On Time: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Accounts 1443897523, 9781443897525

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On Time

On Time: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Accounts Edited by

Marina Marren

On Time: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Accounts Edited by Marina Marren This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Marina Marren and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9752-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9752-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................ ix INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1 PART I: TIME AND ETERNITY IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY AND IN THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS BEING AND ETERNITY: A NON-THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF ETERNITY .............. 7 ZACHARY BIONDI TEMPORALITY OF THE UNSEEN AND UNREPRESENTED: KIERKEGAARD’S ETERNAL LOVE AND LEVINAS’S INFINITE RESPONSIBILITY ....................... 17 ASHLEY GAY THE TIME OF THE BODY: SEX, LITURGY, ESCHATOLOGY ........................... 31 JOHN PANTELEIMON MANOUSSAKIS PART II: PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE TEMPORAL FUNCTION: UNSETTLING FORCE OR UNIFYING AGENT? THE TURN, THE OPEN: FROM DASEIN’S CONSCIOUSNESS OF TIME TO TIME’S AFFECTION OF DASEIN .............................................................. 49 MICHAEL R. KELLY TIME AND IMAGINATION IN KANT’S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON................ 81 MARINA MARREN BETWEEN IDEALISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY: KIERKEGAARD ON RELIGIOUS TEMPORALITY ............................................ 91 GREGORY P. FLOYD INTERNAL TIME AND HISTORY: ON HUSSERL AND RICOEUR ................... 105 KEVIN MARREN CONTRIBUTORS ........................................................................................ 129

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many of the essays to follow were presented at Boston College in April of 2015 at a conference entitled Phenomenology and Time. We want to share our deepest gratitude with all of the contributors and presenters, as well as all of the conference participants. Special thanks are reserved for the Boston College community members who made the conference possible. We would like to thank Fr. Arthur Madigan and Dean Candace Hetzner for funding so graciously our endeavors. Also, thank you to all of the graduate students in the Boston College Philosophy Department who contributed to the organization of the conference.

FRANCISCO GOYA, TRUTH RESCUED BY TIME, WITNESSED BY HISTORY (C. 1812 – 1814)

INTRODUCTION

A winged demon holds an hour glass in his left hand and, with his right one, leads a naked maiden. She is truth being unveiled by time. Another unrobed female figure is portrayed sitting down and holding a book. She is history. Francisco Goya’s (1746—1828) unfinished, allegorical sketch “Time, Truth and History” (1797—99 or 1804) images the relationship between these three dimensions or meanings of existence. Drawn during the period in which Goya’s focus shifts from the search for halcyon beauty towards reflections that bespeak a coincidence between the fantastic and the mundane, the sketch relates a sense of uneasiness and tension generated by the confrontation with the necessarily uncertain foundations of human existence. Time arises in the face of our attempts at reckoning with an abyssal uncertainty. What does it mean to count time? To resolve to count the limitless, and to believe that by such a counting we measure existence, means to live in a construct. Fancy and fantasy are at the core of human constructs, world orderings, and models. And yet, if we pay attention, as did Goya, to the uncanniness of the fantastical, which traces out and glosses over the appearance of human life, we confront also the monstrous. As we work back from Goya’s finished painting, “Truth Rescued by Time, Witnessed by History” (1812—1814), to the underlying sketch we mentioned to start, we reckon with the abyssal, the limitless, the excessive, and the monstrous permutations of that which we aim to regulate and count. For, although Goya’s demonic sketch predates the painting that has covered it over with the better angels of our intellectual nature, for us, the deeper image, which we can only arrive at in the second place, raises the better questions. The meaning of time, having been eclipsed in a finished painting, is revealed as we trace it back to and work it out in Goya’s sketch. The meaning is beautifully simple until we start scraping off the veneer—our constructs, models, and orderings—and asking after its truth. The essays in this volume retrace time in its multi-dimensional, carnal, cognitive, and world installing arrangements. Questioning after the relationship between time and eternity, Zachary Biondi’s contribution triangulates the Ancient, Platonist, and Modern views of time. Drawing on Plato, Plotinus, and Spinoza, Biondi articulates the philosophical foundation of the theological account of eternity and argues that the

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Introduction

thinking of eternity is then fruitful when it owes less to mysticism and more to the systematic efforts of the human intellect. Pursuing the opposing trajectory of argumentation, Ashley Gay’s rigorous investigation of the eternal and the infinite relies on Levinas’s thinking about concealed divinity and on Kierkegaard’s account of an incalculable time in order to ask after an eternity that arrives as love in the face of death. Articulating the relationship between classical, theological, and contemporary philosophies on time, John Panteleimon Manoussakis filters his findings through the lens of psychoanalytic and literary reflections on temporality. Manoussakis’s rich essay insists on a return or recoil from the otherworldly, and it configures the eternal as the carnal, lived, and sensuous flow of temporal phenomena. The contribution by Michael Kelly marks a shift in focus in the volume. Kelly’s essay does not concern itself with the eternal, nor does it approach time from a strictly scientific or theological perspective. Instead, analyzing Heidegger’s reflections on time in the Kantbuch, Kelly develops a phenomenological account of the confluences and the divergences between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s understanding of temporality. Marina Marren’s essay shows a thematic continuity with Kelly’s work. Marren takes up Kant’s chapter on the schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason. Marren develops arguments intended to show what the implications of the relationship between time and imagination are for Kant’s view of cognition. Continuing the investigation of time understood as an element that constitutes a self, Gregory P. Floyd’s essay questions the origin and genesis of the reflective self in Kierkegaard. Positioning Kierkegaard’s religiosity against Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies of time, Floyd offers an integrated view of the heterogeneous temporality of the self. Concluding the volume, Kevin Marren’s essay defends Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time against Paul Ricoeur’s critique from Time and Narrative. Marren’s findings point to oversights in Ricoeur’s account. The essay provides a Husserlian reintegration of Ricoeur’s narrative theory with transcendental phenomenology. The essays in this volume all aim to be an occasion for the reader to arrive at original insights about the relationship between eternity and time, temporality and worldly existence, and the temporal dimension at the heart of the agencies that constitute the self. Another goal pursued by the publication is to avail the readers of the sense that the questioning about time is always also an inquiry about the character of one’s own existence. One of the reasons for this intimate connection between temporality and character is time’s function as the ground of history. As we take time now to reflect on what is so succinctly imaged by Goya’s painting—on time’s

On Time: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Accounts

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revealing power—we observe the dark moments in the biography of one of the most careful thinkers of time: Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had himself timed the release of his Schwarze Hefte. Now his groundbreaking analyses of temporality, in Sein und Zeit, are all the more poignant. The realization that the same individual, Heidegger, wrote both about the call of conscience and decried world Jewry is, as Heidegger himself might say, unheimlich (uncanny) to the utmost degree. However, this uncanniness is but one example of the way in which one’s own time— the time of one’s thinking—is both ahead of itself and is retrograde. Certainly, Heidegger’s thought has contributed towards the working out of time even in this introduction—to the meaning of concealment and truth. Yet, that one and the same thing can be monstrous and be glossed over by beauty indicates, for us, that time cardinally lacks coincidence with itself. Out of this non-coincidence arises the possibility of reflection, of return, of an attempt at a home coming. Such attempts bear no guarantee of being fruitful, if by the latter we understand solely having something with which to comfort ourselves, or with which to reaffirm our views of the world, our egos, or our entrenched senses of self. This is all the more reason to set sail. Let the questioning bring up from the probed depths the grievous images that go into the constitution of both the self and the world. The reflective pursuits do not stop here. Time given, the animating loves, truths, and callings—those joints that hold up the hope in the goodness of life—also manifest. Are not these worth the time we give to work that makes possible their arrival? —Marina and Kevin Marren

PART I: TIME AND ETERNITY IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY AND IN THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS

BEING AND ETERNITY: A NON-THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF ETERNITY ZACH BIONDI

Death is not an event in Life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. —Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.4311

The debate over a proper view of eternity has traditionally been concentrated around two distant poles: timelessness and sempiternity. The former is thought to have originated in Plato, the latter in Aristotle. Such a characterization makes historically oriented discussions concerning eternity far more manageable. But the sharpness with which these discrete notions are opposed is not commensurate with whether, historically speaking, the two Greeks univocally advocated for their respective theories; the differences among them are not as drastic as the titles ascribed to their views would lead us to believe. It is likely that the poles were set with the integration of Greek thought into Christian thought: the exigencies of theology called for careful theorizing about eternity for purposes of solving problems surrounding God’s nature.1 Hence, as is expected with this development, ascriptions of eternity are typically reserved for God—with the possible addition of mathematical truths and laws of logic (both of which might be related to God in some way relevant to how one should understand the eternity of logical and mathematical truths). Few can deny that talk of eternity is dominated by theology, and one cannot go far without seeing a theory of eternity applied to or motivated by theological concerns (and very few things besides God are called eternal). Does God exist in time? If not, how does he act in time? 1

See W. von Leyden “Time, Number, and Eternity in Plato and Aristotle,” in The Philosophical Quarterly 14, no. 54 (Jan. 1964), 36-7.

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Being and Eternity: A Non-Theological View of Eternity

How might God ‘perceive’ time, if such a phrase makes sense? And there are far more issues in philosophical theology that make use of eternity. Godspeed to those debates. They, however, will not be my concern here. There is a powerful pedigree of philosophers with non-theological theories of eternity.2 In fact—and in proper monist spirit—these theories are essentially one theory, running from Plato to Plotinus to Spinoza. My emphasis will predominantly be on Plotinus, with the predecessor and progeny surfacing to supply textual parallels and bring greater clarity. It is not my aim to chart the influences of the earlier figures on the later figures, but instead to focus on the ideas.3 I acknowledge that there are crucial differences between the three figures (to claim there are not would be foolish), but this does not preclude a fruitful synthesis and unification of their commonalities, especially with regard to a specific topic; and ‘What is a non-theological way of understanding eternity?’ is a question worthy of an answer. Although the three thinkers use eternity in different ways on occasion—i.e. applying it to different parts in their systems and using it to solve different problems—I claim that the concept of eternity they are using is essentially one and the same. Plotinus’ view of eternity is mainly confined to his tractate, “Time and Eternity” (III.7).4 In it there are several definitions that serve as fitting starting points: Thus, we come to the definition: the life—instantaneously entire, complete, at no point broken into period or part—that belongs to the Authentic Existent by its very existence, this is the thing we were probing for—this is Eternity. (III.7.3) 2

Theological here narrowly construed. Of the three I consider, Plotinus is most likely to be considered theological, but he is also likely not taken as propounding the orthodoxy of a particular religion, and this is my meaning. One might also call their views ‘non-theistic’ in the sense that 1) for all three, eternity is not required in order to square certain preset notions of God’s character, and 2) Plotinus and Spinoza (and Plato, if he is pushed) do not mean by God an anthropomorphic deity with a personality, and it is likely true to call them atheists with respect to the gods of traditional religions. Eternity and God are hence separable. Conceptually, it is worth noting, calling the view of eternity ‘non-theological’ is not to commit the advocate of the view to atheism (which explains my phrasing). ‘Non-theological’ and ‘non-theistic’ are not equivalent. The former emphasizes the idea that eternity might relate or apply to a God. The latter is stronger and likely entails the former. 3 The amount of influence could not be more different. Plotinus saw himself simply as an expositor of Platonism, whereas Spinoza was very likely to be wholly unaware of Plotinus (but probably familiar with Neoplatonism generally). 4 Plotinus, The Enneads, S. Mackenna (London: Penguin Books, 1991). All parentheticals reference sections in III.7.

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Thus a close enough definition of Eternity would be that it is life limitless in the full sense of being all the life there is and a life which, knowing nothing of past or future to shatter its completeness, possesses itself intact for ever. (III.7.5)

Eternity, as we see, is linked with life and being as such, not with a span of existence—as incalculable or infinite as that span might be. In fact, eternity must be understood as the express denial of such temporal attempts at explanation: what is not eternal is temporal, and the existence of being itself, when conceived simply as being, must be eternal. For Plotinus, there is something (or a way of understanding or experiencing everything) to which temporality does not apply. We are to abandon an understanding of eternity through time in favor of an understanding through being. Plotinus says, “That which neither has been nor will be, but simply possesses being; that which enjoys stable existence as neither in process of change nor having ever changed—that is eternity” (III.7.3). One hears echoes of Parmenides in the idea that eternity is the unbroken and full existence of the whole. After all, for Parmenides, the questioning of what there was before being and what there will be after falls far from the path of persuasion. There can be no conception of an eternal thing that persists through time or is generated or annihilated; rather, eternity entails the complete and entire existence of something unlimited by notions of before and after. In a sense, it sits above and unaffected by such conceptions. What is eternal is being, namely, the whole: it is changeless and motionless, inherently entire, impervious to development. It is not subject to growth or decay, now being one way and later another, but is always all of itself, concentrated at one point, as Plotinus says (III.7.3) Accordingly, in contemplating the whole, we move away from constraining and, strictly speaking, inaccurate notions of unending time to a consideration of the nature and essence of being and life. We find the same view in Spinoza, in a definition to Part 1: “By eternity I understand existence itself [ipsam existentiam], insofar as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the definition alone of the eternal thing.”5 This might appear hopelessly circular, but any such reading is a mistake. Spinoza means something very close to Plotinus: eternity is not 5

Baruch Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, Edwin Curley, ed. and trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Cf. especially, (Id8). All references to the Latin are from Spinoza Opera, 4 vols., Carl Gebhardt, ed. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925). The Ethics is abbreviated as follows: ‘IIp7s,’ for instance, that means ‘Ethics Part 2, Proposition 7, Scholium’ ‘d’, ‘a’, ‘c’ refer to definition, axiom, and corollary, respectively.

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Being and Eternity: A Non-Theological View of Eternity

explicated through duration, but is instead the eternal truth of the existence of the whole, whose essence is all things (everything considered as a unity) and thus existence. Spinoza, like Plotinus, expresses eternity as precisely not existence in time, even time considered as without beginning or end, as he says in the explication following the definition: “For such existence, like the essence of a thing, is conceived as an eternal truth, and on that account cannot be explained by duration or time [per durationem aut tempus explicari non potest], even if the duration is conceived to be without beginning or end.”6 This is perhaps the clearest expression of the timelessness of the eternity view.7 The whole must exist (for the alternatives—i.e., something less than the whole or more than the whole— are incoherent) and must include in it everything. One is reminded of Quine famously answering, “everything” to the question “what is there?”. Plotinus considers this explicitly when he argues for the whole as immune to exclusion. By this he means that all that exists is included, and all that does not (all that is non-existent) is, quite obviously, not contained within the whole. What it means to exist is to be contained within the category of ‘everything.’ Eternity is the existence of this ‘everything’ considered as an undifferentiated whole (Ip15s); it is being as such when understood as an immutable and unchangeable unity. In the view of both figures there is only one (however, not the One of Plotinus, which is ineffable) that deserves the ascription of eternity, but this ascription is nothing more than the being of the whole—i.e., to use Spinoza’s language, the existence, essence, and eternity of the whole are all one and the same (Ip34). “There is, of course, no difference between Being and Everlasting Being,” Plotinus says (III.7.6). It is the nature of being to be eternal, and any proper understanding of one term will include an understanding of the other. Although it is true that eternity cannot be understood through temporality, time is not therefore extraneous. It is important to understand the above notion of eternity in relation to time, and how eternal being relates to the changing world bound in time. We begin with the patriarch. Plato is certainly without the strong monisms of Plotinus and Spinoza, but he speaks similarly about eternity when he considers the forms. He calls them “changeless,”8 “ever the same and in the same state,”9 “uniform,” 6

Spinoza, Id8. In fact, Spinoza stresses this time and time again in the Ethics. He says, for instance, at Vp23s, “[W]e nevertheless feel that our mind, insofar as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity, is eternal, and that this existence it has cannot be defined by time or explained through duration.” 8 Plato, Timaeus in Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), 28a. 7

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and “indissoluble.”10 Plato’s theory is not as clear and developed as those who followed him, and, as I stated at the outset, he is not an undeviating propounder of the timelessness idea we discover more directly in the other two, but what we find in the Timeaus particularly are the forms described as pre-existing the creation of the world as eternal templates which serve as the ‘image’ of not only the world but of time itself. The model of the world (i.e., the forms) is “an everlasting living thing.”11 If it is uniform and everlasting, it clearly cannot be thought of as in development, growth or decay, or in any way bound to temporality. The world, however, being subject to change, process, and variation, does not share in these qualities of the forms, and in fact cannot due to the separation: Plato says, “[I]t was the Living Thing’s nature to be eternal, but it isn’t possible to bestow eternity fully upon anything that is begotten.”12 There is a stark divide between eternity and temporality, yet despite this, there is a relation. The moving world is an ‘image’ (eikos) of eternity. This obscure phrasing is also found in Plotinus who argues that time is understood to be a “representation in image” of eternity (III.7.1). Plato means by this that the world of time is somehow analogous to the eternal model; it is a likeness in that it copies certain true characteristics of the model and does not merely resemble it, to use the distinction found at Sophist 235d.13 The world must bear a certain relation to its model; otherwise there is no structure in which the world can partake. And being that the models are eternal and the world partakes in them, although the world is not eternal, it must be an image of the models and thus an image of eternity. The shadows and puppets are images of the authentic and ‘more real’ objects outside. This manner of speaking highlights for Plato the idea that the forms are more fundamental than the created world, and the latter is derived from the former: “Time, then, came together with the universe.”14 We also find in Plotinus the idea that eternity is, metaphysically speaking, prior to time, and time should always be understood as depending on eternity. He says, “Time itself must descend from eternity” (III.7.7). The similarity between the two is even more striking when we consider the creation-myth structure and language of the Timeaus; and for Plato it is in a passage concerning the creation of the world that we find treatment of the relationship between eternity and time. Plotinus employs a comparable 9

Ibid., Phaedo in Complete Works, 78d. Ibid., 80b. 11 Timaeus, 37d. 12 Ibid. 13 See von Leyden, “Time, Number, and Eternity in Plato and Aristotle,” 37-8. 14 Timaeus, 38b. 10

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creation-myth when he turns to his own theory of time after refuting the others in 7-10. He says, To this end [i.e., a definition of time] we must go back to the state we affirmed of Eternity, unwavering Life, undivided totality, limitless, knowing no divagation, at rest in unity and intent upon it. Time was not yet; or at least it did not exist for the Eternal Beings. It is we that must create time out of the concept and nature of progressive derivation, which remained latent in the Divine Beings. […] Time lay, though not yet as Time, in the Authentic Existent together with the Cosmos itself.” (III.7.11)

It is from an understanding of eternity that we can make sense of the existence of time, which is separate from eternity and yet bears some relation or likeness to it. Time is also understood through number in Plato’s case15 and additionally through “derivation” for Plotinus. (This commonality—the intimate relation between time and mathematics—is seen most notably in Kant). I will consider two other points from this passage and the others I have employed: the categories of eternity and time are somehow discrete and yet related or analogous, as we have seen; and further, we somehow play an active role in the creation of time insofar as we measure and experience it. Plotinus’ tractate begins with the dichotomy of the essay’s title: we learn that time and eternity are discrete and mutually exclusive categories (“two entirely separate things” (III.7.1)), and thus there can be nothing, when conceived in a particular way that can be eternal and temporal. The relevance of ‘conception,’ as I phrase it, is both important and vague. In Spinoza, for instance, it is through an act of the intellect (namely, ‘reason,’ the second type of knowledge (IIp40s2)) that enables a person to perceive something no longer bound within a temporal sequence or process, but rather sub quadam specie aeternitatis, and hence as necessary (IIp44c2). Similarly in Plotinus, although the categories are discrete, the membership of a thing to one class or the other is not a question of a neutral ontological sorting process (i.e., this object is temporal and that one is eternal) but depends on how the thing is conceived according to the unity of being, and the manner of this conception naturally depends upon an act of intellect as well. The issue concerns the form of one’s knowledge of being. Plotinus and Spinoza certainly wish to retain our normal way of speaking about particular and separate things existing in time while also maintaining the eternity of the unified whole. How can they maintain this when the categories are utterly discrete and yet everything is part of the whole? 15

Ibid., 37d.

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The answer lies in the role we play in the creation of time. Spinoza says that “quin etiam tempus imaginemur” (IIp44s). In fact, no one can doubt it. By imagination Spinoza means the lowest type of knowledge: the fragmentary, “mutilatam et confusam” perception of the succession of objects presented to the senses. Time then, being a product of a low type of knowledge, only exists insofar as we perceive images in succession, and does not exist (at least as we experience it, though this is controversial) in any real way apart from these perceptions. (The notion of levels of knowledge is, of course, inspired by Plato and the divided line in Republic at 509d-511e). Plotinus makes the same point, saying, “Time [is the] Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another” (III.7.11). Here, we find a clear parallel to Spinoza’s idea that time is comprised according to a succession of sensory experiences—and the relevance of number in the experience of time is particularly germane. Plotinus continues, “Time, however, is not to be conceived as outside of the Soul,” (III.7.11) expressing the necessary role the Soul plays in the creation of time. Plotinus even makes the strong claim that time would cease to exist without an ‘imagining’ soul: “If, then, the Soul withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal unity, Time would disappear” (III.7.12).16 This, however, is not the claim that time would disappear with the disappearance of Soul, but a claim about an intellectual transformation the Soul can undergo. Like Spinoza, we can conceive of things as eternal when we understand them through a higher type of knowledge. If the soul is united with the Unity, for Plotinus, or if we attain knowledge that proceeds from adequate ideas of the essence of God, for Spinoza, we will then understand the whole under the form of eternity. This form of knowledge is the understanding of things as necessary insofar as they follow from the essence of the whole. Since the whole is eternal and not subject to change, what exists must exist and cannot exist in any other way. Embracing the eternity of the whole leads to this Stoic point, which is seated in proper understanding (i.e., an act of intellect). Although this is attainable, it is not permanently attainable: both Plotinus and Spinoza hold that humans, being a part of nature, necessarily at times perceive according to the lower type of knowledge, and, accordingly, a life wholly without the experience of time is impossible. But the less one experiences 16

Because Spinoza holds that humans are necessarily a part of nature and thus necessarily passive at times, there is no such thing as a ‘non-imagining’ mind. Although we can work to conceive of more things under a form of eternity (and this is virtue and blessedness itself), we can never conceive of everything in this way. Expressed in another way, we are not self-sufficient bodies; we require other bodies for our existence. But, as we see, Plotinus has a similar view.

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Being and Eternity: A Non-Theological View of Eternity

in time, and thus conceives eternally, the greater one’s virtue. For Spinoza, these two are one and the same. We are to become rational mystics. It is worth pointing out in conclusion that all three thinkers recognize the inherent challenge of speaking about eternity. Here we are confronted with the familiar boundaries and frustrations of apophasis. Plato, for instance, uses various time-esque terms to describe the forms: e.g., “everlasting” and “sempiternal.”17 Plotinus, one of the greatest apophatics, eschews temporal means of speaking about eternity, though he concedes that such a project is, as a practical matter, impossible. Spinoza links language with a process of imagination (i.e., memory (IIp18s)), which, we have seen, is bound to temporality. However, Plato is probably clearest about these shortcomings: “[W]as and will and be are forms of time that have come to be. Such notions we unthinkingly but incorrectly apply to everlasting being. […] [B]ut according to the true account, only is is appropriately said of it.”18 Spinoza says at Ip33s2, “[I]n eternity, there is neither when, nor before, nor after.” Failings of language are inevitable when speaking about eternity, and perhaps the very act of speaking presupposes a dependence on time, in which case we cannot expect our language to stretch towards concepts like eternity. There is no hope in equipping language for eternity by purifying it. Can an utterance itself be eternal? Spinoza is conscious of this, and we are left to work through his proofs. There is something infuriating and yet enticing about the idea, shared by the three and many more in the history, that we must be diligent and patient, and open to the idea that what seem like problems now will (in time), when we finally reach the good or achieve the intellectual love of God, eventually dissolve. We are being led by the hand, as it were, up Wittgenstein’s ladder. The common image of ascent stresses that it is not the world that changes, but the perspective; the ascent does not yield solutions to problems, but a manner of seeing—one in which we see that there is no problem at all. These approaches frustrate common sensibilities of philosophy today. In all three we find the idea (contrary also to our scientific sensibilities) that what is tangible and sensible, what we commonly take to be the most real due to its amenability to measurement and quantification is, in fact, not the most real, but confused and ephemeral, derivative and dependent. Eternity is abstract and difficult (and perhaps impossible) to express to others. It does not follow from this, however, that it is less essential to life and existence, or that it is a chimera or sophistry. It is the opposite! It 17 18

Timaeus, 38c. Ibid., 37e-38a.

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demands a patience that so few are willing to give. But in due course and diligence we can achieve the highest knowledge, the intellectual love of God; we can experience the loss of our soul in the One and come to understanding; we can, as the well-known story goes, ascend into the light.

TEMPORALITY OF THE UNSEEN AND UNREPRESENTED: KIERKEGAARD’S ETERNAL LOVE AND LEVINAS’S INFINITE RESPONSIBILITY ASHLEY GAY

Both Kierkegaard and Levinas write of an alternative temporality, figured in faces of death1 and the unseen God.2 Kierkegaard describes this temporality as eternity, experienced in love for the dead,3 and in the indiscriminate love for every other.4 Levinas describes an immemorial time that opens the relation to the Infinity of the Other. In reading Levinas through Kierkegaard, this essay has four aims: (1) to enunciate Kierkegaard’s notion of eternity in Works of Love, especially insofar as it disrupts a temporality of calculation, return, or false infinities; (2) to suggest how this alternative temporality affords a loving relation to the unseen God, the dead beloved, and every neighbor who is seen with a “closed eye;”5 (3) to intimate the dilemma of expressing time as both a relation to God and a relation to another’s death; and (4) to hear Kierkegaard’s eternal love in conversation with Levinas’s infinite 1

Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. H. and E. Hong (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 317-329. Also, Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. B. Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 117. 2 The “unseen” God is Kierkegaard’s language. Though, the disruption of phenomenology implied in this phrase resembles Levinas’s language of God’s enigma—the disruption of a phenomenon, an appearance. Hence Levinas, too, can write of the incognito God. Emmanuel Levinas, “Phenomenon and Enigma,” Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 66, 72. 3 Works of Love, 317-329. 4 Ibid., 158-159. Kierkegaard’s eternal love “makes every relation to other human beings into a God-relationship”—a statement not unlike Levinas’s understanding of the God who comes to us in the face of the other (ibid., 345). 5 Ibid.

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responsibility, while acknowledging the latter’s more radical break with the temporality of ontology.6

1. Eternity of the Unseen in Works of Love I will first isolate the term eternal as not simply in contrast to infinity, but in contrast to the worldly. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard emphasizes that the temporality of Christian love reveals the insufficiencies of various worldly loves: the poet’s “self-love;” the “giddy” infinity of erotic love; and the “lofty” expression of celebrated love.7 In contrast to these incomplete modes of loving, he suggests eternal love as the “awareness of possibility.”8 The experience of the eternal seems as ‘lofty’ as it is phenomenologically problematic. However, Kierkegaard’s atemporal love is far from an exemption from temporality, or a suspension of Levinasian ethics. Kierkegaard’s sense of the eternal is rather akin to an immemorial time that disrupts the economy of returns or reciprocity. Eternal love has its own temporality, a “prior history” to the “interlude[s]” of “erotic love and friendship.”9 Erotic love and “earthly love” imply a joy of being; eternal love is not bound to the dynamics of being and nothingness. The contrast between these interludes of ‘worldly loves’ and the ultimacy of eternal love could be better expressed as that between incomplete loves, and an ever-completing love—between an unsatisfactory (insufficient, partial) love and an unsatisfiable (immeasurable because not calculating)10 love. A helpful set of distinctions, but not without a problem at the heart of the “eternal.” For it is not simply as Kierkegaard initially 6

Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 31-43. I acknowledge that this enterprise of comparison is perilous, insofar as drawing any parallels implies a synchrony, or a potentially reductive relation. However, I would like to risk this reading so as to welcome the two authors into one another’s philosophical contributions. Following Lyotard, one might call this a commentary rather than a work, in the Levinasian sense. JeanFrancois Lyotard, “Levinas’s Logic,” Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 117-118. 7 Works of Love, 35-36. 8 “The lover, on the other hand, hopes all things; for him no indolence of habit, no pettiness of mind, no picayunishness of prudence, no extensiveness of experience, no slackness of the years, no evil bitterness of passion corrupts his hope or adulterates possibility. Every morning, yes, ever moment, he renews his hope and enlivens possibility, if love endures and he endures in love.” Ibid., 241. 9 Ibid., 149. 10 Ibid., 176.

