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Edmund Husserl’s Internal Time Consciousness and Modern Times, a Socio-historical

Interpretation.

By Jonathan Martineau, Liberal Arts College, Concordia University

Edmund Husserl’s philosophical inquiries into the topic of time have proven one of

the most thought-provoking and influential of such endeavours in the history of Western

thought (Husserl 1991, 1962, 215-219). In many ways, some philosophical developments

found in momentous thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Derrida, would

be unthinkable were it not for Husserl’s pioneering work. His conception of time has also

influenced further developments in sociological and anthropological research on time, for

example in the work of Alfred Schutz and Pierre Bourdieu. Based on a phenomenological

approach that seeks to unravel the complex cluster formed by consciousness and

phenomena in experience, Husserl locates the true essence of time in human consciousness.

Scholars working on the topic of time have proposed interpretations and readings of

Husserl’s contribution to the topic (Adam 2004, 56-57, Ricoeur 1985, 44-82, Gell 1992, 217-

228, Brough 1972, Mensch 2010), but none have endeavoured to situate his conception of

time in its own social context, a context marked by the full maturation of the modern

standard time regime based on abstract clock-time.

This paper first provides a reading of Husserl’s conception of time, before

addressing potential relationships between Husserl’s contribution and the context of

modern social time relations. By “social time relations”, I mean a given set of conceptions

and practices of time that shapes and organizes people’s temporal relations with each other,

with their world, as well as informs personal time-experience. Every society displays a

certain form of organization of its time relations, institutionalised to different degrees

according to varying logics of power and property, and social time relations are traversed

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by struggles between different and often conflicting conceptions and practices of time

(Martineau 2015, 45-46). In this sense, time is here problematized as a social as well as a

political phenomenon,1 and new interpretative light might be shed on conceptions of time

when read in relation to the prevailing social time relations and time regimes in which they

are formulated. This paper therefore seeks to situate Husserl’s time in Husserl’s times. I will

delineate how Husserl’s conception of time-consciousness, despite its limits and

shortcomings, gives us a most remarkable account of the formal structure of time-

consciousness, and might reveal, by the way of what it explicitly excludes, core features of

the constitution of temporal subjectivities in the modern period.

Husserl’s time

In an influential study, Paul Ricoeur situates Husserl’s conception of time in relation

to two founding works of the Western tradition on the topic of time: Aristotle’s discussion in

Physics, and Augustine’s own in the Confessions (Ricoeur 1985). Ricoeur reads these Ancient

thinkers as instituting two incommensurable conceptions of time which structure what he

terms the Western “aporetics of temporality” (Ricoeur 1985, 16). According to this reading,

Aristotle located the essence of time in the objective world, while Augustine placed it in

subjective experience. Indeed, even if Aristotle’s concept of the “now” could actually be read

as unifying both an objective “instant” and a subjective “present”, Ricoeur rather

emphasizes Aristotle’s idea of the flow of time as a passage from a before to an after,

depicting moments of time as instants, and therefore ultimately locating time’s essence in

the natural world. Then Augustine, on Ricoeur’s reading, abstracts a concept of the present

1 For similar sociological and political approaches the topic of time, see among others (Elias 1992, Adam 1995, Hassan 2009, Osborne 2011). The concept of social time relations also builds on Robert Brenner and Ellen M. Wood’s concept of social-property relations, see (Brenner 1985, Wood 2012).

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from Aristotle’s now, therefore separating present and instant and focusing his discussion

on the flow of time as a passage from future to past. Time’s moments become presents and

the essence of time is located in subjective experience (Ricoeur 1985, 19-42).

Which camp Husserl sides with on this topic is no mystery. His admiration for

Augustine is plain, as our modern age “has failed to surpass or even to match the splendid

achievement of this great thinker” (Husserl 1991, 3). This filiation is also shown in his

critical stance towards the so-called “Aristotelian instant”, as he rejects Aristotle’s idea of

the now as a point-like instant which moves from before to after: “the original temporal

field”, he writes, “is obviously not a bit of objective time; the experienced now, taken in

itself, is not a point of objective time” (Husserl 1991, 6). This testifies of Husserl’s situating

his own conceptual endeavour in continuation with Augustine’s distinction between instant

and present, framing the problem of time in terms of the past-present-future triad, and

focusing on time as a subjective experience. Locating the essence of time in an experienced

present rather than in a physical instant turns the latter in but a derivative of the former.

