This week, I’ll be using Philosopher Fridays to add to my current thematic mini-series on Literary Time Consciousness. For this post, I draw lightly from my undergraduate philosophy thesis on time, and as such I owe much of my understanding to the professors who guided me.
Husserl: Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859-1938) was a Moravian-born German philosopher who is considered the father of phenomenology, which is essentially the study of the first-person subjective consciousness. His work extends to mathematics, psychology, science, epistemology, and more, making him a pillar of the philosophical canon. For a thorough introduction to his life and works, check out his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For now, let’s turn to his understanding of time as a subjective experience.
According to Husserl in his Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, no matter how regimented our experience of time may seem, we are still only able to understand it insofar as we are perceiving it. Attempts at an objective perspective are inherently naive, as each perception of an objective or subjective phenomenon is always added to a history of perceptions, the order of which is a perception in itself. As we perceive something new, all other perceptions are altered in light of it. If the meaning of the ordered content can change with new perceptions, then even time, as we think of it, is an object of intention.
As such, we have temporal order only as it relates to the streaming present, where there is order but no meaning, retention but not reflection, and protention (that is, looking intentionally forward) without expectation. The only thing that we can know for certain is that the present connects to what has come before and what will come after. That to which we expect it to connect is not an objective truth, but an intentional perception, and is thus subject to revision and manipulation.
The only inescapable tenant of time is the streaming consciousness. Retention and protention are facets of narrativity that proclaim some kind of order – though it is not necessarily one that is meaningful, durative, or purposeful. How we interpret that order itself part of our perception, and thus relies on other perceptions.
A great model for seeing this is to get into the headspace of partner dancing. Social partner dances are broken into two roles: leaders decide what moves to do and guide the motion, and followers receive that information and execute it fully. I particularly like following because it forces me to live inside the central moment of the present, even as it is inexorably connected to a past moment (retention) and will be connected to the next moment (protention). In order for me to really do my job as a follow well, I have to think of each piece of information I get from my lead as a moment. I must be connected to the previous moment, as the end of one moment is the set-up of the next moment (a move that winds me up will build momentum that will be released, for instance) but I can’t look intentionally forward with expectation – I have no real way of knowing what my lead is going to do next (the lead could release the momentum in any number of different directions relative to either of us), and so to be properly prepared, I need to be ready for something, but I cannot anticipate what.
While I can, after the fact, draw out some meaningful pattern – common moves, bits of famous choreographies, a musical structure, etc. – if I’m to succeed in executing that pattern, I need to be fully in the moment, executing each piece of the puzzle as fully as possible until I get new information. And yet (when I succeed – it’s challenging, and I’m no professional) it feels like continuous motion – I perceive it as streaming, well connected, and fluid.
What this means for Husserl is that our understanding of the present moment cannot be objective, as it depends upon the next moment to become meaningful. Following in a partner dance forces me to see that and embrace it. A talented follower could even use that knowledge to make subtle suggestions without taking over (it’s called “Ninja”ing the lead – playing an active role without “back leading”).
Next week, I’ll take a closer look at Husserl’s understanding of internal time consciousness, and explore the possibility that through literature, we might be able to “Ninja” our consciousness into a different experience of time, even if we cannot escape our temporal streaming. At the very least, through literature we might be able to see how we reflectively create subjective meaning in our experience of time, and realize that our foundation of reality is a lot less objectively solid than we typically assume.
6 thoughts on “Philosopher Fridays: Husserl On Time Consciousness, Part One”
SelfAwarePatterns
Michelle, this is turning out to be a fascinating series.
New moments definitely can change how we interpret past experiences, but I wonder which is usually affected more, how we view past experiences by new experiences, or how we interpret new experiences based on previous experiences. (Always keeping in mind that we come to these experiences with varying natures.)
Michelle Joelle
I’m so glad you’re enjoying – I’m having a lot of fun writing it. I think for Husserl, the effect of retention and protention are equal – just as reflection and expectation are equal also. I think also, every future moment only gives meaning as it becomes a past moment, which then itself becomes a new perception and… I’ll need to flesh this out next week, I think. Husserl is difficult!
SelfAwarePatterns
Looking forward to it.
Tienzen (Jeh-Tween) Gong
“… no matter how regimented our experience of time may seem, we are still only able to understand it insofar as we are perceiving it. Attempts at an objective perspective are inherently naive, … the order of which is a perception in itself. …
…The only thing that we can know for certain is that the present connects to… is not an objective truth, …
our understanding of the present moment cannot be objective, as it depends upon the next moment to become meaningful. … our foundation of reality is a lot less objectively solid than we typically assume.”
Again, you make a very difficult issue such an easy read. I do agree with all Husserl’s and your great reasons on the subjectivity but do not agree with your conclusion that those great reasons of subjectivity must lead to a conclusion that ‘reality is less objectively solid’. The subjectivity is a solid reality for any conscious agent for ‘sensing the external reality’, but it has no power of ‘altering’ the external reality beyond the reach of its senses.
Husserl was obviously getting his insights via intuition and introspection, a good common sense. But, seemingly, he did not challenge the scientific view ‘directly’. I have showed a ‘chicken/duck argument’ at “Scientia Salon” about the skepticism argument (at http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/are-you-sure-you-have-hands/comment-page-1/#comment-4155 ).
Chicken says: gaga
Duck says: yaya
Then, there are two possible outcomes for this chicken/duck argument.