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states, “Erotic love is still not the eternal; it is the beautiful giddiness of infinite.”11 In other words, the distinction is not between a limited erotic love and eternal love, but two senses of the infinite. Kierkegaard revises: as there is a worldly sense of the infinite (erotic love praised by the poet), there is also an eternal sense of the infinite. The worldly lover, suspicious of infinite love, points out its insufficiencies.12 In a way, Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is thus written from the perspective of the worldly lover. And yet, because of this noted insufficiency, he can somehow hope for the “eternal sense of infinite.”13 The finitude of the world’s infinite love becomes apparent in what it is not. Therefore, the eternal is an apophatic move; the eternal demarcates the limitation of a certain infinite. Eternal love is not infinite love, if infinite means an “infinite passion for an individual.”14 Rather, the eternal is an infinite debt to infinite others.15 This infinite debt of eternal love is not “reminiscent of an actual bookkeeping relationship,” but the unfathomable paradox: “that the lover by giving infinitely comes into—infinite debt.”16 As in Levinas’s infinite responsibility to the other, eternal love is a desire that “hollows out,” and therefore perpetuates, desire.17

2. Eternity as Seeing Otherwise Granted, Kierkegaard resists the language of desire, of erotic love, insofar as it connotes one’s insatiable lust. He admits that there can be a purification of eros, which gives the lover a “calm,” or “strength of weakness.”18 This “sacred” desire chastens the possessiveness of lust.19 By Levinas’s definition, “metaphysical eros” is precisely this avoidance of possession and refutation of the lustful ego.20 Accepting their differences in denotations, it is possible to sense in Kierkegaard’s eternal love the

11

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 78. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 54. 15 Ibid., 172. 16 Ibid. 17 Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Collected Philosophical Papers, 58. 18 Works of Love, 315. 19 Ibid. 20 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 33. 12

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ethical “optics” afforded in Levinas’s metaphysical eros.21 Because, for Kierkegaard, eternal love is a constant, it withdraws from the changes and lapses of finite love. This withdrawal from the vicissitudes of being is not synonymous with one’s ability to ignore the neighbor. Rather, eternity occurs when one acknowledges the ways in which every person’s arrival is a withdrawal, thereby demanding a love against calculation, partiality, and personal need. Eternity, as what resists representation and sight, trains love’s perception. It is not that one should “love only the unseen,” but rather be trained by the unseen to unsee the prerequisites of “fastidious” love.22 Worldly love demands that the other change to fit my conception of perfection; eternal love reverses my demand of the other into a demand placed upon me—to love every other without conditions.23 The eternal is thus a love freed from finitude, insofar as it “imprison[s]” us in an infinite duty toward others.24 When Kierkegaard posits eternal love as indifferent, impartial, freed from externals and calculations, he inadvertently suggests two “works”: that we love others better than the God of judgment would suggest (if judgment implies calculation), and love God as if God were dead. We must love God not for God’s activity in the world, but for God’s hiddenness, trusting God’s presence despite God’s invisibility. We must love God in spite of the question of God’s being, that is, if we are truly to be freed for loving those whom we can see. The eye trained by God’s transcendence will better ‘see’ the duty to not only love those we cannot see, but also love all others with a closed eye to their contexts.25 Eternal love closes an eye to what worldly love demands to see; and in so doing, is better able to see the other. The other is seen without her finite distinctions—her errors, her imperfections, her failure of the Same’s

21

Ibid., 23. Works of Love, 159. 23 One begins to hear in this reversal of the needy subject into an attention for the other’s need in Levinas, articulation of the Other irreducible to the totalizing of the Same. The closure of the Same, in Kierkegaard’s understanding of love, becomes a dis-enclosure. Or as Levinas writes of it, a “denucleation.” Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. B. Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 12. 24 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 176. 25 In a sense, Kierkegaard’s contemplation of the closed eye of love resembles Levinas’s attempt to express the other’s face as nude—both to ‘see’ her in her transcendence and exposure, but also to unclothe her from the restrictions of her context. Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” Collected Philosophical Papers, 121. 22

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totalizing need26—not despite her singularity but because of it. It is from within this conclusion that Kierkegaard unpacks his title: The work of love in remembering one who is dead is thus a work of the most disinterested, the freest, the most faithful love. Therefore go out and practise it; remember one dead and learn in just this way to love the living disinterestedly, freely, faithfully. In the relationship to the one dead you have the criterion whereby you can test yourself…. Remember one who is dead, and in addition to the blessing which is inseparable from this work of love, you will also have the best guidance to rightly understanding life: that it is one’s duty to love the men we do not see, but also those we do see. Our duty to love the men we see cannot be set aside because death separates them from us, for the duty is eternal; but consequently our duty toward the dead cannot separate our contemporaries from us so that they do not remain objects of our love.27

A relation to the eternal thus demands that one not love out of preference (as in the case of the celebrated love for the beloved or friend),28 but indifferently, one and all, self as every other. And as in Levinas, impartiality is not imperviousness; one cannot view the relationship to every other from outside those relationships. Eternal love, in its impartiality, prevents one from the oscillating temporality of “doublemindedness,”29 which pretends to love the other without limits while also accounting her insufficiencies. Concordantly, eternal love is not a ‘God’s eye view’ whereby one can compare others, or “stand above the relationship and test the beloved.”30 Because eternal love cannot transcend its relations to every seen neighbor, nor dispose of its duty to the unseen God, and the dead beloved, its temporality is not an exemption from existence, but a refiguration of its demands. Eternal love boasts no finite object, no single person—lover or 26

“It is a sad upside-downness, which, however, is altogether too common, to talk on and on about how the object of love should be in order to be lovable enough, instead of talking about how love should be in order that it can love” (Works of Love, 157). 27 Ibid., 328. 28 Ibid., 35. 29 Ibid., 163. 30 Ibid., Strangely, Kierkegaard suggests that this maneuver is like inviting a “third person” into a relationship. Though he characterizes this third person as judgmental and divisive, not unlike Levinas he links this “third” with both another person and with God. While this conflation of the third person and God—in Levinas—links God and justice, in Kierkegaard it flags a contradiction. Kierkegaard both asks for an eternal love without judgment, in the figure of the ‘third person,’ but also links God with this judgment.

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friend. And yet, the beloved can be loved in her finitude. In a strange turn, Kierkegaard suggests that the finitude of the other is the supreme evocation of truly ‘free’ love. Love is learned in the relation to the dead beloved, just as it is transformed in the relation to the eternal God.31 To love the unseen (dead to phenomenal presence) God or perished beloved is not to disregard the seen neighbor. But neither is privileging the seen neighbor an excuse to neglect the dead one, or the absent God.

3. Eternity as Relation to God and Death As a task of ongoing remembrance, the eternal demands a never completed love for the “unpoetic neighbour.”32 This love does not even complete itself in death—as the most provocative chapter, “The Work of Love in Remembering One Dead,” states.33 The dead one, in a sense no longer worldly, becomes an interesting limit expression of the otherworldly, the God.34 After reflecting on the ‘one dead’ as an expression of the eternal God, I will ask whether Kierkegaard’s God must be eternally dead. To love God, must one regard God as giving the grave and living in the grave? Is this the truest love—to regard God as dead while acting as if God were eternally present? What, indeed, is the difference between eternity and death? These distinctions would seem to have more bearing on Kierkegaard’s views of love, insofar as love for the dead is the freest love, and eternal love is the most disinterested. Why is it that, to undergo the “transformation of the eternal,”35 one must be subject to ‘you shall love’ and not the world’s obligation, ‘you shall die’? These questions implicitly mount in Kierkegaard’s admonition to love the dead in remembrance. What follows, in this section, is a tracing of his admonition as it has implications for the distinctness of eternal love. How can it be that the eternal love—as an infinite love for an infinite number of neighbors—is best tested in one’s love for the all too finite

31

“If, therefore, you want to test whether you love freely, observe some time how over a period of time you relate yourself to one who is dead” (ibid., 324). 32 Ibid., 35. 33 Ibid., 317-329. 34 I am using “limit expression” in Paul Ricoeur’s sense of the phrase. Paul Ricoeur, “Naming God,” Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 228-230. 35 Works of Love, 55.

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beloved?36 This would be utterly contradictory, unless the dead were not somehow correlated with the eternal itself. And, indeed, Kierkegaard ascribes to death what he elsewhere ascribes to the eternal. In both the person who is no more, and the God who is invisible, love meets lack. A love based on externals, according to Kierkegaard, is “just what Christianity does not want…rather by the very lack of this, it will test faith in the individual, test whether the individual will keep the secrecy of faith and be satisfied with it.”37 Love, as faith in the eternal, the unseen, parallels the relation to the dead—insofar as evidences are no longer the grounds for its decision. Thus, the duty to love is a strange law: inwardly adopted and externally indifferent. As Kierkegaard writes, There is something wonderful and perhaps for many something strange, something incomprehensible in the fact that Christianity’s eternal power is so indifferent towards recognition in the external world, something wonderful in that its earnestness is precisely in this—that for the very sake of earnestness inwardness plays the stranger amid worldliness.38

According to Kierkegaard, love is best when indifferent in this sense: when it keeps its secret in earnestness, in inwardness. But the grave, too, has its secrets; and death too is indifferent. So how is this model of eternal love not mirrored on the indifference of death? To begin to respond, one must also summon Kierkegaard’s disdain for the indifference of knowledge. Knowledge, despite its “infinitely detached” quality,39 is not the same as an infinitely undiscriminating love (“believes all things, hopes all things.”)40 Kierkegaard writes against knowledge’s view from nowhere, its claimed equilibrium, and its lack of investment. How is love different from knowledge’s “infinite equivocation,” which “place[s] contrasting possibilities in equilibrium”?41 To believe everything, in love, is not to place everything in equal relations, as if submerging all in a water of transparency.42 This distinction between the love that believes all and the knowledge that accepts all is integral. Equalizing from a distance of mediating consciousness, knowledge claims a position of height. Love 36

Contrary to his statements of testing in Training in Christianity, Kierkegaard here states that love itself should not be tested, unless it wishes to be denigrated into the spontaneous (and uncertain) love of the poets. Ibid., 48. 37 Ibid., 145. 38 Ibid., 144. 39 Ibid., 218. 40 Ibid., 213-246. 41 Ibid., 218. 42 Ibid., 220.

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claims a position of descendence, of sacrificial relation. Love does not know people in the way a scientist claims to know objects of study. Love’s self-emptying is different than knowledge’s clarity: the former makes room for God and thereby makes room for all.43 But if love is not like knowledge, how is it not, like the grave, allwelcoming? Death is an impartial host par excellence. Death is the best eternal lover, in this sense. Death, like love, cares not for money. Death, like love, can exercise a certain mercy—putting an end to the world’s false infinity.44 Is God, as eternal love, this death? In Christ, one might finagle a certain affirmative response: Christ died for all in love, thus allowing an equal kinship to God across humanity.45 And yet, death—unlike love—is no respecter of particularity. Kierkegaard makes clear that love maintains the tension between equality and differentiation, universality and particularity: “What love! First of all, it makes no distinction. Second, which is like the first, it makes infinite distinction in loving the differences. Wondrous love!”46 While personifying death is as problematic as personifying God, Kierkegaard does wager that God—in the person of Christ—implements what death cannot: Christ dies for all, while loving each. Thus, eternal love goes beyond the work of death, which is no respecter of persons. This, of course, makes some distinction between love and death, but not yet between God and the dead one. Are we to read Kierkegaard’s urge to love by remembering the dead as an admonition to re-member God in love? It would seem that the dead one’s lasting legacy is not unlike how Kierkegaard describes God’s odd “omnipresence.”47 Much as Kierkegaard aims to break outside of a love that is tit-for-tat, he does describe God as the presence of a response adequated to our judgment of others. Our judgment of others is met by God’s judgment of us. If there is any asymmetry to this relation, it lies in the non-adequation of God’s infinite judgment; one false action on our part is met with echoes of amplified condemnation.48 At least there is an end to the dead one’s judgment. God’s judgment is not so finite as death. Death’s love—and one’s love for the dead—seems more indifferent to externals than God. Thus, Kierkegaard’s

43

Ibid., 123. Ibid., 292-303. 45 Ibid., 80. 46 Ibid., 252. 47 Ibid., 350. 48 Ibid., 351-352. 44

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conclusion is haunted by “fear and trembling”: God’s love is also an infinite echo of our love (or lack of love) toward others.49 Kierkegaard is not comfortable calling God absent, or dead, so much as invisible or unseen. But his description of loving the dead, on these points of empirical lack or transcendent absence, resonates with one’s love for God. It may be that, at risk of loving an idol (a finite god), one must regard God as dead in a different sense. Eternal love condemns to death certain illusory loves—limited and changeable loves, idols. And thus to truly love God, in Kierkegaard’s sense, one must ascribe to God a death distinguished from both the idol’s finitude, and worldly love’s incompleteness. One must ascribe to God the death of eternity; both the dead and the God are unchanging, indifferent, timeless. God’s death, like the death of a loved one, is an escape from the economics of the world’s externality, evidence, and knowledge. Like Kierkegaard’s God, the dead one is both the crucible of love and a site of fear and trembling. In words that markedly resemble Kierkegaard’s description of God as the “infinitising” echo,50 the dead one is said to hear one’s words and amplify them in return.51 Thus, one is left to wonder if God’s love is not, in some dangerous sense, dependent on God’s special death, God’s eternity. Is it simply that the Christian hope of love, and of life after death, has been applied indefinitely to God? Or has the eternal been revealed as only another mask of death: one that leaves no hints,52 but remembers all in judgment, while commanding remembrance in love.

4. Eternal Love and Infinite Debt For Kierkegaard, eternal love both amplifies judgment eternally and seeks no recompense. It both takes on a perpetual indebtedness and stalls judgment.53 This debt hollows out any means of restricting the other to the same.54 Scholars of Levinas may respect this language; but they may also remain puzzled by Kierkegaard’s attempts to disrupt the ultimacy of being, and its finite temporality. In stating that God’s hiddenness both teaches us the impartialities of timeless love, and the infinite echoes of partial judgments, Kierkegaard’s God offers a gift of love never far from a gift of

49

Ibid., 353. Ibid., 352. 51 Ibid., 327. 52 Ibid., 328. 53 Ibid., 172. 54 Ibid., 252. 50

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finitude. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Kierkegaard’s God resembles death.55 One can respect Kierkegaard’s attempts to think together the absence of the dead beloved and the hiddenness of God, without sliding into the presentation of God as a judge in secret. One can respect his unique break with temporal loves, without demanding that this unseen God be the bad infinite of eternal death or unending judgment. In reading Kierkegaard through Levinas, one can still argue for an otherwise temporality, expressed in an unsatisfiable debt of love. And yet, the temporality of this love does not conflate death with eternity, nor assimilate God’s being into God’s nothingness. Levinas’s temporality is better able to dislodge itself from the ultimacy of being and non-being, because he construes God’s eternity with the holy, albeit traumatic, separation of the “immemorial past.” If ethics, indeed love, is this relation to the immemorial, neither the neighbor, nor the God, can be synchronized in an image of judgment. Rather, they are the deferral of a certain judgment—if that judgment were a gift of death and not the gift of responsibility for another’s finitude. In articulating his ethics of the infinite, Levinas resists appealing to love, insofar as it implies the “bourgeois ideal of love as domestic comfort or the mutual possession of two people living out an égoïsme à deux.”56 But in considering Kierkegaard’s eternal love—as the possibility of love without the consolations of a certain presence—Levinas would concede the import of a love that suffers the transcendence of the other. This would 55 Perhaps Levinas had this in mind when, in his 1979 preface to Time and the Other, he writes: “But then eternity—the idea of which, without borrowing anything from lived duration, the intellect would claim to possess a priori: the idea of a mode of being, where the multiple is one and which would confer on the present its full sense—is it not always suspect of only dissimulating the fulguration of the instant, its half-truth, which is retained in an imagination capable of playing in the intemporal and of deluding itself about a gathering of the ingatherable? In the final account, would not this eternity and this intellectual God, composed of these abstract and inconstant half-instants of the temporal dispersion, be an abstract eternity and a dead God?” Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other: And Additional Essays, trans. R. A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 31. 56 Qtd. in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, The Phenomenological Heritage: Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, Stanislas Breton, Jacques Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 66. Kierkegaard has a similar depiction of egoistic love: “For he who is—such an extraordinary lover—that he is able to love only one person is not the true lover but one smitten with love, and one smitten with love is a self-lover, as previously shown” (Works of Love, 223).

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be “love without lust,”57 since lust stems from a need that seeks fulfillment. Not unlike Kierkegaard’s characterization of attending the otherwise than being58—whether the unseen God or the dead beloved— ethical love does not seek “self-satisfaction,”59 nor “remuneration,”60 nor the “consolations” of a certain future.61 It certainly avoids, as Kierkegaard would appreciate,62 a waiting too easily filled by whatever “corresponds to a grasp and a comprehension.”63 Levinas uses the word love to denote a way that thought might think beyond its conceptual holds. For Levinas, as for Kierkegaard, love is not simply desire for the poetic neighbor, but a “desire for the undesirable.”64 As responsibility, this love is prior to ontological considerations. Responsibility for the neighbor, even dying for him,65 “ventures all the way to significations of the beyond of being and nothingness, beyond reality and illusion.”66 Ethical love is thus not only one’s engagement with the neighbor, but also the possibility of a temporality beyond being.67 God’s elusion of ontological temporality is God’s opening of the “immemorial past that is unrepresentable and was never present… [wherein] I am committed, in responsibility for the other, according to the singular figure that a creature presents, responding to the fiat of Genesis.”68 A command that operates more like an “unassumable trauma,”69 my perpetual debt of substitution (being-for-the-other) precedes my sense of contract and freedom.70 And because God eludes us like “a

57

Of God Who Comes to Mind, 163. He calls it the “non-being,” a term that Levinas would refigure as ‘otherwise than being’ in order to disrupt the ultimacy of the opposition being vs. nothing. See Works of Love, 321. 59 Ibid., 10. 60 Ibid., 134. 61 Ibid., 96. 62 Works of Love, 279-291. 63 Of God Who Comes to Mind, 50. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s characterization of love—as squandering one’s life “on the existence of others,” without assurance, in that life, of the success of one’s efforts—resembles Levinas’s characterization of patience. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” Collected Philosophical Papers, 92-93. 64 God, Death, and Time, 177. 65 Of God Who Comes to Mind, ix. 66 Ibid., 131. 67 Levinas, “God on the Basis of Ethics,” God, Death, and Time, 136-139. 68 Of God Who Comes to Mind, 166. 69 Ibid., 70. 70 Ibid., 71. 58

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‘more’ in the ‘less,’”71 any obedience to God is an awakening to alterity without reprieve.72 As exposure toward the other, the idea of the Infinite (that, for Levinas, is named God) facilitates an obedience prior to hearing a specific command.73 This indebtedness—prior to acceptance—diverts my desire for the Go(o)d that can be enjoyed or remembered, directing it instead into a hungry obsession for the neighbor. The other can never be assimilated into the digestion of enjoyment not simply because of her singularity (as Kierkegaard knows), but also because of the structure of temporality that the immemorial past opens. I cannot represent to myself the immemorial past when I was created as a being, exposed to the other; I occupy a temporality that also prevents my catching up to the neighbor. The other “leaves me without a present for recollection or a return into the self… [and] makes me late.”74 This inability to catch up to the other in comprehension, or re-presentation of the other to myself, is a feature of Levinas’s temporality. It is not simply a resistance to Kierkegaard’s eternally loving, though death-dealing God, or to the metaphysics of presence that Heidegger seeks to thwart in his beingtoward-death. Levinas’s dia-chronic temporality, founded in the immemorial past, becomes viable because he does not grant ultimacy to the beingtoward-nothingness, especially if this being-toward-nothingness resembles one’s being-toward-God. The infinite does not support a temporality garnered in the fear of death; neither is it the “fright before the Sacred” that makes us dream of eternity.75 Levinas’s temporality begins, not in a fear of the neighbor, but in a fear for the neighbor. As “a reversion of this waiting for God into the proximity of another,”76 love is not the oscillation between deferred judgment and sacred fear. It is the demand for justice, wherein the other—and not simply God’s coming—is both absent and too near. 71

Ibid., 59. As Levinas writes, “the unto-God is not a finality” (ibid., 177). Consequently the toward-God that leads us to the neighbor asks that our vigilance for the other be like an insomnia. This insomnia is not the prevention of rest, but an intensification of consciousness. Consciousness is derivative of insomnia. Insomnia, as the ethical alertness to the other that cannot be brought into the rest of the same, is prior to the “modification” consciousness. Cf. ibid., 58. 73 This obedience is a “pure witnessing that bears witness not to a previous experience, but to the Infinite, it is inaccessible to the unity of apperception, it is nonappearing, and it is disproportionate to the present” (ibid., 74). 74 Ibid., 71. 75 Ibid., 120. 76 Ibid., 51. 72

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Kierkegaard and Levinas both suggest a temporality that resists finitude and makes us more attuned to God’s infinity through the other’s vulnerability. Both suggest a time that breaks the partitions of temporal calculation through the impartiality of ethical vigilance toward every ‘seen’ neighbor. Perhaps Kierkegaard’s eternity demands a more radical debt. We must respond ethically in loving those who not only say, “You shall not commit murder,”77 but also in remembering those who have already perished. And perhaps Levinas’s immemorial past, in its diachronic disruption, demands a more radical God. We must pray to a God who is not simultaneously representable as eternal judgment and impartial love, but rather remains in the face of every other, whose resistance to representation is the very (im)possibility of justice, of love.

77

Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 117.

THE TIME OF THE BODY: SEX, LITURGY, ESCHATOLOGY JOHN PANTELEIMON MANOUSSAKIS

For Jean-Luc Marion who showed us the way

1. The Presence of an Absence The consensus of the philosophical tradition on time can be summarized, not without some simplification, as follows: time is in the mind, in the soul, in consciousness. Perhaps one could rephrase this in a slightly more sophisticated manner by saying that time is of the mind, of the soul, of consciousness. Thus, when Husserl writes his lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time he finds it necessary to begin his discussion by paying homage to Augustine’s famous analysis of time in the Confessions. Augustine’s definition of time as an extension of the soul had its own, earlier precedent, namely Anaxagoras’s nous as the originator of movement that, in moving the primordial mixture of elements, transforms a world in a state of chaos into an orderly and unified whole: the cosmos. In a sense what Augustine does in the eleventh book of the Confessions is to translate an aspect of Pre-Socratic cosmology into Christian anthropology. Nevertheless, time as a phenomenon of the soul remains fundamentally unchanged in the history of philosophy up to Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet, we are presented with certain aporiae: what does it mean to say that time is the outstretching of the soul into past, future, and present? Is the soul that makes time—as if the soul somehow pre-existed time—or is it rather time that makes the soul? Could one imagine the one without the other? And how are we to understand the outstretching, this distension of the soul1 without committing the double 1

See Augustine, The Loeb Classical Library: St. Augustine's Confessions, G. P. Goold, ed.,f Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912. “Video igitur tempus quondam esse distentionem,” (XI.30.23). “Inde mihi visum est nihil esse aliud

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error of making the soul a body, by assigning a material character to the soul and thinking of time as space, insofar as the soul is envisioned as some-thing that can be stretched out, as over some space? As Freud writes enigmatically in one of his posthumous notes: “Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nichts davon.”2 The double ambiguity of knowing nothing is telling: if the soul knows nothing about it, about its own distention, about itself, how could I know if all my knowledge, and particularly the knowledge of my knowing, is by means of the soul? Is it even possible, then, to know time insofar as time is not an object of perception but the condition of all perception? Or, better yet, how is time itself even possible? As every student of Augustine’s Confessions knows, these questions form the core of his investigation into the nature of time. “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know” (XI.14.17). Confronted with the enigma of time, one finds oneself divided—at the very least, this is a division between knowing and not-knowing. The question of time reveals this inner bifurcation that runs through the knowing subject itself: at the same time and with respect to the same question I find myself both knowing and not knowing. Already here the distinction, if not the division, between reflective and unreflective consciousness is prefigured. It is important to take notice of this effect that time has on us as soon as the question “What is time?” is raised. Of course, the perplexities of time are due to its nature: namely, that time, properly understood as the passing of time, as sequence and duration over time (a still time would either be a contradiction in terms or a category mistake, mistaken for eternity) can only be understood in relation to a past and a future, or, otherwise put, to what is not-any-more and what is not-yet, that is, it cannot be understood without reference to nothing. Now, what about those two times, past and future: in what sense do they have real being, if the past no longer exists and the future does not exist yet? As for present time, if that were always present and never slipped away into the past, it would not be time at all; it would be eternity. If, therefore, the present’s only claim to be called “time” is that it is slipping away into the past, how can we assert that this thing is, when its only title to being is that it will soon cease to be? In other words, we cannot really say that time exists, except because it tends to non-being (XI.14.17).

tempus quam distentionem: sed cuius rei, nescio, et mirum, si non ipsius animi” (XI.33.26). 2 See Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher (Paris: Edition Galilée, 2000), 21ff.

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Here Augustine comes as close as one could to the mystery of time: what we know of time is that which cannot be known, for time presents itself precisely as a never-ending absence-ing. Any meditation on time places us face to face with the problem of absence. How to account for the presence of an absence? Phenomenology was uniquely situated to address this very question. From the outset, phenomenology sought to disprove the illusion of consciousness’s immanentism—the belief, in other words, that every act of cognition takes place within the confines of the brain—and which arises precisely from the difficulty we have just named: the presence of an absence. Immanentism fakes what it cannot account for: absence. Since one cannot explain how consciousness does not need its objects present-athand in order to be a consciousness of them, the only other possible alternative, in the absence of absence, seemed to be the presence of the world with all its objects in consciousness. A whole philosophical difference is played out in these grammatical propositions: where the “of” seemed inexplicable, then the “in” had to be supplanted. If we assume that memory remembers by means of images, and that every remembering becomes a form of re-presentation, we confront the very same problems St. Augustine was forced to face in Book X of the Confessions. These problems can be summarized as the conundrum of “imagining the unimaginable” since one has to account for the difficulty of ascribing an image to such memories which cannot, as we would say today, be “visualized.” That is, memories of emotions and feelings (X.14.21-22), or the memories of a piece of innate knowledge that presumably is not mediated by any image (X.11.18-12.19). When I think, for example, of freewill, do I recall the concept of free-will or free-will’s image? And what would the image of a concept be like if not a concept itself? Is, then, the recollection of a concept mediated by the concept of a concept? And would not such mediation require ever new and seemingly endless intermediaries? What, then, about memory itself and forgetfulness? “Does this mean that memory is present to itself through its image, and not in itself?” (X.15.23). There St. Augustine seems to come to the root of these paralogisms: forgetfulness is an absence—to say that I think of an absence by means of a presence (an image presented in memory) is to annul the very thing I am trying to think and to explain it by means of representation is to do away with what stands in need of explanation. Incidentally, such was also Brentano’s theory of the origin of time, which Husserl criticizes precisely as failing to take the past as that which has passed (i.e., as an absence) into account. Instead, Brentano supplanted an image for the thing remembered but then, as Husserl rightly observes:

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“where do we get the idea of the past?”3 Husserl’s answer to this problem was that every act of perception is surrounded by absences, as if by a halo. In order to see what is in front of me, in order to see it as that which it is, it is not enough to see what I see but it is equally necessary to “see” what I do not see. When I look at the facade of a building, it is not enough to see the side of the building in front of me, it is equally important that the other sides of the building which are not within my visual field co-present themselves together with the one that presents itself to my vision—but they co-present themselves not as present but precisely as absent sides. I can never see something all at once: in a moment of pure, unadulterated presence. The perception of any physical thing, that is, any perception in space and time, “involves a certain inadequacy.”4 By this Husserl means that what I see is always necessarily partial, for I can never grasp what I see fully, from every single angle, in every possible way an object can show itself to me. This partiality, this imperfection endemic to perception itself, is a limitation necessitated by the limitations that are imposed on both me, as the perceiver, and the object of my perception, on account of our respective embodiments. However, the same imperfection perpetuates a series of inexhaustible possible perceptions “which can always be continued” and “which are never completed.”5 This characteristic alone is enough to become the criterion for distinguishing between two kinds of beings: being as a physical thing, and being as an act of consciousness (for example, the distinction between the perception of a thing and the consciousness of that perception). The former is always given through a multiplicity of adumbrations, the latter can never be perceived adumbrated. This very rudimentary sketch of one of the fundamental positions of the phenomenological method should suffice in making clear that phenomenology was prepared to account for the presence of an absence, to pay equal attention to what is absent as philosophy had in the past done for the present and, therefore, that it was natural that time, as the process of absence-ing, should become a proper subject-matter for phenomenological analysis. Thus, the phenomenological analysis of internal time reveals time as the perichoretic intertwining of three ecstasies: impression, protention, and retention. It is important to note that in what we call the “now” all three 3

Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. John Barnett Brough, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 19. 4 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), 94. 5 Ibid., 191.

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temporalities are to be found: there is a present-present, and a present-past, and a present-future.6 And the present-present, in turn, springs its own branches of protention and retention. This seemingly endless process affords us with a much more nuanced conception of temporality than that of a linear succession of “nows.”7

2. Eschatology: A Theological Interlude Leaving aside for the moment the technicalities of this analysis, it would be useful to open up our discussion to a broader scope so that it will include some theological considerations, keeping in mind that the question of time in Augustine (as well as in Anaxagoras) are raised against such a theological background. I have spoken of a “perichoretic intertwining”— the term perichoresis, which might be unfamiliar to some of you, is a term that we first meet in Anaxagoras’ fragments8 indicating the movement that propels the universe to its teleological perfection. It is the movement we know more concretely as history. Taken up by the Christian authors of the fourth century, it became a technical term that describes the indwelling of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity. Even though Augustine does not explicitly makes such a claim, it would be safe, I think, to see in the perichoretic intertwining of attention, expectation, and memory (XI.28.37) a vestigium trinitatis, that is, the trace of the Trinitarian God. Such claim has the far-reaching implication of a reduction of temporality (in the sense of re-ducere, leading back to) to the heart of God’s existence—an existence that moves away from the notion of a static being, but upholds both being and becoming and the coincidence of being with becoming.9 6

This was also St. Augustine’s description: “There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things” (Confessions, XI.20.26, 300). 7 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time: the now “is continuously mediated with [the not-now],” pg. 42; the familiar terminology of retention and protention is introduced at pg. 89; this is later called “the temporal fringe,” pg. 172, horizon or halo surrounding the now. On the same subject, see also Neal DeRoo’s analysis in Futurity in Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). This perichoretic intertwining of three “ecstasies” of time is what Heidegger calls “the horizon of time” (see, for example, Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), especially, pp. 146-150). 8 Anaxagoras, Fr. B12. 9 See, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. V: The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998).

