.

The constitution of an abiding co-humanity, of a general sociality referring to a practical environing-world, can be treated abstractly already prior to generation; and, thus, by virtue of the type of temporalization of this practical environing-world as personally significant, there already exists an abstract historicity enclosed within it. If we put into play generation, then this progression in terms of concretion is also a concretization of the remaining co-humanity, mother, i.e., parents and child, etc.; and at the same time we have a more concrete generatively formed temporalization and historical environing-world.[58]

The first co-humanity, “treated abstractly already prior to generation” is the genetically revealed intersubjectivity with its “abstract historicity.” In contrast, the generative intersubjectivity occurs only after the concretization of the monad in birth. Thus generative intersubjectivity would be irrelevant for transcendental analysis (would be merely psycho-physical) were it not the case that birth and death are “essential occurrences for the constitution of the world.”[59] Husserl says, “It must be shown that birth and death must be accepted as constitutive occurrences for the coming into possibility [Ermöglichung] of the constitution of the world—or must be accepted as an essential piece of a constituted word, that is to say, generativity in birth and death.”[60]

We have seen that Husserl thinks that our generative intersubjective relation is the source of sedimentations that determine (at least in part) the structures of constitution. Generative intersubjectivity must be seen as a necessary supplement to genetic intersubjectivity—one that requires an actual historical and cultural analyses rather than formal structural analyses. We can conclude with Husserl that a “new birth belongs to every present as a worldly [occurrence] and indeed then as a transcendental occurrence,”[61] and that, “the transcendence, in which the world is constituted, consists in the fact that it is constituted among the others and the generative co-subjectivity.”[62] Talking of generativity, what is familiar, and tradition allows Husserl to address the issue of how we can both belong to and constitute an intersubjectivite community which precedes our birth and survives our death.

The fact that the world into which one is born is that from which one acquires one’s habitualities does not itself threaten to turn the project of phenomenology as a rigorous science into a cultural relativism. Rather it requires supplementing the account of constituting consciousness with a transcendental account of history. Such an account shows the present world to be at a historical point such that the pre-given world—what will become the “life-word” in the Crisis—is such as to foster the development of a phenomenological science. This is just the project Husserl engaged himself in the Crisis and other later texts.[63] What is important to note here is that with the development of generative intersubjectivity Husserl alters the account of the constitution of the world and thus the account of the relationship between the subject and the world. As we saw above, the new question of intersubjectivity is the question of how the ego can both produce the intersubjective world and be part of it.

I am the subject who produces the world which obtains for me. … I am such, however, on the underlying basis of an intentional formation of a pre-worldly being understood as founding the latter [the world]. In this founding, my others first exist for me … [yet] before this founding the ego <is> in coincidence with Others.[64]

The generative intersubjective constitution of the ego provides an answer to the question of the constituting/belonging relation between the ego and the world. The world is only disclosed as constituted through other subjects which themselves can only be discovered through the world.

I can only know the world if I am already myself in the world which as [a] human [world] can have its co-humans in it. … The meaning of the world is that of transcendence; the transcendence that is meant here cannot be found in the mere one-sidedness, in the imperfectness, of the perspective presentation and the general openness of the horizon. [Rather] with respect to this [transcendence] we must say: my essential finitude shows itself here in the fact that I (and we) can reach in original experience only a finite part of nature as my natural surrounding world, although this part is, in its way, an open unbounded part. If I perform a primordial reduction [i.e., a reduction to what I can directly or primordially experience] I thereby get a finite nature or world. Certainly this finitude is concealed so long as my birth has not been discovered, so long as I have not brought into play the co-being of Others. The transcendence in which the world is constituted exists by virtue of its constituting itself by means of others and the generatively constituted co-subjectivity.[65]

Empathy and generativity are interdependently related just as recollection and retention are. On the one hand, generativity is the condition for the possibility of empathy,—the initial intersubjective structure which allows the ego to appear to itself in its intersubjective relation to others,—just as retention,—the ‘initial’ temporal structure which allows the ego to appear to itself in its temporal constitution—is the condition for the possibility of recollection; yet, on the other hand, generativity only receives its conformation in empathy, just as retention only receives its conformation in recollection.

The supplement of generative intersubjectivity to “co-existence” intersubjectivity as operative on the structure of second passivity (the pre-given sedimentations of the past ego acts) seems to require a methodological supplement to the normal “solipsistic” investigations of genetic and generative investigations into the “we.” After all, we now have: (1) the constituting activities of consciousness structurally determined by the ego’s temporal finitude (existing at this time in this world), and (2) the methodological requirement of genetic phenomenology that we return to the temporal and stratificational origins of the constitutional structure. Just as the spatial finitude of the ego is overcome (and the possibility of phenomenology grounding the sciences is maintained), through correlating the ego’s direct experiences with the empathetic experiences of other egos, so too it would seem that we could overcome the temporal finitude of the ego through correlating the ego’s direct experience with the expressed experiences of other egos past and present.

David Carr has argued for the necessity of such a methodological addition to phenomenology. He writes:

To understand what the individual is we need to move beyond the individual to the social and in particular to the social past. … The interesting thing is that such an analysis need not even give up the ‘first person’ perspective: in calling on these grammatical categories we have almost forgotten that the first person (like the second person and the third) can be plural as well as singular.[66]

Carr’s suggestion is that at this point we turn to dialogue to construct a view of our social past. Phenomenology, then, leaves its traditional founding of the descriptions on the evidencing of one ego, to become an intersubjective phenomenology where dialogical verification replaces monological verification.[67] Such a methodologically intersubjective phenomenology, however, threatens its apodicticity and undermines phenomenology’s ability to finally ground the sciences. This is too much for Husserl to concede so, instead of “following” Carr’s route, he returns to his account of time consciousness an introduces “the streaming living present.” The more the structures of consciousness have their origins in something other than the activity of the ego, the more powerful both the transcendental reduction and transcendental reflection must be in order to reveal the origins of the structures of consciousness.