This derivation is a result of what Ricoeur elegantly calls, summarizing Husserl’s position,

“the abstraction operated on continuity by a gaze which stops on instant and converts it

from a source-point into a limit-point” (Ricoeur 1985, 60). This prioritization of the present

over the instant will reverberate throughout Husserl’s conceptual endeavour.

In true Augustinian fashion, the Husserlian “now” qua present is furthermore made

of three parts: the present-present, the present-past, and the present-future. This means

that each present is the source-point of its own separation of temporal dimensions: the past

is past and the future is future only in relation to a definite present. It is in this sense that

the now is therefore a “relative concept” for Husserl (Husserl 1991, 70). This triadic present

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will lead to further subdivisions in the mapping of the whole “time-field of the pure Ego”

(Husserl 1962, 219) as will be discussed below.

However, for all of Husserl’s continuation of Augustinian ideas, he does contrast his

own conception of the present from Augustine’s in one crucial way. While for Augustine the

present had no duration and acted like a knife-edge between future and past, Husserl

conceives of the phenomenological present as enduring, as implying a certain duration.

Indeed, based on Husserl’s diagram (Husserl 1991, 29), the phenomenological present

appears not as a duration-less point, but as extended, or even deepened.2 Husserl suggests

that it persists through change, as the identity of a temporal totality. This durational

deepening of the present will become one of the main pillars upon which Husserl further

erects his concept of time. Establishing it as the “primary phenomenon of phenomenological

time,”3 Husserl goes on to specify the modes of consciousness pertaining to this

fundamental durational experience of the present.

Husserl’s argument builds on the idea that consciousness never experiences the

present as duration-less. The present is extended in the sense that consciousness

experiences it as continuous, i.e. as also including moments of the past and projections into

the future. Indeed, if the experienced present was only made of a passing point-like now,

conscious experience would lose its continuity and the passage of the presents would be

experienced as a series of unrelated stroboscopic moments. One would not be able to use

language, hear a melody, maintain an identity, or even merely perform basic orientation

operations (Kern 1983, 43). Every present would appear as a spontaneous event unrelated

2 Ricoeur says “widened”, (élargi), (Ricoeur 1985, 57). Stephen Kern says “thickened”, (Kern 1983, 84). 3 See also (Osborne 2011, 60).

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to past experiences, un-announcing of anything future, and the breaks in continuous time

would mean the loss of unity in thinking.

Husserl endeavours to explain how the existential structure of any present moment

includes (recent) past as well as projected future. Importantly, the present can’t simply

include memories, “recollections” in Husserl’s terms, since these are, precisely,

reconstructions of the past, and not experiences of the present. Husserl’s introduces the

concepts of retention and protention - which are in Husserlian terms forms of intention - in

order to differentiate the mode of consciousness identifying past and future elements with

the present, from memories (which are reproduction of the past) or anticipations (which are

projections of the future). Therefore, retention is a form of past consciousness included in

the experience of the present, while recollection (memory) refers to a past experience. In

this sense, recollection is absolutely different from retention: it can constitute enduring

objectivities, while retention only “holds in consciousness what has been produced and

stamps on it the character of the "just past"”(Husserl 1991, 38). While retention can be said

to be perception in so far as it “constitutes originally”, recollection cannot give a present,

but only re-present it: “I can relive the present, but it cannot be given again” (Husserl 1991,

43, 45). Re-presenting through recollection is also free, and entails a potentiality of error

with regards to succession, while retention, as part of perception, is something “at which we

can only look”. i.e. not free in the same sense, and which is “absolutely certain” with regards

to the perception of succession (Husserl 1991, 49-51).4

The present must then share its “given-ness” to consciousness, its “immediacy,” so

to speak, with recent past “nows” which remain present to consciousness in the form of

retentions, and, similarly, with immediate outcomes of the present experience in the form of

4 See also (Ricoeur 1985, 67-72).

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protentions. The concepts of retention and protention allow for the continuity of

consciousness’ experience, consciousness can intend objects through sensory contents not

only with data which is immediately, now, present to consciousness, but with data that is

“still” or “already” intended in the present. These past and future elements are therefore

thought of as “absolutely given” in the present which is as a result, one could say, deepened.