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Incidentally, this is also Husserl’s insight: for what else is the “absolute flow,” the stehend-strömended Gegenwart10 which, for Husserl is the origin of time and thus somehow outside time, an unconscious consciousness,11 if not the ıIJȐıȚȢ ਕİȚțȓȞȘIJȠȢ (the ever-moving rest) that someone like Maximus the Confessor uses to describe the temporal mode of humanity’s eschatological destiny?12 Thus, time is not any more divorced from eternity, but rather finds its origin, and therefore its goodness, in it. At once close and yet distant from the definition that Plato gives of time in the Timaeus as the “moving image of eternity” (37c-e), time is not the byproduct of an immemorial fall, a catastrophe away from the stillness of the One, and thus a deplorable characteristic of a fallen humanity from which one could only seek and hope to escape. Time, in this theological reading that phenomenology has presented us with, is the means to participate in a process of perfection. Life is then called a way because each being that enters into life hastens toward its end. Just as those who are sleeping in ships are carried by the wind through its own force to the harbors, even though they themselves do not perceive it but the course hurries them on to the end, so we also, as the

“Nevertheless this fundamental quality of creaturehood (its unlikeness to God) must have some basis in God himself if it is to be posited at all” (pg. 76). And again: “A second conclusion refers to the dynamic relationship between creature and Creator, or the way in which becoming is rooted in absolute Being. We cannot avoid using the concept ‘process,’ ‘procession’ in the context of the life of the Trinity to denote its constant vitality; this concept is the link between creature and Creator, between being and becoming. The eternal life that God is, and that remains ‘ineffable,’ cannot be described as a becoming, for it is unacquainted with that ‘poverty which is the ground’ of our ‘striving,’ of our ‘restlessness.’ ‘The divine life,’ precisely because it is ‘the fullness of life…[is] perfect peace.’ Yet this peace, or rest, is not inert, but ‘eternal movement’…” (pg. 76). And finally: “Unless we see eternal being in terms of eternal event, we are condemned to see the form of its duration as a mere nunc stans, which deprives it of everything that makes world-time (in all its transience) exciting and delightful” (pg. 91). Emphasis in the original. 10 “The flowing-static present,” cf., Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 168. 11 “But we should seriously consider whether we must assume such an ultimate consciousness, which would necessarily be an ‘unconscious’ consciousness…,” On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 394. 12 Maximus the Confessor, Ad Thalassium II (CCSG) 22, 59.122-159 and Opuscula (PG 91:185 A). See, Paul C. Plass, “Moving Rest in Maximus the Confessor” in Classica et Mediaevalia, 34 (1984), pp. 177-190 and Sotiris Mitralexis, Ever-moving Repose (Berlin, 2014).

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time of our lives flows on, are hurried along as if by a continuous and restless motion on the unheeded course of life, each one toward his proper end.13

It is precisely such a salvific understanding of time that St. Augustine illustrates in his biographical narrative of the Confessions, and it is this role that time has played in his journey from the garden to Thagaste to the garden of Ostia (or, reading his history writ large, from the garden of Eden to the eschatological garden of Paradise), that necessitates that time as such be thematized in book XI. It is time that unites the two seemingly disparate halves of the Confessions. Let us now bring to our discussion a third interlocutor, Søren Kierkegaar who in the Concept of Anxiety offers the following gloss on Romans 8:19: “[I]nasmuch as one can speak of an eager longing, it follows as a matter of course that the creation is in a state of imperfection.”14 What is this longing if not direction, movement, desire that stretches out (epektasis) to its ultimate good? What is this “ultimate good”? Let’s call it, after Kierkegaard, “perfection.” Thus movement, in this case disguised as desire, becomes the indication of the expectation of a future perfection (perfection can only be futural) and, at the same time the means by which this perfection is to be carried out. Here two elements come together: anticipation (desire as movement, expectation, and the future) and pleasure (desire as perfection: “all pleasures have within themselves some feeling of perfection” wrote Leibniz15). The anticipation of pleasure, as well as its reverse side, namely, the pleasure of anticipation—the foreplay—unite the temporal and the bodily insofar as, in its most immediate level, this anticipation of pleasure is the expectation for the Other’s body: both sexual and Eucharistic at once. At their crisscrossing, the pleasure of anticipation and the anticipation of pleasure dislocate the present as the privileged vantage point in the metaphysics of time (from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond).16

13 Basil the Great, “On Psalm 1” in Homilies on the Psalms, (PG 29:220), trans. Agnes Clare Way, in Exegetic Homilies, vol. 46, (Washington D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 158-9. 14 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 58. 15 Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (BiblioBazaar, 2007), 145-6. 16 “But, to think time starting from the present constitutes the function, stake, and characteristic not of a specific metaphysic, but of metaphysics as a whole, from Aristotle to Hegel (and Nietzsche)—if at least one admits the initial thought of Heidegger, hence first if one accedes to it.” Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being,

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3. The Body’s Time: Sex and the Eucharist The episodic and fragmented nature of Augustine’s past life must be rhapsodized into a unity—a unity, however, that can only come from a unified self. How is the self unified? By its return to the one God. What prompts or enables that return? Certainly, not space. Thus, he writes: Not with our feet or by traversing great distances do we journey away from you or find our way back. That younger son of yours in the gospel did not hire horses or carriages, nor did he board ships, nor take wing in any visible sense, nor put one foot before the other when he journeyed to that far country where he could squander at will the wealth you, his gentle father, had given him at his departure (I.18.28, pg. 58).

Yet, not by the turning of the mind either, unless it is a mind affected by the after (meta-noia). We recall again that monstrosity which Augustine so aptly describes in Book VIII: “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed; the mind commands itself, and meets with resistance” (VIII.9.21, pg. 201). Can we reverse this chain of command? Can we say that the body could perhaps command the mind and that mind would obey? The prodigal’s metanoia that set him upon the journey back to the paternal house was not a mental, spiritual, or psychological affectation, but physical, as physical and visceral as hunger can be.17 The task in the Confessions is not to spiritualize the flesh, but to incarnate the spirit and in this regard the verticality of the Greek schema (Platonic and Neo-Platonic) of ascents and descents has to be abandoned for the sake of a communion between exteriority and interiority. Yet, as long as hunger is only “interior,” that is, spiritual, it is not even perceived as hunger at all. “I was inwardly starved of that food which is yourself, O my God. Yet this inner famine created no pangs of hunger in me” (III.1.1, pg. 75). Spiritual hunger remains ineffective. Let us return to the Lucan parable: “After he had spent eerything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need [ਫ਼ıIJİȡİ૙ıșĮȚ/egere]. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. (Lk. 15:14-16)

trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 170. Hence, the difference between “metaphysical” and “Christic” temporality. 17 A paradigmatic reading of the same parable can be found in Marion’s God Without Being, 95ff.

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Notice that from all the images that the Gospel could use in order to convey the state of human misery, the evangelist chose that of hunger. Eating is not only a way for recognizing our dependency to each other and to the world—so much for the prodigal son’s claim to independence!—but by eating we assimilate the world to ourselves, we turn that which is outside inside. Think of this passage from outside to inside and you will discover that this opposition is nothing else than the exemplification of distance and fragmentation. Ultimately, distance comes down to this opposition between an inside (that I identify with myself) and everything else that is outside me. In eating, however, this wall of separation collapses—when I am hungry, I am really hungry for the Other (following Sartre and Levinas)—and eating is one of the ways we have for overcoming our isolation that is the result of being scattered beings. Eating declares—willingly or not, and contra to all our illusory attempts at selfmastery and independence—my dependence on the world, on the cows which provide me with their meat, but also on the grass that fed the cows, on the water that fertilized the soil on which that grass grew, and so on. “But eating, by contrast, is peaceful and simple; it fully realizes its sincere intention: ‘The man who is eating is the most just of men.’”18 A referential totality is presented in every meal whereby the entire world is eaten. When I eat, I eat the world. But even more than the world, I eat the labor and the effort, the care and the artistry of the people who cultivated, prepared, and cooked my food. No meal is ever solitary—even if I eat alone in the seclusion of my room—every meal is a public and communal event. A community established and referred to by every bite. It is also a way that can take place only by means of and thanks to our bodies. Obviously only an embodied being can be hungry and only an embodied being can eat. Contrary to what one might believe, our best chance to overcome the fragmentation that human nature imposes on us is through our bodies. It is our body that abridges the distance that keeps separating us from others, but it is our body that allows us to be united with God. It is not accidental that we eat the Eucharist and that the liturgy takes the form of a meal, such as the meal that the Father offers in celebration for the return of the lost son: “Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate” (Lk. 15:23). It is also not an accident that we have these gifts on account of the body that Christ took upon Himself in His kenotic effort to traverse the land of distance that separated us from Him. In Christ, God is no more a god who sees (theos), but a god 18 E. Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 44.

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who touches and can be touched even to the folly of being-eaten. In eating, I make the world my flesh and my blood, not my spirit, but I incarnate or rather I incorporate—the original and literal meaning of incorporation— the world which, otherwise, would have remained an abstraction in spite of its cows, its grass, and its soil. Spiritualization posits a real danger that seeks to cancel out both the incarnation as well the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. Every time one partakes of communion he or she does not change the host into their body but it changes them—in an inverse digestion indicative and exemplary of inverse intentionality—into His body. As Augustine was told: “I am the food of the mature; grow then, and you will eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food: you will be changed into me” (VII.10.16, pg. 173). The Church is turning the world into Christ a mass at a time. There is not room here for the “spirituality” of Gnosis. Without a physical body, our experience of the distance that separates us from each other becomes permanent. It is in this sense that we read in the parable of the rich man and the poor Lazarus that: “[B]etween us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us” (Lk. 16:26). This explains, I believe, the systematic and, at times, elaborate employment of the language of hungering, eating, and feasting in the Confessions that begins with Book I and extends with Book X, where memory is compared to the stomach of the mind (X.14.21). It also sheds some light on a broader operation of incarnation set in motion in the Confessions, best exemplified perhaps by the assignment of the same key adjective, “restless” (inquietum/inquieta) in describing both the spiritual longing of the heart (I.1.1) and the physical manifestation of his sexual desire in his youthful erections (II.3.6). The desire for God is not independent from the desire for the other human; nor is the desire for rest promised in God’s kingdom contrary to the satisfaction that the body seeks. One who has not felt the latter rarely and with difficulty would seek the former. Finally, hunger entails a temporal element. Despite satisfying my hunger, in the course of time, I will become hungry again. Hunger, and its satisfaction by eating, demarcates the before and after of the body’s time. Before repentance’s after-thought (meta-noia), there is the after-body (meta-somoia): a body that becomes hungry is a body affected by time. The proof is again in the Scriptural parable of the prodigal son: “After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need [‫ބ‬ıIJİȡİ߿ıșĮȚ]” (Lk. 15:14). The Greek verb employed here to denote a need that is most physical, namely hunger,

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means primarily “to come late,” “to be too late.” ੥ıIJİȡȑȦ implies a lack or want first and foremost in terms of lateness (੢ıIJİȡȠȢ).19 The prodigal son was, like Augustine, late (“Late have I loved you…” (X.27.38)). This ethical lateness is first inscribed and awakened in the body. Allow me to use another example, this time from the world of the Opera. In La Traviata’s last act (Act III), Violetta, after reading Giorgio Germont’s letter (Teneste la promessa) exclaims: è tardi! There is an irony in a future that is late: a letter long awaited, a forgiveness never hoped for—finally they arrive but it is too late. It is always already late, as long as there is time or, rather, as soon as there is time, it is too late. For without this lateness, that is without the concept of “being-late” one could not possibly have time as such. Of course, Violetta’s “è tardi” has a different weight than the before and after that flank any perception of the now. Yet, one is reminded of Kafka’s observation that the Messiah will come after he is expected—that is, he will come late, indeed when it is too late, when one does not need him and does not know what to do with him. “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all.”20 There is a lot one could perhaps say on this notion of a late Messiah. It prompts me to ask at what time in history’s span the coming of the Messiah would not have been “too late”? As soon as there is history, it is already too late for salvation. What does it mean to arrive late? Are we not all of us late-comers with respect to our lives, to our present? Is what moves consciousness, what drives it, not the always already failed attempt to catch up—but with what? With itself. Consciousness wants to catch up with itself, to become synchronous with itself, even though such synchronicity would signal its death. The confessional opening of the Confessions (where, by confession, one understands primarily praise and prayer) draws attention to the other alternative, an alternative that is almost destined to fail with regards to 19

It is of interest to see how this term is used elsewhere in the Scriptures and especially in the eschatological parables of the Gospel of St. Matthew. In the parable of the two sons, the father sends his first son to work in the vineyard but he refuses; “but later [੢ıIJİȡȠȞ] he changed his mind and went” (21:29). Here the term “later” is used together with a verb denoting repentance, or changing one’s mind [ȝİIJĮȝİȜȘșİȓȢ]. In the parable of the tenants that follows immediately after this one, the term is employed as an indicator of the time the father sent his own son to the vineyard (21:37)—a reference to the incarnation, and thus to the eschatological fullness of time. 20 Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, trans. E. Kaiser, E. Wilkin (Exact Change, 1991), 28.

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God, namely, language. The problematic of language is introduced by Augustine’s emphasis on the literal meaning of infancy, as his “unspeaking stage” in life (I.6.10, pg. 44). Language comes as a remedy to a fundamental experience of a primordial separation, a separation that manifests itself first in the distinction within/without, inside/outside: “I was frustrated in this, because my desires were inside me, while other people were outside and could by no effort of understanding enter my mind” (quia illae [voluntates] intus erat, foris autem illi, I.6.8, pg. 44). The first experience of fallenness (trauma) is the separation from others, in terms of a distance in space.21 Language here, as in Freud’s celebrated example of the child’s game, wherein the child utters alternatively the words “fort/da,” becomes the means to cope with and remedy a painful absence. To this one, immediately, Augustine adds a second one: the separation from oneself, in terms of a distance in time. “My infancy has been so long dead now, whereas I am alive” (I.6.9), thus he begins in his attempt to remember what cannot be recalled. “For what is it that I am trying to say, Lord, except that I do not know whence I came into this life that is but a dying…. I do not know where I came from” (I.6.7, pg. 43). The mystery of memory, as it will be fully developed in book X, is first disclosed through forgetfulness. “So I have been told, and I believe it on the strength of what we see other babies doing, for I do not remember doing it myself” (I.6.8, pg. 43). Both experiences, separation from others, namely space, and separation from oneself, namely time, are, for Augustine, but two aspects of the same condition, namely of the diastemic nature of the fallen creation.22 Language, then, is grounded in such a condition, and it is itself regulated by it. In book X, language is a privileged example of time, for to speak takes time and one cannot speak but in time. But language also “takes” space. The meaning of a word is determined by its position in a sentence. And even though one can use language to communicate with another, not every other speaks my language, as young Augustine learns from his painful attempts to master Greek (I.13.20, pg. 52). Even among speakers of the same language, language can be the source of misconceptions and misunderstandings, thereby my separation from the Other is emphasized once more. Thus, “the very birth of language” is organized by the spatial 21

Augustine thinks throughout the Confessions of his relation to God in terms of distance and proximity. See also “non enim pedibus aut spatiis locorum itur abs te aut reditur ad te” (I.18.28). This phrase illustrates the movement of the narration in the Confessions: moving away from God and returning to God. 22 See Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

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and temporal interplay between presence and absence—the need to make present, if only in symbolic form, what is absent.23 Phenomenology’s original contribution, however, consisted precisely in the recovery of the absence of the absent, by refusing to substitute it with a quasi-presence (e.g., the image “in” the mind in the absence of the thing itself, etc.) and by drawing attention to the role that absences play in the intentional life of the consciousness, where every aspect is always given together with a prospect and a retrospect, every presence is surrounded by absences. In short, if consciousness is not limited to the presence of the present—the synchronicity which we have just called consciousness’s death—if it is able to intend what is absent, it is by virtue of an absence or an absence-ing. Thus, we can say, together with Ricoeur, that what language is for the psychoanalyst intentionality is for the phenomenologist.24 The similarity extends further. As in every act of speech there is always an unspoken remainder, so every act of intentionality remains fundamentally partial and incomplete. Its partiality is twofold and has to do with the mutual embodiment of the thing given and of the intending consciousness. For, as we have seen above, by no act of perception I could ever be able to see a thing in all its aspects and from all its angles; and, similarly, there could have been no consciousness that is not embodied and thus, by its very embodiment, limited. The incompleteness of intentionality is so crucial that in Husserl’s writings it becomes the criterion of distinguishing between the unreflective and reflective consciousness: “…a veritable abyss yawns between consciousness and reality. Here, an adumbrated being, not capable of ever becoming given absolutely, merely accidental and relative; there, a necessary and absolute being, essentially incapable of becoming given by virtue of adumbration and appearance.”25 We could say now without further delay that what makes the difference between reflective and unreflective consciousness, between the consciousness of itself, and the consciousness of the world and its manifestations, is nothing else than the 23

“…inasmuch as language distinguishes and interrelates presence and absence,” Paul Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans., D. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 368-9. Ricoeur is thinking here of the original absence, the absence of the absent mother, which, in Freud’s famous example, becomes regulated by (and, in turn, necessitates) the birth of language (fort/da). See also, ibid, pg. 385. 24 Cf., ibid, pg. 385. 25 Edmund Husserl, Ideas I, pg. 111. Cf. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 17-21.

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body. Yet, we would be equally right in saying that what makes the difference between reflective and unreflective consciousness is nothing else than time. For if the presentation of phenomena is necessarily adumbrated, this is because they cannot give themselves all at once, but rather only through the unfolding of time—a time that is ultimately grounded in the consciousness itself.26 How are we to think of this homology between the bodily and the temporal with which phenomenology presents us? We spoke above about the body’s time but it would not be accurate to speak of the body’s own time; rather, time is the body’s, even before it is the mind’s (internal time) or the world’s (objective time). And it is, in fact, through that time that the mind’s affliction of self-deception and self-division can be overcome. We will leave aside for now Merleau-Ponty’s insight that the body in its ambiguous state (neither consciousness nor a thing of the world) is phenomenology’s closest approximation to the Freudian unconscious.27 It is the body, Ricoeur notes, in its capacity for sex that enable us to exist “with no distance between us and ourself, in an experience of completeness exactly contrary to the incompleteness of perception and spoken communication.”28 Why bring the body and time together? Rather, why do we suggest that the body is the locus, the site of time? The answer lies in the phenomenological observation of imperfection: the very imperfection which Kierkegaard connected in the passage above with longing—with desire that moves and is moving. There is expectation and time in general because, thanks to embodiment—both ours and the world’s—phenomena can never present themselves, or give themselves all at once. We understand now that this “all at once” (Zugleich)29 would have been nothing less than the ruination of imperfection. It is, after all, the original demand for perfection (see, for example, the story of the primordial Fall. Fallen imperfection is the result of our failure to accept our original imperfection. That is, the very fact of having an origin, a beginning, while, looking toward the future. Fallen imperfection is the result of our 26

Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. A. Landes, (London: Routledge, 2012), especially pp. 432-457. 27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Preface to A. Hesnard, L’Oeuvre de Freud et son importance pour le mode modern (1960), cited by Ricoeur in Freud & Philosophy, pg. 417, ff99. The insight itself is discussed by Ricoeur at pg. 382. 28 Paul Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy, pg. 383. 29 After Husserl’s remarks in the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp. 81 and 390.

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impatient desire to haste the coming of eschatological perfection before its time, or rather, the desire to do away with the burden of waiting—the desire to “wipe out the duration of time and, with this, any irritating delays”).30 The body puts a halt on those demands whether their orientation is toward the past, in the form of the protological refusal of origin, or toward the future, as the eschatological immediacy and impatience. Thus, time now can come about—it can find its horizon in the space opened up by the body, the place that is precisely embodied in the body. So much is suggested by the story of Genesis where the bodily (the garments of skin) and time as history appear together. It is also this connection that situates the temporal in the bodily that makes us believe that time will have no end. This does not mean that perfection will be ultimately (even eschatologically) unattainable, but rather that the pleasure of perfection will remain insatiable (epektasis contra the Origenist koros). Otherwise, the possibility of an eschatological boredom—with all its devastating implications—would have been inescapable. Andy Warhol’s observation that “sex is nostalgia for sex”31 reveals the connection between temporality and embodiment insofar as nostalgia is the desire to return, to go back to an idealized past that never was, to one’s own Ithaca (as another Odysseus), to one’s childhood and, ultimately, to the mother’s womb. It is, therefore, our desperate effort to escape the burden of existence, to refuse the presence of the present and to cancel out the promise of the future. “Sex is nostalgia.” Nostalgia for what? For sex, for the nostalgic itself, the desire to desire a past outside of time, “a past that has no date and can have none.”32 An act of embodiment as having sex becomes the moment of truth— “from the start, the question of pleasure is the question of truth”33—insofar as the self-deception enabled precisely by the opening between the reflected and the unreflected, the saying and the said, is eliminated by the closing of that very distance of self from itself by the descent to the bodily. Nevertheless, this descent remains always as something desired but never completely achieved—the impossibility of desire, the impossibility of “existing as body, and nothing but body”34 is due to the inescapable fact 30 Paolo Virno, Déjà Vu and the End of History, trans. D. Broder (London and New York: Verso, 2015), 9. 31 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Boston: Harcourt, 1975), 53. 32 Henri Bergson, “Memory of the Present and False Recognition,” in Key Writings, trans. M. McMahon (London: Continuum, 2002), 148. 33 Paul Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy, pg. 370. 34 Ibid, pg. 383.

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that desire itself is always articulated, that is, desire is fundamentally a demand on the Other, for it is never simply the desire for the Other but the desire for the Other’s desire, the demand “Desire me!” Only for him who becomes fully and entirely flesh (John, 1:14) and who is one with the utterance “this is my body”—only for him who is this body and nothing but his body, the descent to the bodily has not only become possible but actual in a desire that is not any longer desired but lived. Indeed, the phrase “this is my body” must be understood (to the extent that it can be understood) only as an erotic declaration. In the same way, one understands (to the extent that one understands) the phrase “I love you.”35 “This is my body” makes little or no sense if one were to approach it as an informative proposition like “Paris is the capital of France.”36 Rather, the invitation to “take, eat, this is my body” does not inform but it performs: it offers unconditionally and unreservedly the Other’s body at a moment— and it could only be for a moment—where the torturous stretching of the soul on the rack of time is closed over a body infinitely condensed because it condenses infinity in a body. Thus, for a moment, Psyche ist ausgedehnt—not any more.

35

Hence the analogy between liturgical and sexual language as described by Marion in his Erotic Phenomenon., trans. S. E. Lewis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 143-150. 36 I am indebted for this insight to Fr. Patrick Royannais who writes: “Si vous voulez comprendre quelque chose à l’eucharistie, n’imaginez pas que la parole de Jésus répétée à chaque eucharistie est une information qui vise à dire ce qu’est le pain, vraiment son corps. Il s’agit bien davantage d’une déclaration d’amour. Lorsque Jésus dit, c’est mon corps pour vous, il dit, je vous aime, « Ayant aimé les siens qui étaient dans le monde, il les aima jusqu’au bout » (Jn. 13). Le repas eucharistique est nuptial s’il s’agit d’alliance, comme l’enseigne Cana, festin des noces de l’agneau. Les amants se disent: prends, ceci est mon corps pour toi.”

PART II: PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE TEMPORAL FUNCTION: UNSETTLING FORCE OR UNIFYING AGENT?

THE TURN, THE OPEN: FROM DASEIN’S CONSCIOUSNESS OF TIME TO TIME’S AFFECTION OF DASEIN MICHAEL R. KELLY

Of a life, or immanence, or the transcendental field, Gilles Deleuze writes, “[I]t can be distinguished from experience in that it does not refer to an object or belong to a subject.”1 Little could seem less phenomenological than a life or immanence that is distinguished from experience and, as Deleuze continues, that “reintroduces Spinozim.”2 And yet, there is a certain lifeism, if you will, in French phenomenology from the 1940s to the 1960s and into the present. For example: Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego that so influenced Deleuze; Merleau-Ponty’s later notions of latentintentionality, the flesh, wild-being; Michel Henry’s monolith on life that starts with his massive Essence of Manifestation; Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given, etc. My broad hypothesis is that part of the story of phenomenology in its second and third generations in the 40s and 60s into today (especially in France) could be told as a series of layered misunderstandings of (or misapprehensions about) Husserl’s writings on the consciousness of internal time and their implications for his view of intentionality. To put the matter more theoretically, maybe more polemically, but certainly less historically, if Husserl declares time the most important and difficult of all phenomenological problems, time begins to become a problem for phenomenology. All major phenomenologists after Husserl will take his view of absolute time-constituting consciousness as evidence that phenomenology is not yet radical enough in its view of intentionality to break free from modern philosophy’s notions of immanence or subjectivity. My more substantive reason for making this claim is that as Husserl’s theory of the consciousness of internal-time matures between the years 1908 and 1911, his view of intentionality and consciousness becomes much more sophisticated and phenomenologically fitting than the 1

G. Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. A. Boyman (New York: Urzone Inc., 2001) pg. 25-6. 2 Ibid., 27.

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view he articulated in his Logical Investigations and the one permitted to emerge in Ideas I, which notably suppresses the discussion of time for the sake of clarity. The early writings on time-consciousness—the 1905 Lectures—underscore the view that the subject in Husserl’s phenomenology certainly renders all experience reducible to the present now of consciousness that never really extends beyond the now but only ever brings the past back into the present through an intentional act of primary memory executed from the now itself, undifferentiated. I think the standard criticisms still floated today against Husserl—criticisms by an idealist who has not escaped the problems of modern philosophy, one who still suffers the problem of appearances, and who inadequately captures the transcendence characteristic of intentionality, while being unable to account for the lived-experience of the self, and who cannot capture otherness or difference because he reduces all otherness to the subject and all dimensions of time to the now—stem from a failure to grasp the development of a non-objectifying dimension of intentionality that one finds in Husserl’s 1908 theory of time-consciousness but that his inheritors overlooked or misinterpreted. Heidegger’s 1929 lecture course, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, seems to agree. Heidegger himself noted, “These lectures [Husserl’s time lectures] are important … for the sharper development of intentionality beyond the Logical Investigations.”3 This remark is interesting for two reasons. First, it is inaccurate; as we have seen earlier, John Brough and Rudolf Bernet alike have well documented that Husserl’s 1905 lectures on time-consciousness were doomed to fail to account for the consciousness of time precisely because Husserl determined these analyses in light of the model of intentionality articulated in his Logical Investigations. Second, Heidegger does not present his appreciation for Husserl’s lectures in his published writings at the time and indeed even seems to actively suppress their influence over his descriptions of Dasein’s originary “temporality,” or “primordial outside of itself,” which is the definition of Dasein’s originary temporality in Being and Time.4 Some of the most influential oversights of this development in Husserl’s thought, I am suggesting, stem from Heidegger’s attempt to rethink the account of time and intentionality developed in his 1927 Being 3

Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 204. 4 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986); Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers Inc, 1963), 329/302. Henceforth cited parenthetically as BT with the English translation following the original, German pagination.

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and Time. The view of time, subjectivity, and intentionality that Heidegger is working out in his 1929 Kantbuch and lectures on “The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic” from the same time anticipates his later thinking and influences the thinking of the next generations of French phenomenologists. In the case of the Kantbuch, we can trace direct influences on the views of time, subjectivity, and intentionality in the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, hence, the legacy of time as a problem for phenomenology. Before Heidegger begins in 1929 to rework his own dissatisfaction with his earlier 1927 theory of Dasein’s intentional structure, he is not as far apart from his mentor on the issue time-consciousness as popularly thought. Heidegger’s account of the self and time in Being and Time depends in crucial places on Husserl’s theory of self- and timeconsciousness. Heidegger’s 1927 account of time and Dasein in Being and Time develops Husserl’s notion of absolute consciousness in terms of Dasein’s originary temporality in such a way that virtually every characteristic of the latter is a functional equivalent of the former. There is innovation in Heidegger beyond Husserl, but not substantive divergence. In his 1929 thinking, however, I argue that Heidegger comes to realize that even his own 1927 alternative to Husserlian subjectivism remains too subjective.5 To highlight this worry, I include an interlude summarizing the later Heidegger’s notion of the clearing from his 1963 essay, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” I include this interlude so that we can see how the 1929 Kantbuch view of time anticipates the later notion of the clearing. Time, as that which “temporalizes itself,” “activates itself,” and “turns the mind into a mind,” anticipates the later Heidegger’s turn to the es gibt, “the clearing,” which “is the open for everything pre- and absent,” as Heidegger put it in 1963.6 Put slightly differently, in his 1929 The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger identifies “temporality as the metaphysical essence of Dasein.”7 Sketched in general terms, Heidegger trades in the horizon of transcendence that is Dasein’s mode of 5

Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991); Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 130. Henceforth referred to and cited as KPM with the English translation following the original, German pagination. 6 Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, ed. and trans. J. Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 65. 7 Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 167.