One requires a reduction within the transcendental reduction to grasp, in a more complete manner, the streaming immanent temporalization and time, to grasp the primal temporalization, the primal time. … This is the reduction to the streaming, primal ‘immanence,’ to the primal unities constituting themselves in this [immanence].[68]

In the face of an increasing intersubjective, decentered account of constitution, Husserl increasingly deepens his account of subjectivity. Instead of turning to dialogue, then, Husserl extends the reduction to an ever more primordial level, that of the streaming living present.

The Streaming Living Present vs. The Flow

The “streaming primal immanence” should reminds us of “the flow”, the primal source of all temporalization itself outside of time. The most obvious difference is that “the flow” was posited as a necessary condition for the possibility of the unity of time consciousness, not as something directly intuitable through the transcendental reduction.[69] Recall that Husserl equated the flow with “absolute subjectivity;” this will no longer be the case. Instead Husserl will say that

The structural analysis of the primordial present (the standing, living streaming) leads us to the ego structure and to the constantly founding underlying levels of the egoless stream, which, through a consequent inquiry, leads back to that which makes possible and presupposes sedimented activity and leads back to the radically pre-egoic.[70]

Moreover, —and more importantly for addressing the issue of pre-empathetic intersubjectivity—, Husserl claims that the radical reduction uncovers “my ‘coincidence’ with others on an original level of constitution, my coincidence, so to speak, before there is constituted a world for myself and Others.”[71] In these later C-manuscripts Husserl is introducing a level of being and a level of time constitution never before seen in his writings. This will be the last and most dramatic shift in the formal structures of constitution, the one that he hopes will finally make the project viable, and also the one that will give us Husserl’s final word on the relation of intersubjectivity to time-consciousness.

Let’s look closely at the nature of the streaming living present, as it came to be called. In the quotations above we can draw out many of its essential features. First of all, it is the source of all temporalization.

The reduction to the living present is … a reduction to the sphere of the primal temporalization in which the first and originary sense of time comes forward—time as the living streaming present. All further temporality, —be it subjective or objective, whatever be the sense these words might take on—receives its ontological sense and validity from this present.[72]

The formal retentional/protentional structure is preserved in the account of the streaming living present. “We have, in this primal temporalization, the primal present, the primal past and the primal future, themselves as constituted temporal modalities which, for their part, stream.”[73] Like the Flow, the stream is both outside of time (“the primordial changing is, absolutely speaking, not in time”[74]) and the source of its own temporal constitution (“the temporalizing at the same time temporalizes itself, the living present as presently living present is continually linked up with the just-having-been living present and so on”[75]). Unlike the flow, however, the streaming living present is the endpoint of the phenomenological reduction and thus it is the absolute source of all constitutional content (the flow could only be considered this to the extent it was the absolute subject). This initiates an obvious question: if, as we have seen, the origins of the structures of constitution are more a result of the passive sedimentations and associations than the activity of the ego, and the reduction leads us to the source of a constitutional content, does Husserl leave his Cartesianism behind?

Throughout the period of the C-manuscripts (1928-1934) Husserl attempted to map out the relation between the streaming living present and the ego. On the one hand, in addition to the quotations above, which present the stream as pre-egological, he says that

the stream does not exist by virtue of the action of the ego, as if the ego aimed at actualizing the stream, as if the stream were actualized by an action. The stream is not something done, not a deed in the widest sense. Rather, action is itself ‘contained’ in the universal stream of experiences which is, thus, called the ‘life’ of the ego.[76]

On the other hand three pages later he says that “temporality is, in every respect, whether originary or derivative, an accomplishment of the ego.”[77] In some places Husserl seems to think that the stream is prior to the ego; in other places he seems to think that the ego is prior to the stream.[78] At one point, again in the same manuscript, he even says both: “the stream is always ahead, but the ego is also ahead.”[79] We cannot write off these contradictory views by claiming that Husserl changed back and forth between the views, nor should we simply dismiss it as mystical metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Rather, if we are going to arrive at a final understanding of the relationship between intersubjectivity and temporality at this most primordial level of Husserl’s phenomenology, we are going to have to straighten out his view here. The key will be the distinction between the transcendental ego to which belongs the stream of consciousness, and the primal ego (Ur-Ich), the ego-pole.

The Ego-Pole

At the time of the writing of the C-manuscripts the ego-pole was already well established part of Husserl’s theory of subjectivity. There are predecessors of it in Ideas I[80] , though the term is not introduced until Ideas II, §22 “The Pure Ego as Ego-pole.” [81] This account is importantly expanded in the Cartesian Meditations.

Heretofore … we have looked only at the flowing cogito. The ego grasps itself not only as a flowing life but also as I, who lives this and that subjective process, who lives through this and that cogito, as the same I. … [The ego-pole] is not an empty pole of identity, … [r]ather according to a law of ‘transcendental generation’, with every act emanating from it and having a new objective sense, it acquires a new abiding property. … From now on I am abidingly the Ego who is thus and so decided.[82]

Here we have two important features of the ego-pole. First, the ego-pole is defined in contrast to the “flowing cogito”—the ego present in the stream of experiences—as that which persists through all actions and affections. Second, it is the locus of the sedimentations and thus of the structures of secondary passive constitution. Still, as seemingly with everything in the C-manuscripts, the account of the ego-pole will receive another degree of radicalization. There Husserl consistantly ascribes four other properties to the ego-pole.

1. The ego-pole is the “functioning ego”: the original source point of activity. It is that which not only remains constant throughout all activity and affectivity, it is the source of all activity. He writes that

The ego is stationary and remaining in a special sense: it, itself, does not stream but it does act. It posits its thesis, and this acting is a letting loose from itself. It is a primal welling up, a creative allowing to depart from itself of that which, in itself, streams, namely the acts.[83]

It is through the emanations of the functioning ego that time becomes constituted. More specifically, it is through the activity of the functioning ego that time constitutes itself. This means, however that:

2. the ego-pole is outside of time. He writes

The ego is non-temporal. Naturally it makes no sense to consider the ego as temporal. The ego is supra-temporal [über-Zeitlich], it is the pole of the egoic ways of behaving towards the temporal [der Pol von Ich-Verhaltungsweisen zu Zeitlichem].[84]

As outside of time and as the source of all “egoic ways of behaving towards the temporal” its unity is a passive accomplishment prior to its being one ego among many. Thus,

3. it is absolutely singular.