Husserl illustrates this with the example of a sound – or a tone - noting that it does not only

occur in time, but also through time. He wants to stress that the unity of the experience of a

sound, its identity, is constituted “over time”: it is only possible to experience its unity by

performing a “retention” of recent previous phases of the sound and by identifying these

phases with a point-like immediate present, which is as a result temporally deepened. For

every present moment, there is a form of past and future which shares the “primordial now-

form” (Husserl 1962, 219).

This also implies that consciousness operates in different modes in its primordial

now-form. Indeed, while consciousness operates in an impressional mode at the source

point, it is constantly changing, modified into retentional consciousness. Husserl refers to

this as the law of modification of consciousness (Husserl 1991, 31), consisting of the

constant modification from impressional consciousness to retentional consciousness,

between the “grasping-as-now” of impressional consciousness and the retentions attached

to it.5 Accordingly, retention is like “a comet’s tail that attaches itself to the perception of the

moment” (Husserl 1991, 37).

5 Indeed, with regards to the past, “necessarily attached to the now-consciousness is the consciousness of the just past, and this consciousness again is itself a now” (Husserl 1962, 219). Husserl spends less time developing the argument as per the future (protention). Ricoeur points out that Husserl’s own stance – a phenomenology of perception– makes the transposition from an analysis of past consciousness to future consciousness difficult, given the difference between the forms in which memory and anticipation ‘produce’ a present. See (Ricoeur 1985, 70-71).

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This discussion of the temporal modes of consciousness involved in the construction

of continuous experience leads Husserl towards the conceptualization of time as a formal

structure. Indeed, experience has, so to speak, two dimensions: there is on the one hand the

actual experience (joy, pain, color, etc.) and, on the other hand, the form in which this

experience gives itself. Temporality or endurance is one such form - which is a feature of

both transcendent and immanent objects - but Husserl’s stance leads him to enquire into

immanent objects to derive their transcendental character. This means that the subject

experiences the threefold extended ‘now’ as a form with continuously new and fresh

contents: the now is “a form that persists through continuous change of content” (Husserl

1962, 218). Considered from the perspective of the temporal object, a tone, for example,

“itself is the same, but the tone "in the manner in which" it appears is continually different”

(Husserl 1991, 27). In other words, as the nows pass and vanish, the content of the past,

present and future changes, while the form of temporality past-present-future is always the

same : “Time is fixed, and yet time flows” (Husserl 1991, 67).

This formal structure, the whole complex of past, present and future, is therefore

moving alongside the ever-vanishing now (Husserl 1962, 218). It is in this sense that every

present moment entails a present-present, a present-past, and a present-future. Husserl

calls this complex of now-consciousness the pure Ego’s “total primordial now-

consciousness” (Husserl 1962, 219). The same threefold structure applies to past-

consciousness and by extension to future modes as well. Indeed, this clustering of three

temporal dimensions is valid for every “present” moment, but also in every past and every

future. Only when one considers the totality of past (past-past, past-present, past-future),

present (present-past, present-present, present-future) and future (future-past, future-

present and future-future), can one arrive at the whole phenomenological time-field of the

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pure Ego, the “whole, essentially unitary, rigorously self-contained stream of temporal

unities of experiences” (Husserl 1962, 219).