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being-there for a notion of the “it gives” or the “clearing” that is phenomenologically prior to Dasein’s transcendence and, indeed, Dasein’s temporality. Recalling the Deleuzean starting point, one quite neutral commentator on Heidegger notes of the clearing, it “is not brought about through … disclosure (consciousness), nor is it … explained as originating in things (objects). It is an ‘event’ which does not arise through the agency of particular beings, either man or things.”8 Heidegger’s 1929 view of time, then, achieves three things. First, it less ambiguously provides for phenomenology its radical realization of the ground of intentionality itself and thereby an alternative to Husserl’s subjectivism. It anticipates Heidegger’s “turn.” And it inaugurates a radical turn in phenomenology that presents it with a set of problems similar to those faced by Spinoza following his rejection of Cartesian philosophy. Shifting from an absolute time-constituting consciousness to a form of absolute-time constituting consciousness, so to speak, Heidegger’s conclusions in his Kantbuch led him to identify the self with time and, according to Husserl, “backslide” into metaphysics.9 And this “backslide” creates problems for how one gives an account of the phenomena of subjectivity and temporality because its equation of the self with a time itself makes difficult an account of the one to whom the world appears, thereby threatening to lose each in the other. Heidegger’s rethinking of time transforms the landscape of phenomenology and is perhaps the end of phenomenology (taken as either the realization of its inner logic or the naming of its passing away).10

8

Ronald P. Morrison, “Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger on Time and the Unity of ‘Consciousness,’” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 39.2 (1978): 182-198, 196. 9 Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931), trans. T. Sheehan and R. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 448. 10 As Bernard Waldenfels writes regarding this matter, “The author of the Phenomenology of Perception does not only refer to Husserl’s motif of selfmanifestation, with which Husserl undermines his own standpoint of consciousness, he also adopts the motif of self-affection, introduced by Heidegger in section 34 of his book on Kant.” B. Walenfels, “Coming and Going of Time,” in Time, Memory, Institution: Merleau-Ponty’s New Ontology of Self, ed. D. Morris and K. Maclaren (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 221.

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1. The Problem of Subjectivity for Phenomenology and Its Historical Roots It will help, I think, to remind ourselves that as intentional the self always already goes out to the world (or transcends itself) and primarily finds itself absorbed in the tasks and opinions of its day. Husserlian consciousness does not transcend itself by leaving a box, an immanence, like some philosophical magician. Intentional consciousness’s engagement with the world is such that it entails an awareness of itself in its awareness of objects, for “every experience is ‘conscious’ and consciousness is consciousness of [something] … But every experience is itself experience and to that extent is also conscious.”11 Husserl’s account of intentionality thus entails two levels of distinction and three distinguished parts: We should distinguish (1a) the perception of the thing from (1b) the perceived thing. He distinguishes (1a) and (1b) from (2) that to whom the perceived thing appears. These distinctions do not hold in regard to the givenness of self, absolute consciousness; in self-awareness, (1a) the mode of appearing, (1b) that which appears and (2) that to whom it appears are unified. Husserl characterizes this life of absolute consciousness, the living-present, with three distinguishable yet inseparable moments: primal impression, retention, and protention.12 These moments replaced, respectively, the notions of perception, memory, and expectation, which the standard model of time-consciousness (such as that found in Augustine or Kant) indistinguishably collapses into the now (or the soul’s now). This tripartite form of the living-present should not be thought of as separate pieces in a process (or procession) but as the mode of intentionality of the living-present. Because Husserl realizes that a discussion of the perception of a temporal object first requires an account of the consciousness of succession as opposed to the remembrance of a succession of consciousnesses, he famously distinguishes, for example, memory from retention as differing modes of intentionality. Husserl thus describes the moments of the living-present, which are distinguishable though inseparable, as moments that do not affect each other in chronological succession. Of “the flow of these modes of consciousness,” Husserl claims, “they denote

11

Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans., J. Brough, in Collected Works, Vol. 4 ed., R. Bernet (Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1991), 291/301. 12 John Brough, “The Emergence of Absolute Consciousness in Husserl’s Early Writings on Time-Consciousness,” Man and World in Continental Philosophy Review, August 1972, Volume 5, Issue 3, 298-326. See especially pg. 314.

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neither successively ordered temporal pieces nor a temporal ‘process,’” for the modes of the living-present “do not endure and are not temporal.”13 As such, consciousness reveals itself as ek-static, a non-temporal temporalizing (or unfolding), i.e., a non-sequential time-constituting consciousness that makes possible the disclosure of temporal objects insofar as it makes possible the disclosure of the self’s temporality by accounting for our original sense of pastness in the retentional dimension of the living-present.14 This non-objective, non-temporal consciousness of succession makes possible the objective, temporal apprehension of a succession of consciousnesses because the living-present provides a consciousness of the past of the self and thereby a consciousness of the self and its experiences as past; in this sense, self-awareness is said to be intrinsic to object-awareness. The unity of (1) this ‘shimmering’ livingpresent—the self’s non-objective, non-temporal temporalizing—makes possible the consciousness of (2) psychological time and (3) clock or world time.15 The self for Husserl, then, is not a substance, not a box or a bag and thus not another object in the world graspable only in reflection, not a being among beings; rather, it is a way of existing, the manner of the being of intentional consciousness such that it is implicated, as a pivot of experience, however anonymously or non-objectively, whenever it experiences something in the world.

2. Heidegger’s 1927 Development of Husserl’s Theory of Absolute Consciousness Heidegger in Being and Time reaffirms Husserl’s thesis that intentionality is the structure of consciousness. Yet, from the outset Heidegger avoids the concept of consciousness. He insists that intentionality must be understood in a more originary way, must be understood more radically than it was taken by Husserl. Heidegger maintains that if intentionality is understood more radically, then the psychic cannot even be taken as subject or subjectivity, i.e., not as transcendental subjectivity, thus diverging completely from the later path of Husserl’s work on transcendental subjectivity. If intentionality is understood more radically, then it cannot be subjectivity precisely because the concept of subjectivity is built on the very distinction between inner/outer, a distinction that a

13

PCIT, 333/345. Ibid., 334/346. 15 Ibid., 287/297, 371/382. 14

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more radical view of intentionality undermines. So, in place of the subject, Heidegger introduces the expression, ‘Dasein.’ It is true that for Heidegger if one sufficiently and originarily understands what intentionality is and what it entails, then the psychical can no longer be understood as subject or subjectivity. It is true, too, that we must understand the being to whom intentional comportment belongs as Dasein if we are to grasp what is really entailed in the transformative power of the notion of intentionality. But none of this popular entry into Heidegger is very helpful. Such a way of looking at the basic originality of Heidegger over against his teacher gives the impression of introducing a distinction, of supposedly showing us two things where we might only see one. But such a way of presenting Heidegger and Heidegger presenting phenomenology really just presents two ways of saying the same thing as if they were two separate things. It is like a shell-game with words or phenomenological pseudo-distinctions. We can direct ourselves to things or be intentional only because we are not self-enclosed subjects; but this is only to say that we are—Dasein is—intentional. Heidegger is asking the harder question, however, namely, “What is intentionality?” There, he traces intentionality to the meaning-structure of experience. Building upon Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition, Heidegger notes that intentionality is a moment of taking something-assomething. Non-human animals might be directed toward objects, for example, and then might have transitive consciousness. But transitive consciousness is not intentionality. This might be better thought as Heidegger’s advance beyond Husserl in Being and Time. For Heidegger, a creature capable of intentionality—or taking something-as-something— cannot be described merely as ‘consciousness’ or a ‘subject.’ Such a creature is a creature that is trying to be something or trying to do something with its life. Such a creature is a creature for whom “its very being must be an issue for it.” Taking something-as-something opens up only when I am trying to be something and I care about my success or failure at that project and thus hold myself to the norms and standards associated with those commitments tied to my project. It is for this reason that one may say intentionality is primordially pre-theoretical or a matter of tacit reckoning. Heidegger’s starting point for developing an account of Dasein’s manner of existing stems from Husserl’s position that consciousness is not a container or a locational term, not a being among beings or a thing among things in the world. Concerning Dasein’s manner of “being-in-theworld,” Heidegger states, “[T]he person is not a thing, not a subject, not an object.” Persons exist as the “performance” of intentional acts and

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intentional “acts are … non-physical.”16 Dasein’s intentional structure and its intentional acts do not exist the way, for example, that “water is ‘in’ the glass.”17 Of course, this is trivially true; it makes no sense to talk of these kinds of objects as having intentionality or awareness as Dasein’s relation to the world is not merely an indifferent relation of being next to or within other things in the world—the way a glass is on the counter, next to the sink and within the room. Such designations are nonsensical for beings that lack self-awareness. Dasein, by contrast “is in each case mine.”18 The early Heidegger thus concerned himself not with overcoming subjectivity in general but with overcoming the traditional, Cartesian notion of subjectivity as a worldless mental substance (which, granted, he claims to have found much remaining in Husserl’s thought).19 Seeking a new descriptive level of subjectivity, Heidegger’s fidelity to phenomenology’s principle of all principles led him to propose a different tack toward understanding the character of intentional consciousness and the self-awareness intrinsic to it. Before Husserl’s reduction that serves a “distinctive manner of being … for an objective science,” Heidegger asks: [I]s it not contrary to the rules of all sound method to approach a problematic without sticking to what is given as evident in the area of our theme? And what is more indubitable than the givenness of the ‘I’ … Is it … obvious … that access to Dasein must be gained only by mere reflective awareness of the ‘I’ of actions? (BT, 115/151, my italics)

On the one hand, the givenness of the ‘I’ is indubitable because, as Dasein, all my experiences are mine. Heidegger makes this clear from the outset of Being and Time, noting that “because Dasein has in each case a mineness, one must always use personal pronouns when one addresses it: ‘I am,’ ‘you are.’”20 On the other hand, the indubitability of the givenness of the ‘I’ is not obvious in Dasein’s engagement with the world: “[I]f we posit an ‘I’ or subject as that which is … given, we shall completely miss the phenomenal content of Dasein,” and this is because “every idea of a ‘subject’ still posits the subjectum … the ‘reification’ of consciousness.”21 What is most accurate as a description of Dasein’s manner of existing for Heidegger? 16

BT, 48/73. BT, 54/79. 18 BT, 42/68. 19 Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First Person Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 229ff. 20 BT, 42/68. 21 BT, 46/72. 17

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Dasein exists as interested or “absorbed in” the world, and this means that ‘‘I ‘reside’ or ‘dwell alongside’ the world as that which is familiar to me and in such and such a way.”22 The matter of familiarity is crucial to Heidegger’s hermeneutical development of Husserl’s theory of subjectivity and intentionality. The self that resides or dwells in the world resides or dwells in a world imbued with meaning, a world into which it is thrown, and thus affectively attuned by a ‘pastness’ that colors its presence in a world of objects available for its interested use, or ‘ready to hand,’ in realizing its projects of futural or teleological directedness as Heidegger puts it. One who has chosen to be a humanities professor, for example, dwells in a world where desks and chalk and blackboards show themselves as familiar and in ways that facilitate her existence as a good instructor. In living, this instructor takes herself as neither object nor subject in a thematically, i.e., objectively, explicit sense.23 Dasein’s manner of existence neither exclusively nor even primarily concerns itself with how it knows ‘objects’ in the world or itself as engaged with the world. Such a question of objectivity is a derivative one for intentional being. Granted, for the new instructor such conceptual questions like, “Where and how am I to situate myself in the room and before my students?” often occur in an (awkwardly) deliberative or conceptual way. But the veteran instructor, like Aristotle’s phronimos, directs herself when conducting class to the class, ‘dwells’ in the class, and finds herself given along with, or implicated in, the tasks of her day.24 When teaching, I do not have a secondary objective awareness that ‘I am teaching the class.’ I do not find an ‘I’ in my experience but only intentional directedness toward the world, the task at hand as ‘the class being taught,’ and I non-objectively grasp this engagement as ‘mine,’ i.e., I am implicated in and intrinsic to it.25 Dasein’s tacit engagement with the world betrays a basic self-world duality evidenced by the fact that she can say, after or perhaps even during the class, ‘I’m having a good class today,’ thus thematizing the lived experience of her conducting a good class. Dasein’s very pre-reflective self-givenness makes such reflective objectification possible. And this 22

BT, 54/80. Heidegger writes, “Dasein does not have the kind of being which belongs to something merely present at hand in the world [as an object], nor does it ever have it. So neither is it to be presented thematically as something we come across in the same way as we come across what is present at hand [as an object]” (BT, 243). 24 Hubert Dreyfus, “Overcoming the myth of the Mental: How Philosophers can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” APA Pacific Division Presidential Address 2005, 11, 20. D. Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, 79. 25 Ibid., 81. 23

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implicit communion of self and others—classroom, students, blackboard —stems from Dasein’s care-structure of subjectivity, which is, for Heidegger, “life as a whole in [its] structural and developmental interconnections.”26 Inserting the ‘I’ into subjectivity’s engagement with the world corrupts the phenomenon of subjective experience by introducing a reflective apprehension in the service of the goal of an objective and rigorous science. Taking a cue from Dilthey, and registering a complaint against Husserl, Heidegger argues we cannot construe the inter connections of life as “psychical elements and atoms” or “piece the life of the soul together.”27 Reminded of some reasons to think that Husserl’s explanation of consciousness’s constitution of its lived-experience objectifies and corrodes the givenness of living,28 we see that for Heidegger a return to the things themselves—the phenomenon precisely as given in the limits in which they are given—thus requires a move away from a view of self as consciousness to a view of self in its manner of existing; hence, Heidegger’s famous claim that “the essence of Dasein lies in its existence.”29 The essence of Dasein as lying in its existence lies in its intentional care-structure. But, of course, “The primordial unity of the structure of care lies in temporality;”30 it “makes possible the constitution of the structures of care.”31 Or, as put elsewhere in the rough draft of Being and Time, i.e., lectures published as the History of the Concept of Time, that care-structure “presupposes what we are seeking: time.”32 Getting to intentionality more radically and to its more radical implications thus requires a view of time different from Husserl’s account of the consciousness of internal time. While it is often thought that our thrownness and facticity map onto the past that is an essential moment of Dasein’s temporality, we must see that this is a crude mapping, for bound up with our thrownness and facticity is our death, or rather our demise. As our demise reveals us as always ahead of ourselves, the “center of gravity of temporality is no longer the present

26

BT, 46/72. BT, 46/72. 28 Ibid. 29 BT, 42/67. 30 BT, 327/301. 31 BT, 331/304. 32 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans., T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 72. 27

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but the future. The future is the source from which time flows.”33 Likewise, while our projects are meant to map onto the future that is an essential moment of Dasein’s temporality, that too is a crude mapping, for our projects are conditioned by our disposedness that colors how the world will show up for us, what matters to us and how it matters, and thus what projects and commitments one may choose to purse. This brief phenomenological reflection on Heidegger is important because it raises questions about the tendency to reify one or both of these characteristics of Dasein’s temporality—pastness/thrownness and futurity/projectedness— and presents them as substantive moves past Husserl. Such emphasis is often presented as a claim that Heidegger, unlike Husserl’s and other traditional views of time, does not privilege the now among time’s moments; hence, Heidegger’s advance beyond Husserl’s theory of absolute time-constituting consciousness and intentionality. But the 1927 Heidegger’s view of Dasein’s temporality bears substantive structural similarities (with different points of emphasis, of course) to Husserl’s account of absolute consciousness. And Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s temporality remains tied to the ‘now’ despite the emphasis often put on time coming from the future (rather than present or past in a Husserlian account). Concerning the second point first, in the lecture, Basic Problems, Heidegger, notes, the ‘now’ is “nothing but the ‘expression,’ the speaking out,’ of original temporality in its ecstatic character.”34 As Irene McMullin recently glossed this claim, “Temporality expressed is time and this expression is the very way Dasein exists its being-in-the-world.”35 There are four features of Dasein’s self-expressive determination of time: spannedness, datability, significance, and publicity. The determinations of datability, significance, and publicity have their nowness to them that is somewhat obvious. But spannedness seems to overcome the now in an equally obvious sense, and insofar as these other determinations of time may flow from spannedness, one might say, the privilege of the now is overcome. Perhaps. But Heidegger himself also notes that spannedness “has its basis in the fact that the now is nothing but the ‘expression,’ the 33

Keith Ansell-Person and Allen Schrift, The New Century: Bergsonism, Phenomenology and Responses to Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 2014), 204. 34 Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 429. Cited in D. Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start, ed. T. Kisiel and J. van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 270. 35 Basic Problems (BP), 208.

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‘speaking out’ of original temporality in its ecstatic character.”36 In response to the idea that our projects or practical commitments drive us forward or make us future-oriented, one notes Heidegger’s claim that “the now itself guides and pushes us forward to that which is just transpiring there in the now … the now is, in its essence, a ‘now when this and that …,’ a ‘now wherein ….’”37 Granted, one does not focus thematically or reflectively on the now in pursuing these practical tasks. And while the future is of crucial importance in understanding Dasein’s care-structure— its intentionality—we cannot reify the future but instead must take time as its three moments; Heidegger writes: Whichever then I may choose, the then as such always refers in each case back to a now, or more precisely, the then is understood on the basis of a now, however inexplicit. Conversely, every formerly is a ‘now no longer’ and is as such, in its structure, the bridge to a now. But this now is, in each case, the now of a particular making-present or retention in which a ‘then’ and a ‘formerly’ is, in each case uttered.38

If Heidegger—and those inclined to read him strictly as a critic of Husserl—intended these observations as advances beyond Husserl’s theory of absolute consciousness, they are not very persuasive. Husserl has said much the same about the place of the now in the internal differentiation and sameness or identity in a manifold that is absolute timeconstituting consciousness. As Heidegger maintains elsewhere in 1927, “The transcendence of being-in-the-world in its distinctive entirety is grounded in the original … horizonal unity of temporality.”39 And, indeed, Heidegger himself recognized Husserl’s advances beyond Cartesianism on such a point.40 Husserl’s theory of absolute consciousness clearly does not consider the subject as a conglomeration of atomistic, psychical elements united by an ‘I’ in the now. His account of the absolute time-constituting consciousness, rather than ‘reifying’ consciousness, demonstrates its manner of givenness such that the living-present grasps spatiotemporal objects and itself along with them according to their specific mode of intentionality and givenness. The very non-objectifying, prethematic mode of intentionality that Heidegger packages in practical examples is developed first by Husserl in his mature account of absolute time36

BT, 407/374. MFL, (407/374). 38 MFL, 202. 39 BP, 243. 40 BT, 48/73. 37

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constituting consciousness. Indeed, we should recall that Husserl maintains (i) that “every experience is ‘conscious’ and consciousness is consciousness of [something] …;” (ii) that absolute consciousness’s mode of givenness is not temporal and is not constructed out of pieces in a “process;” and yet (iii) absolute consciousness constitutes through its double-intentionality a non-objectifying awareness of itself that accompanies its awareness of psychological and clock time.41 While Husserl brackets these forms of psychological and clock time with the reduction, Heidegger begins his account of Dasein’s temporality by imitating Husserl’s distinction of the absolute consciousness from clock and psychological time. While Husserl brackets the levels of clock (calendar or world) time and psychological (or subjective) time, Heidegger considers such worldly and psychological modes of time “inauthentic” or derivative because they consider time and the self as things within time taken in an objective glance as something “pieced together cumulatively … ‘in the course of time.’”42 The matters of worldly and psychological time for Heidegger are likewise derivative senses of time, that is, because they depend on a more fundamental phenomenon, namely, Dasein’s nonthematic, non-objectifying practical engagement with the world that discloses clock and psychological time.43 Originary time concerns the mode of the self’s non-objective and lived self-givenness in its engagements with temporal objects. One might polemically or teasingly say that Heidegger just names that for which Husserl concluded we lack names—that is, the non-temporal temporalizing that is a standing streaming, or absolute consciousness. Much like Husserl’s description of the living-present as a non-temporal temporalizing, the primordial self is “not an entity at all” but a self that apprehends itself in a non-objectified glance that gradually differentiates and consolidates its experiences.44 Perhaps most tellingly, as Heidegger admits in 1928, “that which Husserl still calls [time-consciousness] … is precisely time itself in its original sense.”45 Heidegger’s description of Dasein’s fundamental feature in its tacit coping with the world, namely, its 41

These three points refer respectively to: PCIT 291/301, 333/345, and 371/382. BT, 328/376. 43 D. Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start, ed. T. Kisiel and J. van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 240. 44 BT, 328/377. Cf. R. Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 171. 45 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 26 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, 1928. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 264. 42

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temporality, rests on these very descriptions of absolute consciousness, the self’s non-objective form of self-givenness, that Husserl first presented. Heidegger’s view of Dasein or subjectivity’s self-givenness adds a wrinkle to (or irons out a wrinkle of, if you like) Husserl’s theory of absolute consciousness.46 Just as Husserl discovered the living-present as the absolute bedrock of intentionality, Heidegger discovers Dasein’s originary temporality as the essence of its being-in-the-world and disclosure of the things themselves.

3. An Interlude: Later Heidegger and ‘The End of Phenomenology and the Task of Thinking’ In Being and Time, Heidegger gives elaborate distinctions of being in the world and various kinds of comportment in which we direct ourselves theoretically or practically in such a way that presupposes the world in which things take shape, appear, are accessible and so forth. This open site or space or world in which things show themselves, in which Dasein is always already engaged, becomes in the development of Heidegger’s work more and more the focus of his thought. Especially after Being and Time, this open space is no longer conceived as a structure of the psyche; it is no longer conceived even as the basic structure of the psyche. It is conceived rather as that in which the psyche and in which Dasein are engaged. In fact, this engagement itself is essential to Dasein and the things themselves; it is only through this engagement that Dasein is Dasein and that the things themselves show themselves as themselves: The following text [“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’”] belongs to a larger context. It is the attempt undertaken again and again ever since 1930 to shape the question of Being and Time in a more primal way. This means: to subject the point of departure of the question in Being and Time to an immanent criticism.47

Very soon after Being and Time, Heidegger realizes that phenomenology cannot simply stop with intentionality, not even with intentionality understood in a radical way that undercuts the concept of subject and subjectivity, if it wants to return to the things themselves. Rather, we must 46

The most cogent defense of this position I have found is Steven Crowell’s. See, S. Crowell, “Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time.” Inquiry, Vol. 44 (2001): 433-454. 47 Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Basic Writing, D. Krell, ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 54.

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turn back to that which first makes intentionality possible. We must regress as it were. We must, in other words, carry out a move in thinking back to the ground of intentionality. One of the many names Heidegger gives that ground of intentionality—particularly in the Marburg texts—is being-in-the-world and later “the open,” “the clearing.” Basically, Heidegger wants to rework his alternative to, and critique of, Husserl’s call for a turn to the things themselves that presupposes what the Sache is. Husserl calls for a turn to the Sache but takes the Sache for granted rather than questioning about the identity and the logos of it. Husserl, as Heidegger expresses it, takes the Sache as the subjectivity of consciousness, and Heidegger maintains that for Husserl “the matter of philosophy is subjectivity.”48 Here, we have a presupposition in the presuppositionless science, according to Heidegger. Husserl, that is, really concerns himself with simply determining the method of presentation of the Sache, the method by which the things are to be presented and accessed so as to be submitted to phenomenological descriptions in light of the principle of all principles, which “decides what matters alone can suffice for the method.”49 Heidegger targets the method of the phenomenological reduction and argues that Husserl takes for granted that subjectivity is the Sache; accordingly, Husserl then concerns himself with the method of accessing the subject. Phenomenology’s principle of all principles is already violated or cannot be upheld. Hence, these concepts that function centrally for Husserl have, for Heidegger, to be set aside. As Heidegger has shown, intentionality thought through most radically undermines the concept of subjectivity and consciousness. My sense in assessing Heidegger’s own self-assessment is that he did not achieve these goals in 1927 because he did not set aside the matter of timeconsciousness adequately or thoroughly enough to set aside transcendental subjectivity. Now, in distancing his thought from Husserl’s phenomenology (which one clearly sees in this late essay) Heidegger poses this question: what remains “unthought in the call ‘to the thing itself?’”50 When the phenomenologist carries out this turn to the Sache, is there something, some condition, that must already be in play, that must already prevail in order for that very turning to be possible? What is it that must always be in play whenever one turns to the Sache of phenomenology and metaphysics (philosophy itself) but remains unthought?51 Heidegger observes that 48

ibid., 64. ibid., 63. 50 ibid., 64. 51 ibid. 49

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whatever form the classical phenomenological turn to the Sache takes (e.g., Husserl’s reduction) the concern is to bring the Sache to present itself (e.g., Husserl’s concern is to bring transcendental subjectivity to present itself for phenomenological investigation). The matter, then, is to allow the Sache to come to presence. For Heidegger, we want to let the Sache come forth in such a way as to show itself. The question is, then, what condition must always prevail, be operative, be in play, in order for this showing to happen, in order for the Sache to shine forth and be brought to presence in such a way as to show itself? Heidegger answers the question in two stages. First, any such shinning necessarily occurs in some light (in eine Helle or brightness). In other words, something can shine forth in such a way as to show itself, i.e., something can appear only in some light, only within a certain brightness. This first step is not foreign to metaphysics but is at the very core of metaphysics. Heidegger refers specifically to Plato for whom the shining of the eidos or ideas presupposes the brightness or light in which the idea can be radiant or show itself: “All metaphysics … speaks the language of Plato …. No outward appearance without light—Plato already knew this.”52 Up to this point, metaphysics, most of all Plato, has carried out from the beginning this step. From the shining showing of thing and the being of things, metaphysics pursues the source of this shining. Yet Heidegger continues, “[B]rightness, in its turn, rests within something open, something free which might illuminate it here and there, now and then. Brightness plays in the open and wars there with the darkness.”53 Here we have the decisive move back to what remains unthought in classical phenomenology and metaphysics. The move from the brightness that shinning showing presupposes back to something open and free in which the brightness plays, an openness in which the brightness plays or in which the brightness spreads or is extended. So, it is a matter of regress from the brightness to the source, this openness in which this brightness plays and spreads out. Heidegger calls this “the open” (das Offen) or “the free” or “the openness.” Then, however, he introduces the notion of Lichtung, “the clearing.” Heidegger claims that this ‘open’ that grants a possible letting shine and a showing (because it first gives space for the brightness) we call the clearing. The word, Lichtung, is derived from the verb lichten, which means to thin out or to clear as one thins out the section of the forest. So, 52 53

ibid., 67. ibid., 64.

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lichten means to make something free, to make something open. He then adds that this thinning out has nothing in common with the word Licht or light in the sense of brightness. Heidegger writes, To open something means: To make something light, free and open, e.g., to make the forest free of trees at one place. The openness thus originating is the clearing. What is light in the sense of being free and open has nothing in common with the adjective ‘light’ [Licht], meaning ‘bright’ …. This is to be observed for the difference between openness and light …. Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates the clearing. Rather, light presupposes the clearing.54

This means that the clearing must already prevail in order for there to be any light, any illumination, any brightness and hence in order for any shining, showing of things to occur (or in order for the Sache of phenomenology to be made present, to show itself). Hence, the complete dissociation between Licht and Lichtung or light and the clearing because light presupposes the clearing or Licht presupposes the Lichtung. Even in Plato, Lichtung goes unthought and the task of philosophy, the task of thinking at the end of philosophy is to think the clearing, for while Plato realized that there was “no outward appearance without light,” Heidegger adds, “But there is no light and brightness without the open. Even darkness needs it.”55 These are, of course, very broad strokes in this essay. Many questions very quickly will arise. How is the regress avoided? How are the clearing, light, and shining in the clearing precisely related? What is the relation between the clearing and Dasein? Does the clearing depend on Dasein or vice versa? I do not know exactly the answer to these questions. It is not my interest to answer these questions, but to see the anticipation of these notions and issues that give rise to such questions—notions and issues that are found not only in Heidegger, but also in other phenomenological work in the 1940s, 1960s, and present. It is my hypothesis that Heidegger already has seen in 1929 that Dasein depends on the clearing or the Lichtung, and the functional equivalent of these notions in 1929 is temporality, the metaphysical essence of Dasein that “first makes the mind into a mind” and “belongs to the inner possibility of the letting-stand-against.”56 The notion of time in Kant and 54

ibid., 65. ibid., 67. 56 KPM, 133. 55

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the Problem of Metaphysics anticipates the later Heidegger’s notion of the clearing, for as the light presupposes and depends on the clearing, intentionality—both the mind and that which stands against it, the object, the Gegenstand—presupposes time. As Heidegger writes in his Kantbuch: Because our Dasein is finite—existing in the midst of beings that already are, beings to which it has been delivered over—therefore it must necessarily take this already-existing being in stride, that is to say, it must offer it the possibility of announcing itself.57

Though such offering itself sounds too subjective or too much the doing of the subject, we shall see that time itself makes the subject and thus time itself makes the offering in which the subject or Dasein finds itself. Heidegger was well on his way, as he said, since just before 1930 (1929, to be precise) to identifying the end of phenomenology: … [We] may suggest that the day will come when we will not shun the question whether the opening, the free open, may not be within which alone pure space and ecstatic time and everything present and absent in them have the place which gathers and projects everything …. All philosophical thinking which explicitly or inexplicitly follows the call ‘to the thing itself’ is already admitted to the free space of the opening in its movement and with its method …. Whether or not what is present is experienced, comprehended, or presented, presence as lingering in openness always remains dependent upon the prevalent opening. What is absent, too, cannot be as such unless it presences in the free space of the opening …. If this were so, then the opening would not be the mere opening of presence but the opening of presence concealing itself, the opening of a self-concealing sheltering. If this were so, then with these questions we would reach the path to the task of thinking at the end of philosophy. But isn’t this all unfounded mysticism or even bad mythology …?58

4. Heidegger’s Kantbuch and the Problem of Time for Phenomenology Heidegger’s 1927 masterpiece tracked the question of the meaning of being. But meaning arises in and from our pretheoretical encounters with life as it is lived. Heidegger thus seeks a return to the things themselves by “render[ing] the interpreter transparent to himself as life, and this means temporal, historical reality. Hermeneutics is directed toward the living 57 58

KPM, 19. KPM, 66-7, 71.

