Abstract
In his later work Husserl explored a genetic phenomenology which underpinned the static phenomenology of his earlier work. Genetic phenomenology explored the genesis of the possibility of judgments as arising out of the fundamental horizon of temporality occurring within primary passivity. This project was taken up by Deleuze in the exploration of a more comprehensive and detailed genesis of individuation and generic difference. In doing so Deleuze described three passive syntheses of time which he presents in a regressive order from conditioned to condition. However, Deleuze’s exposition of the most fundamental of especially the third passive synthesis of time is notoriously under described. This essay presents an experimental description which attempts, by reversing the order of exposition of the three syntheses and describing them in the order of genesis, rather than the order of the regress of conditions, to produce a more complete explication of the third passive synthesis and so to account for its genetic dynamism.
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Notes
- 1.
On the confusions inherent in the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy see Bernard Williams “What Might Philosophy Become?” in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, 2006, pp. 200–201. I thank Adrian Moore for reminding me of this passage.
- 2.
Husserl, Edmund (1976), Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die tranzendentale Phänomenologie (Husserliana [HUA] VI), mistranslated into English as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1970. The mistranslation in the title introduces an ambiguity that is not in the original, viz. the crisis in the European Sciences is not also a crisis in transcendental phenomenology. There are also many problems with the translation of the text as well.
- 3.
Husserl, Edmund, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1969. pp. 256–257 (HUA XVII). On Husserl’s assessment of Hume see also HUA VII pp. 152–182. On the relationship between Hume’s work and Husserl’s see Richard T. Murphy, Hume and Husserl: Towards Radical Subjectivism, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 1980.
- 4.
Deleuze, Gilles, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, pp. 30–31. See also pp. 86–87 where Deleuze proposes the problem belonging to empiricism as asking, “…how is the subject constituted in the given?”
- 5.
Here substance merely means that which can stand on its own, or in Descartes phrase, “substance, or a thing that can exist independently” Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2, translated by John Cottingham, et al., Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 30. Phenomenologically there are no substances; neither spatial objects, nor mental life, nor even the transcendental field itself stands on its own (in the case of the transcendental field, as we shall see, the field is necessarily open due to its temporality).
- 6.
There is an important distinction that Husserl marks by the terms Gegenstand and Objekt. The latter refers to all entities, beings, toward which specifically objectivating acts can be directed (including spatial objects, states of affairs, etc.), while the former more inclusive term refers to anything which can be the subject of true predications. So, Gegenstanden include phenomena such as temporal phases, values, and even impossible things like round squares. Husserl’s translators have too often blurred this crucial distinction by translating both as “object” (see note 2 above) For more on this distinction see “Husserl’s Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg im Breisgau (1917)” in Husserl: Shorter Works, edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1981. On Object and objectivating attitude see Robert Welsh Jordan (2008c) http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rwjordan/Notes/W-NotesHUS.HTML#E_objects_[Gegenst%E4nde]_and_objectivating_[Vorstellen]. In this essay, the word “object” will be used to stand for Gegenstand unless explicitly noted otherwise.
- 7.
Husserl expresses this in“…the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book, translated by F. Kersten, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 1983, p. 44 (HUA III).
- 8.
For a clear and detailed explication of intentionality see Robert Welsh Jordan’s (2008b) Notes on the Intentionality of Consciousness on his website at http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rwjordan/Notes/NotesInt.HTML.
- 9.
See footnote 7 above. The horizonal structure of experience as including the openness of objects onto their possibilities is a theme in all of Husserl’s writings beginning with Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, Vol. 1 Routledge, New York, 2001a, pp. 176, 199–200 (HUA XVIII). For an example from his later work see, Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. Redigiert und heruasgegeben von Ludwig Landgrebe. London, Eng.: Allen and Unwin, 1939, Einleitung § 8. Husserl clarifies the apperception of something not itself given, including possibilities, as follows: “Apperceptions are intentional lived-experiences that are conscious of something as perceived which is not self-given in these lived-experiences (not completely); and they are called apperceptions to the extent that they have this trait, even if in this case they also consciously intend what in truth is self-given in them.” Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001b, p. 624 see also 624 ff. (HUA XI).
- 10.
op. cit Robert Welsh Jordan (2008d) http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rwjordan/Notes/W-NotesHUS.HTML#E_formal_essences,_superordinate_to_material_essences.
- 11.
- 12.
Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life” in Pure Immanence, Zone Books, New York, 2001, p. 31, see also the footnote, p. 33 where Deleuze cites Husserl’s agreement with this claim.