This conception of time-consciousness rests moreover on an articulation of three

levels of time-constitution, which Husserl locates as follows (Husserl 1991, 77). One level is

objective time. This is the time of “the things of empirical experience,” to which I come back

below. For the time being let it be mentioned that this level, for Husserl, derives from the

other two, which are therefore primordial in the constitution of objective time - recall that

objects themselves, in Husserlian phenomenology, are not given in-the-world per se, but are

constituted by transcendental consciousness through objectivating apprehensions,

themselves performed through consciousness’ intentionality. In other words, objective

time, the time of the world, is not the time that primordially is, but is rather constituted by

consciousness. A second level comprises the time-constituting acts of temporal objects

(Zeitobjekts), the “constituting multiplicities of appearance” (Husserl 1991, 77), or in other

words the level at which objects are made temporal through the temporal modes of

appearance in which they appear: past, present, future. For Husserl, therefore, a temporal

object is not an object in all of its determinations, but only in so far as its duration is

considered,

By temporal objects in the specific sense we understand objects that are not only unities in

time but that also contain temporal extension in themselves. When a tone sounds, my

objectivating apprehension can make the tone itself, which endures and fades away, into an

object and yet not make the duration of the tone or the tone in its duration into an object.

The latter – the tone in its duration – is a temporal object (Husserl 1991, 77).

In other words, this second level of time constitution refers to the duration of the

object as constituted when appearing through the formal structure of the three-fold now.

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This is the level of the immanent internal time of intending acts and contents of

consciousness. Objects are made temporal by their appearing in durational form. Then,

immanent temporal objects are objects of consciousness which in themselves endure, which

are considered from the aspect of their duration. It is at this level that Husserl explores the

characteristics of time as a continuum, temporal phases such as past, present and future,

time’s flux, the constant receding into the past of the unity of any temporal object: these are

all features belonging to the formal structure of the consciousness of time, constituting

immanent temporal objects.

The primordial level of time consciousness is the third level, the one of the “absolute

flux of consciousness”, “this absolute consciousness that lies before all constitution”

(Husserl 1991, 77). Husserl reaches this third level of time precisely when, as Ricoeur notes,

he articulates the relationship between immanent temporal objects: in other words, the

“absolute flux” of consciousness appears in the formalization of the relationships between

present, retention and protention, between, as Ricoeur puts it, “the original now and its

modifications” (Ricoeur 1985, 77). At this level of pure consciousness, Husserl thus leaves

any and all objects (immanent or transcendent) out of the analysis, and focuses on the

formalization of the relationships between retention, protention and now-source without

any reference to temporal objects. The constitution of such a temporal form of experience,

for Husserl, is itself the product of the “absolute flux of consciousness”. “Time-constituting

phenomena,” he tells us, “are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those

constituted in time.” In other words, what constitutes the now itself, is not in time per se, but

constitutive of it: it is “the time constituting flow as absolute subjectivity.” Impressional and

retentional modes of consciousness which constitutes temporal objects are themselves

moments of this flow (Husserl 1991, 79-80). At this level, there is no-thing enduring

anymore, there is only pure duration itself, and Husserl confesses that he is at a loss for

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words to characterize or depict it, “for all this, we lack names” (Husserl 1991, 79). One can

only speak of the absolute flux of consciousness “in conformity with what is constituted,” i.e.

with the conceptual vocabulary already used in the theorizing of the second level of the

formal structure of time. Husserl therefore uses a series of metaphors which convey the

characteristics of such an “absolute flux”, such as “flux” itself, but also “source-point,”

“continuity”, and so on.

The question then becomes: how can one be aware of the unity of such an absolute

flux? Such unity has to be asserted in order to derive every moment of consciousness as a

moment of this primordial flux. Furthermore, if one is to speak of one consciousness, one

needs to say something about the unity of the absolute flux. Husserl’s solution is articulated

along the idea that the unity of the absolute flux of consciousness is formed at once with the

constitution of immanent temporal objects: they are both constituted in “the same flux of

consciousness” by what he terms a “duality in the intentionality of the retention”:

There is one, unique flow of consciousness in which both the unity of the tone in immanent

time and the unity of the flow of consciousness itself becomes constituted at once. As

shocking (when not initially even absurd) as it may seem to say that the flow of

consciousness constitutes its own unity, it is nonetheless the case that it does (Husserl 1991,

84)

And, a few pages later,

Consequently, two inseparably united intentionalities, requiring one another like two sides of

one and the same thing, are interwoven with each other in the one, unique flow of

consciousness (…) The flow of the consciousness that constitutes immanent time not only

exists but is so remarkably and yet intelligibly fashioned that a self-appearance of the flow

necessarily exists in it, and therefore the flow itself must necessarily be apprehensible in the

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flowing. The self-appearance of the flow does not require a second flow; on the contrary, it

constitutes itself as a phenomenon in itself (Husserl 1991, 87-88).