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present or the fundamental mobility of life.”59 Husserl’s ‘cognitive’ and ‘scientific’ (or theoretical) version of phenomenology is discarded because, in this pretheoretical (pre-scientific) engagement with life, there is no room for, or reason to, talk about consciousness “because there is no interiority into which [life] can withdraw.”60 Heidegger thus takes Husserl to task for the commitment that corners phenomenology from the outset, namely, the search for an adequate ground for the certainty of experience in the rigorous science that Husserl wishes to make phenomenology. This search in Heidegger’s view is a theoretical one, a philosopher’s search, however much Husserl professed setting aside philosophical and scientific dogmas. The assumption that we need to and can find in consciousness’s lived-experience an adequate certainty or indomitability resurrects the notion of an inside impervious to the doubt that plagues the world outside. What is needed is a clearer sense of temporality.61 As R. P. Morrison put the matter with an accuracy matched by its simplicity, “Heidegger’s later thought takes place on this prehorizonal level … or pretemporalized time … prior to all historical determinations of being. It cannot … be … correlated with the formal quasi-temporality which for Husserl unites consciousness.”62 As I understand Heidegger, Husserl’s search for an adequate ground for the certainty of experience undermines the radical value of intentionality and limits phenomenology’s access to the radical implications of a view of 59

KPM, 198. KPM, 199. I am not sure I agree with, for instance, de Bestugie, or perhaps I just do not understand him. It seemed to me that in the History of the Concept of Time, pg., 107, Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl is far simpler: Husserl’s failed to bracket a Cartesian scientific/theoretical approach to the world, and therefore his epoche is incomplete. So, Heidegger wants to turn to factical life as more basic. I think the stuff that de Bestugie is talking about is discovered on the basis of the critique, but not the grounds of it. 61 F. Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. D. Pettigrew (New York: Humanities Press, 1998), 57. 62 R. P. Morrison, “Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger on Time and the Unity of ‘Consciousness,’” 196-97. He writes of Heidegger’s thought from the Kantbuch forward: “[I]t is clear that Heidegger now has to account for two different manifestations of human temporality. He does this by referring to them as ‘temporalizations’ of what could be called a ‘prehorizonal’ time. The temporality of consciousness is not thereby put on equal footing with the temporality of disclosedness; the latter is still the most primordial temporalization. But the notion of temporalization means that there is an essential respect in which time remains constant in all horizons, whether they are ‘ecstatic’ or internal to the subject’s experience.” 60

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intentionality. In the 1925 lecture course that amounts to something like a working-draft of Being and Time, Heidegger notes that he will work from Husserl’s three decisive discoveries, namely, intentionality, categoriality, and the original sense of the a priori. Heidegger already, in his 1922 view from his Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, understood the original a priori as “precisely the preeminent way in which life comes to itself.”63 The original a priori will become Dasein’s existentials in Being and Time. And regardless of how one works out the meaning of such existentials or original a priori, Heidegger is clear that this decisive discovery must be understood in terms of the discovery of intentionality. More precisely, this discovery of the existentials or original a priori “presupposes the understanding of what we are seeking: time.”64 This is not the fundamentally Husserlian insight that identifies timeconsciousness as the bedrock of all intentionality. Heidegger is quite clear about this in lectures, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic: In his … Gottingen lectures of 1904/05, Husserl investigated the problem of time in a rather definite context …. He speaks of the “internal timeconsciousness” …. Concerning the problem of time … everything remains, in principle, as it was, so much so that time gets understood as something immanent; it remains something internal, “in the subject.” Hence, the title, “internal time-consciousness.” Husserl’s whole investigation originated from his observations of the primary and primordial consciousness of time in the knowledge about a merely experiential datum … that which Husserl still calls time-consciousness, i.e., the consciousness of time, is precisely time, itself, in the primordial sense.65

To put the matter less abstractly, Heidegger argues, “Husserl does not further ask the question about the being constituted as consciousness. The insight into intentionality does not go far enough ….”66 Heidegger takes the insight further. Husserl applies the doctrine of intentionality according to its traditional conception.67 The being constituted as consciousness or the subject that goes beyond itself and reaches objects in the world is a more primordial phenomenon. This more primordial phenomenon is 63 Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans., R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 66. 64 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans., T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 72. 65 MFL, 203-04. 66 ibid., 133. 67 ibid., 135.

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transcendence, and “this phenomenon of transcendence is not identical with the problem of the subject-object relation.”68 Lest one miss Heidegger’s point, “[T]he problem of transcendence as such is not at all identical with the problem of intentionality …. [T]he latter is itself only possible on the basis of original transcendence … being-in-the-world.”69 Unsatisfied with his account of Dasein’s originary temporality in Being and Time, Heidegger reformulates his theory between 1927 and 1929. As he explains in the preface to the fourth edition of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), the “decisive motivation for the book” was “the misunderstanding of the question of being presented in Being and Time.”70 I take this claim to mean that Being and Time had not radically rethought intentionality because it remained too closely tied to the self’s manner of being in the world as a knower in relation to a known or self in relation to world.71 Originary temporality was supposed to explain Dasein’s being and being in the world, but it remained the other way around. Indeed, Dasein’s originary temporality amounts to a functional equivalent of the tripartite structure of Husserl’s absolute time-constituting consciousness. The presence in person of Dasein’s tacit coping parallels the primal impression; the affective determinacy of the always already there parallels Husserlian retention; the teleological directedness of Dasein’s projects and engagement with the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ about which we care develops Husserl’s notion of protention (an undoubtedly needed phenomenological advance). Heidegger in 1929 thus begins to abandon the view of a non-sequential form of time that structures Dasein’s activity—that is, Dasein as the structure of the being for whom being is a question—and he exchanges this theory for an eventual view of the “obtaining of being,” the clearing (or Lichtung), the “it gives” (or es gibt) that being is and that is being. The root of this new view of intentionality—an intentionality liberated from consciousness—I believe is found in Heidegger’s 1929 Kantbuch. There he identifies a time that “activates itself,” “makes the mind into a mind,” and captures the ontological status of intuition. Also there Being’s selfannouncing comes “before” subject and object, and indeed “before,” as Heidegger will put it in 1969, “everything pre- and ab-sent.” As the “clearing is the opening for everything pre-and ab-sent,” i.e., everything temporal, I want to propose that we consider this 1929 view of time that activates itself as the opening to the opening that is clearing. 68

ibid. ibid. 70 KPM, 210. 71 ibid., xv. 69

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In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger begins his more radical reconstruction of intentionality by identifying Kant’s genius as an ontological fusing of “time and the I think” into an “original sameness” such that “as pure self-affection, it forms in an original way the finite selfhood, so that the self can become something like self-consciousness.”72 This strikingly ambiguous expression rests at the heart of Heidegger’s new theory of time and intentionality in phenomenology. On the one hand, one could interpret this view as a “phenomenological investigation of the subjectivity of the finite subject,” as Dan Zahavi does.73 On the other hand, one could interpret this view as a metaphysical account of the self. To evaluate these possible interpretations of Heidegger’s newfound appreciation for Kant as a development of phenomenology or phenomenological apostasy requires an inquiry into the following: (i) Heidegger’s description of the self’s transcendence as a unity of infinite and finite intuition, or the ‘ontological synthesis;’ (ii) the notion of the fusion of time and the ‘I think;’ and (iii) how the relation between (i) and

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KPM, 183/130. D. Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First Person Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 229, fn1. “This interpretation,” writes Zahavi, “can find support in, for instance, Sein und Zeit, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1927), Einleitung in die Philosophie, and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. In these works, Heidegger called for an analysis of the being of the subject, and wrote that it was necessary to commence a phenomenological investigation of the subjectivity of the finite subject. He also argued that his own thematization of the ontology of Dasein was an ontological analysis of the subjectivity of the subject, and that an ontological comprehension of the subject would lead us to the existing Dasein” (291). Interestingly, the insertion of the dates of publication for these works is Zahavi’s, and while he notes works dating from and before 1928 (the publication date for Einleitung in die Philosophie), the date for Heidegger’s Kantbuch, 1929, remains absent. Zahavi’s gloss on this passage maintains that Heidegger endorses a hermeneutical variation on Husserl’s claim that pure self-affection is the essence of manifestation: subjective, objective, and temporal. Moreover, Zahavi claims in his Self-awareness and Alterity that this passage indicates Heidegger’s continued interest in phenomenology’s attempt to clarify the first-person givenness of subjectivity: “Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of self-affection has often been overshadowed by the better-known analyses of Heidegger …. In Heidegger’s reading of Kant, the essence of time is taken to be pure self-affection. To speak of self-affection … is to speak of a … process … in and through which selfhood and subjectivity are established …. Thus, qua pure self-affection, time turns out to be the essence of subjectivity” (293). Zahavi contends that Heidegger has further translated Husserl’s livingpresent into an ontologically clarified concept of subjectivity. 73

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(ii) results in what I shall track as the emergence of a Spinozism in phenomenology. In the preparatory sections of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger states that what is at issue is “the essential possibility of ontological synthesis,”74 an inquiry into the ontological structure of the kind of being that transcends itself. Heidegger considers this ontological synthesis “essential” because he believes that “if finite knowledge of beings is possible, then it must be grounded in a knowing of the Being of beings prior to all receiving … a knowledge … (which is apparently nonfinite) such as ‘creative’ intuiting.”75 The notion of an ontological synthesis thus denotes some fundamental synthesis that unites two modes of knowing or intuiting (Heidegger uses these terms interchangeably) that Kant divorced, namely the finite and the infinite, the receptive and the creative. Finite, human knowing apprehends only appearances, while infinite, godly knowing apprehends the thing-in-itself. If one wants to hold that the subject apprehends the object and not merely an appearance of it, particularly since Descartes, then one must argue that finite knowledge prior to the service of an objective science must retain as the condition of its possibility some connection to this manner of infinite knowing. Hence, for Heidegger, a proper phenomenological investigation into the subjectivity of the subject must be ontological. In reconstructing the prefacing material in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger acknowledges that the mode of human intuition is “noncreative.”76 He maintains that, for Kant, sensibility receives intuitions and understanding provides their determinate cognitive content.77 Following Kant’s insistence that “neither of these qualities is to be preferred to the other,”78 Heidegger insists that one should consider sense and understanding as “an original unity,” an “original synthesis of the basic sources” of knowing.79 To gather support for this notion of an original synthesis Heidegger seizes upon an ambiguity in Kant’s preface, which states, “There are two stems of human knowledge, sensibility, and understanding, which perhaps spring forth from a common, but to us unknown, root.”80 74

KPM, 40/28. ibid., 36/25. 76 ibid., 25/17. 77 ibid., 25-29/18-20. 78 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1927), A51. 79 KPM, 34/24. 80 Ibid., A51. 75

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This “unknown root” of which Heidegger wishes to avail himself seems to refer back to the mode of infinite or absolute knowing—or mode of access that permits being to announce itself. Infinite or absolute knowing intuits “being as being in itself, i.e., not as an object,” not as a mere appearance revealing some part of the thing itself to a constituting subject.81 If finite knowing is to know the beings that it encounters rather than merely appearances of them, then “ontological knowledge” must be “the condition for the possibility of ontic [finite] knowledge.”82 This is why Heidegger makes Kant say, If finite knowledge of beings is to be possible, then it must be grounded in a knowing of the Being of beings prior to all receiving. For its own possibility, therefore, the finite knowledge of beings requires a knowing … (which is apparently nonfinite) such as creative intuiting.83

The ontological synthesis thus designates the original intuiting or synthesis from which sense and understanding “spring forth” such that “the finite being that we call human being … can be open to a being that it itself is not and that therefore must be able to show itself from itself”—or “shows itself from itself,” the clearing.84 Finite knowing can be intentional, i.e., “open to a being that it itself is not,” only if it first is “grounded in a knowing of the being of beings,” i.e., absolute knowing as ontological disclosure or the transcendence that itself makes possible intentionality (or makes the mind into a mind so that it can take something-as-something). For Heidegger, insofar as Husserl’s phenomenology considers intentional experience as a distinctive manner of being an object for an objective science of consciousness, it obscures the being of beings—the things themselves—because it reduces all beings to appearing objects for consciousness or finite knowing. The ontological alternative Heidegger seeks in order to get beyond this traditional view of the subject (from Descartes to Husserl and even Heidegger’s own Being and Time) no longer concerns itself with expanding the traditional concept of awareness rooted in the view of consciousness’s lived experience. Heidegger’s thesis argues instead for two radically different modes of givenness, one ontological or absolute, the other ontic or finite, the latter being founded upon the former or “springing forth” from the former—a metaphor that we shall see reappear in a new metaphor in Merleau-Ponty’s thought on 81

KPM, 29/21. ibid., 38/26 83 ibid., 36/25. 84 ibid., 41/28. 82

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temporality and intentionality. To develop this notion of subjectivity’s ontological or nonfinite knowledge of the Being of beings prior to receiving, Heidegger again turns to the problem of time. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, the notion of the temporal character of the subject goes beyond mere negative determinations—e.g., the Kantian claim that time does not exist without the subject, a claim that Heidegger believes persists through Husserl and even his 1927 Dasein— and is “permitted” only “on the basis of the correctly understood subjective character of time.”85 According to Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger’s 1929 Kantbuch’s claim is that “[T]ime is ‘the affecting of self by self.’”86 More fully: “Die Zeit ist ihrem Wesen nach reine Affektion ihrer selbst,” or “Time is in its essence pure-affection of itself.”87 Heidegger’s Kant correctly understands, not that time is the subject, but that the subject is time. From Heidegger’s discussion of the necessity that finite knowledge be creative or nonfinite, it seems that time cannot be the subject because the subject grasping time in this way would grasp only its appearance rather than its apriori givenness. The subjective character of time that makes possible transcendence and knowledge, then, would have to be considered as the original synthesis that makes possible the subject’s intentionality both self- and object-awareness. Let us now consider the text upon which depends Heidegger’s 1929 thesis of transcendence as the ground of intentionality: “Die Zeit gehört zur inneren Möglichkeit dieses Gegenstehen-lassens von …. Als reine Selbstaffektion bildet sie ursprünglich die endliche Selbstheit dergestalt, daß das Selbsts so etwas wie Selbstbewußtsein sein kann,” or “Time belongs to the inner possibility of letting-stand-against …. As pure self-affection, it forms in an original way the finite self-hood, so that the self can be something like self-consciousness.”88 This “letting stand against,” this Gegenstand or object, depends on a subject but the subject depends on time’s affection of itself as that which forms the self’s self-consciousness upon which (awareness of) objects are founded; or, time is the being from which beings as entities first show themselves, the condition upon which beings are allowed to announce themselves, or the ground of all intentionality. Heidegger presents a phenomenologically sensitive premise to establish the original sameness of time and the self. First, Heidegger claims, following a Husserlian premise, 85

KPM, 182/129. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 425–26/487. 87 KPM, 129/183. 88 ibid., 130/183. 86

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there is no affecting (object) without the affected (subject); second, as the a priori form of inner sense, time affects us differently than objects, i.e., “without the aid of experience;” third, as a priori, time “activates itself;” fourth, as self-activating, time’s essence is “pure affection of itself;” fifth, as independent of experience, as itself not an object (but pure selfaffection), the self’s essence also is “to be activated as a self;” hence, sixth, since both time and self both share the feature of self-activation, the self is time, a pure affection of itself.89 Heidegger seemingly can draw from this account a conclusion similar to that rendered in Being and Time for two reasons. First, he notes that understanding the self as pure self-affection, i.e., time, establishes that it “is absolutely not the case that a mind exists among others” or is as a thing among things merely manifest through objectivation.90 Second, Heidegger continues to maintain his stance from 1927 that “neither the ‘I’ nor time is in time.”91 That is, it is a non-temporal temporalizing for which we lack names. Nevertheless, much to Husserl’s dismay and much different from his 1927 thought, Heidegger claims that time is “the ground for the possibility of selfhood.”92 Heidegger’s claim that there is no affecting without the affected seemingly can accommodate the duality between self and world that characterizes intentional experience—but it is a premise for which Heidegger has no further use. Since time “activates itself,” time seems prior to self and other, subject and object.93 Hence, Heidegger concludes “[T]ime … lies within pure apperception and, so, it first makes the mind into a mind.”94 To this statement, Husserl remarked in the margins of his copy of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, “[T]his is a misleading formulation.”95 Husserl found this formulation misleading because it inverts the relation of the absolute consciousness to time, since a nontemporal temporalizing absolute consciousness constitutes time as time rather than as time making or constituting the mind into or as a mind. Husserl, that is, described an absolute time-constituting consciousness that the 1929 Heidegger exchanges for an absolute-time constituting 89

KPM, 183-85/129-30. BT, 186/131. 91 ibid., 186/131. 92 ibid., 183/130. 93 ibid., 183/129 94 ibid., 183/130. 95 Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931), eds. and trans. T. Sheehan and R. E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 449. 90

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consciousness. Nevertheless, Heidegger believes his conclusion liberates time from consciousness and gives time an autonomous ontological existence, i.e., not only is time prior to the duality of subject and object, but it also enables the self-showing or self-announcing of the being of beings, including the finite subject’s intentionality. For Heidegger, “in its inner most essence, the self is originally time itself”96 because “the ‘I’ is so ‘temporal’ that it is time itself and … only as time itself … does it [the ‘I’] become possible.”97 And Heidegger’s apparently contradictory descriptions of the ‘I’ as ‘time itself’ and yet ‘not in time’ are reconciled by his insistence that finite knowing also must be infinite knowing, for the latter grounds the former. Plainly befuddled, Husserl found Heidegger’s reduction of the self to the product of time’s a priori self-activating to be “obviously backwards,”98 and Husserl wonders, again in the margins of his copy of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, whether Heidegger’s account of the self “is something that is phenomenologically demonstrable (instead of metaphysically substructed).”99 Indeed, Heidegger notes elsewhere in 1929, in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, “[T]emporality [is] the metaphysical essence of Dasein [and] transcendence becomes itself conceived by way of temporality.”100 And later, in the 1960s in “My Way to Phenomenology,” Heidegger returns to the core of metaphysics when he considers the clearing or the open as the condition for the possibility of transcendence and intentionality itself—or temporality in 1929. Rejecting what he deemed the chief obstacles to phenomenology— namely the method of grasping consciousness based on an initial positing of man as consciousness and the nexus of lived experience—Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics realizes the goal he intuited in 1925 but failed to explicate in 1927, namely, that phenomenology must become ontology if it hopes to provide an inquiry into the specific being of consciousness rather than an inquiry into a distinctive manner of being an object for an objective science of consciousness. On the way to exploring the ontological synthesis that makes possible transcendence— intentionality—and thus constitutes the subject, Heidegger turns to the essence of time and draws a conclusion that dramatically departs from 96

KPM, 189/133. KPM, 186/131. 98 Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, 448. 99 Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, 451. 100 MFL, 216/279-280. 97

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Husserl’s phenomenological enterprise, debunking Husserl’s phenomenological theory of absolute time-constituting consciousness. In fact, as Heidegger claims elsewhere in 1929, the essence of time “constitutes … the possibility of the subjectivity of subjects … the essence of subjects … because things and people are enveloped by temporality and permeated by it.”101 What makes the subject open to taking something-as-something; what is the ground of intentionality is time itself, which temporalizes itself. This is the originary a priori. Time is the ground of the offering to the being to which Dasein is always already given over to the possibility of announcing itself. We are no longer in the terrain of Dasein’s heeding a call or responding to a solicitation. Here, we speak of time’s affecting of itself as transcendence and the very condition for the possibility of intentionality. That time temporalizes itself is, as Françoise Dastur has put it, “tantamount to saying that time does not constitute the ‘internal sense’ or the ‘interiority’ of a ‘subject’ but that it is ‘the ekstatikon pure and simple,’ the ‘original outside-of-itself’ in and for itself.”102 Time is thus an ecstatic unfolding and not a series of ‘nows’ without beginning and end. Existence, Dasein, is “entirely outside,” a pure transcendence and not an immanence that must transcend itself or an interiority that must exteriorize itself. All of which is to say that for Heidegger from 1929 forward “it is increasingly emphasized that time constitutes the unified dimension of consciousness or disclosedness …. [T]ime is to be recognized as the original ‘region’ or ‘clearing’ of being.”103 Perhaps time is the clearing presupposed by the light of intentionality in which all beings shine forth and are brought to presence as themselves, both Dasein and its world. In any event, time itself does not refer to an object or belong to a subject—as Deleuze said about life, immanence, or transcendental field.

101

Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 158. 102 Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. F. Raffoul (Humanities Press Intl., 1996), 37. 103 Ronald P. Morrison, “Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger on Time and the Unity of ‘Consciousness,’” 197.

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4. The Loss of the Phenomenological Self and the End of Phenomenology Heidegger may in fact offer an ontologically clarified conception of subjectivity as time, as Zahavi proposed, but it no longer looks like a phenomenological investigation into the subjectivity of the finite subject because the subject seems to have been escorted off the scene. Though there is no affecting without the affected, the subject seems to have been integrated into an ontological well-spring that spawns intentionality—from which subjects and objects ‘spring forth’—just as a fountain’s water always already bursts forth from itself to return to itself. In 1929, just two years after Being and Time, Heidegger no longer considers the self self-given, self-constituting, or time-constituting, for “it [time] forms in an original way the finite selfhood so that the self can become something like self-consciousness.”104 And if the self is time itself, then the self’s self-givenness no longer arises in the living-present that constitutes time-, self-, and object-awareness. Rather, Heidegger’s view of the self’s self-affection as time construes the self ontologically in a union with the being of beings from which, as Heidegger puts it, its transcendence, intentionality, “springs forth.”105 Heidegger’s 1929 account of subjectivity seems to commute his 1927 account of subjectivity’s communion with the world into a union such that the basic duality between self and world characteristic of human living becomes indecipherable phenomenological monism, if you will. Perhaps this is the regress to the ground of intentionality itself that Heidegger sought. Perhaps it is the inner logic of phenomenology after Husserl’s investigations in absolute time-constituting consciousness. Recasting the self as a peculiar form of time, the 1929 Heidegger replaces Husserl’s theory of absolute consciousness—the non-objective, first-person self-givenness that accompanies all object-awareness—with an immanentist theory of time that activates itself—a conception of time’s self-affection, an ontological synthesis that begets the self’s transcending character and its awareness of itself and objects, i.e., intentionality. Heidegger’s immanentist thesis takes intentional subjectivity’s transcendence to an extreme from which the self cannot return because it is ensnared in its ontological condition. If one interprets Heidegger’s view of intentionality as a unity without diversity his equation of the self with time in an “ontological synthesis” 104 105

BT, 133. BT, 34/23.

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that seemingly renders intentionality superfluous precisely because it renders superfluous the fundamental feature of the self’s transcendence, namely, its temporality. The very identity of the finite with the infinite knower collapses the duality between self and world characteristic of subjectivity, for an infinite knower need not transcend itself because all is one with itself. For reasons like these, Husserl criticizes Heidegger’s notion of the ontological synthesis, for not only does God not see in perspectives and thus needs no intentionality, but also the notion of Godlike intuiting is phenomenologically absurd.106 And if Heidegger’s view of subjectivity loses the duality between self and world because it renders temporality superfluous, then it also loses the duality between the self as now and past because such distinctions do not characterize an absolute knower. In short, Heidegger’s immanentist thesis reduces to a monopsychism or monoselfism, where not only the mineness of experience comes into question, but also the not-mineness of other subjects’ experiences because we no longer can decipher a duality between self and other.107 Along with Heidegger’s loss of the phenomenological conception of the self, came a new view of the self and time that exerted such influence on twentieth century French phenomenology that phenomenology “backslides into metaphysics” to use Husserl’s words about the 1929 Heidegger. Historically, I believe, one can trace the prominence of what I have termed Heidegger’s immanentist thesis throughout the phenomenological movement. Sartre’s theory of the self’s transcendence in his Transcendence of the Ego takes much from Heidegger’s displacement of the self from the intentional scene. For Sartre the self is no-thing, or not the thing of which it is aware and the ‘I’ appears only in an act of reflection. Such an anonymous and undifferentiated subject aware of itself only negatively as not-that-of-which-it-is-conscious, however, will have difficulty explaining how the self can originally differentiate itself in order to objectify itself in an act of reflection.108 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception 106

Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931), 443. 107 Monopsychism was the doctrine of the Latin Averroists. See Philip Rosemann, “Wandering in the Path of the Averroean System: Is Kant’s Doctrine of ‘Bewußtsein überhaupt’ Averroistic?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol., 73, 1 (Winter, 1999), 185-230. 108 Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), 40. I have developed these criticisms of Sartre in “Self-Awareness and Ontological Monism: Why Kant is not an Ontological Monist,” in Idealistic Studies, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003, 239-256.

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presents a view of subjectivity as an ambiguous, pre-personal consciousness, directly influenced by Heidegger’s Kantbuch. Merleau-Ponty concludes that we “must understand time as the subject and the subject as time,”109 a view that he will develop in his 1961 Visible and the Invisible into the claim that consciousness does not constitute the past but the past constitutes consciousness. And the thinker who has done the most to displace classical phenomenology, Jacques Derrida, rejects Husserl’s theory of absolute consciousness by positing a theory of self-affection sympathetic to—indeed indebted to—Heidegger’s Kantbuch.110 If this multiplication of movements in continental philosophy that operate under the sign of phenomenology finds its root in Heidegger’s 1929 theory of a time that activates and temporalizes itself—a wild appropriation of Husserl that led him to invert one of Husserl’s central claims, namely, that the self (understood as the living-present) constitutes time and not vice-versa—then it is no surprise that these ontological versions of ‘phenomenology’ resemble more a modern mode of metaphysics than Husserl’s phenomenology—this time Spinozistic rather than Cartesian.

109

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962), 422, 426. 110 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 83.

TIME AND IMAGINATION IN KANT’S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON MARINA MARREN

A very brief, but very important chapter of Immanuel Kant’s first critique, the chapter entitled “On the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,”1 describes a process by which the two elements, that are absolutely necessary for cognition, are united. The idea that the sensible and the conceptual, both in their experiential and pure permutations, need to be unified, lest cognition dwindles, is surprising. What are we to learn from the fact that Kant’s insistence on uniting the senses and the understanding comes after the thorough analyses that aim at separating the two? The schematism chapter situates the eidetic separability of the faculties by grounding it in a necessary, genetic unity. Schematism identifies two dimensions—time and imagination—resting the weight of the cognitive synthesis on these. In this paper, I do not argue for a special significance of time nor do I privilege the role of imagination. Instead, I explain the function of time in cognition and, in turn, the reason why Kant retraces the temporal to the imaginative in the schematism chapter.

1. Kant’s Account of Time: Meaning and Function Kant’s treatment of time2 begins in the Transcendental Aesthetic.3 Kant describes time as “nothing other than the subjective condition under which 1 CPR, A137/B176. All alphanumeric references are to Paul Guyer’s and Allen W. Wood’s translation of the text. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 2 Time plays an integral role in cognition. Kant separates out and describes the processes, which bring the sensible data or the matter of sensible intuition under the categories of thought. He writes about these processes or “schemata [that without them] the categories are only functions” (CPR, A147/B187) and without their action also sensibility remains unrestricted (A147/B187). Without the schemata the gap between purely intellectual and purely sensible remains rent. Kant states that schemata are “nothing but a priori time-determinations”

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all intuitions can take place in us . . . [namely as] nothing other than the form of inner sense.”4 Essential to the subject’s capacity for intuiting, time is determinately lacking in objective persistence. Time is not a substance, nor an attribute of objects. Agreeing with Kant’s description of time, Charles Sherover, too, denies time substantial qualities. He sees time as a way “in which things are related to each other.”5 Time is a form of relatedness. Sherover restates Kant’s formulation of time suggesting that “time … [is] the form of inner intuition wherein all representations … must be ordered.”6 Time, as an ordering function, renders that which is intuited as representable and cognizable. Time is not something, which is itself cognizable without those sensations, impressions, and stimuli which exist in and are to be ordered by it into recognizable things and experiences. Sherover states, “[I]t is by means of the unity of time, which we impose on any presentation so that it may become a presentation for us, that the representation of time, as such, enters our cognitive awareness.”7 Awareness of time can only be spoken about meaningfully when it refers to perception of appearances—or to succession of related representations. These representations, in turn, are cognitive phenomena. Temporal awareness both depends on cognition and structures it. However, awareness of time is not pre-cognitive. Time does not exist (in a robust or concrete sense of existence) outside of conscious beings. One passage in particular emphasizes the impossibility of a transcendental8 reality of time. Kant writes: (A145/B184). The reference to a priori here means that schemata are among the procedural elements which first enable experience or cognition of the world. Explaining why schemata’s primacy is indebted to their being temporally determining, Charles M. Sherover, in his book entitled Heidegger, Kant and Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), writes that “time is both intuitional and apriori, [therefore] it has a common bond with the pure thought as well as pure intuition. Through the temporal reconstruction of the categories—in their schematization—concept and intuition are brought together into functional unity” (105). 3 CPR, A19/B33. 4 CPR, A33/B49. 5 Heidegger, Kant and Time, 50. 6 Ibid., 51. 7 Ibid., 146. 8 Kant calls knowledge “transcendental . . . [when it] is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori” (CPR, A12/B25). In other words, transcendental knowledge has to do with knowing or speculating about the grounds of the possibility of our being able to cognize. With respect to time being transcendentally ideal, but not

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Time is … merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensible, i.e., insofar as we are affected by objects), and in itself, outside the subject, is nothing …. In this therefore consists the transcendental ideality of time, according to which it is nothing if one abstracts from the subjective conditions of sensible intuition, and cannot be counted as either subsisting or inhering in the objects in themselves (without their relation to our intuition).9

Lacking objects of experience, time is said to be “the merely formal condition … [that is] pure time”10 or an “[e]mpty intuition without an object.”11 Time as the pure or a priori form of intuition is a condition for perceiving the temporally grounded appearances, yet time is not directly perceivable as such. Time cannot be considered by itself as a pure phenomenon. It cannot be perceived apart from that which appears in it. How does Kant make good on the promise that time play a central role as a form of subjective intuition, which presents one with a possibility of cognizing the appearing world, when time is said to be imperceptible independent of appearances? According to Kant, that which is perceptible (and thus that which can be experienced) is a derivative form or an appearance of “things in themselves.”12 In delimiting the function of time, as it refers to the concept of things in themselves, Kant writes: “[S]pace and time are only forms of sensible intuition, and therefore only conditions of the existence of the things as appearances …. [W]e have cognition of no object as a thing in itself, but only in so far as it is an object of sensible intuition, i.e., as an appearance.”13 The pre-experiential realm, or better, the conditions of experience, cannot be experienced. Analysis of these conditions, too, must admit of only limited verifiability. Somewhere the traceable correspondence between the transcendental and the empirical breaks down. It, most likely, does so at the point where one would least want it to, leaving rather a promise than a proof of causal dependency and interaction. transcendentally real (A36/B52) it should be said that time is non-existent aside from the subject who “perceives” or posits the temporal progression. Time does not exist in itself. It, therefore, can only have an ideal and not a real transcendental existence. 9 CPR, A36/B52. 10 CPR, A291/B347. 11 Ibid., CPR, A292/B348. The same, Kant states, holds for space when he writes that “[s]pace is nothing other than merely the form of all appearances of outer sense” (A26/B42). 12 Ibid., BXXVI. 13 Ibid., BXXVI

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There are at least two reasons for the incomplete access to formal conditions. 1. The formal is not fully accessible in principle, because we are accessing it always from within the conscious, from within the experiential, which is conditioned by it. In this case, the formal is the everreceding horizon of the experiential. 2. The formal cannot be completely known by virtue of its function. This is so because the way in which the experiential is structured entails separating out the formal at the precise point where the two—the transcendental and the empirical—are most intimately entwined. In this case, the formal is a “dream’s navel,”14 as it emerges out of the interaction with the experiential and “reaches down into the [necessarily] unknown.”15 Giving an intimation of the character of the entwinement, Martin Heidegger joins the formable and the form as he is working through Kant’s analyses of time.16 Heidegger understands that “[t]ime as pure intuition means neither just what is intuited in pure intuiting nor just the intuiting which lacks the ‘object.’ Time as pure intuition is the forming intuiting of what intuits in one.”17 Heidegger’s customarily idiosyncratic language shows the difficulty of expressing the point at which the condition and the conditioned are no longer neatly separable. This point is of particular interest. It is both constitutive of the interaction between the formal and the experiential as well as prohibitive of the strictly diaeretic thinking about the two. Not the form, nor the formal, but the forming process yields intuited unity—that oneness or the self-sameness essential for experiencing of anything at all. Time as a formative force relates or regathers. Time plays into an emergence of unity, into a reckoning with or apprehension thereof. Time structures a grasping or a representation of continuity as a unitary phenomenon. Forming the oneness or the unification out of which perception of self-same entities arises, when experienced, time normally appears as occurring at once or together with 14

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books Publishing, 2010), 528. 15 Ibid. 16 Heidegger’s view of the direction that Kant’s project takes is critical. Andrew Cutrofello points out that Heidegger sees a problem with the fact that “Kant . . . in the second edition to the Critique . . . subordinated the function of synthesis— previously ascribed to the transcendental imagination—to the understanding. According to Heidegger, Kant did this because he remained under the spell of the rationalist conception of the subject as responsible for its judgments and actions,” quoted from Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge Publishing, 2005), 22. 17 Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 123.