- 13.
For Deleuze’s detailed discussion of the differences between the projects of the natural science, which create functions, and philosophy, which creates concepts, see Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, What is Philosophy?, Columbia University Press, 1994. In a remark quoted in the translator’s preface to Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987 (a work pervaded by the use of concepts derived from the natural sciences, the arts, and mathematics), and which can be applied to all of his work, Deleuze said that he was doing “philosophy and nothing but philosophy.” See Gilles Deleuze, interview with Catherine Clement, L’Arc, no. 49 (revised ed., 1980), p. 99.
- 14.
Edmund Husserl, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/07, trans. Claire Ortiz Hill, Springer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2008, p. 243.
- 15.
On the development of Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between genetic and static phenomenology see Husserl 2001, pp. 624–645 and Steinbock’s introduction to this volume, pp. xxviii–xxxviii.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 644 “…attending to constitution is not attending to genesis, which is precisely the genesis of constitution…”
- 17.
Ibid., p. 635.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 92 ff.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 631.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 163.
- 21.
It is partly due to Husserl’s realization that the constitution of sensations must be intentional that he came to focus on passive genesis. See ibid. translator’s introduction, pp. lv–lvi.
- 22.
See Husserl, op. cit. p. 201 and passim. and Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, pp. 106 ff. and p. 174.
- 23.
Deleuze, op. cit. 1994, pp. 34–35, and passim.
- 24.
from Daniel W. Smith “The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze’s Ontology of Immanence” in Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary Bryden, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 167–183.
- 25.
Deleuze, ibid., pp. 28–69. On univocality see also Smith op. cit. Deleuze couches his critique of these presuppositions by arguing that Husserl presupposes what Deleuze calls common sense and good sense, see Deleuze, ibid., pp. 129–134 and passim.
- 26.
See Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy, Northwestern University Press, Evanston Illinois, 2001, pp. 167–181.
- 27.
Aristotle Metaphysics: Book III (B) 998b 4 ff.
- 28.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, The Athlone Press, London, 1990, pp. 96–99. On the transformation of the event into predicative form see p. 111 ff.
- 29.
ibid., p. 22.
- 30.
It is worth noting, however, that much the same structures and dynamics are described in Anti-Oedipus as found in The Logic of Sense. In particular, what in Anti-Oedipus are called desiring-machines, which produce flows on one side and break flows on the other synthesizing the production of production, align with intensity in Difference and Repetition and the paradoxical element in The Logic of Sense which produces indefinite series on one side and vicious circles on the other.
- 31.
Deleuze 1990, pp. 20–21.
- 32.
The Event as a totality serves as a boundary condition on phenomena in accord with the thesis of my book Time, 1998.
- 33.
- 34.
Nietzsche 1974 p. 270.
- 35.
- 36.
Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough, Kluwer Academic Press, Dordrecht, 1991, p. 89, (HUA X).
- 37.
It is contingent that the transcendental field, the field of immanence, exists at all, hence the significance Heidegger attributes to death.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 309 note. See also Husserl 2001, pp. 129, 170, 365, and 614.
- 39.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 1982, p. 75, (HUA I), “We can call it furthermore a formal regularity pertaining to a universal genesis, which is such that past, present, and future, become unitarily constituted over and over again, in a certain noetic-noematic formal structure of flowing modes of givenness.”
- 40.
Deleuze 1994, p. 88.
- 41.
Robert Welsh Jordan (2008a) http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rwjordan/Notes/W-NotesHUS.HTML#E_time,_as_the_Universal_form. “The transcendental ego and all of its really inherent constituents (all of which are abstract parts) are individual objects. None of them is something universal [Allegmeines] and none of them is something eidetic. Nothing individual can have constituents, really inherent parts, that would be other than individual.”
- 42.
We shall return to this paradox below.
- 43.
See the discussion of the second passive synthesis of time, below.
- 44.
See for only one example, Husserl 2001, p. 83.
- 45.
- 46.
Deleuze 1994 p. 89.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Husserl 2001, p. 184, for Husserl’s account of affection see Husserl 2001, p. 216. For an excellent account of these and the following points with respect to the present as the moment of original affection see Andrea Staiti, “The Primacy of the Present: Metaphysical Ballast or Phenomenological Finding?,” Research in Phenomenology 40 (2010) 34–54.
- 49.
Deleuze 1994 pp. 89–90.
- 50.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983, pp. 48 and 189–190.