How Husserl conceives of time as a ‘self-constituting’ absolute flux of consciousness will

then give rise, as seen below, to objective time as a derivative category. There is much to say

on this. In the derivation of objective time from an absolute flux of consciousness, I suggest

we find traces of a specifically modern temporal experience.

The separation of human time and worldly time

Husserlian time appears ultimately rooted in the self-constituting “absolute flux of

consciousness,” as a formal structure itself product of intentionalities of consciousness. In

the analysis of the three levels of time constitution, level one, objective time, is a derivative

of the intentional interactions between level two and three. Crucially, what allows Husserl

to derive objective time from the absolute flux of consciousness is a methodological

operation performed prior to the analysis, which consists in the complete isolation of time-

consciousness from any reference to objective time. Indeed, in order to focus solely on pure

experience, Husserl’s enquiry begins only after a radical separation of “phenomenological”

time from “cosmical” time, and concerns itself only with the former, as it “demands a

separate discussion” (Husserl 1962, 215). Husserl here operates a “phenomenological

reduction”, which consists in “bracketing away”, suspending from the analysis, any

presupposition of “transcendence” or of any existing world-out-there. Indeed, says Husserl,

“inherent,” in a phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness, is “the complete

exclusion of every assumption, stipulation and conviction with respect to objective time”

(Husserl 1991, 4). The exclusion of world time is therefore rooted in Husserl’s philosophical

a priori: “Just as the actual thing, the actual world, is not a phenomenological datum, neither

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is world time, the real time, the time of nature in the sense of natural science…” (Husserl

1991, 5). Throughout his endeavour, Husserl focuses on objective time only in so far as it

“declares itself” in the phenomenological realm. He is not interested in the empirical or

worldly origins of experiences of time, but rather in experiences of time as constitutive of its

objectivity. The time of the world, here in Husserl, is not a constitutive part of human

experience, it is othered and does not enter the discussion of time. Indeed, the time that

exists is not “of the experienced world”, the only time that exists is rather the “immanent

time of the flow of consciousness” (Husserl 1991, 5). The “empirical being” – or social being,

for that matter - of experience is not of concern to the phenomenology of time: “we do not

fit experiences into any reality” (Husserl 1991, 9). As such, a priori temporal laws belong

essentially to time-consciousness: world time plays no part in their constitution.

Having rejected objective time at the start, Husserl proceeds to re-introduce it at the

end, not as an empirical or worldly datum, but rather as a product of consciousness. Since

before and after, which are categories of objective time, are themselves products of the play

between levels of intentionality stemming from the difference Husserl posits between

retention and recollection, succession becomes in this sense a formal property of time not to

be found in the world, but in a pre-contemplative interrelatedness which “lies before all

"comparison" and all "thinking" as the presupposition of the intuitions of likeness and

difference” (Husserl 1991, 46). Husserl thus derives formal aspects of objective time from

internal operations of the mind predicated, in the last instance, on the self-constitution of

the “absolute flux” of consciousness which itself is constitutive of the whole formal temporal

mode of appearance of Zeitobjekts.