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the perceived and the sensed things. Explaining this simultaneity, which inheres in our perception of appearances and temporality, John Sallis writes: Each is implicated in the other, yet in a way that maintains, even secures, the alterity between them. In showing itself, a thing proves to have its time; and time gives itself precisely as the time of self-showing things, not in the sense of an empty continuum that self-showing would somehow come to fill up, but rather as a time … in the very midst of the selfshowing, a time so interlaced with manifestations that it is as if woven from the very depth of sensible things. One could say that time and selfshowing come about at once, at the same time; yet this simultaneity is determined primarily by the interlacement and not simply by reference to another time posited as an anterior measure.18

The two: awareness of time and perception of appearances are indivisible insofar as they cannot be experienced one without another, but they are distinguishable. Sallis contends that appearing of a thing to us or its “selfshowing” does not “fill” the span of some pre-existing time. The moment of appearing is the moment of our experience of temporality. The statement that time is not “an empty continuum”19 qualifies Kant’s notion of time as a “pure form of sensible intuition.”20 As a form of intuition it is a condition, not an existing thing, not an ever-extending continuum that needs to be filled with appearances. Conditions are essential, but imperceptible; they are enabling and formative grounds of perception.

2. The Place of Imagination Kant suggests a power by which the consciousness of time (and with it, that of the appearing world, as well as of oneself in it) is generated. He exposes the function of processes which operate out of the transcendental ground of experience. These processes are the time-related syntheses, or, put otherwise, the syntheses that coincide with or are necessary for the perception of time. Appearances that are given as a matter of the formal intuition of time need to be synthesized by the understanding in order to be perceived.21 The power which forms the sensible and readies it for the unification in the conceptual, enabling the cognition of the world and time 18

Sallis, Force of Imagination: the Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 189. 19 Ibid. 20 CPR, A32/B47. 21 Ibid., A19/B33-A22/B36 and A77/B103.

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at and in which it appears, is the “synthesis of the imagination.”22 The ability of imagination to secure a possible, a priori knowable world depends on its function as “spontaneity”23 or its “faculty for presenting an object even without its presence in intuition.”24 Whereas the formative function of time is one of the agents producing the cognition of unities, the synthesizing power of imagination underlies the possibility of cognition as such. As a synthesis that conditions the temporal perception, imagination informs the way in which the intuited data is given to the intuition of time as a form of inner sense, as well as the manner in which this data conforms to time as the a priori form of an intuition. Qualifying the relationship between imagination and time, Heidegger warns: “[I]t is in no way permissible to think of time, especially in the Kantian sense, as an arbitrary field which the power of imagination just gets into for the purposes of its own activity.”25 This kind of thinking would limit both imagination and time to their empirical instantiations. Unearthing the transcendental and the formative relationship between the two, entails understanding the reason why Kant insists that without imagination “we would have no cognition at all.”26 Kant places both the sensible and the conceptual within the imaginative describing the “transcendental synthesis of the imagination”27 as the “transcendental unity, which is thought in the categories.”28 Categories allow coherent cogitation of appearances by restricting them (by defining how any appearance is to be appropriated and 22

Ibid., A118. Ibid., B152. 24 Ibid., B151. 25 Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 123. In his discussion of imagination as a unifying power, Heidegger states that imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. He writes: “[B]edeutet aber Rezeptivität soviel wie Sinnlichkeit und Spontaneität soviel wie Verstand, dann fällt die Einbildungskraft in einer eigentümlich Weise zwischen beide” (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Bonn: Friedrich Cohen Verlag, 1929), 121—122. I translate this as follows: “[T]he receptivity of [imagination] means as much as sensibility, and spontaneity means as much as understanding. Thus, imagination characteristically falls between both.” Heidegger then adds a note in which he qualifies the sense of the “between” and places it historically with Aristotle: “Zwischen’ Į੅ıșȘıȚȢ und ȞȩȘıȚȢ steht die ijĮȞIJĮıȓĮ schon bei Aristoteles, de anima I’ 3” (122, fn1). That is, “Already for Aristotle, imagination is between aesthesis and noesis,” or between the sensible and the noetic powers of the soul. 26 CPR, A78/B103. 27 Ibid., B151. 28 Ibid., B151. 23

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understood). Transcendental unity of the categories defines in advance the limits within which understanding can reach out to and interpret the appearances. These limits of understanding are circumscribed also by imagination through its synthesizing power. Preceding any concrete perceptions, transcendental imaginative synthesis sets the stage for application of the categories to appearances. It does so by “determining the sensibility a priori, and its synthesis of intuitions, in accordance with the categories.”29 Imagination prepares the sensibility (our receptivity or capacity to be affected)30 for it being formed in accord with the pure intuitions31 (in relation to the pure forms of space and time) and for accepting the intuited matter (of sensible appearances). Imagination also determines in advance or a priori, the conceptual routes that understanding will take in order to interpret the appearance. Imagination works both on sensibility and on understanding by circumscribing the functions of each and by synthesizing both into one cognitive experience. Preparing the way for analysis of imagination in Kant’s second critique, Bernard Freydberg simply equates the synthetic and the imaginative. He writes, “[S]ynthesis means imagination.”32 As synthesis, imagination integrates that, which otherwise remains apart: the outer and the inner formal intuitions, with the spontaneity of understanding that orders the incoming stream of sensible appearances (or the apparent matter). Imagination lets the temporal dimension of the manifold of appearances be assimilated in the intuition of time (as the form of inner sense) and conceptualized in the categories. When considering the schemata in his Logic of Imagination, Sallis specifies that although imagination hovers between different, distinct, often even opposed, moments …, it does not blend the moments, does not eliminate their distinctness. […] On the contrary, in holding the moments together, imagination also sustains their difference; in drawing opposites together, it maintains them in their opposition.33

Thus, imagination does not drive the conceptual and the sensible “moments” to the point of disappearance of the difference between the sensible intuition and the organizing work of understanding. Instead, 29

Ibid., B152. Ibid., A19/B33. 31 Ibid. 32 Freydberg, Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 15. 33 Sallis, The Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 160. 30

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imagination carries out a unifying work by means of which the opposition of the faculties persists. Through the tension generated by the approximation of principally different capacities (of sensibility and understanding), a creative resistance arises. Imagination enables and sustains this cognitiongenerating, differentiated unity.

3. The Role of Imagination in the Schematism Chapter Suturing the divide between the conceptual and the sensible, schemata, or the “a priori time-determinations”34 generated by imagination, unite the appearances (as the not yet conceptualized matter of intuition) with, and allow the appearances to be understood by, the appropriate categories. Kant writes, “[A]n application of the category to appearances becomes possible by means of the transcendental time-determination which, as the schema of the concept of the understanding, mediates the subsumption of the latter under the former.”35 Disparate appearances need to be “mediated” by an appropriate schema in order to be subsumed under a corresponding category. Schemata in general relegate objects to the categories under which they are to be determined and cognized. Presenting schemata as “a ‘third’ element … [which must be] similar enough to both understanding and intuition,”36 Eva Brann, raises the question as to how exactly schemata, in one progression, weave together these fundamentally separate components that, when united, amount to a cognition of the world? It is through the transcendental time determinations that the pure concepts of understanding first acquire their objects as well as empirical (as opposed to purely logical) significance. Conversely, if the schemata operated on the empirical level then the process would have been reversed, pointing toward the transcendental and, hence, mistaken application of the categories. Suggesting how the transcendental time-determinations communicate both with pure concepts of understanding and the a priori forms of intuition, Kant writes: The concept of the understanding contains pure synthetic unity of the manifold in general. Time, as the formal condition of the manifold of inner sense, thus of the connection of all representations, contains an a priori manifold in pure intuition. Now a transcendental time-determination is homogeneous with the category (which constitutes its unity) insofar as it 34

CPR, A145/B184. Ibid., A139/B178. 36 Eva Brann, The World of Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 1991), 93. 35

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is universal and rests on a rule a priori. But it is on the other hand homogeneous with the appearance insofar as time is contained in every empirical representation of the manifold.37

This description points to a common feature between the pure concept and the a priori intuition of time; namely, that both relate to the manifold—to the field of disparate but relatable interactions—which, when synthesized, yield cognition. The reason for singling out time (as opposed to space), it seems, has to do with its role as the intuition of the inner sense, and thus as enabling the representations of objects in a cognizing subject. Specifically, all of the subject’s intuitions are in the subject and, thus, belong to the subject’s inner sense—even those that represent objects outside the subject. Inner sense is, of course, the realm of appearances which, in their turn, are not the things, not the objects themselves, but images or imaginatively conditioned upsurges thereof. Whatever is present in or is presented for the inner sense is re-presented. It is, thus, necessarily given through the power of imagination. Notwithstanding the fact that the a priori manifold or the synthetic unity thereof is contained in both the form of intuition and the pure concept of understanding respectively, Kant still stresses the necessary homogeneity of the schemata with both the categories and the appearances. Through this homogeneity, the determinations of time first bring the categories out of their transcendental function. Since appearances are to be brought under the universal concepts and thereby presented to the empirical understanding, the transcendental universality of the concepts has to be first appropriated through the determinations of time as the form of inner sense. The transcendental does not become apparent. It manifests the appearances (and therefore can be partially understood through an analysis thereof) in a way that ignites cognition. This manifesting process is (at least) twofold. It involves both the synthesis of imagination and the relational power of time. The syntheticrelational process has, further, three distinguishable steps. Through temporal relations, designations, or “determinations,”38 an amorphous appearance is: 1. related to itself in a subsisting unity; 2. related to understanding as an identified unity; and 3. related to the perceiver as an apprehended unity—even and especially if this unity or self-sameness persists not as a thing but as a process. Imagination sets the process of temporal relating into motion. Kant frustratingly refrains from a “dry and

37 38

CPR, A138-139/B177-178. Ibid., A145/B184

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boring analysis of what is required for transcendental schemata.”39 He does not explain exactly how imagination produces the determining or relational function of time. Instead, Kant aligns the schemata with the categories and gives examples of their effects on the cognitive synthesis. One such example, the very first one, referring to the “schema of magnitude,”40 posits that “I generate time itself in the apprehension of the intuition.”41 The relating, representational, unifying power of time is constitutive of my cognition. On Kant’s account, this means that time does not—in deed—precede me, because it is generated through me. And yet, its power defines both the appearance of the world and my relation to it. Time, as “the intuition of our self and our inner state”42 and as an “a priori formal condition of all appearances,”43 in its permutations, is present in subjectivity (as persistent awareness), in sensibility (as the form of inner sense), as well as in understanding (as relational and integrating schemata). Time plays the part of a medium when it comes to the communication between the intuited and the conceptual, and it performs as the internalizing agent that presents subjectivity with appearing objects. However, because time-affected appearances are given to us only in the form of the spatio-temporal manifold via the time-related syntheses, it seems that time itself, and through it also cognition, needs to be grounded in some other faculty. If it were not, time (albeit in its different permutations) would have been the subject, the form, the agent, and the ground of itself, which would lead to an unavoidable fusion of its functions, and, therefore, to an interruption in the cognitive process. Although it is a part of the syntheses that bring the appearing world into cognizable relief, time itself must be grounded. About this grounding, Kant says that it is “in general … the mere effect of the imagination, of a blind though indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all.”44

39

Ibid., A142/B181 Ibid., A142/B182 41 Ibid., A143/B182. 42 Ibid., A33/B50. 43 Ibid., A34/B39. 44 Ibid., A78/B103. 40

BETWEEN IDEALISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY: KIERKEGAARD ON RELIGIOUS TEMPORALITY GREGORY P. FLOYD

Time is what changes and diversifies itself. Eternity remains simple. —Meister Eckhart In much ancient and medieval thought, time was ingredient to the metaphysical problem of how to discover and deduce the unchanging principles, essences, and causes at work behind the melee of temporal flux and appearance.1 Kant’s insight into time as the form of inner sense and, therefore, outer sense as we experience it recharacterizes the question of time as an epistemological problem. Husserl reconceives time as a phenomenological problem in which are brought together the consciousness of time and the time of consciousness. Together these are “the constitutive foundation for the possibility of an intelligible, and thereby meaningful world of human experience.”2 Heidegger radicalizes that phenomenological analysis such that time becomes not only the horizon of the meaning of being, but also the very structure of Dasein. Whether time is understood as inner sense, as time-consciousness, or as the existential structure of Dasein, to each account of time there corresponds an account of subjectivity. Indeed, the two ultimately collapse into one another in Heidegger’s existential analytic where Dasein is disclosed as thrown,

1

Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie, The Basic Works, ed. McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). Aristotle defines time as “a number of change in respect of the before and after” (219b1). The central meaning of change in Aristotle is the reduction from potentiality to actuality. Time is the quantitative measurement of this qualitative difference, i.e., “the way in which change has a number” (219b2). In this, it concerns entities and, therefore, is something predicated in its first instance of reality and, therefore, ingredient to a metaphysical account. 2 Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2.

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fallen, and living toward its future death thereby occupying, respectively, the past, the present, and the future. Where might we locate Kierkegaard in this hastily sketched topology? Where does he stand with respect to Kant and the German Idealists who precede him and with respect to the phenomenologists who follow him? One of the principal theses of this investigation, building on the work of David Kangas,3 is that Kierkegaard’s account of time is a challenge to the idealist account of consciousness grounded in the self-positing of the I. Kierkegaard’s account, by contrast, through its appeal to religious language, concepts, and figures, attempts to provide an alternate account of our experience of time in which we—the transparent ego or consciousness—are displaced from its center. In this account, Eigenwille is replaced with the Ekhartian notion of Gelassenheit. What then of Kierkegaard and phenomenology? This is a question at once more complicated and more interesting. We can consider its possible answers under the categories of history, theme, and method. Historically, there can be no doubt that Kierkegaard was not only known to, but also read by and influential for a set of thinkers who by any reckoning constitute the figureheads of phenomenology and twentieth-century European philosophy more broadly. To give just one example, the philosopher Lev Shestov recounts that after a 1929 lecture in Freiburg he was approached by Husserl who, “literally forced Shestov to read [Kierkegaard].”4 Reflecting on this encounter after Husserl’s death, Shestov suggested that despite important differences between Husserl and Kierkegaard (and Shestov himself), one cannot understand Husserl without Kierkegaard.5 A possible interpretation of this enigmatic comment is offered by the poet Czeslaw Milosz who believed that, “Shestov admired Husserl precisely because he [like Kierkegaard,] was a man ready to accept a verdict of reason even if it provided him with no comfort at all.”6 That Heidegger is indebted to the gloomy Dane needs little justification, though a close reckoning of those debts shows them to be greater than Heidegger has led

3

David Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 4 Czeslaw Milosz recounts the story in “Shestov, or the Purity of Despair,” Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (Oakland, University of California Press, 1981), 99-119. 5 See Jeff Hanson, Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment (Chicago: Northeastern University Press, 2010). According to Hansen, the two met for the first time in 1928 in Amsterdam. 6 Op. cit.

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us to believe.7 Levinas and Derrida,8 too, have recourse to Kierkegaard, as do contemporary thinkers such as Michel Henry9 and Jean-Yves Lacoste. But if it is the case that we cannot think the origin of contemporary Continental philosophy without speaking of Kierkegaard, this is a thematic claim as much as a historical one. That is to say, Kierkegaard matters to the history of philosophy because the themes according to which he constituted his peculiar approach to philosophy also matter greatly. Derrida, for example, writes: It is Kierkegaard to whom I have been most faithful and who interests me most: absolute existence, the meaning he gives to the word subjectivity, the resistance of existence to the concept or the system—this is something I attach great importance to and feel very deeply, something I am always ready to stand up for.10

And indeed, the particular contours of many recurrent topics in phenomenology and continental philosophy—subjectivity, anxiety, subjective truth—are marked by the prior analyses of Kierkegaard. But what, more precisely, is the character of those analyses? With this question, we come to the third and most difficult of our three categories of evaluation, though philosophically it is perhaps the most interesting: how to characterize the “method” of Søren Kierkegaard? Without claiming to provide a definitive answer, let us make a few observations. It is worth noting in the first place that, like his phenomenological successors, the question of the right method was a preoccupation for Kierkegaard. It ought not surprise us that an author who describes the self as “the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation”11 exhibits a 7

One can find Heidegger citing Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death at least as early as his 1921 “Augustine and Neo-Platonism,” §8. There are also, of course, the attributions in Being and Time. 8 Levinas is critical of Kierkegaard’s attempts to transcend the ethical, but also appreciates his resistance of totality, (Hanson, 2010). Derrida’s The Gift of Death is much indebted to Kierkegaard. See also his remarks in A Taste for the Secret (Boston: Polity Press, 2001) 6, 24, 40, 57. 9 See Jon Stuart’s contribution, “Kierkegaard as a Forerunner of Existentialism and Poststructuralism,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, vol. I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. J. Stuart (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 421-474. Stuart gives an account of Kierkegaard’s influence on Henry in relation to the latter’s C’est moi la vérité: por un philosophie du christianisme (1996) and Incarnation: un philosophie de la chair (2000). 10 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 40. 11 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, eds. and trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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particular sensitivity to the different ways we can be in relation, and the different phenomena that are permitted and prevented from appearing depending on the nature of such a relation. The signal example of this is Kierkegaard’s claim that “Truth is Subjectivity,” by which he intends to highlight the fact that “there is a fundamental discrepancy between existence and theory”12 and if we consider only truth as objective we misapprehend the nature of truth because we grasp it incompletely. He writes: When the question of truth is raised in an objective manner, reflection is directed objectively to the truth, as an object to which the knower is related. Reflection is not focused on the relations …. When the question of the truth is raised subjectively, reflection is directed subjectively to the nature of the individual’s relationship.13

On Kierkegaard’s rendering truth contains a rational-propositional component (true/false) and a subjective-appropriative component (in/authentic). Given modernity’s preference for the former over that latter, it often results that the more we know true statements the less we are able to be in the truth. Kierkegaard’s reorientation of our attention seeks to recapture the how of truth beyond its what. This task leads him to develop a manner of philosophical engagement distinct from the rationalism of Descartes and the system-building of the Hegelians. It overlaps with phenomenology in a number of ways. First, Kierkegaard designates a number of his pseudonymous works as “psychological,”14 by which he does not intend something akin to either empirical or experimental psychology, but rather a method that hovers between theology on the one side and speculative philosophy on the other in its attempt to analyze descriptively certain phenomena, e.g., the experience of doubt or faith, without retreating to the concept or presupposing doctrinal categories. Second, such a “psychological” account is attentive to mood. Despair, for example, is a term whose meaning embodies an entire way of being in relation to oneself and one’s world (and, ultimately, to God). Third, this attentiveness to relation has two corollaries. This first is the practice of indirect communication that, in its emphasis on the how, rather than the what, anticipates Heidegger’s distinction between the Gehaltsinn and the Vollzugsinn, the content- and 12 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 158. For the full treatment on the relation between subjectivity and truth, see pg. 189ff. 13 Ibid., 87. 14 This is true of Repetition, Concept of Anxiety, and Sickness Unto Death.

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enactment-senses or meaning. The second is an attentiveness to the nonapparent. Kierkegaard attends to everyday existence with the Heideggerian suspicion that what is most significant is perhaps hidden or absent from view. Fourth, this raises the question of our access to phenomenon both on the side of the subject—my ability to access certain phenomena—and that of the object— that is, there are certain phenomena hidden, indirectly communicated, non-apparent. Finally, in all this, it has been suggested that Kierkegaard is engaged in the reduction in a general sense15 and at certain points conducts his investigations “under the epoché.”16 If these points of contact and overlap suggest the great debt modern European philosophy owes to the Danish gadfly, they should not obscure the fact that Kierkegaard is equally interesting as a possible critic of phenomenology. George Pattison, for example, has argued that, while Kierkegaard must be included in any self-accounting of phenomenology, he is interesting precisely as an unapologetic student of religious experience and religious themes often at apparent odds with some of the standard readings of Husserlian or Heideggerian phenomenology. Therefore, in what follows let us be particularly attentive to the continuities, but also to the discontinuities, in Kierkegaard’s account of the foundation of much of modern European philosophy, Temporalität.

I. Homo Temporalis Kierkegaard’s account of time is indispensable for understanding his problematization of human subjectivity. An understanding of the heterogeneous temporalities that lie at the heart of consciousness illumines the rest of his work. The problem of temporality, the human experience of time, is most clearly attested to in the problematic definition of human being in The Concept of Anxiety. Here Vigilius Haufniensis defines the human being as a synthesis of body and psyche in spirit,17 only to add later that we are also 15 See Kevin Hart “The Elusive Reductions of Søren Kierkegaard” in Hanson, 2010. 16 Westphal suggests, for example, that de Silentio’s analysis in Fear and Trembling is a search for a form of “religious consciousness” and that this occurs from within the epoché since he does not have faith himself (cf. Hanson, 2010 and Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Conception of Faith, 2014). But he also suggests that Kierkegaard’s is a hermeneutic phenomenology in both a Heideggarian and a Ricoeurian sense. 17 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, eds. and trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 43.

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a synthesis of the temporal and eternal. Not content to let the paradox lie, he proceeds to make explicit the claim that the two definitions are convertible formulae of a single synthesis: “[T]he synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is … the expression for the first synthesis.”18 To be human, then, is a temporal denomination. But in an instructive contrast with his phenomenological and existential successors, for Kierkegaard human temporality is not a function of a single temporal structure, but a function of two incommensurate orders: the temporal and the eternal. This incommensurability and the “gap” it creates enable Kierkegaard, through various pseudonyms, to elaborate a unique account of time that attempts to think an origin apart from and anterior to the beginning of the representational time of self-positing consciousness. Notably, the elements of each of the two definitions are not proportionate. In the first, two elements, psyche and body, are brought together in a third, spirit. There is no corresponding third element in the second definition. The synthesis of the first account is achieved in the subject’s positing of itself as self-consciousness: “Spirit is the self … the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”19 Yet, in the second definition spirit cannot be the third between time and eternity since, as self-conscious, it is already temporal and therefore already determined by the first element. Commenting on the ambiguity of this definition, Kangas writes: In the present case self-positing takes place in the context of another synthesis that is not really a synthesis at all—not at least in the transcendental sense—because it involves a relation between two things (time and eternity) that can never be brought into a single present. [It] is a synthesis without synthesis. […] The third factor … has always already withdrawn.20

What is this “third factor” always already withdrawn? To answer this question we must grasp Kierkegaard’s account of time. Let us remember that, for Kierkegaard, time, before it is “touched” by eternity is strictly, “infinite succession.”21 Infinite succession has two important qualities. First, any of the possible divisions of such succession are qualitatively indistinct; none matters more than any other. Second, the temporal 18

Ibid., 85. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, eds. and trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1980), 13. 20 Kangas, 2007, 183. For an extended treatment of temporality in Kierkegaard, to which the present investigation is indebted, see especially pp. 91-124 and 160-198. 21 CA, 85. 19

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designations of past, present, and future, by which we describe this succession are not as transparent as they appear. In fact, past and future as designations of time are both derivative of the present; however, Kierkegaard claims that, “the present is not a concept of time.” The temporal present, as a presence, is precisely that which is not succeeded in the midst of succession. It is the (self-) presence by which time is preceded and succeeded. The present is therefore the negation of succession or, what amounts to the same, a retentional “holding in view” of that succession by consciousness. But, Kierkegaard argues, a negation of temporal succession is precisely the eternal: “For thought, the eternal is the present in terms of a sublated succession.”22 Thus the present, which is the site of the first synthesis of the human self, is only possible on the presupposition that time and eternity have in fact “touched,” by which Kierkegaard intends, if indeterminately, an alternative form of relationship to that of synthesis. But here we run aground on the shoal that brings the egology of idealism to grief. For if self-consciousness and thought happen in the present, but the present itself exists only insofar as eternity has always already annulled temporal succession, then the self is subject to a peculiar diachrony whereby it arrives always already too late to grasp itself. To the extent that consciousness becomes aware of itself as an identity persistent through time, i.e., as present, it necessarily presupposes that prior instant in which temporal has been touched by the eternal. The name for this prior encounter between incommensurable orders, the perpetually retreating third factor, Kierkegaard calls the moment: “a designation of time … in the fateful conflict when it is touched by eternity.”23 The moment is without place and outside of time: The moment appears to be this strange entity (atopos) that lies between motion and rest without occupying any time, and into this and out from this that which is in motion changes into rest, and that which is at rest changes into motion. Thus, the moment becomes the category of transition.24

The moment is the movement of becoming—the liminal space between being and nonbeing. Yet even here there is no synthesis between time and eternity. Such a synthesis would require the coincidence of eternity in 22 Ibid., 86. Kangas notes the use of the Danish opaevet here, which, like the German Aufheben, has the dual sense of canceling and preserving. Thus, temporal succession is not “annihilated” but “held back” (2007, 184). 23 CA, 87. 24 Ibid., 82.

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time, which could only result in the annulment of the latter by the former. Yet, our experience is at one and the same time always conditioned by time and yet never wholly determined by it. It is thus the freedom of consciousness that indicates that time, as a merely infinite succession, cannot fully account for the life of consciousness.25 The present moment, understood as both the suspension of succession and the presence of the self to itself, requires, in Kierkegaard’s lexicon, that there be a movement of eternity in time. To the extent that it is the prior condition for time, the moment, like eternity, is the negation of time: in contrast to the plenitude of time, it stands as nothing. Yet the moment, while an “atom of eternity,” is not the same as eternity. That would be to conflate Kierkegaard’s analysis with that of Plato. The appropriate Platonic analogue for the moment is not Platonic eternity, but rather the “sudden” which stands in between (metaxis) time and eternity. Kierkegaard critiques Plato for failing to think the moment with sufficient rigor and thereby collapsing it into the eternal. For Kierkegaard, “[T]he identity is illusion.”26 The inability to maintain this distinction leads to the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis in which recollection moves backward toward knowledge of the eternal. By contrast, Kierkegaard proposes recollection forward which is a movement not of knowledge, but of freedom. From this distinction, emerge two opposed criteria of the real. For the Platonist, the real is the eternal, viz., that which stands outside of time: it is the identical, the immutable, that which will not change in the future and is therefore more readily available in the past. For Kierkegaard, the real is in the event of becoming, i.e., in the moment. It is a recollecting forward because it is a decision undertaken and renewed in each moment. The conception of the self implied by this account is not the ideal self already hidden beneath the stone if we would but learn to use the hammer and chisel with sufficient virtue.27 It is rather a self constantly being reformulated. William MacDonald notes, “[A]ccording to Kierkegaard, contra Plato, a self has not always been itself in a retrospective eternity, but must become itself in its eternal validity by 25

Kierkegaard’s analysis appears to anticipate in interesting ways undertaken by Heidegger in his early (1915) essay, “History of the Concept of Time” where he distinguishes between the time of science and that of history. The time of science is defined as “homogenous” and “quantitatively determinable.” The temporal reckoning of history, by contrast, is qualitative. “The question of ‘when,’ has entirely different meanings in physics and in history,” quoted from John van Buren, Supplements (New York: SUNY University Press, 2002), 59. 26 Kangas, 189. 27 Plotinus, Enneads (Penguin Classics, 1991) see I.6, chapter IX.