In an absolute sense, this ego is the only one. It does not allow of being meaningfully multiplied. Put more pointedly: it excludes this as senseless. The absolute I which perdures in a non-destructive way prior to all being and which bears all being in itself in its “concretion” before all concretions … is the first ‘ego’ of the reduction, an ego which is erroneously so named, because for it an alter ego has no meaning.[85]

If it no longer makes any sense to speak of the ego-pole as someone’s ego-pole, at least when considered at this primordial stratum, then it is appropriate for Husserl to claim that

4. it is anonymous.

The ego, which is the counterpart to everything, is anonymous. It is not its own counterpart. The house is my counterpart, not vice versa. And yet I can turn my attention to myself. But then the counterpart in which the ego comes forward along with everything which was its counterpart is again split. The ego which comes forward as a counterpart and its counterpart [e.g. the house it was perceiving] are both counterparts to me. Forthwith I—the subject of this new counterpart—am anonymous.[86]

The ego-pole exists at such a level of abstraction that all features which might distinguish one ego from another are products of the ego pole, not features of the ego-pole. Therefore it makes no sense to speak of the ego-pole as such as being any particular ego’s. The pole then is absolutely singular, anonymous, outside of time, and is the upsurge of activity which occasions the constitution of time. It’s reminiscent of a Neo-platonic One, but recall that it is also the locus of sedimentations. Of Husserl, ultimately the ego-pole is an abstraction, like the now, but a necessary one to make sense of the permanence of the ego throughout the flow of the streaming living present.

The Not-I

When Husserl writes that temporalization, and thus the streaming living present is an accomplishment of the ego, he is referring to this ur-ego, the ego-pole. Yet he also says that the ego exists only in virtue of belonging to the streaming living present. Which is primary, the ego or the streaming living present? According to the C-manuscripts, neither. Within the stream is the ego-pole, but it is pre-individuated and anonymous—it is neither your ego-pole nor my ego-pole—until is taken up by itself as a locus point in the stream and becomes an ego with affections and actions; a history and a flow of consciousness. That is, it is anonymous until it becomes the ego-pole of a transcendental ego. The transcendental ego is the link to the ego-pole in the stream. With this becoming it becomes the source of a perceptions. Thus, following Husserl, we can speak of the twofold nature of the ego: “on the one side we have the temporal stream of consciousness and the transcendental ego of acts which is related to this temporality, … on the other side we have the primal ground of temporalization, the primal ego.”[87] More accurately, the ego-pole is abstractively differentiated from the particularities of the transcendental ego as that which is the source of the original unity of the transcendental ego. As the source of the unity of the ego, it is the locus for the reception of past habitualities and future actions. To the extent that all perceptions come to be through the ego-pole and are unified in perception as a constitutional accomplishment of the transcendental ego, —including temporal unification of temporal perceptions—, Husserl can say that “the actual temporalization is now not that of the stream, but my [temporalization], that of the transcendental ego,” and thus that “temporality is in every respect ego-accomplishment.”[88] The accomplishment is not an active accomplishment, but a passive accomplishment. And yet as the content of the transcendental ego is determined in virtue of the ego-pole’s ‘location’ in the streaming living present, and all activity of the ego depends on the prior existence of the streaming living present, Husserl can say that the stream contains the ego. As we’ve seen, he wrote “the stream is always ahead, but the ego is also ahead.”[89] Furthermore, to return to an earlier theme, the original association of a primal ego-pole and a transcendental ego is the birth of the ego; likewise, death is the disassociation between the ego-pole and the transcendental ego. The ego-pole, never actually being alive much less egoic, never dies.

A new dichotomy appears here between the ego and the non-ego. At the most fundamental level, the formal structure of the process of constitution is not a monism, but a dualism. Equally primordial as the ego is the non-ego, the not-I. “Proceeding from the deepest ground, we therefore have an essential two layerdness which we can designate as non-ego and ego.”[90] In a crucial C-Manuscript he writes

The constitution of existence (in it various levels), of values, and of time has two primal presuppositions, two primal source points, which temporally speaking (in each if these temporalities) at all times forms their basis: 1) my primordial ego as [a] functioning [ego], a primal ego in its affections and actions, with all of the forms of essences and the modalities belonging to them; 2) my primordial not-I as primordial stream of temporalizing and itself a primal form of the temporalizing, a temporal field, which constitutes the primal factuality [Ur-Sachlichkeit]. But both primal grounds are unitary, inseparable and therefore considered to be abstract.[91]

This primal duality appears of necessity in every instance of idealism. In Fichte, for example, the second principle, equally primordial as the first principle, is that a not-I opposes the I. Only through such an opposition can constitution be possible, and in both cases, it is the materiality of constitution which takes on the role of not-I.[92] The not-I in Husserl is the stream itself. “The presently streaming present, understood as an immanent [temporal] stream, is already thoroughly non-ego; and everything which is constituted and continues to constitute itself within it is the non-ego in various levels.”[93] While the ego-pole is the source of all activity; the not-I is the source of all affectivity. Yet the activity of the ego presupposes the existence of the not-I: activity depends on affectivity in the same way that the active synthesis of the ego depends on a prior passive synthesis. Indeed passive synthesis is what Husserl has in mind when he writes that

[t]he primally streaming and primally constituting non-ego is the hyletic universe [of actual experiential contents] which, in itself, is constituting and which already has constantly constituted; it is a temporalizing-temporal primal occurring which does not occur from egological sources; it therefore occurs without the participation of the ego.[94]

The streaming living present is all that is foreign to the activity of the ego, —purely hyletic, passively constituted—, yet still the necessary presupposition for all egoic activity.

