PhD in Humanities - From the Question of Time to the Time of Questioning: Husserl and the Ambiguity of Time
3:30pm - 5:30pm
Room 3301, Academic Building (Lift no.2)
Abstract:
Time is one of the long-lasting puzzles in philosophy. A traditional formulation of the question of time is what Augustine states: “How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into to the past: it would not be time but eternity.” (Confessions, XI) In this dissertation, I argue that Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness is an attempt to respond to this traditional time question. Husserl’s first theory in the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time tries to explain how time and temporal phenomena are constituted by the subjective experience of time, namely the internal time. However, this theory cannot solve the question; rather, the question revives in the internal time in three aspects: the adequate memory, the consciousness of the present, and the infinite regress of self-consciousness. These problems in Husserl’s first theory indicates that presentism and subjectivism is not a solution to the question of time. Martin Heidegger therefore criticizes Husserl’s phenomenology and developed an existential phenomenology of Dasein. On the other hand, Husserl also develops a new time theory in the Bernau Manuscripts which does not reduce the constitution of time to a standing subject but a passive flow of constituting time consciousness. These two movements imply that both the unity of time (how the past, present, and future unify to be time) and the alterity of time (how the past, present, and future differ from each other in order to have the changing phenomena) are two necessary conditions of time. Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas observe this and propose that the alterity of time is the mean to overcome the metaphysics of presence and the totality of being. Nevertheless, they over-emphasize the alterity of time so that time cannot be explained as a unified phenomenon as we experience in daily life. In the last chapter of this dissertation, I argue based on the contribution of these four philosophers that time is primarily known as the questioning situation in which all philosophical questions, including the time question, become possible. This questioning situation is the ambiguity of time.
Time is one of the long-lasting puzzles in philosophy. A traditional formulation of the question of time is what Augustine states: “How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into to the past: it would not be time but eternity.” (Confessions, XI) In this dissertation, I argue that Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness is an attempt to respond to this traditional time question. Husserl’s first theory in the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time tries to explain how time and temporal phenomena are constituted by the subjective experience of time, namely the internal time. However, this theory cannot solve the question; rather, the question revives in the internal time in three aspects: the adequate memory, the consciousness of the present, and the infinite regress of self-consciousness. These problems in Husserl’s first theory indicates that presentism and subjectivism is not a solution to the question of time. Martin Heidegger therefore criticizes Husserl’s phenomenology and developed an existential phenomenology of Dasein. On the other hand, Husserl also develops a new time theory in the Bernau Manuscripts which does not reduce the constitution of time to a standing subject but a passive flow of constituting time consciousness. These two movements imply that both the unity of time (how the past, present, and future unify to be time) and the alterity of time (how the past, present, and future differ from each other in order to have the changing phenomena) are two necessary conditions of time. Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas observe this and propose that the alterity of time is the mean to overcome the metaphysics of presence and the totality of being. Nevertheless, they over-emphasize the alterity of time so that time cannot be explained as a unified phenomenon as we experience in daily life. In the last chapter of this dissertation, I argue based on the contribution of these four philosophers that time is primarily known as the questioning situation in which all philosophical questions, including the time question, become possible. This questioning situation is the ambiguity of time.