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means of an act of freedom undertaken in time.”28 The moment is the site of human freedom and for that reason also responsibility. As the ‘category of transition,’ it is the time in which the spirit acts. It is, therefore, on account of the moment that we are free, in virtue of, at one and the same time, an exposition to eternity and to temporal possibility.

II. Originary and Representational Time As we have seen, for Kierkegaard, the present indicates both the suspension of temporal succession as well as the presence of the self to itself. These are in fact two sides of the same coin: there is no self before or without the unity of identity amidst temporal succession. Selfconsciousness is dependent upon time-consciousness. This we have known since Kant, if not since Augustine. It is Kierkegaard’s further contention that time-consciousness can exist only on the prior supposition of that conflict of time and eternity which takes place in and constitutes the moment. But this means self-consciousness is not ultimate or, more precisely, that it is not originary. Thus, the broader temporal categories under which to locate time and eternity are originary time and representational time: “between eternity and time is the event of coming into existence, or originary time—to be radically distinguished from time as represented, which it makes possible.”29 Originary time is the moment in which the first movement takes place: when consciousness is given over to itself. Representational time is the “inner sense” of Kant, the absolute I’s moment of pure presence of Fichte,30 or the retention—impression— protention structure of internal time consciousness in Husserl. It is any and all forms by which consciousness organizes intuition. Kierkegaard conceives originary time as a radical challenge to the entire project of German idealism, which grounds self-consciousness in the primal self-possession and self-positing of the ‘I.’ The originary moment, in contrast to this, is not a primal self-positing, but an event prior to any possible positing. It is the contention that the ground of consciousness is an unground (afgrund), that there is an origin to time not commensurate with the beginning of representational consciousness. Thus, what we might call with Kangas “the most basic contradiction of existence” is not being and nonbeing, but what lies prior to both, namely, 28 William McDonald, “Kierkegaard’s Demonic Boredom,” in Critical Studies (Amsterdam: Brill, 2009) vol. 31, 61-76. See especially pg. 12. 29 Ibid., 115. 30 For a more detailed comparison between Kierkegaard and Fichte on the ‘originary,’ see Kangas (2007, 97).

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originary time.31 Originary time is the temporality of immediacy that is the presupposition of experience and yet is also that which consciousness annuls by its very performance.32 This original alienation at the heart of consciousness gives rise to the range of existential phenomena that occupy Kierkegaard throughout his corpus.

III. Religion and Repetition But how is such a self to be in time? Kierkegaard uses religious categories to illustrate the self’s relation to time, but it is also only in grasping his account of time that we can make sense of some of his religious claims. His ‘phenomenological’ detours through phenomena, such as anxiety and sin, are meant to communicate, indirectly, the experience of the moment he is trying to bring to evidence. In Sickness Unto Death, Haufniensis tells us that anxiety exists in innocence, where we are only psychically qualified, and also in maturity, where the human is fully qualified as spirit, and “Spirit is the self.”33 This movement from the psychic to the spiritual is the first synthesis discussed above. It is the movement from innocence to maturity, the primal leap and the first free act of (fully) human consciousness. Kierkegaard’s definition of the self is, for this reason, a description of an act, not an entity: the self is the “relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.” It is the act by which we become fully self-conscious, the act in which we become aware of ourselves as defined by freedom and possibility. Why should the mood of this transition be that of anxiety? Why, moreover, does Kierkegaard claim that, viewed theologically, this anxiety is the ground of sinfulness, that “through which” we become guilty and therefore “the pivot on which everything turns.”34

31 For an extended treatment of this, see Kangas, passim, especially pp. 52-58 and 115-126. 32 Though it would take us too far afield of the present investigation, for Kierkegaard language is the primary form of such mediation. It discloses consciousness to itself. It is therefore, whether in the form of the serpent or Adam himself, what precipitates the leap from innocence to guilt. Adam need not understand the prohibition to be awakened to the “ambiguity of anxiety,” since, in the very instance of language—of the saying rather than the said—he becomes aware of the inevitable possibility of consciousness to become self-consciousness: a willful positing of self. 33 SUD, 13. 34 Ibid., 43.

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Anxiety, I submit, is precisely the relation between originary and representational time. It is the self’s affective apprehension of its own incongruity, the heterogeneity of which it cannot become conscious in innocence and to which it rarely if ever adverts in self-conscious maturity. Once qualified as spirit the self becomes aware of its essential representational activity. It cannot but constitute its world and its projects temporally.35 Kangas designates this activity of self-consciousness an Eigenwille, which he describes as, “the will toward ownness or possession of self; or better, it is the will that seizes the abyss of possibility as the domain of the free and sovereign play of the ‘I.’”36 Theologically determined, the qualitative leap into self-consciousness as the self-positing of the ‘I’ is sinfulness. This original sinfulness is not, however, the final word. Sin and its dialectical opposite, faith, are alternative behaviors toward the originary. They are the two qualities of the qualitative leap: sin is a qualification in the direction of a self-willing that obscures the originary, while faith is a qualification in the direction of transparency. As the two are dialectically linked, to the extent that sin is fundamentally self-willing, the religious movement must enable some form of dispossession. That is precisely what is achieved in Kierkegaard’s account of repetition, which is constituted by a negative and positive moment. Repetition in its negative moment attempts, against the pretensions of speculative philosophy and idealist epistemology, to accede to the ground of consciousness in such a way that the self is either “suspended” or “withheld” and thereby prevented from its obscuring intervention. It attempts to return to the immediacy prior to positional consciousness.37 However, this cannot be simply a reduplication of consciousness—that would be the inauthentic repetition attempted by the young man in Repetition. The negative moment of authentic repetition is conceived according to the Ekhartian notion of Gelassenheit, i.e., as a kind of selfrelease or letting go. If achieved this would make possible a mediated immediacy: immediate because of its attempt to think the originary 35

This is why Job is the figure par excellence for consciousness. He “holds fast to his own interpretation” maintaining his innocence and in the end, on Kierkegaard’s reading, he is vindicated even as he is also discovered to be guilty. So too, consciousness cannot be anything other than temporally determined; and yet, it is guilty of the forgetting of its dependence on a prior origin to which it cannot accede. 36 Kangas, 176. 37 “The first expression for the relation between immediacy and mediation is Repetition” (JC, 260) as quoted in, Kangas, 83.

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covered over by positional consciousness, mediated because it is brought about through an exercise of freedom, even if only in form of self-release (Gelassenheit). Haufniensis refers to this transcendence38 as transparency. Transparency becomes, therefore, the category of mediated immediacy, the mode in which the self without ceasing to be self-conscious (and therefore a self) ceases to obscure and occlude becoming instead the medium through which something is brought to light. Transparency is achieved through a dispossession of the self in which the self is not annulled, but displaced by brining into being what Haufniensis calls the “theological self,”39 or the self before God. Thus, what was for positional consciousness a single point of origin becomes, through repetition, an acknowledgement of a prior moment that lies outside the appropriative and constitutive activities of consciousness. It does not annul these, but in acknowledging the moment prior to them, it radically conditions their claims to ultimacy. This transparency is the substance of faith40 insofar as “the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently in God.”41 This first negative moment of repetition as dispossession, enables the positive religious moment whereby, “all is made new.”42 This second moment constitutes the definitive temporal category of the fullness of time: “The pivotal concept in Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the moment as the eternal and yet this eternal is also the future and the past.”43 This fullness of time does not refer first to a particular historical moment, but to the fact that all time contains a plenitude because it is touched by the eternal. In other words, consciousness itself, which represents time, contains within itself a fullness it cannot exhaust. For Kierkegaard, Christ is the fullness of time; not, however, because the synthesis is first achieved in him. Again, there is no synthesis between time and eternity, not even in Christ. Quite the 38 “Repetition, its possibility, is itself transcendence to such a degree that the repeated is not in continuity with what came before” (CA, 17). Kangas writes, “What transcends self-consciousness is not what stands over against it, but what falls prior to it” (Kangas, 4). 39 SUD, 79. 40 “Faith is not a first immediacy, but a later immediacy” (CA, 17). 41 Ibid., 82. 42 II Corinthians, 5:17. 43 CA, 90. See also Kierkegaard (John Climacus), Philosophical Fragments, eds. and trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). In the Fragments, Kierkegaard says, “The moment therefore is decisive, filled with the eternal, it is the ‘fullness of time’” (18).

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opposite: the greater the individual, the greater the tension between temporal orders: Christ himself was “anxious unto death.” Christ is the fullness of time because he was absolute transparency: the word adequate to the origin and therefore a mediation that recovered immediacy. In being “anxious unto death” he was able to be in anxiety in the right way. The quintessential religious movement, writes Kangas, “will mean allowing the death of the conception of the self as an origin of meaning, or allowing the metaphysics of the subject to founder.”44 Such a deconstruction of the Eigenwille through ecstatic dispossession, however, has never been understood in the mystical tradition as a permanent achievement. Similarly, for Kierkegaard, the religious repetition of faith is an exercise in freedom maintained, not in logos, but in passion. It remains fundamentally an act of will, not an act of knowledge. For this reason, the temporal character of the knight of faith is that of the greatest anxiety because he has most fully appropriated the “synthesis” at the core of his being and has resigned himself, not unlike Jacob and the angel at Peniel, to “struggle with the infinite.”45 We might say, then, that for Kierkegaard, in distinction from his idealist predecessors and phenomenological successors, the self is not a unity. Therefore, authenticity is not a function of returning to or uncovering the original unity of the self, but a movement away from the self-as-represented that recognizes a founding heterogeneity at the heart of subjectivity. This rift constitutes the vulnerability of consciousness, which lives in exposition before the originary. Thus, at the deepest level of the self, one discovers not interiority but externality. But if such externality discovers in the originary a second temporal determination of Dasein, which is indeed the first truth of Dasein, it permits us, perhaps, to think a mode of being-in-the-world other than that of Sorge. Such an attitude might approximate the “holy hypochondria” of Hamann46 with which Kierkegaard closes the Concept of Anxiety. One suspects that neither Abraham nor Job, despite being given back their worlds, was able to live in it the same way as before.

44

Kangas, 114. CA, 155. 46 Ibid., 162: “The anxiety in the world is only proof of our heterogeneity. If we lacked nothing … no homesickness would come over us. This impertinent disquiet, this holy hypochondria, is perhaps the fire with which we season sacrificial animals in order to preserve us from the putrefaction of the current seculi.” 45

INTERNAL TIME AND HISTORY: ON HUSSERL AND RICOEUR KEVIN MARREN

This essay considers the meaning of time in Husserl’s phenomenological analyses, especially as presented in his 1905 lectures. I have addressed the essay on several points to the critical commentary of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur calls Husserl’s theory of internal time-consciousness radically into question in the third volume of Time and Narrative; however, as I argue in the first part of this essay, Ricoeur misunderstands the finer points of phenomenology when giving his own narrative account of temporality. And, although Ricoeur’s account is worthwhile in its own right, we must undertake to correct its oversights in respect to the phenomenological method. This is because Husserl’s phenomenology, far from being fraught with aporia (pace Ricoeur’s treatment thereof), offers us an opportunity for deepening Ricoeur’s own theory of narrative time. Thus, the second part of the essay represents a phenomenological expansion of Ricoeur’s work on narrativity. The first part of the essay makes three overlapping points: the phenomenological reduction reveals the essential difference between the general “what” of an object and the existential predicates corresponding to one’s belief in an object’s “really” being. That is, the reduction, rather than suppressing objectivity itself, rather than producing a new domain of objects, reveals the contours of essential difference between two kinds of predicates already obtaining in the objects we encounter every day. Following from this, I reject Ricoeur’s claims that the phenomenological reduction is productive of the immanence characteristic of internal time. But, more to the point, I reject Ricoeur’s critical assessment of Husserl’s use of natural language post-reduction. I argue that natural language continues to function after the reduction in just the way it functions in its everyday use, and precisely because its functioning is not tied to the existential predicates that are suppressed. This includes straightforward expression, as well as figures of speech. By clearing up the status of language, I move into a discussion of meaning in respect to temporal

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objects. Here, I identify the temporal “what” of familiar objects in abstraction from the acceptance of such objects as “really being” in the world. And finally, in revealing the temporal “what”—the temporal meaning we all understand already—I follow Husserl from the immanent sense of time given within these objects, to the sense of time obtaining within the corresponding acts of consciousness that the phenomenologist singles out and discloses reflectively. Contra Ricoeur, I take this reflective turn as the moment of disclosure of the temporal sense given in the meaning of a “conscious being situated” alongside temporal objects. The second part of the essay, then, follows from Ricoeur’s discussion of the narrative character of historical time. I do not disagree with Ricoeur that narrative unfolds in the mimesis of an action and that disclosure of this action gives us historiographical access to history; however, I contend that the form of action accrues generally to mimesis at the limit between doxa and episteme. Thus, drawing from the phenomenological research in the first part of the essay, I seek to expand Ricoeur’s mimetic theory of historical narrative by orienting it to the structure of belief. I characterize historical time by the necessity of believing in an historical content as meant—by taking the “really” of such a content as necessary for the sense of the historical meaning. Here, I believe the terms of Husserl’s analysis of internal time consciousness give us a special access to the subject’s being historically situated, and to the subject’s believing and knowing in respect to historical matters. Thus, the second part of the essay attempts a reintegration of Husserl’s phenomenology and Ricoeur’s narrative theory of history.

First Part Since every defense or expansion of Husserl’s work must attempt the phenomenological reduction, let us begin there. The reduction, under the auspices of which we bring internal time to essential definition, involves, to use Husserl’s words, “the complete exclusion of all transcending presuppositions concerning what exists.”1 Ricoeur quotes this line from Husserl, of course;2 but, he seems to have misunderstood the reduction entirely, mistaking the suppression of “all transcending presuppositions” for an attempt at suppressing the phenomenologist’s “knowledge” 1 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. J. Brough, in Collected Works, vol. 4 ed. R. Bernet (Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1991), 61. 2 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 3, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 24. Hereafter abbreviated TN3.

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concerning the general “what” of existents. For, immediately after citing this line from Husserl, Ricoeur asks, rhetorically, critically, “Would we use the expression ‘sensed at the same time’ if we knew nothing of objective simultaneity?”3 thus illustrating his emphasis on “knowledge.” Here, we can answer from Ricoeur to Ricoeur, “[The reduction] does not suppress anything at all” at least, nothing that we know, insofar as we know it. This is, further, what Husserl’s principle of principles says in Ideas I: “that each intuition affording [something] in an originary way is a legitimate source of knowledge,”4 which, we cannot reduce, whether temporal or otherwise, to a nothing.5 The appearing as such has precisely this status; it is an absolute datum, the foundation of all belief, of all phenomenological description—it is the indubitable correlate, the primordial-existential ‘that there is something’ upon which all experience is founded. The reduction, then, “is confined,” as Ricoeur suggests, “to the 3

Ibid. Edmund Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. D. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2014), 44. 5 Certainly, in a Ricoeurian mode, the principle of principles itself represents a problem, since it seems to assume that we already understand the meaning of presence in respect to something knowable, while, at the same time, relying upon that meaning. However, I see nothing contradictory or paradoxical in saying that the principle discloses every aspect of its own legitimacy. Or it may be better said that the principle of principles provides its own legitimacy precisely in and because of what it accomplishes. In grasping something originally, for instance, I have that Protagorean kernel of truth, that Hegelian moment of sense-certainty, in which the thing is guaranteed just as it appears to me. But, in addition, I have the capacity for questioning back to the principle or condition of such a kernel or moment, and the questioning back is toward the principle, which is the ideal limit of the questioning. Sallis has raised a related quasi-objection concerning the principle of principles, arguing “It is a principle which, by referring all legitimation of knowledge to originary intuition, disrupts the very concept of principle. It withdraws from all principles their traditional function, their grounding function, by placing them all under the demand for legitimation by reference to intuition. The principle of all principles … is a principle which is not a principle, which is not itself something different from itself.” I can only agree with this. It is not a principle in the traditional sense. But, this is hardly an objection that undermines phenomenology. It only undermines those phenomenologists who proceed as though Husserl’s principle operates like a Kantian principle, for example, or one which must have its legitimacy posited on the basis of something else. See, Sallis, John, “The Identities of the Things Themselves” in Research in Phenomenology, vol. XII (Brill, 1982), 118. 4

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redirecting of our gaze, without losing sight of what is bracketed.”6 But, if we have not lost sight of what is bracketed, does that mean we have presupposed it in its total significance, as existing, for instance, in an objective world-time, as a given in-the-world as such? Husserl, as though responding to our rhetorical question, adds directly to Ricoeur’s own conclusions, deepening them, and addressing expressly the possible accusation that phenomenology must take objective worldtime as a presupposition. Husserl takes this up in the supplements to his lectures: We must consider the following question here: To what extent have we assumed in advance the flow of objective time? Well, precisely in the sense in which we have assumed a physical thing in the analysis of the physical thing, or something perceived in the analysis of perception, and so on. We surely have not assumed the truth of a world and of some world-time [which would be to believe in it], nor have we assumed the real existence of any physical thing and its duration. But we certainly do accept the appearing duration as it appears.7

Following this, we say that what remains post-reduction “without losing sight” of it, what appears, are what philosophers have historically designated as episteme, or the proper objects of knowledge. And, in the case of time, these are the phenomenal data of an experienced duration or succession. What undergoes modification, by contrast, is the doxic position we adopt toward such constituted objectivities, namely, our acceptance of the status of a thing “really” enduring, or of a “really” succeeding chain of events. That we believe is certain. That there is a correlate of belief is certain. And the general “what” of the believed-in thing remains certain for us. Yet, there has been a suppression of what is “really” there insofar as these three components have been abstracted from their usual cooperation. Put otherwise, Husserl has confined the reduction to a functional modification with respect to the existential predication of the “what.” The “really” drops out. Or, better, it remains but we do not make use of it as an essential predicate obtaining for the “what” of a given thing. We find further exemplification of Husserl’s procedure in the Cartesian Meditations: “The philosophically reflective Ego's abstention from position-takings, his depriving them of acceptance, does not signify their disappearance from his field of experience. The [corresponding] concrete subjective processes, let us repeat, are indeed the things to which 6 7

TN3, 25. PCIT, 326.

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his attentive regard is directed …”8 after the reduction. And this thematic attentiveness to belief and the process in which believing is caught up, affects the function of the belief. Reducing a belief to a mere phenomenon deprives it of its efficacy. As Husserl says, the general thesis of the natural attitude, the believing that corresponds to our everyday taking the world for what it is undergoes a modification while it continues to remain in itself what it is, we place it, as it were, “out of action,” we “suspend it,” we “bracket it.” It is still here as before, like the bracketed in the brackets, like the suspended outside the context of the suspension, [although] we can say, the thesis is an experience, but we make “no use” of it.9

What remains after this bracketing—the phenomenal residue—can be nothing other than the episteme, for, speaking according to the epistemological spectrum, what is neither belief nor reduced to nothing is knowledge. The reductive method of phenomenological investigation is now a little clearer. Contra Ricoeur, we understand that the reduction suppresses the doxa, leaving the episteme intact. And the episteme available seem to be bifurcated: on the one hand, that I believe becomes an object of knowledge; on the other hand, the meaning of what I believe in remains unaffected. Time, then, must be given as something we can know according to the object correlate of a belief without actually believing. Put otherwise, and further, Husserl’s investigation does not so much claim that there is some new thing called “internal time” that phenomenology produces through its reductive method; but, rather, it shows that what is at issue from the start is the significance of an internal time, as time is indicated already in the meaning of certain objectivities. Yet, if we are to focus on meanings, we must identify our access thereto. Phenomenology, as a descriptive enterprise, rests upon (natural) language to convey the meanings it wishes to analyze. Moreover, Husserl uses metaphors to approach highly technical matters—metaphors that never seem to drop out of the analysis of internal time. These metaphors include “flux” and “flow,” as well as “point” and “dying-away.” Ricoeur identifies this as a problem: Either we name the constituting—the flux—after what is constituted (the present phase, the continuity of pasts in retention, etc.), or we rely on 8

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 20 [60]. 9 Ideas I, 54 [55].

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Internal Time and History: On Husserl and Ricoeur metaphors: flux, source-point, springing up, sinking back, and so on. It was already difficult enough [for Husserl] to go beneath the transcendent object and to remain on the level of appearing, that of the immanent object or the tempo-object. The task is now to go beneath the immanent object and to place ourselves on the level where consciousness is flux, where all “consciousness of” … is a “moment of the flux.” The question is whether we are not simply reduced to a mere shift in vocabulary, in which the same analyses, carried out once in terms of appearing, would be done a second time in terms of consciousness: perceptual consciousness, retentional consciousness, reproductive consciousness, etc.10

Ricoeur may be wrong to say, “Husserl does not stop to consider the irreducibly metaphorical character of the most important terms upon which his description is based.”11 After all, Husserl admits, “absolute subjectivity has the … properties of something to be designated metaphorically as ‘flow.’”12 However, we must take seriously Ricoeur’s charge in the above quote, that, although Husserl recognizes a metaphor for what it is, metaphor and natural language have not undergone, but, instead, have resisted, the phenomenological reduction, and that they have introduced, post-reduction, a trace of the objective validities according to which we accept the presentation of the world in the natural attitude. The problem is that, insofar as we articulate our interpretation of internal time in, for example, the German, French, or English languages, it seems as though we have tacitly accepted the contingencies of the semantic arrangement of natural languages, right down to their densest idioms and cultural-historical idiosyncrasies. And from this, Ricoeur insinuates, we risk importing—illegitimately and without a foundation in evidence—the contingent aspects of the languages that we employ, not 10

TN3, 41. Ibid., 27. 12 PCIT, 76. Ricoeur himself comes close to citing this line immediately after the quote to which we are responding (TN3, 27), but does not address Husserl in his own words regarding metaphor. I find this strange considering the veiled criticism Ricoeur levels against Husserl in the line just above. Another thing: even if Ricoeur is right that Husserl did not give serious enough consideration to the use of metaphor in the lectures on internal time, it remains that he is not inferring from the metaphors to his descriptions of time, but, in reverse order, is employing the metaphor to describe something given originally and evidently in intuition. So, in any case, an objection should attempt to meet Husserl on his own ground; it should have to reach back and show that either what a particular metaphor is describing is non-originally given to intuition as an evident time-consciousness (or constituent thereof), or, in a self-defeating move, it would have to contest the use of metaphor generally. Ricoeur does neither. 11

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only in our analysis of temporal objects, but also into the domain of subjective processes, which we make, for the sake of those languages, the mirror of the object. On the contrary, however, Husserl is not drawing conclusions from the factual arrangement of meanings in natural languages. Nor is he using the contingent arrangement of objects in-the-world to infer anything about what essentially obtains for consciousness. In respect to the first objection, I should point out that there is a difference between, on the one hand, inferring from the structure of a particular linguistic arrangement to a given conclusion, and, on the other hand, using language to articulate a conclusion founded on other evidence given originally. And this latter possibility belongs, not to natural language, qua natural, but to the essence of language, qua language. On the second count against Husserl, that there is a fortuitous, but illegitimate, symmetry between the analyses of objects and the analyses of subjective processes, I argue that there is no reason in the first place to suppose such a break in meaning between objects of consciousness generally and consciousness itself when meant objectively for itself. That is, in a certain sense, and as I will argue in the forthcoming analysis of meaning, time-consciousness, directed at the underlying temporal structure of consciousness itself, remains an object-consciousness, just one having a peculiarly immanent orientation via reflection. Really, though, the time— the before, during, and after—that we find in the absolute data of a perceptual experience, as for instance, in a perceptual having present of an object, is identical in its logical structure with time as we find it in the objectivation of a conscious act, and, from this, we may discern the absolute data of the experience of internal time. But we will return to this later. Let us return to say a few more words on the question of language before we address the question of the meaning of temporal objects specifically. Even when we perform the reduction, when we put out of play our position towards language, and our taking instances of speech as “real” or “really corresponding to something in fact,” we retain, along with the figures of speech themselves (which are of necessity always presented as full of meaning), the meanings that those figures articulate and that we understandingly interpret them to mean. This is because the meaning is “there”—it corresponds to a “that it is”—and is irreducibly and immediately given as a content for consciousness as soon as we understand the linguistic figure as such. One lifts the meaning from the substratum, the natural language, and has it rendered as an absolute datum in the act of understanding. This is because understanding a language

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never involves taking a position on the existential status of such a figure. It does not depend on the predicate “real.” Rather, knowing what something means precedes any position taking; for, the meaning is precisely that towards which we can take a position, and must therefore precede doing so. We might doubt that what someone says is true, or that we have understood a phrase, but even if a speech is false, or if we have misunderstood, our believing it false or our misunderstanding remains attached to a linguistic phenomenon presented as full of meaning. Otherwise, there would be no basis for objectively stating that what we have is a false statement or a misunderstanding. Moreover, even though the phenomenologist willfully denies himself the importation of inferences drawn from the history of language, or from etymologies, into his description of objectivities as such, these histories and etymologies nonetheless give him access to those various phenomena having essentially a semantic character since they disclose in their particular aspect the very structure of semantics. For, what it means to have a sentence, for instance, entails having possible access to a meaning—a meaning given in different degrees of fullness. And, having a meaning is irreducibly to have an original content for consciousness. Up until this point, we have given a preparatory thematization of several of the issues from Time and Narrative concerning the phenomenological method and its access to time-consciousness. And, while this has been useful work, rather than continuing to refine our understanding of the method, let us attempt to analyze a concrete example: Husserl’s infamous melody. To make the matter of time-consciousness clearer, we can approach the example at two different levels of scope: first, as a melody given according to straightforward description; and, then, by way of reflection upon the melody thematized as reflection. After, let us attempt also to isolate the sense (or senses) of time and temporality as required for understanding the meaning of a “melody” in these two cases. We can say, a priori, that a melody is not a melody heard unless it takes a determinate stretch of time to listen to it. This is just an implication in what it means to be a melody. For “if we hear a bit of a melody,” Husserl says, “we do not hear merely single tones, even less moments of single tones;”13 rather, the melody itself is presented in its temporal form, as a now present tonal-formation extending into the past. That is, what it means to perceive a melody already includes this extension into the past and the passive anticipation of the tonal-formations yet to come. By 13

PCIT, 355.

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contrast, a melody decomposed into single tones is not a melody, but a collection of tones. The difference here is huge, since a collection of tones is something distinct in form from a melody. Such a collection we might call a heap of tonal objects. These objects do not refer to each other, and so, they do not sound-off in a way that presents itself as a melody. Meanwhile only an organized whole would be called a melody or a composition. And, if we follow the connections of our ordinary language, and shift our analysis for a moment toward the meaning of ‘composition,’ we reveal, in correspondence with the meaning of ‘melody,’ the very intent of a composer: an organizing influence or design made upon the sonorous (tonal) material of the melody that is there and the same throughout the presentation of the melody. However, this intention would not show itself in our abstractly having individual tones. In fact, the classical distinction made here between material and form is also instructive, since a melody and a random constellation of tones may be materially indistinguishable, but are clearly different (insofar as our experience of each is different) in definition, that is, in respect to form and meaning. If we continue to enquire after the meaning of melody in respect to its being a whole, we can uncover certain a priori laws written into its composition. For instance, in a melody, there are no single tones. And we have founded this law on a kind of temporal reference. The toneformations are distinguished by taking apart the singular guiding intention of a composer that “sounds off” throughout a melody. We might follow Husserl here: To perceive a temporal flow means to perceive a present existent [tone] A together with a just past B objectively connected with an A and a C belonging to the further past, etc.; it means to perceive the A and, in the process of [B] being pushed back, to experience B as next past, and so on. And this whole succession is perceived; it is a present process, since we are looking at the objective unity and perceiving it. We perceive the melody.14

Thus, the sense we have of time is like the sense we have of a melody. Its “flowing” is given like a whole, but certain temporal-formations can be abstracted off like notes. And these formations are given, in their abstraction, and their inherent dependence on the whole, as within a system of reference. They spring from the sense of time already there in the temporal object as temporal—the melody as a whole. And just as no 14

PITC, 151-152.

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single note inheres in a melody, so no single moment inheres in a temporal stretch. And this a priori law is not concluded on the basis of analogy between a ‘pure’ time and a melodic time. Rather, the sense of internal time is the same as the sense of time given according to a melody-object, or by whatever tempo-object is at hand. And, further, this is the sense of time located directly within the sense of the object in a perception. The truer function of excluding objective time, which entails a reduction to the phenomenal data of chronometric determinations (no matter whether according to clock-time or to the cosmic-time of celestial motions, since these are really fungible denominations of motion),15 is to separate abstractly the sense of duration and succession themselves from those things that “take time” and are founded on duration and succession secondarily, and to make this separation out along essential lines. That is, objective time takes time; every determination of an objectively temporal connection, of a clock’s hand being at one moment on the three, and at another, on the four, presupposes our understanding of the meaning of a thing in time, a perceptual thing that is subject to continuous, indecomposable change. Thus, no matter whether we are speaking of objective connections between the tonal-formations comprising a melody, or between the ticks of a clock, or between night and day, these connections already have in their sense a certain temporal aspect that we can isolate as an identical takingtime, posited, of essential necessity, in accordance with their respective meanings. We ask, in an appropriately phenomenological register, “How, then, is time given?” “How is this one temporal sense drawn out in every case?” Husserl examines the principles that underpin these observations in the appendices, and he sets us down the path of apprehending the givenness of time: We have no intuition of a physical thing in the strong sense of the word [because] there is no momentary act that would grasp, in itself, all together and as actually present, the manifold parts, properties and connections of which the physical thing objectively consists [e.g., the tone-formations of the melody, the ticking-away and enduring of the clock hands], [there is] no momentary intuition that would observe and apprehend them all at the same time. [This is because what it means to apprehend a physical object entails a peculiar temporal synthesis, a synthetic “flowing” of consciousness, as Husserl will announce in the following pages. For] if perception takes place in a momentary act [which we might relate to what Husserl calls a “mono-thetic act” in §119 of Ideas I] then this manifold is 15

Cf., PCIT, Appendix XI, 128.

