The present volume is a translation of Edmund Husserl’s Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. With this translation Professor Churchill has rendered to the English-speaking world a service of inestimable value. In the light of the resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Husserl and the development of phenomenology more generally a translation of Husserl’s important but often neglected lectures on the phenomenology of the internal time-consciousness is long overdue, and we owe Professor Churchill a great deal for making accessible to the English reader this particular aspect of Husserl’s philosophical contribution. A translation is never an easy undertaking, and the value of the services performed by the translator are often overlooked. A good translation requires both a technical knowledge of the language and a fundamental grasp of the subject matter. The present translation is commendable on both counts. It remains grammatically true to the original text and succeeds in capturing the spirit of Husserl’s philosophy.
Phenomenology, since the foundations of its program were laid by Husserl, has always received serious attention on the Continent. In the United States and Great Britain, however, its impact has been somewhat delayed. Although it has been the subject of discussion for some time in various isolated philosophical circles in the English-speaking world, not until recently has it made its way into the mainstream of contemporary Anglo-American thought. This is in some respects puzzling, for the phenomenological approach is not alien to American philosophical soil. William James, for whom Husserl always had a great admiration, not only dealt with phenomenological issues but did so in a way that exhibits striking parallels to the method of Husserl. James’ interest in the structure of human consciousness and his suggestions regarding the intentional nature of knowledge afford a link between American pragmatism and German phenomenology which merits further exploration. Currently there is some interest in investigating the parallels between phenomenology and Anglo-American linguistic philosophy. Although it is well to caution against a too easy rapprochement between these two traditions, it would appear that the meanings disclosed in the usages of ordinary language are significantly akin to those explicated by the language of the “Lebenswelt.” It would thus be a fair inference that the task of philosophy is envisioned by these two traditions in a not wholly dissimilar way.
One of the more distinctive characteristics of the phenomenological movement is its cultural pervasiveness. Its impact has been discernible in studies on perception, psychology, psychiatry, ethics, religion, art, and education. Husserl himself was quite aware of the relevance of his investigations to the various areas in the cultural and historical life of man. Although the primary task which he assumed was that of laying the foundations (which in a sense have to be laid anew for each generation), his writings offer fertile suggestions for phenomenological investigations in the special areas of the humanities and the social sciences. He did not have the time to carry through these investigations, but he did provide the impulse and the methodological tools for his phenomenological successors. The continuation of this impulse and the refined elaboration of these tools is discernible in such provocative works as Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethics, Max Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy, Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, and Alfred Schutz’s The Problems of Social Reality—not to mention the direct influence of Husserl’s thought on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
In the thought of Husserl, as in the thought of every great philosopher, one can trace stages of development. He deepened his investigations and matured his reflections as he moved from the University of Halle (1887–1901) to Göttingen (1901–1916) and then to Freiburg (1916–1929). It was during his career at Freiburg, as well as during the period following his retirement, that he assimilated his later and mature reflections with his earlier insights. It was this whole course of development that gave to the world the seminal ideas of phenomenological philosophy. Some of the main themes and ideas that emerged throughout this development were: a critique of psychologism, the intentionality of consciousness, the phenomenological and eidetic reduction, the phenomenological ego, transcendental intersubjectivity, time-consciousness, and the life-world. Husserl’s approach to these phenomenological issues, however, was never that of the system-builder. He abhorred system-building as much as did Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. He was always a beginner, reexamining the foundations of his investigations, resisting all fixed formulations and final conclusions. Philosophy for Husserl was a never-ending pursuit of serious and open-ended questions, which lead to further questions that may require a resetting of the original questions. This at the same time accounts for the fertility of his investigations and for the philosophical freedom which his whole philosophy illustrates.
What place does Husserl’s essay on the internal time-consciousness have in his over-all historical and ideational development? The first part of the essay was originally presented as the content of a lecture course at the University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1904–1905. The second part is based on additional and supplementary lectures which he gave on the subject between 1905 and 1910. The period which spanned the formulation and development of the ideas contained in the present work constituted an interim between the publication of the second volume of his Logical Investigations (1901) and his Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913). Although Husserl published very little during these intervening years, this interim was a kind of ripening period for his philosophical ideas, as is evidenced by his lectures on time. The significance of these lectures did not become immediately apparent, either because of an apathetic philosophical audience or because of historical factors in the development of philosophy in Germany at the time. It was not until 1928 that the lectures were compiled and published by Husserl’s former student, Martin Heidegger.
The significance of the content of these compiled lectures can hardly be overemphasized. During his University of Halle period Husserl was interested in formulating a philosophical logic which would undercut any and all psychological reductivisms. In his Göttingen lectures the attention shifts from an interest in logic to an interest in the structure of consciousness. It is in these lectures that Husserl first makes explicit his doctrine of intentionality, which he took over from his former teacher, Franz Brentano, and then redefined so as to free it from all vestiges of psychologism. All forms of perception, according to Husserl, presuppose an intentional structure of consciousness, and it is in this intentional structure that the primordial link between consciousness and the world is to be sought. This theme of intentionality is then developed and more fully elaborated in his Ideas, which appeared three years after the completion of his lectures comprised in the present volume. Also, in the present volume one finds penetrating studies on phantasy, imagination, memory, and recollection. The distinctive contribution of these lectures, however, is Husserl’s exploration of the terrain of consciousness in the light of its temporality. Hence the significance and appropriateness of the title: The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Consciousness is qualified by temporal determinants. Temporality provides the form for perception, phantasy, imagination, memory, and recollection. In these lectures the two “categories” of temporality, retention and protention, which play such an important role in his subsequent thought, are stated and clarified. The distinction between cosmic and phenomenological time, which was so decisive in the development of existentialism, is delineated; and the relevance of phenomenological time for the constitution of temporal objects is discussed. All these themes were later developed more extensively in his Ideas and continued to hold his interest until the end of his philosophical career, as is evidenced by his Nachlass (presently housed in the Husserl Archives at the University of Louvain). The unpublished manuscripts have been collected and grouped under various headings, providing a kind of classification of his later philosophical interests. Of particular relevance for the present essay are the collected manuscripts entitled Zeitkonstitution als formale Konstitution (designated in the archives as “Manuskripten C”). A study of these manuscripts will show that his early Göttingen lectures not only provide the tone for his subsequent philosophical investigations but also state the basic problems with which Husserl was concerned until the very end. To be sure, significant reformulations take place throughout his philosophical maturation, but a discernible continuity is apparent as one moves from the early to the later Husserl.
Both the Husserl scholar and the general philosophical reader will benefit from this translation. It will provide the scholar with material for further examination of the significance of time in the thought of Husserl. It will provide the general reader with some of the methodological procedures and governing concepts in a type of philosophy which is eliciting increasing interest in various philosophical circles in the English-speaking world.
CALVIN O. SCHRAG
Purdue University