Lecture: Husserl

NCTU Graduate

Edmund Husserl : Erlebnis and Ur-impression




Husserl was unsatisfied with Kantianism’s rigid division between the theoretical and the practical or the empirical; between the constituting ego and the constituted ego. He sought for a ‘passage’ between the two which would not be an intellectual synthesis but a ‘lived experience’, Erlebnis, and in the Ur-impression. His career as a philosopher is complicated and he was continually re-beginning the pursuit for an origin.



He begins with the challenge from the German Neo-Kantian philosopher Paul Natorp (1854-1924) who said that either logic is founded on itself or there is no logic, there is only psychology. He asserted that logic is not a subjective experience and thus it has no genesis. Logic is a universal consciousness outside time. Truth is a-temporal. (Years later, Wittgenstein will take up this question in his “Remarks on the foundations of Mathematics” and ask, well, if that’s true then how do we account for developments in mathematics? Doesn’t mathematics have a history, and if so, then a genesis, a beginning-middle-and ending in concrete, historical time? For Wittgenstein (and others) mathematics begins with the psychological act of abstraction from which is born the concept of number.)



Husserl will note that the whole of mathematics is given, concretely, to consciousness and is not a result of a psychological act. It is given as constitutively whole just as consciousness is constitutively intentional. The object—mathematics—is immediately present to consciousness and this whole is what makes the psychological act of abstraction—number and arithmetic—possible (and not the reverse).



There is a problem, however, which Jacques Derrida is alert to: OK, the whole, the totality is given a priori to any empirical, historical, concrete psychological act. It, the whole, is a transcendental synthetic act. But syntesis implies time, the time in which the synthesis is actualized. Is that time transcendental or empirical?



Husserl will, initially, decide to divide time into worldly, psychological, real time and transcendental, phenomenological, reel time. The latter is phenomenologically ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis) which is worldly time ‘reduced’ , or, put in brackets. But is the reduction itself transcendental or empirical? Husserl then turns to logicism in his Logical Investigations. He wonders, how do logical forms become available to consciousness (to ‘lived experience’?) There seems to be an irreducible constituting/constituted aporia. But for Husserl, at the level of the constituting there is no aporia: both are ‘lived’ as originary. This is “internal time consciousness” which, Husserl says, “it makes no sense to doubt.” Consciousness is always in the presence of time as duration, or, time as such; that which is a priori is not a form (as in Kant) but a manner or a way whose essence is to be-lived (Erlebnis).



The classical phenomenological question is: How is it possible to perceive a melody? The present note only makes melodic sense if there is somehow retained a previous note and somehow anticipated a subsequent note. For Husserl’s teacher, Franz Bentano (from whom he got the idea of intentionality) it is imagination that accomplishes this feat. But then Husserl asks himself: how do I distinguish between a perceived and an imaginary melody? With regard to melody, the categories ‘fact’ and ‘essence’ or ‘imaginary’ all dissolve into, Husserl hopes, an Ur-impression.



The Ur-impression is continually changing, being modified by, “retention”. The present note is present as it were ‘in the raw’ and at the same time it is being retained by consciousness. Now, as retained it is no longer ‘raw’ data (as in Hume, for example) but what Husserl calls hyletic data. The hyle is the modification of the present in the present. Each retention (modification, hyle) modifies the raw and also modifies previous retentions. Hence, what is produced is a time that was never present in the raw. A new present is presented-as-retained, or as-past. What is produced is a past that was never (in the raw) present. That is melody. Melody is never present in the raw. Following Hume, only note after note is present in the raw.





Given new raw present

Retained new raw present which modifies given new present into a new new1



Given new raw present

Retained new raw present which modifies given new present into a new new 2 and which modifies new new 1 into an ‘old’ or ‘previous’ or ‘past’ new new 1A



Given new raw present

Retained new present which modifies given new raw present into a new new 3 and which modifies new new 1 and 2 into an ‘old’ or ‘previous’ or ‘past’ new new 1AA and 2A



And so on and so on…





That which is given to intentionality via this retention-ur-impression synthesis is a new object: the past never present or the whole never present (in the raw). That which intentionality receives is not that which it constitutes, but is that which is imposed on it: a whole (the whole melody or the whole of mathematical logic). The past as such, as essentially past, as raw, is never given to consciousness. But isn’t the withdrawal of this raw past itself a temporalizing or an auto-temporaizing that escapes consciousness? Of course, for Lévinas and Derrida, this become a key question.



Review: the present is always immediately retained; it is retained NOW and thus the present is always NOW immediately modified (not constituted, not formed—modified). The present is the new in the raw and as modified it is a new new. This is the essence of time in human consciousness: re-newal. Re-newal is the noematic sense of time, its ‘meaning’ and its ‘direction’. The ‘new new’ time is raw time reduced only to its being new, not to its being in the raw. But, again, is this process of reduction not a raw fact of consciousness? Something raw, empirical, given cannot be eliminated. Is a melody empirical or is it not? Is melody phenomenological/transcendental or empirical/factical/ontological?