The Priority of Temporality over Intersubjectivity

Recall that the very reason for the need to shift to the account of the streaming living present as the fundamental unifying source of all constitutional structures was that Husserl realized that more and more of the structures of constitution had non-egoic sources. It seemed as if he was going to have to abandon his goal of grounding the natural sciences in apodictic Cartesian origins and instead move towards introducing the necessity of communication for determining the structures of consciousness. Concerns surrounding intersubjectivity motivated the move to the streaming living present, so we should consider the affects this move has on Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity. Recall also that we left off with an account that combines empathy-intersubjectivity with generative-intersubjectivity. What is the affect of the anonymity and absolute singularity of the ego in the streaming living present on the account of intersubjectivity?

Eugen Fink has claimed that

In some of the manuscripts that were written after the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl . . . arrives at the curious idea of a primal ego, of a primal subjectivity which is prior to the distinction between the primordial subjectivity and transcendental intersubjectivity of other monads. He seems to try, to some extent, to withdraw the plurality from the dimension of the transcendental—thus heading toward a problem which reminds us of the late Fichte. In the same context Husserl also tries to circumvent the difference between essence and fact by going back to the primal facticity of transcendental life which first constitutes possibility, and thereby variations, and—as an objectivation of variational multiplicities—also constitutes essence. According to Husserl’s ideas in these very late manuscripts, there is a primal life which is neither one nor many, neither factual nor essential; rather, it is the ultimate ground of all these distinctions: a transcendental primal life which turns itself into a plurality and which produces in itself the differentiation into fact and essence.[95]

Although what Fink says is true, the primal ontological dualism of the streaming living present and the primal ego could never be the sources of a new, more radical account of intersubjectivity. As we know the ego-pole is non-individuated and anonymous. This does not make it a supra-individual relating all subjects together, but entirely not an individual. In an important sense, the ur-ego is as thoroughly non-ego as the stream. The intersubjective relation holds between subjects, while the primal stratum is prior to the appearance of a subjects. Therefore it can not be the ground for a primal-intersubjectivity.[96] Rather, intersubjective relations only appear after the birth of the ego through the birth of the ego. At this point the appearance of the other is analyzable through straightforward genetic analysis. The reduction to the stream provides us with the motivating stratum of all constitution, one which is first-person accessible and avoids the problems raised by the later concerns of intersubjectivity (the concern that the ego belongs to, yet still constitutes the world, and the concern that one’s essential finitude and historicity is only available through witnessing the birth and death of others). That is to say, Husserl has finally subsumed intersubjectivity to subjectivity through a redicalization of temporality. Just as in 1911 when the alterity of other subjects only first comes to be through their synthesis as objects across the alterity in internal time-consciousness, so too does the alterity of others, effectively present in the structures of passive synthesis as sedimentations of past actions and traditions, first come to be through the primal-temporalizing activity of the ego-pole “standing” in a primally-passive streaming living present, and born into a transcendental and historical world. As born, it can return through the transcendental reduction, though genetic, static and generative phenomenology and preserve the first-person mandate of apodicticity.

By seeing this constant movement in Husserl we can appreciate Levinas’s criticisms better. In Otherwise than Being and Beyond Essence[97] Levinas credits Husserl with coming close to an understanding of the transcendence of the other. Levinas appeals to Husserl’s account of the primal impression calling this “the most remarkable point of this philosophy in which intentionality constitutes the universe.” Here he points out that,

Husserl will then have liberated the psyche from the primacy of the theoretical neither in the order of the know-how with equipment nor in that of axiological emotion, nor in the thought of Being, different from the metaphysics of entities. Rather objectifying consciousness, the hegemony of re-presentation, is paradoxically surmounted in the consciousness of the present.[98]

According to Levinas, it would seem that Husserl, at the most fundamental level of time consciousness, could have “surmounted” the objectifying consciousness in the constituting/constituted living present. That is to say, Husserl seems to have opened the way to an other—albeit to an other on the model of empirical, sensorial impression—surpassing the subject at the core of all perception and all consciousness. As we have seen and as Levinas is quick to point out, the living present becomes itself thematizable in time, and any possibility of a diachronic interruption of (in Levinas’ terms) “the Same,” is sealed off. Thus—and Levinas presents this as a criticism of Husserl— in fact “nothing incognito enters into the same to interrupt the flow of time and interrupt the consciousness that is produced in the form of this flow.”[99] It is at this point, of course, that Levinas introduces his most radical suggestion—that the summons of the face of the other is the condition for the constitution of time—and both Levinas’ closeness to Husserl and his distance are all the more apparent.

David Vessey

Beloit College

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[1] Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981. p. 32.

[2] pp. 111-230. Zur Ph˛nomenologie der Intersubjectivit˛t, Vol. I. (1905-1920) ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XIII. Hereafter “Hua XIII.”

[3] The C-Manuscripts are a series of manuscripts written between 1928 and 1934 on the topic of “Time Constitution as Formal Constitution.” My thanks to Sam IJsseling for his permission to consult these manuscripts and to the Fulbright Commission for funding a fellowship year at the archives.

[4] It was published in 1928 in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Ph˛nomenological Forschung IX and has been translated into English by J.S. Churchill as Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984). The Beilage reveal the development of Husserl’s thought from 1904 to its mature statement in 1911. Although the specific account of the awareness of time changed little after 1911, Husserl’s views on the relation between temporality and subjectivity changed dramatically first as a result of the shift to genetic phenomenology and then to the establishment of the “streaming living present” as the root of constitution. This shifting of the account of subjectivity leads to an associated shifting of the account of intersubjectivity. Husserl’s reflections on time fall into three periods of his career. First there are the works from 1893-1917 which are collected in Zur Ph˛nomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917) (ed. Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana X, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966, translated into English by John Barnett Brough as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Inner-Time (1893-1917) [Dordrecht: Kluwer AP, 1991]). Hereafter PCIT. The writings from the second period, from 1917-18 are assembled as the “Bernauer Manuscripts” and were given to Fink to organize into another book on time. Fink never completed the work, but it has since been published as Husserliana Vol. XXXIII. The third period was from 1928 to 1934 and are collected as the C-Manuscripts under the heading “Time Constitution as Formal Constitution.” For much more on the development of Husserl’s theory of time consciousness, see: Rudolf Boehm’s introduction to Zur Ph˛nomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917); J. B. Brough’s introduction to On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Inner-Time; and especially, Rudolf Bernet’s introduction to Texte zur Ph˛nomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985).

