PRIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF REFLECTION1
Retention is not a modification in which impressional data really remain preserved, only in an altered form. Rather, retention is an intentionality, in fact, an intentionality of a special kind. When a primal datum, a new phase, emerges, the preceding one is not lost but is “retained in concept” (i.e., “retained” exactly), and thanks to this retention a looking back to what has expired is possible. Retention itself is not an act of looking back which makes an Object of the phase which has expired. Because I have the phase which has expired in hand, I live through [durchlebe] the one actually present, take it—thanks to retention—“in addition to” and am directed to what is coming (in a protention).
But because I have this phase in hand, I can turn my regard toward it in a new act which—depending on whether the living experience which has expired is being generated in a new primal datum (therefore, is an impression), or whether, already completed, it moves as a whole “into the past”—we call a reflection (immanent perception) or recollection. These acts stand to retention in the relation of fulfillment. Retention itself is not an “act” (i.e., an immanent unity of duration constituted in a series of retentional phases) but a momentary consciousness of the phase which has expired and, at the same time, a foundation for the retentional consciousness of the next phase. Since each phase is retentionally cognizant of the preceding one, it encloses in itself, in a chain of mediate intentions, the entire series of retentions which have expired. The unities of duration which are reproduced through the vertical lines of the diagram of time and which are the Objects of the retrospective acts are constituted precisely in this way. In these acts the series of constitutive phases together with the constituted unity (e.g., the enduring sound, retentionally preserved unaltered) attains givenness. It is thanks to retention, therefore, that consciousness can be made an Object.
We can now raise the question: What about the beginning phase of a self-constitutive lived experience? Does it also attain givenness only on the basis of retention and should we be “unconscious” of it if no retention followed thereon? On this it can be said that the beginning phase can become an Object only after its running-off in the way indicated, through retention and reflection (or reproduction). But were we aware of it only through retention, what its designation as “now” bestowed on it would be incomprehensible. The beginning phase could at most only be negatively distinguished from its modifications as that phase which does not make us retentionally conscious of any preceding ones. But consciously it is, of course, positively characterized throughout. It is certainly an absurdity to speak of a content of which we are “unconscious,” one of which we are conscious only later. Consciousness is necessarily consciousness in each of its phases. Just as the retentional phase was conscious of the preceding one without making it an object, so also are we conscious of the primal datum—namely, in the specific form of the “now”—without its being objective. It is precisely this consciousness that goes over into a retentional modification, which then is retention of this consciousness itself and the datum we are cognizant of originarily in it, since both are inseparably one. Were this consciousness not present, no retention would be thinkable, since retention of a content of which we are not conscious is impossible. As for the rest, primal consciousness is nothing inferred by reason but can be beheld in reflection on the constituted living experience as the constituting phase exactly as in the case of retention. One may by no means misinterpret this primal consciousness, this primal apprehension, or whatever he wishes to call it, as an apprehending act. Apart from the fact that it would be an obviously false description of the state of affairs, one would also in this way get involved in insoluble difficulties. If one says that every content attains consciousness only through an act of apprehension directed thereon, then the question immediately arises as to the consciousness in which we are aware of this act, which itself is still a content. Thus the infinite regress is unavoidable. However, if every “content” necessarily and in itself is “unconscious” then the question of an additional dator consciousness becomes senseless.
Furthermore, every act of apprehension is itself a constituted unity of duration. During the time that it is built up, that which it is to make into an Object is long since gone by and would be—if we did not already presuppose the entire play of primal consciousness and retentions—no longer accessible to the act at all. However, because primal consciousness and retentions are on hand, the possibility exists, in reflection of looking to the constituted lived experience and the constituting phases, and even becoming aware of the differences which exist, for example, between the primordial flux as we are conscious of it in primal consciousness and its retentional modifications. All the objections which have been raised against the method of reflection can be explained as arising from ignorance of the essential constitution of consciousness.
1. To § 39, especially pp. 105ff., and § 40, pp. 110ff.