(1) For every chicken (gaga), there is always a response of duck (yaya). Therefore, Gaga = yaya
(2) For every chicken (gaga), I always have a duck (yaya). Therefore, your gaga is wrong.
That is, unless we truly understand the ‘objective’ essence of ‘time’, most of our argument about ‘time and consciousness’ will be just gaga vs yaya. The key point is to show that Narnia story (measuring time is ad hoc) is the ‘essence’ while the ‘time’ of Newton and Einstein is only superficial phenomenon. There are two stories.
Story one: the experience of measuring ‘time’ in the past is the same as of at now, and the ‘expected’ experience of measuring ‘time’ in the future should be the same as of at now. This story is obviously a guesswork, could even be an illusion.
Story two: there is no way to place the time-measuring device into the ‘past’ to measure the ‘time’ in the past, and there is no way to ‘sent’ the time-measuring device into the future to measure the ‘time’ in the future. These are solid facts.
Yet, the story one is the ‘foundation’ of physics as the time-symmetry principle, while the story two was totally ignored in physics. As the ‘time’ in the largest part of this universe (the history and the future) is not measurable, why is Narnia story a fiction? Then, the problem does not stop at here.
The following is an objective time-measurement in physics, with a watch which produces the sounds (the ‘de’ and the ‘da’). The gap between the ‘de’ and ‘da’ is 1-second. The following measurement shows a 3-seconds ‘time-interval’.
Experiment one: de da de da (3-seconds, de/da printed on a page)
Experiment two: d
How long is the time-interval measured in experiment two? For the experiment two, the printer was jammed, and all the printing strike at the same spot. With this terrible experience, we have learned that there are three ‘necessary’ parts for measuring ‘time’.
One, there must be actions (de and da).
Two, these actions must be ‘distinguishable’ (such as a ‘gap’ in-between).
Three, there must be ‘something’ (such as a page or a mind) for these actions to express.
With this terrible experience, we should be able to write a ‘time-definition’ equation.
Time = F {actions (events; subjective or else), distinguishable, X (something not of time; for the expression of distinguished events)}
F is a function.
With an equation-definition, we should be able to discuss the ‘objective’ essence of ‘time’. With an objective ‘time’, we can then discuss the subjective consciousness. Most importantly, we much show that Narnia story is the essence of time while the time of Newton and Einstein is only the superficial phenomenon. This is a big story, and it takes more than one comment post.
Michelle Joelle
I think I must have been a little unclear, because Husserl does not think that we can subjectively alter objective “real” reality. There is a “real reality” for Husserl, but because we perceive in a constant streaming, the only way that we can come to “know” anything in that reality is by an active revision of our passive perception. In essence, our active subjectivity denies us access to that reality, so that when we think we know something real, we’re really only knowing our subjective revision of it, because in order to know it, we have to artificially abstract it from our streaming perception of it in order to concretize it at something meaningful – as an object for our knowledge.
That makes the discussion of an objective sense of time particularly difficult, because turning something durative into an object requires a fixing, or a determination which would utterly change our “real” experience of it. I use the dance example as a model because it slows things down and let’s us sort of reflectively pretend we’re not reflecting (and as I experience dancing as a follow, I am actively not reflecting or expecting). When I say that this might make objective reality feel less solid, I mean that I think this kind of thinking would make what I *think* is objective reality less solid, because I’m seeing “real” reality in an unfixed way – without the active revision that makes it something determinable.
In the end, I think we agree more than we disagree, and that the biggest issue is terminological.
Tienzen (Jeh-Tween) Gong
“In the end, I think we agree more than we disagree, …”
Exactly. But, this is not the case in the mainstream physics community. After 50 years (half a century) failures from M-string theory, SUSY and Multiverse, the physics community is now the base camp for ‘anti-realism’. The slogan is now, “The objective truth is an illusion; all missions of physicist are ‘model building’.” On this anti-realism issue, I debated with Byron Jennings (a theoretical physicist at TRIUMF, Canada) at quantumdiaries (an official blog of CERN). The followings are the records of those debates.
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2014/02/07/interpretations-of-quantum-mechanics/#comment-172367
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2013/12/06/paradigm-shift/#comment-162983
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2013/12/06/paradigm-shift/#comment-163211
You are discussing the most fundamental issue, subjective vs objective. But, while Husserl saw a ‘real reality’, his argument obviously did not change the mind of the modern physicists, because that his view is ‘philosophical’ without any connection to any testable physics model. But, in the above debates, ‘physics’ was the center measure on this ‘real reality’ issue. With these debates, the wind direction has now changed a bit. Hilary Putnam (a prominent Philosopher) is now advocating that Quine is not an anti-realist. See, http://putnamphil.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-final-post-for-now-on-whether-quine.html?showComment=1403375810880#c249913231636084948 .
Although the above debates are centered on physics, they are at the layman readable level. In fact, the anti-‘anti-realism’ can and must come from another direction. The most solid ‘subjective’ system is ‘language’ which is totally analytic while the issue of ‘mind’ is somewhat controversy. Yet, the most important principle in linguistics is the “Martian Language Thesis” (MLT: any human language can ‘always’ communicate with Martian or Martian-like language). This MLT shows a solid fact: The most subjective system (language) is totally based on ‘the’ objective foundation. More details on this MLT is available at http://www.chineselanguageforums.com/linguistics-f25/language-types-and-second-language-acquisition-t222.html#p1933 .
By the way, your “dance example as a model” is great. Yet, I think that this recent debates on the anti-realism may have some relevancy to your topic.