[5] The Idea of Phenomenology (tr. W.P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964).

[6] These lectures have been since published as text number six of Zur Ph˛nomenologie der Intersubjectivit˛t, Vol. (see footnote 2). Kern also edited Zur Ph˛nomenologie der Intersubjectivit˛t Vol. II (1921-1928), (Husserliana XIV, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1973), and Zur Ph˛nomenologie der Intersubjectivit˛t, Vol. III (1929-1934), (Husserliana XV, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1973). Hereafter Hua XIV, and Hua XV. The lectures “Grundprobleme der Ph˛nomenologie” have been published separately under that title. All page references refer to Husserliana XIII.

[7] p. 243, fn. 1. Formal and Transcendental Logic (tr. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969). Hereafter FTL. 1911 is noteworthy not only for being the point at which Husserl arrived at his mature account of intersubjectivity, time consciousness, and the reduction, but also the time of the writing of the Logos article, “Phenomenology as a Rigorous Science” (translated into English by Quentin Lauer in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy [New York: Harper and Row, 1965], pp. 71-147). This article contains the best statement of the project of phenomenology with respect to the sciences and psychology. Given the developments which took place in 1911, it is less surprising that Ideas I emerged in 1912 in the complete form it did.

[8] p. 417, fn. 1. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Phenomenological Investigations Concerning Constitution. (tr. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). Hereafter Ideas I. This epilogue was written in 1931 as the introduction to the W. R. Boyce Gibson English translation of Ideas I . Although the German epilogue and the English introduction are for the most part the identical, the English edition lacks this footnote.

[9] 1910-11 Lectures, p. 138.

[10] 1910-11 Lectures, p. 154.

[11] This is the title of §29 of 1910/1911 Lectures.

[12] 1910-11 Lectures, p. 167.

[13] 1910-11 Lectures, p. 160.

[14] 1910-11 Lectures, p. 160.

[15][15] 1910-11 Lectures, p. 159, fn. 1.

[16] Derrida, following Heidegger, presents a now classic criticism of Husserl on just this point. See his Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction. (tr. John P. Leavey, Jr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

[17] PCITpp. 79, 381-2.

[18] Ms. C 3 III, p. 23. Quoted in Klaus Held’s Lebendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transcendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitprobelmatik (Nijhoff: Den Haag, 1966), p. 114. Hereafter “Held.” We will return to this paradoxical self-temporalizing later in the investigations of the “streaming living present.”

[19] PCITp. 335.

[20] 1910/11 Lectures, pp. 87-88.

[21] FTL p. 243 fn. 1.

[22] Here I diverge from Dorion Cairns’ suggestions in his Guide for Translating Husserl (Phaenomenologica 55, Den Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1973) by translating “Leib” as “lived body” rather than as “animate organism” as he suggests. This translation substitution is widely found in Husserl translations. Moreover I am using the more common translation of “Erlebnis” as “experience” than as “mental process” (as Cairns suggests). The typical problem here has been a matter of distinguishing “Erlebnis” from “Erfahrung.” I will also include the German when the original reads “Erlebnis.”

[23] 1910/11 Lectures, p. 113.

[24] 1910/11 Lectures, p. 114.

[25] 1910/11 Lectures, p. 114. Square bracketed insertions are mine, pointed bracketed insertions are those of the editor (in this case Iso Kern).

[26] In section three Husserl goes farther claiming that all of the ego’s experiences are located in the lived body as opposed to the physical body. He writes, “Pleasure and pain are not in the heart so long as blood is in the heart, taste-sensations are not in the head as if they were pieces of organic matter. . . .We thus state that the experiences of the ego [Icherlebnisse] become recognized on the basis of experience [Erfahrung] (which each ego makes and which determines its judgments), as being in a certainly not very well determined sphere governed by the lived body, by its (lived) bodily states and processes” (1910/11 Lectures, p. 115). Here he points to the fact that as the body moves around, passes through different states, so too do the experiences change. We can conclude therefore that the experiences are themselves located in the lived body. It is important to keep in mind here that Husserl is talking about all of this within the natural attitude, and that once we are dealing with the transcendental ego the relationship between it and the body becomes increasingly vague and problematic.

[27] 1910/11 Lectures, pp. 115-116.

[28] Hua XV, p. 642.

[29] The full title is: “The Identification of the Time of the Own and the Foreign Consciousnesses. The Alter-Ego in the Phenomenological Reduction. Nature as Index for a Empathized Experience System and as Conditioning of the Mirroring of the Monads (Re-working of the Text, p. 189, line 24 to P. 191, line 14, from the Lectures “Foundational Problems of Phenomenology” of 1910/11).” It can be found in Husserliana XIII as Beilage XXVIII and is dated as “certainly” being from 1921. The specific section it is a re-working of is section §39: “The Acquisition of the Other Phenomenological I through the Double Phenomenological Reduction. Nature as an Index of Coordination of a Plurality of I-Monads.” Why Husserl fully re-wrote this section is not clear to me as it is only a longer exposition of what he says in the original text. Since the content of both is so similar, I believe it is reasonable to take this supplement as presenting the same view Husserl held in 1910 even though it is written eleven years later.

[30] Hua XV p. 332 (Ms. C 17 I). Quoted in Mensch, p. 244-5.

[31] 1910/11 Lectures, p. 188. We must keep in mind that anticipation, “Vorerinnerung”, is different than expectation/protention, “Erwarterung.”

[32] Husserl uses three different terms for the analogous awareness of others: analogous appresentation, analogous apprehension, and analogous apperception. Apperception belongs to the wider category of appresentations. Apprehension is the subjective awareness which occurs with an appresentation. So we could rightly say, the form of appresentation through which the other becomes apprehended is apperception.

[33] CM, p. 112

[34] CM, p. 112

[35] Dorion Cairns. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 29. Hereafter Conversations.

