INTERNAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE COMPREHENSION OF LIVED EXPERIENCES1
Every act is consciousness of something, but every act is also that of which we are conscious. Every lived experience is “sensed,” is immanently “perceived” (internal consciousness) although naturally it is not posited or meant (“to perceive” here does not mean intentionally to be directed toward and to apprehend). Every act can be reproduced; to every “internal” consciousness of the act as an act of perception belongs a possible reproductive consciousness, for example, a possible recollection. To be sure, this seems to lead to an infinite regress; for is not the internal consciousness, the perception of the act (of judgment, of external perception, of rejoicing, etc.) now again an act, and hence itself internally perceived, and so on? On the other hand, we can say: every “lived experience” is in the significant sense internally perceived. But internal perception is, in the same sense, not a “lived experience.” It is not itself again internally perceived. Every lived experience which our regard can light upon manifests itself as something enduring, flowing, thus and thus changing. And the intending regard does not create this, but merely looks thereon.
This present, actual, enduring lived experience is, as we can discover through a change in our regard, after all a “unity of internal consciousness,” of time-consciousness, and this is precisely a consciousness of perception. “Perception” here is nothing other than temporally constitutive consciousness with its phases of flowing retentions and protentions. Behind this act of perception there stands no other such act, as if this flux were itself a unity in a flux. What we call “lived experience,” what we call the act of judgment, of enjoyment, of external perception, also the act of observing an act (which is a positing intention)—all these are unities of time-consciousness; therefore they are instances of perceivedness [Wahrgenommenheiten]. And to every unity corresponds a modification. More precisely: to the originary time-consciousness, to the perception, corresponds an act of reproduction, and to what is perceived corresponds something presentified.
We now set beside one another, therefore, the originary act and its presentification. The situation is then the following: Let A be any act known in internal consciousness (which has been constituted in it). Then if Pi is the internal consciousness of this act, we have Pi (A). Of A we have a presentification Vi (A); however, this in turn is something of which we are inwardly conscious. Therefore, we have Pi[Vi(A)].
Within internal consciousness and all its “lived experiences” we have, therefore, two kinds of event, A and Vi (A), which correspond to one another.
The whole phenomenology which I had in mind in Logische Untersuchungen was that of lived experiences in the sense of data of internal consciousness, and this, at all events, is a closed sphere.
Now A can be something different, for example, a sensible content, let us say, a sensed red. Sensation here is nothing other than the internal consciousness of the content of sensation. The sensation red (as the sensing of red) is therefore Pi (red) and the phantasm of red is Vi (red), which, however, has its own conscious existence Pi[Vi (red)]. Thus it is understood why in Logische Untersuchungen I could identify the act of sensation and the content of sensation. If I move within the frame of internal consciousness, there, naturally, we do not find an act of sensation, only what is sensed. It would also be correct, then, to contrast acts (intentional lived experiences of internal consciousness) and non-acts. The latter were precisely the totality of the “primary,” of the sensible content. As regards phantasms, on the other hand, it would naturally be wrong (within the frame of internal consciousness) to say of them that they are “lived experiences,” for the term lived experience signifies givenness of internal consciousness, inward perceivedness. We have, then, to distinguish the presentified content, let us say, the phantasied content of sense, and the presentifications of the same, the Vi(s) and those are intentional lived experiences belonging in the frame of internal consciousness.
Let us now consider the case where A is an “external” perception. It is naturally a unity of internal consciousness. And in internal consciousness there is a presentification of it, as there is of every lived experience. Therefore, Pe(g), like Pi[Pe(g)], has its Vi[Pe(g)]. Now it pertains to the essence of perception as such that a parallel presentification corresponds to it, namely, an act which presentifies the same thing that the act of perception perceives. “Reproduction” is the presentification of internal consciousness, which stands in contrast to the originary running-off, to the impression. Presentification of a material occurrence may not then be reproduction. The natural event is not produced once again, it is remembered, it stands before consciousness in the character of the presentified.
Let us now consider the remarkable relationship of both presentifications, obviously different in themselves from one another, which are here to be compared.
1. Over against Pe stands Vi(Pe) or, as we can now also write, R(Pe) (the internal reproduction of external perception).
2. Over against Pe stands Ve (the presentification of the external object e).
Now, there exists an essential law according to which R(Pe) = Ve. The presentification of a house, for example, and the reproduction of the perception of this house reveal the same phenomenon.