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mere intention; and this stipulates that we say here, as in similar cases, [that] we do not have a true intuition of what is intended [a unified physical object], but its mere re-presentation (namely, a non-presentive representation).16

The meaning of ‘physical thing,’ includes, then, the sense of time, but it includes it as part of a synthesis, that is, as part of our apprehending some particular physical object temporally, in its temporized unfolding of consciousness. And so, on the one hand, we have the meaning of the object in its peculiar temporality, and, on the other, we have the meaning of the synthesis that is requisite to its standing there for us, which, just as the melody is comprised of tonal-formations, appears to be comprised of intuition-formations that refer inherently to each other. The only question, then, and this is the most difficult for phenomenology to answer, is: “In what way do such intuition-formations, those obtaining inherently in a singular act of consciousness, appear?” As Ricoeur is right to state, rhetorically, critically, “It seems that the formal conditions of experience that Kant held to be presuppositions are considered simply as intuitions,”17 which is to say that we risk presupposing their intuitiveness. We will return to the question of intuition at the end of the first part. For now, let us take intuition as an assumption, and, for the sake of the argument, permit that it discloses the contents of consciousness originally. Intuition, in what Husserl here calls the “strong sense,” does not disclose a unified concrete physical thing—that is the work of perception. To perceive a physical thing is to have, in a pre-predicative judgment, a unified object, and a synthesis of related parts. For, the meaning of perception is just this: the objective joining together of differences (different angles, times, inherent parts) all belonging to something which is singularly construed in an identical meaning. But how are the temporal connections of object-phases different from the objective connection of tones in a presently perceived melody as perceived? We must return to the conclusion we arrived at above in respect to the reduction. As a doxic suppression, we have attempted to doubt everything in its connectedness, but this has extended only to objective connections— to connections that can be imagined to be otherwise. What it means to be a tone, for instance, does not entail being part of a melody; it does not entail other tones. So the time of a tone, qua tone, extends just this far in its meaning: it means the ideal (and we will say a word on the meaning of ‘ideal’ here) time corresponding to the perception of what we call a ‘tone.’ 16 17

Ibid., 147. TN3, 41.

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Likewise, a melody is neither a single tonal moment, nor is it a series of disconnected tonal happenings. So the meaning of melody includes a sense of time that unites interdependent tone-formations. It is a temporal object precisely insofar as it cannot be conceived without referring to the time and interconnectedness of its elementary tone-formations. This becomes more obvious when we have suspended our general acceptance of the connectedness of every transcendent thing. But what was the sense of this transcendence in the first place? Clearly, we understand the meaning of transcendence itself only if we have shown— according to laws of essential necessity—the ideal limit of doubt in respect to certain unities of meaning. As Husserl says in illustration of this point, “[That] the consciousness of a tonal process, [for instance,] of a melody I am now hearing, exhibits a succession, is something for which I have an evidence that renders meaningless every doubt and denial.”18 And this is the case insofar as what is present, in its very meaning, is a melody and not something else—not just an intuitive representation of a melody, but a melody in the flesh. And the shift to the immanent data retains this significance; it distinguishes between the non-presentive representation of the melody and what it means to hear the melody. Now, on the one hand, we can scrutinize the relation of the parts of a perceptual object a-temporally. That is, we can notice how one tone intimates another in a given melodic phrase, taking the melody, not in its unfolding, but ideally as the uniform static paradigm for this unfolding. On the other hand, we can identify the joining of temporal predicates in this mutual and essential intimation between tones as they actually appear in a given melody. We can attempt to grasp the sense of the before, during, and after in the tone-formations already being there in the total sense of the melody. Or, moreover, we can say that, via the reduction, via the suppression of our belief in every contingent objective connection, we have revealed the pure meaning of the datum ‘melody’ that appears just in this peculiar sense. For, what survives the reduction is what cannot be doubted or denied. Or, insofar as we have a melody, we cannot deny that time is also given since there can be no melody without its taking time. A final point in this analysis of meaning is of the utmost importance: in setting aside transcendent interconnection, in refraining from accepting any connection that does not show itself to be essentially necessary within the nucleus of something meant, we have arrived at a certain sense of time that we can no longer interpret as coextensive with objective time. We could doubt every relation of objective time, of the chronometric order of 18

PCIT, 5.

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the world, in particular, but also, generally the factual having been, continuing to be, and looking likely to be of empirical happenings, and yet the melody would still take time in a sense entirely impervious to such a doxic suspension. The time the melody takes, that is, is a purely epistemological matter. And yet, to say a different sense of time, different from the world order, is operative here (although this is true) presents an all-too-negative determination of the temporal meaning we are enquiring after. Before we affect the switch to immanent time, we must realize that the ideal time with which we are dealing, is just that which could be marked by any number of objective determinations of time. It is the essential connectedness, the temporal structure imbedded in the essence of things like melodies and tones, of objects of perception generally, but also, as we will see, of objects of reflection. To put this in a final and succinct way: no matter how much objective time we impute to a melody, the temporal form of the melody is exactly the same—‘melody’ means, in a singular way, a taking time. It does not change if we play the melody faster or slower, now or later, because the meaning of ‘melody’ did not depend in the first place on taking a particular portion or other of the objectively determined time. The temporal form of any temporal object is fixed precisely in this way. It is the ideal form of any ‘time taking,’ of every proceeding according to an order that “really” can be articulated by objectivities. Let us now affect the reflective shift toward the immanent sense of time. We have so far only asked what it means to be a melody-object. We have answered that it means for tone-formations to be construed as part of an identical unity in time. That is, we have given only a little more than a definition of melody in terms of time. These tone-formations, we have said, are not mere tones, even if we can isolate them and abstractly posit them as such (for instance, when we say in rehearsal of a piece, “Go back to the first note of the first measure”). The tone-formations only make sense as non-independent constituents of something that took time to perceive. Here, though, is the signpost that signals the entrance point to a study of the immanent sense: if the melody took time to perceive, we can say that time was in some way given, and, in its clear givenness, we can apprehend it directly, not just as time ideally meant in the “melody,” but as time in the sense of what the melody takes in our listening to it, in concrete acts of experiencing it. It takes, on our part, a span of attention or noticing, and this is significant since our perception corresponds to the giving of time to a melody. Staying true now to our shift to immanence, however, we must also say that we find, by reflection, the perceptual act, comprised of the succession

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of intuitive (impressional) phases that are inherent in the experience of a perceptual object. It would be a mistake to say this is a separate step, as though the temporal object and the act of consciousness could be discovered in perfect isolation from each other. Yet, in essence, they are separate as are all correlates. That is, and it is now easier to say because of our preparatory work, what it means to be an act of perception is to take time, the time of action—to unfold according to an idealizable temporal form akin to that belonging to the perceptual object. An act of perception, when held in reflective regard, is as much a temporal object as is the melody perceived. And, in being so, the act of perception, or any other act of consciousness, is shown to be comprised of duration, a succession of intuitive phases, etc. This represents the final point, the answer to the Ricoeurian question concerning intuition. We have deflated the meaning of intuition, made it a quasi-happening, a moment of the “indecomposable flux” of a presentive act of consciousness. That means, when one has an object in perception, when one reflects on the perceptual act, one finds it already in a concordant duration that coincides or, better, corresponds with the time of the constituted object. And, just as one can abstractly represent the phases of the objects appearing qua abstract objectivities (this side, this time-slice of this viewing, etc.) one can also abstractly represent the phases of an act of consciousness—including those of a reflective consciousness, which are not independent acts except in the sense of being possible stopping points for an intellect concerned with singling out non-selfstanding moments of the “flow.” Now, to be quite honest, I cannot fathom whatever it is that Ricoeur might be referring to as an aporia. He uses the term only three times in reference to Husserl: once in respect to the alleged productivity of the exclusion of objective time;19 once in respect to the homonymy between objective and immanent time;20 and once in respect to the possible infinite regress in recollection.21 I believe I have responded to each of these, although the third is only implicitly accounted for in my analysis of the meaning of reflection. Yet, even leaving this last point unresolved, I can find no trace of aporia left that is not either founded on a misunderstanding, or that is not resolvable through further analysis and explication. Let us, then, put the pursuits of the first section to rest.

19

TN3, 23. Ibid., 25. 21 Ibid., 42. 20

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Second Part Despite the several errors we addressed in the first section concerning Ricoeur’s analysis, Ricoeur’s work in Time and Narrative offers an important contribution to the phenomenology of internal timeconsciousness. We have implicitly resolved the thesis question of Husserl’s lectures as, “How do temporal objects present themselves?” To give a phenomenological answer, we emphasized an analysis of the meaning of temporal objects, although we left out the familiar talk of retention and protention, since they are well studied and it was not necessary for our purposes to rehash their importance.22 We might continue with our chosen emphasis on the investigation into meanings after similarly resolving two of Ricoeur’s theses in the interrogative register: “How do historical objects, or objects that get their sense from historical time, present themselves as having that sense?” and “What is the meaning of the object of historical study in respect to internal time?” These questions are asking after different answers, but in a way, they are founded one on the other. It is only through the presentation of a certain past, a configured past, that an historical object provides for us the object of historical study. And this latter object is something either identical with, or productive of, a kind of narrative—one that says, “Something has actually happened in the world.” And the “what it is” of the happening is simply the historical object itself. By providing a phenomenological analysis of the meaning of ‘historical object,’ then, I believe we can begin to answer these questions.

22 We said that there is a temporal structure revealed in the analysis of meaning radically freed of doxa. This structure, whether it is exactly as Husserl described it, is a matter for another investigation. Husserl’s own lectures go a great deal into this, as do several excellent papers. See, for instance, James Dodd, “Reading Husserl’s Time-Diagrams from 1917/18” in Husserl Studies, num. 21 (Online: Springer, 2005), 111-137. The strength of Dodd’s analysis, in particular, is accounting for the sense of “distance” in the time diagrams and the reliance on spatial metaphors in later lectures on time consciousness. There is also a coincidence between my emphasis on meaning and Dodd’s claim (pg. 3) that “[time] represents a ‘special sense’ of the idea of a timeobject.” We might compare this to the above reading of Ricoeur, which has contested that a pure phenomenology should have access to the everyday use of meaning, finding further resources in Dodd’s article to understand exactly what is at stake.

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For Ricoeur, history is disclosed in a kind of narrative distinct from fiction.23 If we follow Ricoeur in the first volume of Time and Narrative, we understand that the work of all narrative involves emplotment of an action according, more or less, to a three-fold mimesis. We are, however, primarily concerned with what he calls “mimesis1” and “mimesis3.” In converting the phenomenology of internal time-consciousness into a phenomenology of the constitution of historical time, we are undertaking an analysis both of our “familiar pre-understanding of the order of action,”24 as it concerns the constitution of something exhibiting the look of being old and connected to the past (mimesis1), as well as of our “refiguring” the pre-understood meaning in production of the historical narrative.25 Here, I do not mean to exclude mimesis2. However, for the sake of simplicity (and for no other reason), I have chosen to downplay the entry into poetry that corresponds to mimesis2. Nonetheless, it is mimesis2, understood as a doxological configuration, that imputes the structure of a phenomenal content to an epistemologically certain content, and constitutes a historical-believing. What mimesis2 does not do is allow us to differentiate between the sense of “really” and the sense of fiction26—that is mutually the work of the other two formulations of mimesis and why we are focusing on them.

23

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Ricoeur says (TN2, 107), “Only fiction, precisely, can explore and bring to language [a] divorce between worldviews and their irreconcilable perspectives on time, a divorce that undermines public time.” This undermining of public time, which only fiction can achieve, has to do with the idea that what makes something historical, is its being “real” publically, as part of a shared believing. The manner of this sharing is precisely accomplished in narrative, but the believing itself must be grounded in something else, a ‘believing oneself to be involved’ that I will discuss in the following analysis. 24 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 1, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), taken from the “preface,” xi. 25 Ibid. 26 TN1, 64. Ricoeur makes this clear when he says, “The word ‘fiction’ is then available for designating the configuration of a narrative for which emplotment is the paradigm, without regard for the differences that concern the truth claims of the two classes of narrative.” The two classes are ‘fictional’ and ‘historical,’ both of which present a configured ideal type in terms of narrative mimesis, in terms of an entry into the understanding of poetic action, and, generally, into the configured time of action.

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Now, in any case, the action of a plot is something like an ideal type; it can be instantiated just as well in history as in fiction, although, in fiction, the paradigm itself seems to be the focus, whereas, in history, the concrete particular or denominative expression of the type is emphasized. We will deal with this distinction more deeply here. We might begin our analysis of the object of historical study by saying how history and fiction are different in respect to time—how the ideality of narrative form takes time into itself—which we can do by first focusing on the meaning of the historical narrative, and then by showing how it poses a limit, on the side of meaning, to the phenomenological reduction that separates doxa from episteme. Let us, then, attempt to explicate the meaning of something’s being historical. Historians, Ricoeur says, “[O]we a debt to the past, a debt of recognition to the dead, that makes them insolvent debtors.”27 It is the meaning of this “owing a debt” that Ricoeur sets adjacent to the question of what the “real” means in an historical narrative—for example, when one says that something “really” has happened. This “really” is what signifies that the narrative represents historical “truth” rather than fantasy. It is this “remaining true to the events” that constitutes the sense of my debt; for this, carried to its limit, means doing justice to the dead, to those who have passed. And yet, recalling the analysis of meaning from our first section, we should recognize that this “really” is our believing in the “truth” of the narrative, which is demanded by the dead, and our holding something as actually past, i.e., as coextensive with the now. This is precisely what the phenomenological reduction (usually) separates from the internal, that is, essential, configuration of something meant (as perceived, remembered, etc.). The doxic position towards a worldhistorical, world-temporal, entity is, in a certain respect, suspended under the reduction. The “really,” insofar as it means a certain believing true, is an objective temporal predicate that qualifies the meaning of a narrative content. That is, it seems, at first, to signify a non-inherent belief character imposed upon the narrative in my taking a position towards the past. This character seems, furthermore, as only objectively connected to the subject matter it qualifies. Yet, this is mere seeming. What looks to be an existential predicate here is, in truth, a quiditative one. It is essential to history, by way of what Ricoeur refers to as the historians’ “owing a debt,” that some essential connection obtains between the historical subject matter present (as presenting its past) and the phenomenological “now.” This amounts to saying that the content of the historical narrative, the 27

TN3, 143.

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phenomena it discloses, which we retain as separated from doxa after the reduction, in some way corresponds, or is configured, in relation to the meaning of the doxic predicate—the “real”—that makes a given narrative historical. At least, that is, the doxic predicate that signifies the “real” of an historical reality, and contrary to the metaphysics of the modern period, signifies a “what.” We are now seeking the meaning of a peculiar doxic predicate that, we will argue, signifies a complex of acceptances mapped out by a narrative form, which tests, not only the limits of knowledge and belief, but the limits of the consciousness of internal time. That is, further, in giving our phenomenological account of historiography, we are undertaking an epistemological investigation into the essence of a species of belief called “historical,” which is founded according to “justice,” or the paying of a debt. Ricoeur, so to speak, has already cleared the ground from which we should make our general start: the historical text. As Ricoeur says, “[O]ur path lies in the mediation that reading brings about between the fictive world of the text and the actual world of the reader.”28 It is in writings on history, which are fictions of a sort, at least insofar as in the reports of historians, we find narrative imputations about historical figures that could not have been made in the time of the figure, and that are the invention of the historian, it is in such writings that an historical subject matter takes its most determinate formulation in respect to a “real” past. For, on the one hand, the historian takes liberties, and, for this, he accrues debt. Yet, on the other hand, the historian ‘pays off’ in the currency of the present (the source of his authority) the debt by re-presenting the “truth.” Now, other transcendent objects may present themselves as historical. A ruins, for instance, has the look of being past. Its very meaning relies on its having a history, and its having “really” preceded me. However, what makes the text the most useful example for a phenomenology of history, is that it has been concretely configured in respect to the past, bringing together information on other artifacts in an historical contextualization or configuration. This also takes place in order to view a ruins or artifact as historical, of course, but, then, the configuring is usually concealed. That is, so to speak, the text provides the ‘as-structure’ of the historical subject matter in the convenient guise of written expression; whereas, the ‘objectabout-which’ or event described in an historical text—the Colosseum, for instance—at first can only give itself over to us, in person, as openly textured, and minimally structured by its historical character. Certainly, 28

TN3, 101.

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this ‘as-structure’ is present as the possibility of writing a text even where no text (let alone a published historical document) is yet available. The only concern is that, in those cases where historical research and investigation have not yet been carried out, the historical texture of the narrative takes on a speculative character and is more easily qualified by a modality of “real,” e.g., as “probably real,” “perhaps real,” “not-likely real,” etc., that is difficult to distinguish from the existential predicates we dealt with in section one. The essence of an historical text, full of historical claims made against a very “real” past, involves, the historian, as Ricoeur says, in “making narrative structure into a ‘model,’ an ‘icon’ of the past, capable of ‘representing’ it.”29 We can say now that the insoluble debt of the historian amounts to the inherent difference between the “real” past, which he cannot present, and the model through which he attempts to present it anyway. In being provided in the guise of narrative, we know that the similitude between “real” past and the model thereof involves a mimetic mapping out of an action in writing or speech. Or, to put it another way, we know that Ricoeur is speaking within the poetic register from the first volume of Time and Narrative when he says that “the function of this poetic operation is to outline possible itineraries within the ‘historical field’ and thus to give an initial shape to possible objects of knowledge.”30 Before, this mapping out, then, the historical object, qua historical, did not even have an “initial shape.” The historical field—the historical possibilities of the object—were only emptily intended before the narrative configuration of the sense of the object. This giving shape comes about, however, not in terms of the narrative itself. The narrative is simply given as itself. It cannot simply be the historical object in the flesh. For even after the reduction, the ideal type, the meaning that the narrative articulates via the historian’s expression, remains as a present phenomenal data, which is not nothing and fundamentally different from the “real” past. What of the “real” that makes it historical? That remains as a phenomenon as well as a residual holding of for the historian claims this model of the past is “real.” The reality, or the “real” itself, must somehow be mapped back into the content of the narrative, which might just as well be a fiction at this point, besides its claiming to be real. How is this possible? This mapping back is possible only at a limit point between the doxa (from which we derive the sense of the “real”) and the episteme (which 29 30

TN3, 152. Ibid.

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encompasses the meaning of the narrative), both of which are, furthermore, indicated in the essence of phenomenological reduction. The purpose of the reduction, as we saw, was to analyze—that is, to separate along essential lines—what of the doxic character of a presently constituted object we could, from the epistemologically considered internal connections of the present content. Or, to put it another way, we found that, in the case of a melody, for instance, what it means to be a melody is not only to endure through differences construed as tone-formations, but really just to be the concordance founding the possibility of making out different toneformations. And this did not rely in the least upon the doxic position we took to the melody because we had entirely excluded from consideration the existential status of the object. Yet, in order to arrive at this definition of melody—this definition of the pure essence of melody—we had to do violence to the objective sense of time. We had to shift, via phenomenological reduction, to a sense of time that became a formal component of the meaning of any temporal object whatever without appeal to the “real.” If we turn back to the sense of the “real” itself however, we find that the doxic predicate is itself something that can be given according to a “what.” For the “real” is essentially just that appearing of the melody in objective time, which is the same objective time that gets its sense from the time-taking that we discovered in the melody. Thus, the “real” is always being mapped back onto the sense of the temporal object, the melody, as the form of the melody’s even possibly appearing to us in time. We must make a similar maneuver in respect to the historical object and with respect to the narrative. Narrative conveys an action, and an action is a kind of temporal object. An action corresponds to the time of enactment. Certainly, a narrative could be emplotted without any reference to reality whatever; however, in the case of an historical narrative, there is the sense of a “real.” Where does this come from, and how does it make its way back into the content of the narrative? If the “real” is imputed back into the melody by the correspondence of the sense of the doxic predicate with the content of the melody object as meant, that is, as the form of the possibility of the melody as meant to occur in objective time, then there is also a correspondence of the “real” with the historical content. And, if Ricoeur is right, if the historical content is configured by emplotment, then the imputation of reality to that content is an inherent aspect of emplotment, and precisely that aspect which is the ground of possibility for the historical content’s making an appearance in objective time. Now, it is from this correspondence between a content and the ground of its possibilities in objective time that a now present artifact takes its configured historical meaning. It is in terms of narrative that the artifact

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gains explicit connection to the past. And, in the very meaning of ‘historical object,’ we find this connection to the past. So, the action of which the historical narrative is the mimesis, is precisely given in its contextualization of an artifact. And, by artifact, we could mean anything from a ruins to a particular street corner, or a country or even the world of facts writ large.31 For each of these can only be given according to their possible being in objective time. Yet, in all of this, we have not made of any particular historical narrative anything but a possibility. Even a fiction could occur as having possibilities in objective time, and this often happens when, unbeknownst to a historian, he errs, and thinks something happened which did not, and imputes that happening to history on the basis of too few, or of too obscure, facts that he has on hand. Yet, perhaps such errors do not give rise to fictions at all. Or, perhaps, there is a difference between a narrative fiction and a mere falsehood. Thus, if the imputation of the “real” into an historical narrative is to be decisive in this way, if it is to decide between mere falsehood and history (including erroneous histories), then belief, from which the doxic predicate takes its meaning, will have to show itself as somehow already in history. By this, I mean, only if belief is already historical, if it gives, of necessity, the grounds of possibility for something’s being historical, then we can say that even erroneous attributions, so long as we impute the structure of a certain believing to them, and whereby they are configured according to the “real,” are, in fact, historical! We will now make a final shift in this direction. We will take the artifact as our starting point, and put it into a text, namely this one. The artifact is an original temporal object—a possible or actual object for perception—that bespeaks a certain “trace” to the past by its very being temporal. That is, its having been and preceding me is an intrinsic possibility included in what it means to be such an object. Here, then, we find a double meaning: on the one hand, in seeing the object, or in taking it as a possible object for perception, we recognize the object’s inherent temporal character for consciousness, which includes a certain past, a past of moments of possible perception for me. Meanwhile, we have it as a present historical object, perhaps one into which we have imputed the narrative of the historian, or which we could configure in terms of 31 It is important to note that I do not mean “world” in its existential significance (as in Heidegger). I do not mean a primordial or ontological condition of “being there,” or of the “being” of the “there.” Rather, here, we must understand only the totality of facts, or the total nexus of instrumentally related things already conceived in their “being there.”

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backward-projected possibilities. That is to say, the very presence of the artifact as historical object, in its “being meant” historically, must already be taken as the locus for possible historical determinations. And, insofar as I believe that it is there, I believe, at least emptily, that it has a history, which means, that it can be configured in the context of other objects that precede me. To give a final variation of this interpretation of the historical object, let us focus on an artifact in concretum. Let us say that I have walked into the Dresden Gallery. I am viewing a painting by Teniers. It displays other paintings. Men in black hats restrain two barking dogs in the foreground. My eye scans over the scene, and the whole, I can determine by reflection, is constituted according to a perceptual consciousness. This is a temporal object, and I am located in its presence. And yet, its meaning, as I have it, as it stands in that gallery, is historicized. I do not even know the painting’s name, but that painting can be nothing else, even if it can be considered at different levels of being, what it is. It is, therefore, only “that” painting, never to be repeated. And yet, this unrepeatability is folded into a story, a form that can be repeated, because it was Teniers that painted it, and, eventually, Husserl that formulated a version of his theory of memory in its presence. It is (and was, and will be) that one, the only one, to which this history corresponds, or could ever correspond. The historical narrative picks it out in this peculiar meaning, and means it universally as such in every retelling. Here, we see how the doxa and the episteme begin to blend together, and how the internal time in which this painting is present for me becomes coextensive with an historical time. The painting is a partial cause for my being present. I am standing there, in its presence, there in the museum, which is to say that its history has enacted itself over me, ambiguously, indeterminately, but certainly, insofar as I am there viewing the painting, and it stands up as the reason for my viewing it. I believe that ‘this’ painting is ‘that one’ by Teniers. Thus, what is given, is colored by the belief; for, if I were not to believe the painting to be by Teniers, if I were not to believe that it resembles the one Husserl saw, it would not be given as ‘that painting’ in particular. It would not call to me to view it in suchand-such a manner, but in some other way, where the painting’s history would be emptily meant for me. This ‘being-in-particular’ rests on the necessity that the painting endure, not only in perception, but also in a certain sense that reaches beyond my perception of it. And this is not the least because the painting has the character imputed to it by the historical narrative that begins to form as soon as I see it as something that preceded my being here, and my

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seeing it as the reason for my being here. As a content of consciousness, it must include in its fully determined sense this believing and knowing together. And, although I could tell a different story about this object, this painting allegedly by Teniers, I could not have such an object meaningfully without there being understood some historical narrative. Moreover, I could not have this object here without its being given temporally as just this one, as the one that precedes me according to a particular course of events, and that will proceed to endure after I turn my sight away. I am in its presence, which is to say, I have a connection to its past, since it endures and I am in its enduring. It is into this space, this indeterminate past of the object given merely as present, or this open having preceded and open proceeding to endure, that historical narrative formulates the content of consciousness—a fully temporal consciousness —to single out and identify what is at hand as itself. I should say a final word on the question of historical veracity. For, even in the presence of something that preceded me, an historical narrative does not bestow any necessity upon the determinate historical content it configures according to the sense of the “real.” And yet, history is never felt originally without one’s own being folded into the time of action, one’s own being-there for the sake of a past that preceded one. It is only insofar as narrative time, the mimetic time granted to a complete action, reaches out to include one’s actual presence to the world in its articulation, and one’s being present for the world at the same time, that we can have this originary experience. Only a narrative that continues into the native believability of the present, that effuses the present with possible meaning, can be confirmed and qualified with the sense of the “real.” And this is precisely because the “real” is, and has always been, in every historical era, and in respect to every historical person’s grasping of time-taking, only the possibility of factually making sense of temporal things, of making true, of a genuine poesis as a creative act. And it is by this creation of history that things in the world take on individual meanings. It is in virtue of a certain creation that this painting becomes just this one, and that ruins is said to belong to just those people. But let us save all this, which points in the direction of further research, for another paper, another time.

CONTRIBUTORS

Editor Biography Marina Marren Editor—Marren is a Ph.D. student and a teaching fellow at Boston College. Marren’s innovative teaching techniques have been recognized both by the Boston College community and by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. Presently working on her dissertation on tyranny in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Marren also conducts research in Philosophy of Psychology and Human Action.

Author Biographies Zachary Biondi —Biondi studies philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing mainly in Spinoza and Kant. The essay published in this volume reflects Biondi’s long-standing interest in developing Spinoza’s theory of time and eternity. Biondi’s Master’s thesis, written at the University of Arkansas in 2015, offers a more extensive account on the 'eternity of the mind' doctrine in Part Five of Spinoza’s Ethics. Gregory Floyd —Floyd is a doctoral student at Boston College. In his dissertation, Floyd addresses the topics of phenomenology and the philosophy of religion. Floyd’s research interests include phenomenology, hermeneutics, the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, and questions of philosophical method. Ashley Gay —Gay received her Ph.D. in Religion from Emory University and her Master’s in Theological Research from Andover Newton Theological School. Gay’s dissertation, "God's Absence is Not Nothing: Thinking the Absolute Otherwise," pursues the perennial question of God’s alterity as it pertains to the limits of thought and the corruptibility of institutions. Gay’s interest in Kierkegaard’s thought is indebted to Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger and Levinas and the way in which Kierkegaard’s writings shape

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their respective articulations of temporal structure, critiques of calculative thought, and the authors’ reworkings of God's death. Michael R. Kelly —Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. Researching in Twentieth-Century continental philosophy and phenomenology, Professor Kelly teaches courses in the History of Philosophy and offers specialized courses in Time-Consciousness, Existentialism, and Emotion Studies. Professor Kelly is editor of several volumes in philosophy. A sustained and extended study of the problems addressed in the paper published in the present volume appears in Professor Kelly’s monograph Phenomenology and the Problem of Time. John Panteleimon Manoussakis —Fr. John Manoussakis holds an Assistant Professorship post at the College of the Holy Cross. Teaching courses in Philosophy of Religion, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis at Holy Cross, Fr. Manoussakis is an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. Fr. Manoussakis is an author of books and articles in philosophy and religion as well as a recipient of a prestigious Templeton Foundation Grant that supports collaborative efforts across the fields of religion, philosophy, and the sciences. Kevin Marren —Marren is a teaching fellow at Boston College, currently working on the intersection between phenomenology and metaphysics. He is the convener of the 2015 Boston College Conference entitled Phenomenology and Time from which the contributions for this volume are drawn. Marina Marren —Marren’s interest in the problem of time is rooted in her Doctoral Dissertation, which examines the pathological psyche. Marren’s previous study of the way in which time functions in abnormal psychological states is published under the title: “Temporality in Psychosis: Loss of Lived Time in an Alien World,” in the 2015 Special Issue of The Humanistic Psychologist.