[36] CM, p. 113

[37] Conversations, p. 29

[38] Here is how Husserl explains it at the end of the section on pairing: “In that case of association and apperception which particularly interests us—namely apperception of the alter ego by the ego—pairing first comes about when the Other enters my field of perception. I, as the primordial psycho-physical Ego, am always prominent in my primordial field, regardless of whether I pay attention to myself and turn towards myself with some activity or other. In particular, my lived body is always there and sensuously prominent; but, in addition to that and likewise with primordial originariness, it is equipped with the sense of an animate organism. Now in this case there presents itself, as outstanding in my primordial sphere, a body “similar” to mine—that is to say, a body with determinations such that it must enter into a phenomenal pairing with mine—it seems clear without more ado that, with the transfer of sense, this body must forthwith appropriate from mine the sense: animate organism.”CM, p. 113

[39] Trying to date the origin of genetic phenomenology is a bit tricky. Husserl wrote in a June 29, 1918 letter to Paul Natorp that he “overcame the stage of static Platonism more than ten years ago and established the idea of transcendental genesis as the main theme of phenomenology” (Quoted in Gadamer’s Truth and Method, p. 243). But, simply put, Husserl is an extremely unreliable self-interpreter. At the same time as always calling himself a beginner, he always wanted to make it seem as if he had all along been doing more or less the same thing. With respect to genetic phenomenology, although Husserl may have overcome his Platonism with the 1909 rejection of the form-content schema of constitution, he certainly had not made “transcendental genesis as the main theme of phenomenology.” We do know from this quotation that by 1918 he did think this to be the case. We can get more precise by noting that in Ideas I he mentions genesis, but not yet in the sense of becoming a distinct phenomenological theme. The first revision of Ideas II, written in 1918, appears to be where Husserl, in the analysis of kinaesthetic constitution, begins to discover the need for supplementing static phenomenology with genetic phenomenology. Interestingly enough, the impetus in 1918 which motivated the systematic explication of genetic phenomenological analysis was his reading of Natorp. For convincing evidence of this influence, see Iso Kern’s Husserl und Kant. Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verh˛ltnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus (Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff, 1974). The account of genesis matured and developed through Husserl’s extensive work on kinesthesia, passive synthesis, and time (the Bernauer manuscripts) from 1914 to 1921. See Analysen zur Passive Synthesis, (Husserliana XI, ed. M. Fleisher, Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff, 1966).

[40] Consider the following from Ideas II: “The habitus that we are concerned with pertains not to the empirical, but to the pure Ego. The identity of the pure Ego does not only reside in the fact that I (the pure Ego), with regard to each and every cogito, can grasp myself as the identical Ego of the cogito; rather, I am even therein and a priori the same Ego, insofar as I, in taking a position, necessarily exercise consistency in a determinate sense. … The nexus of lived experiences of a person is not a mere bundle of lived experiences or a mere stream of consciousness. … [t]here is constantly present an underlying basis which is pre-given to [the ego], to which it is related, or by which it is driven, in various ways. … The basis of pregivenness refers back, however, to the other one, the one we call the psychic basis of habitus” (pp.118, 290).

[41] The locus classicus of Husserl’s account of the body is found in Ideas II, though his reflection on kinesthesia go back at least as far as the 1907 “Thing Lectures” collected in Ding and Raum, (Husserliana XVI, ed. Ulrich Claeges. Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff, 1974) and receive their most extensive treatment in the D manuscripts. A section of D12 has been published in two parts in Husserl: Shorter Works (F. Elliston and P. McCormick, Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1977) under the titles “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origins of the Spatiality of Nature” and “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism.”

[42] For the record Husserl lists the strata on CM, p. 107. First is the primordial level, then the level of other egos, then objective nature and world (to which we belong), then an ego-community, then a community of monads, then one identical world (extending infinitely in space and time), then, finally human beings—seven levels in all.

[43] Hua XXIX, p. 199.

[44] In section 53 of Ideas I he writes, “On the one hand consciousness is said to be the Absolute, in which everything transcendent, and therefore the whole psychological world, is constituted; and on the other hand consciousness is said to be a subordinate real event within this world. How can these statements be reconciled?” (p. 124).

[45] Conversations p. 31. It is interesting to note that as late as 1929 Husserl still saw this problem not as a transcendental one, but as a worldly one. Consider the following quote from manuscript C 8 II, pp. 6-7 (Quoted in Mensch, p. 348). “Every monad has its immanent temporality. In this temporality there is a beginning taken as a beginning of its entering-into-relationship with other monads in its becoming worldly [Verweltlichung] within objective time. This is also a form of co-existence, (in the broad sense) a form of communalization. If the monad appears as a new actor in world time, it also, finally departs. When being and non-being are real temporal being, then previously it did not exist and later it will not exist.

In the immanence of a monad, a beginning is a limit of its worldly self-constitution. A ‘pre’-beginning, does this have a sense? Can it have one? The limit of self-constitution is the [initial] limit of the developmental structure of a child, of the whole person in the world. If one could say that this is not the beginning of being, but rather that of worldly development and of being in the world, and that, therefore the co-existence of monads extends beyond that of the world, then one could try to interpret this as follows: the monad’s being is a being in and for itself in a self-constitution which never begins or ends in immanent temporality. A particular form of this constitution, which does have a beginning and a end, is the world accomplishing constitution in which the monad becomes a monad living in an environment and [as such is a monad who] consciously, constitutively experiences other monads as worldly realities, entering into relation with them.”

[46] Hua XV, p. 336 (Ms. C 17 I)

[47] Ms. C 2 III, p. 3. Quoted in Gerd Brand’s Welt, Ich und Zeit: Nach unveröffentlichen Manuscripten Edmund Husserls (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), p. 109. Hereafter “Brand.” In the Crisis Husserl presents this as the problem of intersubjectivity. “Universal intersubjectivity, into which all objectivity, everything which exists at all, is resolved, can obviously be nothing other than mankind; and the latter is undeniably a component part of the world. How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its internal formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?” (The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. Tr. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. p. 179. Hereafter “Crisis.”)

[48] Ms. A VI 14, p. 3. Quoted in Mensch, p. 158.