Furthermore, we can now say that the act of meaning [Meinen], which in the specific sense is “Objectifying,” can (1) have the character of “internal reflection,” of “internal perception” as a positing intention on the basis of that of which we are “inwardly conscious.” The act of meaning can accustom itself [sich hineinleben] to consciousness, can accept [nehmen] internal consciousness as a substrate. Then, as far as possible, all objectivities implicitly on hand in internal consciousness as such attain givenness; they become “objects.” In this way, sensations, understood as sensible contents, become objects, and, on the other side, all the acts constituted in internal consciousness as unities, cogitationes, the intentional lived experiences of internal consciousness.
(2) In internal consciousness, therefore, we also have “intentional lived experiences,” since there we have perceptions, judgments, feelings, cravings, and the like. These unities can function as substrates. Instead of positing them in “internal reflection,” i.e., in intentional “internal perception,” and objectifying them, an act of meaning enters into their intentionality and thus “takes” away from them the objects implicitly intended in them and makes them intended in the significant sense of the Objectifying act of positing. At the same time, the act which functions as a substrate can be an empty, presentifying one. Naturally, the memory of a joy or a desire, etc., can suddenly emerge and the act of meaning can direct itself toward the agreeable past event, the desired as such, without the vivid idea thereby prevailing.
We must, therefore, distinguish the pre-empirical being of the lived experiences, their being prior to the reflective glance of attention directed toward them, and their being as phenomena. Through the attending directed glance of attention and comprehension, the lived experience acquires a new mode of being. It comes to be differentiated,” “thrown into relief,” and this act of differentiation is nothing other than the act of comprehension, and the differentiation nothing other than being comprehended, being the object of the directed glance of attention. However, the matter is not to be thought of as if the difference consisted merely in this, that the same lived experience just united with the directed glance of attention is a new lived experience, that of directing-oneself-thither-to; as if, therefore, a mere complication occurs. Certainly when a directed glance of attention occurs, it is evident that we distinguish between the object of the directed glance of attention (the experience A) and the directed glance of attention itself. And certainly we have reason to say that our glance of attention was previously directed toward another, that the directed glance of attention toward A then took place, and that A “was already there” before this act. But we take into consideration that this talk of the same lived experience is very ambiguous and that it is in no way to be inferred directly from this way of speaking (where it finds legitimate application) that phenomenologically nothing has been altered in manner of the modal setting of this “same” for the living experience.
Let us consider the matter more closely. The directed glance of attention, which, as we say, goes at one time this way and at another time that, is also something that is grasped through a new directed glance of attention, and thus becomes primordially objective (in a primordial cognizance of it). Consequently, the setting-in-relation of the object of the directed glance of attention and the directed glance itself and the primordial taking cognizance of this relation constitute also a new phenomenon, just as is the setting-in-relation of the directed glance of attention to the object prior to this act, with the knowledge that this directed glance of attention to the object previously free of it supervenes.
We understand without further ado what it means to have a directed glance of attention toward an object, for example, toward this piece of paper, and, in particular, toward a corner of the paper which is especially prominent. This distinction on the “subjective side,” the attending itself in its various steps, is something entirely other than what is specifically noted and not noted in the Object. The object is given in an attentional mode and, if the occasion should arise, we can again direct our attention to the alteration of these modes, precisely to that which we have just described, namely, that, with regard to the object, now this, now that is objective in a particular way, and that what is now specially favored was already there but previously not so favored, that everything favored has a background, an environment in that objective total frame, and so on. It pertains to the essence of this object that it is dependent, that it cannot be without “its” mode of exhibition, i.e., without the ideal possibility of making this an object, and again to pass over from this to the object. It is again part of the essence of the “one and the same” object of which I am conscious in a series that my regard is to be directed toward this very series of modes of exhibition.
These reflections take place in the unity of a time-consciousness. The newly comprehended was—so it is said—already there, belongs to what was previously comprehended as a background, and so on. Every “change of attention” implies a continuity of intentions and, on the other side, in this continuity lies a unity capable of being grasped, a constituted unity, the unity of that which is exhibited only in different attentional changes and from which at any given time different moments or parts are “attended to,” “stand in the light.”
Now, what is attention other than the running-off of differences of such modes of “consciousness as such,” and the circumstance that such instances of perceivedness go together into one which is in form “the same” and which has now this, now that attentional mode? What does it mean to reflect on the moment “directed glance of attention toward”? At one time, the attentional modes run off “naïvely.” In their running-off, my glance of attention is directed toward the object appearing in them. At another time, an objectifying regard is directed toward the series of modes itself. In memory, I can run through the series repeatedly, and as such it has its unity.
1. To § 44, pp. 122ff.