Husserl's Time Consciousness

I try to show that Augustine analysis of time is superior to Husserl's, while anticipating Husserl's time analysis.  I also brief suggest how Augustine prefigures Heidegger's existential analysis.  I also argue that in order to fully appreciate Augustine's analysis we must understand the elimination of temporality in terms of eternity.  Without that perspective, temporality is bound to lead to despair, as Augustine shows.

In this paper, I start with the opposition between the Husserlian project
of a phenomenology of the experience of time, started in 1905, and the mathematical and physical theory of time as it comes out of Einstein’s special theory of relativity in the same year. Although the contrast between the two approaches is apparent, my aim is to show that the original program of Husserl’s time theory is the constitution of an objective time and a time of the world, starting from the intuitive
giveness of time, i.e., from time as it appears. To show this, I stress the structural similarity between Husserl’s original question of time and the problem of a phenomenology of space constitution as it was first developed in the his manuscripts from the nineteenth century, in which we find the threefold question of the origin of our representation of space, of the geometrization of intuitive space, and of the constitution of transcendent world space. Finally, I reconsider some of Husserl’s
main theses about the phenomenological constitution of objective time in light of the main results of special relativity time-theory, introducing several corrections to central assumptions that underlie Husserl’s theory of time.

Il libro di Federica Buongiorno presenta un sintetico confronto tra la fenomenologia di Husserl e il pensiero di Bergson, circoscritto al tema del rapporto tra percezione e memoria e della costituzione della coscienza del "passato"; il percorso è basato in maniera precipua rispettivamente sulle Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins del 1904-5 e su Matière et mémoire (1896). L'intento complessivo di questo saggio è "aprire" il pensiero husserliano tramite il confronto con altri pensieri eludendo così il rischio di un "appiattimento di Husserl su Husserl", rischio ingenerato, d'altra parte, dalla radicalità dell'opzione metodologica indissolubilmente connessa al pensiero del fondatore della fenomenologia. Buongiorno tenta quindi di supplire, almeno parzialmente, alla mancanza di un confronto sistematico dal punto di vista teorico tra queste due filosofie, mettendo in luce al contempo la divergenza che le caratterizza per quanto concerne la loro intenzione fondamentale. Il confronto prende avvio dalla critica della temporalità obbiettiva delle scienze naturali e dalla messa in luce della necessità di tracciarne la genesi a partire dalla "reciproca inerenza" tra temporalità e coscienza. Tanto per Husserl quanto per Bergson, il reale è il temporale, e la comprensione della realtà dipende quindi dal chiarimento archeologico del suo modo di costituzione nella coscienza vissuta, il cui modo d'essere è caratterizzato da una temporalità intrinseca che Bergson definisce durata. Di qui emerge un'affinità strategica tra l'esclusione husserliana del "tempo obbiettivo" e il "potente sforzo di astrazione" che Bergson invoca nell'Essai del 1889 affinché la coscienza "ridivent[i] se stessa" (p.13). Questa strategia permette di rimettere il tempo obiettivo e la coscienza soggettiva del tempo in giusto rapporto, laddove le scienze naturali, con il loro concetto numerico e dunque spazializzato di tempo, perdono completamente di vista la "sfera di originaria datità del rapporto tra coscienza e realtà" (p.15).

Memory is not a conscious act. It happens by happenstance. Augustine says, "Here [in memory...] I happen upon myself, and I am recalled [to myself] (Conf., 10, 8, 14). 1 Memory comes to mind; it befalls upon the consciousness. It is not a product of conscious act but is somehow independent from the mind (mens) or consciousness. The mind often fails to recall the memory it seeks to recover. And memory often occurs even when the mind is paying attention to something else, related or not. More importantly, memory remembers the fact that it forgot. And above all, it even remembers what it in principle cannot remember: happiness and the Creator. How can we remember happiness without having experienced it? How can a creature remembers its Creator when it was not there "in the beginning" when God created heaven and earth? Memory, in short, is capable of remembering "the immemorial"-the term which Marion borrows from Levinas in his reading of Confessions and which Levinas uses to refer to the "election" or the "creation" of the moral self endowed with responsibility from the beginning prior to freedom. 2 God's act of creation is immemorial; that is to say, it takes place "in the beginning" before time began, "in an irrecuperable time." 3 And yet the self somehow finds Him and remembers Him as its Creator in memory, in the self's place (au lieu de soi), in lieu of and despite itself. 4 Memory then exceeds the span of time; for it recalls the irrecuperable time of creation. It remembers what cannot be remembered. Memory, then, is the other in the self-other than consciousness, to be sure; but also other than the self, despite and in lieu of itself. For it is capable of remembering beyond itself, other than itself. It remembers the primordial