Husserl’s New Phenomenology of Time Consciousness in the Bernau Manuscripts

Abstract

This paper has no other ambition than to provide a short historical and systematic overview of the analysis of time-consciousness developed in the Bernau manuscripts. More specifically, it investigates where these manuscripts make a significant progress when dealing with problems which had remained unsolved in the earlier texts of Hua X, and where they pave the way for to the later C-manuscripts. Four main areas of renewal are signaled out: (1) a better account of transcendental constitution and how it applies to the meaning of immanent temporal objects, but not to the self-awareness of the temporal flux of consciousness; (2) the renewal of the meaning of transcendental constitution through a “genetic” analysis of the emergence of all acts of intentional consciousness; (3) a better account of the consciousness of a present now in terms of a process of fulfillment in which retentions and protentions are interwoven; (4) a fresh interest in specifically noematic temporal characteristics and their contribution to a phenomenological ontology, especially with regard to individuation. These new insights have decisive consequences for the treatment of all the well-known technical issues in Husserl’s phenomenology of time: the use of the schema “apprehension – apprehension-content” for the intentional consciousness of (different sorts of) temporal objects; the infinite regress arising from the search for an absolute foundation of time-consciousness; the distinction between a passively (and unconsciously?) lived-through temporal stream and the modification it undergoes when it becomes an object of reflection. Emphasizing where progress has been made, the paper, however, also points to the remaining, and possibly structural, “Aporien” that Husserl himself admits of in his Bernau manuscripts.