[49] In a letter to Gustav Albrecht on June 3, 1932 (quoted in Ron Bruzina’s “Translator’s Introduction” to Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation. [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995], p. lxxviii). Fink was much more interested in this intersubjective dependance than Husserl. Fink is the one who tells Cairns that “Birth and death we only know on the basis of intersubjectivity” (Conversations, p. 31). Fink even brings up this issue of the ontological reliance on others for the constitution of the ego as a possible starting point for a revised “Fifth Meditation.” Bruzina writes, “rather than beginning with the place of others as set in the object-constituting performance of the ego as autonomous monadic center, Fink proposes to enter the presentation of intersubjectivity on the transcendental level by setting out the problem of the constitution of the ego itself, namely, in terms of its own limits within the larger context of transcedental time (and therefore in terms of both its ontological wholeness and its ontological dependency)” (Sixth Cartesian Meditation, p. xliii). The relationship between Fink’s views and Husserl’s views on these matters has been much debated. I disagree with Bruzina’s claim that Husserl’s writings of the 1930’s must be seen as collaborative efforts of Fink and Husserl. I seems clear from Husserl’s writings that he never abandoned the project of “phenomenology as a rigorous science”, nor his strictly Cartesian rationality and conviction that the transcendental ego under the reduction is the sole source of apodicticity. This thesis is defended later in this chapter as the explanation for Husserl’s shift to the account of the streaming living present.

[50] Conversations, p. 13. Husserl adds to the complexity of this activity when he points out that “we are faced with the fact that a new born child (a newly “awake” transcendental ego) may have determinations of character, i.e., traditional determinations, which are awakeable in him, though he may never have acquired them himself nor gained them through communication with other subjects with whom he has a common world intercourse, either through his actual associates or through reading of history, etc. A child may, e.g., resemble an ancestor who has died before the child’s birth and of whom he never “hears” directly or indirectly” (Conversations, p. 69).

[51] For a recent investigation into the nature of generative phenomenology see Anthony Steinbock’s Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1995. Hereafter “Steinbock.”

[52] This shift to a dual account of intersubjectivity also shifts the relation of the ego to the world. Before, the world was to be constituted out of the empathetic interconnections of the monads, now, however, the world takes ontological precedence as something into which “the ego makes an entrance.” This shift is undoubtedly part of the transition to the development of the concept of ego’s pregiven “life-world.”

[53] Ms. C 17 V, p. 30. Quoted in Mensch, p. 19.

[54] Ms. C 17 V, p. 30. Quoted in Dan Zahavi’s Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivit˛t: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatishce Kritik (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1996), p. 60. Hereafter “Zahavi.” This is the best book to date to lay out Husserl’s “intersubjective subjectivity” in the late manuscripts.

[55] Ms. C 17 V, p. 30. Quoted in Zahavi, p. 45. Zahavi’s presents this quotation as a question, but the manuscripts don’t show that to be the case.

[56] Ms. C17 V. Quoted in Steinbock p. 305-6. Prior to this passage Husserl speaks of the ego inheriting character traits from past egos. The inheritance is not a repetition of the past person’s character but a corresponding-covering. Our character traits come from our parents, but they have become ours and in becoming ours we cover over their origins in the other.

[57] The issue of generative intersubjectivity is signaled, though not developed, in the Cartesian Meditations. “To a great extent genetic problems, and naturally those of the first and most fundamental level, have already been dealt with in the actual work of phenomenology. The fundamental level is, of course, the one pertaining to “my” ego in respect to its primordial own-essentialness. Constitution on the part of the consciousness of internal time and the whole phenomenological theory of association belong here; and what my primordial ego finds in original intuitive self-explication applies to every other ego forthwith, and for essential reasons. But with that, to be sure, the above-indicated genetic problems of birth and death and the generative nexus of psycho-physical being have not yet been touched. Manifestly they belong to a higher dimension and presuppose such a tremendous labor of explication pertaining to the lower spheres that it will be a long time before they can become problems to work on.” (CM, p. 142.) Closely connected to the theme of generativity, and prior to the thematization of the life-world, is the concept of the “Heimwelt”—the home world to which we and those like us belong. It is the shared world of the restricted “we”: not the we of all humanity, but the we of a circumscribed community. Cf. Hua XV Nr. 14 and attached Beilagen.

[58] Hua XV, p. 138, fn. 2. Quoted in Steinbock, p. 192.

[59] Hua XV, p. 171. The title of Beilage VIII is: “Problem: Generativity—Birth and Death as Essential Occurrences for the Constitution of the World.”

[60] Hua XV, p. 171.

[61] Ms. C 17 V. Quoted in Steinbock, p. 304.

[62] Ms. C 17 II. Quoted in Mensch, p. 170.

[63] cf. “The Vienna Lecture” and “The Prague Lecture” as well as, of course, The Crisis of the European Sciences.

[64] Ms. B III 4, pp. 65-66. Quoted in Mensch, p. 245.

[65] Ms. C17 II, pp. 7. Quoted in Mensch, p. 158.

[66] David Carr. Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 116,120.

[67] Carr draws very heavily on Husserl’s claim in “The Origin of Geometry” (Appendix VI, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcedental Phenomenology. pp. 353-378) that mathematics is only possible because present mathematicians can read the writings of past mathematicians and build on their conclusions. Thus the historical continuity of the practice is preserved through historical dialogue with texts.

[68] Ms. C 7 I, pp. 31-2. Quoted in Mensch, p. 214.

[69] Husserl does say that the flow is intuitable through what he calls the “longitudinal intentionality” of the retention, but this remains an oblique presentation of the flow and is nothing compared to our supposed awareness of the streaming living present.

[70] Hua XV, p. 598. Also: [t]he regressive inquiry, which begins with the epoché leads to the primary, stationary streaming; in a certain sense it leads to the ‘nunc stans’, the stationary present. Properly speaking, the word ‘present’ is unsuitable in this context insofar as it already indicates a modality of time” (Ms. C 7 I, p. 30. Quoted in Mensch, p. 214). And “[the regressive inquiry leads to] the pre-being which bears all being, including even the being of the acts and the being of the ego, indeed, the being of the pre-time and the being of the stream of consciousness” (Ms. C 17 IV, p. 4, Quoted in Mensch, p. 214).