- 51.
Even in his discussions of sense arising out of nonsense, Deleuze does not treat nonsense as an undifferentiated irrationality (as something that cannot be explicated), and he explicitly distinguishes the transcendental field, insofar as it consists of differences, from an undifferentiated nothingness, see Deleuze 1994, p. 28. Hence, despite his debt to Bergson, Deleuze, like Husserl, and contrary to what many expositors of Deleuze write, is critical of Bergson’s and other forms of vitalism which posit something undifferentiated at the core of time.
- 52.
While Deleuze discusses intensity throughout his work, the most detailed discussion occurs in Deleuze 1994, pp. 232 ff.
- 53.
- 54.
Here we should note that Husserl too affirms that transcendental syntheses do not themselves occur over temporal intervals. See Husserl 1991, p. 381 ff.
- 55.
Deleuze 1994, p. 237.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Deleuze 1990, pp. 40–41.
- 59.
On the paradoxical element as quasi-cause see Deleuze 1990, p. 183, see also pp. 6–7, and 166.
- 60.
Deleuze 1994, p. 94, see also p. 1 ff.
- 61.
- 62.
Husserl Ideas I, section 124, p. 296. Deleuze 1990, p. 32.
- 63.
Deleuze 1990, p. 299–300.
- 64.
Deleuze 1990, pp. 40, and 95.
- 65.
Contrary to what Kelly has written (“Husserl, Deleuzean Bergsonism and the Sense of the Past in General” Michael R. Kelly (2008), Husserl Studies, 24(1):15–30), Husserl’s retention corresponds with Deleuze’s second passive synthesis of time not with the first. Confusion seems to have arisen because of the use of the term ‘retained’ in Deleuze’s discussion of the first synthesis of time (Deleuze 1994, pp. 70 ff.), but what is meant here is not retention in Husserl’s sense. Deleuze, himself makes note of these different uses of “retention,” see Deleuze 1994, p. 80.
- 66.
Husserl’s original truncated form of this diagram depicts only the series of retentions, see Husserl 1991 pp. 29 and 98, however it is clear from Husserl’s expositions in these lectures and in later works that the diagram should be expanded as it is here.
- 67.
Deleuze 1994 pp. 81–84.
- 68.
Unfortunately, Husserl was not always as clear as he should have been on this point. See note 41 above.
- 69.
This point contrasts Deleuze and Husserl sharply with Derrida for whom the split in time comes after an impossibly isolated present (Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, translated by David B. Allison, Northwestern University Press, 1973, see pp. 48–69).
- 70.
On the present as an affection on which a phase of the retentional series is founded see Andrea 2010.
- 71.
Deleuze 1994 p. 82.
- 72.
Ibid.
- 73.
For more on the genetic force of these rhythmic structures see my “Rhythm: Assemblage and Event” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics, Vol. 15, Issue 1, 2002.
- 74.
Deleuze 1994 p. 83.
- 75.
This notion has a dubious ancestry which unfortunately calls up the notion of the specious present or “saddle-back” posited by William James. Neither Husserl nor Deleuze accept James’ claim that “the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched…” (William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, Dover Publications, 1950, p. 609). So, insofar as Husserl, although he is not always clear about this (see notes 68 and 41) and Deleuze write of “the living present” they are referring to the experience and connection by association of successive presents.
- 76.
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, edited L. A. Selby-Biggs, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1960, pp. 34–35.
- 77.
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1908) “The Unreality of Time,” Mind, New Series, no. 68, pp. 457–474.
- 78.
Hume 1960, p. 31.
- 79.
For a defense of this view see Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 281 ff. and passim.
- 80.
These are not the same as retentions in the sense of the second synthesis, despite Deleuze’s use of the term, see note 65.
- 81.
Deleuze 1994, p. 74 see also p. 78 for different expressions of this synthesis. It should also be noted that the text uses the term contraction for the fusion of successive presents. We shall avoid this term since what is at issue differs radically from the sort of contraction evinced in the second synthesis, see Deleuze 1994, p. 82 ff.
- 82.
Deleuze 1994, p. 70.
- 83.
Ibid., pp. 272–277.
- 84.
Hume 1960 p. 31
- 85.
This is the project of Husserl 1939.
- 86.
Deleuze 1994, pp. 103–104 ff.
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Turetzky, P. (2016). The Passive Syntheses of Time. In: Dolev, Y., Roubach, M. (eds) Cosmological and Psychological Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 285. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22590-6_11
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