[71] Ms. C 17 V, p. 30. Quoted in Mensch, p. 19.

[72] Ms. C 3 I pp. 3-4. Quoted in Mensch, p. 240. “The absolute is nothing other than absolute temporalizing, and even its interpretation as the absolute which I directly encounter as my stationary streaming primordiality, is a temporalizing of it into a primordially existing thing [Urseienden]” (Hua XV, p. 670 (Ms. C 1, p. 6)).

[73] Ms. C 7 I, p. 17. Quoted in Mensch, p. 222. Also: “A lasting and remaining now constitutes itself in this streaming. It constitutes itself as a fixed form for a content which streams through it and as the source point for all constituted modifications. In union with [the constitution of] the fixed form of the primally welling primal now, there is constituted a two-sided continuity of forms that are just as fixed. Thus, in toto, there is constituted a fixed continuum of form in which the primal now is a primal welling middle point for two continua [understood] as branches of the modes of [temporal] modifications: the continuum of what is just past and that of futurities.” (Ms. C 2 I, p. 15. Quoted in Mensch, p. 231.) Notice that Husserl referred to the “streaming living present” as the “primary, stationary streaming.” The “stationary” refers to the fact that the formal temporal structures are fixed; it is the whole structure which “streams.” Compare Ms. C 7 I, p. 31 (Quoted in Mensch, p. 225): “‘Stationary’ signifies [the Stream’s] unvarying being as a process—the process of primal temporalization.”

[74] Ms. C 2 I, p. 22. Quoted in Brand, p. 77.

[75] Ms. C 3 III, p. 23. Quoted in Held, p. 114

[76] Ms. C 17 IV, pp. 1-2. Quoted in Mensch, p. 93.

[77] Ms. C 17 IV. p. 5. Quoted in Held, p. 101. Compare with Ms. C 10, p. 23 (Quoted in Ludwig Landgrebe’s The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. [translated and and edited by Donn Welton, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981], p. 54. Hereafter “Landgrebe.”) , “the entire primal streaming occurrence is not a dead occurrence [dead meaning: foreign to the ego] but rather the accomplishment of the ego is the inner most dynamo”, and Hua XV p. 667 (Ms. C 1), “I am. It is from me that time is constituted.”

[78] It’s “prior” in the sense of a transcendental condition for the possibility of the other’s existence.

[79] Ms. C 17 IV, p. 6. Quoted in Held, p. 102. The original reads: “Das Strömen ist immerzu im Voraus; aber auch das Ich ist im Voraus.”

[80] “<The positings> are instead radiations from the <pure ego> as from a primal source of generation[:] every positing begins with a point of initiation, with a positional point of origin” (Ideas I, p. 235).

[81] “The ego-pole is in every case an a priori center of original properties”(Ideas II, p. 324).

[82] CM, p. 66.

[83] Ms. B III 9, pp. 13-14. Quoted in Mensch, p. 228. Compare: “The ego which is always now and remains now (which as a stationary and lasting now is actually not a now in an objective sense) is this living, this ‘supratemporal’ now, [is] the ego of all productions” (Ms. C 10, p. 29. Quoted in Mensch, p. 219).

[84] Ms. E III 2. Quoted in Held, p. 117. Also: “The ego in its originality is not in time.” (Ms. C 10, p. 21. Quoted in Held, p. 117) and “The ego, in this proper sense, has absolutely no duration.” (Ms. C 16 VII, p. 5. Quoted in Held, p. 117.)

[85] Hua XV, p. 589. Quoted in Mensch, p. 210-11.

[86] Ms. C 2 1, pp. 2-3. Quoted in Brand, p. 65. The quotation continues: “In the continuous self-splitting and then again identification of the ego I find an ur-ego, the ego as ur-pole, designated as the originary functioning ego and [I also find] that which the ur-ego (as opposed to the ego already come into existence and the surroundings of it, what is there for this and for me as anonymous ego and non-ego) bears in itself.”

[87] Ms. C 2 I, p. 12. Quoted in Mensch, p. 411.

[88] Ms. C 17 IV, pp. 3,5. Quoted in Landgrebe, p. 54.

[89] Ms. C 17 IV, p. 6. Quoted in Held, p. 102.

[90] Ms. B III 9, p. 23. Quoted in Mensch, p. 109.

[91] Ms. C 10, pg. 23. Compare with this quotation from C 7 I, pg. 18. “I always need two things: on the one hand the streaming field of the living experiences [Erlebnisse] within which [there is] constantly a field of primal impressions fading into retentions and before it, protentions; and, on the other hand, the ego that is affected and motivated to act by this.” Also C21: “We must make the distinction: on the one side, we have the temporal stream of consciousness and the transcendental ego of acts which is related to this temporality … on the other side, we have the primal ground of temporalization, the primal ego” (Quoted in Mensch, p. 411) and C6: “This primal impressional streaming present of the concrete primal-presence has the following universal structure: a) the phenomenological residue of the actually perceivable side of mundane reality, etc., namely the hylé of sensation, the ur-hylé in its own temporality; b) the “ego” with all open and hidden egoic constituents, to which [also] belongs: all constituents of the worldly apprehension, all constituents of the worldly “referring”, of the worldly horizonal-possibilities, of the worldly past, and so on.”

[92] See J. G. Fichte’s Science of Knowledge. Ed. and tr. Heath, Peter and Lachs, John. New York: Appelton Century Crofts, 1970.

[93] Ms. C 10, p. 21. Quoted in Mensch, p. 227.

[94] Ms. C 10, p. 25. Quoted in Mensch, p. 150. Italics mine.

[95] Eugen Fink’s comments on Alfred Schutz’s essay “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl” in Alfred Schutz’s Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1970), p. 86.

[96] see Dan Zahavni’s “The Self-Pluralization of the Primal Life. A Problem in Fink’s Husserl-Interpretation.” Researches Husserliennes. vol. 2, 1994. pp. 3-18.

[97] Alphonso Lingus, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Hereafter referred to as OBBE.

[98] OBBE, pg. 33

[99] OBBE, pg. 33

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