Succession as such a form – the internally produced chain of time – forms the basis

upon which is built what Husserl calls objective time. This time is fixed, identical, and

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homogeneous. It also has to be unitary, and here the role of reproduction in the constitution

of “one” objective time is crucial. Indeed, there has to be a link, a common ground, between

a reproduced time-field and the present-now. It is a requirement that even “phantasied”

time must exist “as an extent within the one and only objective time” (Husserl 1991, 73). In

the temporal fields succeeding one another, a linear order emerges: objective time. Let us

read Husserl directly here,

One will perhaps ask in this respect how, in these temporal fields succeeding one another,

the one objective time with its one fixed order comes about. The continuous coinciding of the

temporal fields in temporal succession, offers the answer. The coinciding parts are

individually identified during their intuitive and continuous regression in the past. Let us

assume that we proceed back into the past from any actually experienced time-point – that

is, from any time-point originally given in the temporal field of perception or from some

time-point that reproduces a remote past – and that we move, as it were, along a fixed chain

of connected objectivities that are identified over and over again. Now how is the linear

order established here according to which any extent of time whatsoever, even one that is

reproduced without continuity with the actually present temporal field, must be part of a

single chain continuing up to the actually present now? Even an arbitrarily phantasied time

is subject to the requirement that it must exist as an extent within the one and only objective

time if one is going to be able to think of it as actual time (Husserl 1991, 72-73).

Objective time, then, is founded on the preobjectivated time of pure consciousness, since

“the preobjectivated time belonging to sensation necessarily founds the unique possibility

of an objectivation of time positions” (Husserl 1991, 74).

One sees here an objective time produced by consciousness introduced in place of

the objective time bracketed away at the start of the inquiry. Husserl reintroduces objective

time here to reach a unitary conception of time: in his search for unity, Husserl has to

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account for the objective time he had left out at the start. However, having conceptualized

time as absolute subjectivity, he is left with no choice but to derive objective time from

consciousness’ absolute flux. The three levels of time, namely objective time as derived from

immanent time, which is itself the product of the play of a twofold intentionality in which

the absolute flux of consciousness constitutes itself, thus appear here as an attempt at

reconstruction of the unity of time.

However, this reconstructed unity can’t satisfactorily seal the gap opened by the a

priori phenomenological reduction. Ricoeur notes that in performing this operation, Husserl

cannot but reproduce the “aporia of time”, i.e. the unbridgeable gap Ricoeur finds in

Western conceptions of time between conceptualizations that locate time’s essence in the

objective world, and conceptualizations that locate time’s essence in human experience. In

this sense, the aporia between the time of nature and the time of experience is reinforced by

the very epistemological stance of Husserl’s philosophy. Not only is the aporia reflected in

Husserl’s a priori operations, but furthermore, his endeavour into the phenomenology of

time-consciousness can only result in a “growing aporicity” between phenomenological

time and the “time of the world” (Ricoeur 1985, 20, 49). In other words, the more one

delves into the inner experience of time, the more one tends to reproduce its separation

from the time of the world. The resulting aporia of time, for Ricoeur, is unbridgeable in

conceptual terms, since both poles of the aporia, the time of the world and the time of

consciousness, simultaneously imply and obscure one another (Ricoeur 1985, 25, 41-42). In

other words, one cannot conceptualize the time of the world without implicit reference to

the measuring operations of a conscious mind, while a concept of subjective time always

implies references to features of objective time, for example movement and succession. It is

as if each conception negates the other, and yet cannot stand on its own.

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Ricoeur diagnoses the aporia in Husserl’s symptomatic repeated borrowings of

features of objective time – such as the ideas of succession, continuum and multiplicity - in

order to analyze immanent time, and in the presupposition of a metaphysical

correspondence between the flow of consciousness and the flow of the world. As Ricoeur

suggests, the very idea of an absolute flux does seem difficult to flesh out without any

implicit a priori reference to objective time. The very oneness, unity, of the absolute flux

seems predicated on the idea of objective time as a linear extent of successive time

positions. Ultimately, Ricoeur criticizes Husserl for reducing the objective time of serial

succession to the temporality of past, present and future of subjective consciousness. This

aporetics of time, for Ricoeur, means that Husserl failed to construct a unitary conception of

time.

Ricoeur’s criticism of a “failure of unity” might seem somehow counter-intuitive at

first glance since Husserl’s efforts, as we have seen, are directed precisely toward a unitary

conception of time-consciousness. This is explicit in his claim to have founded the whole

time-field of consciousness in the absolute flux. From Husserl’s perspective, the very unity

of consciousness requires the possibility of a unity of experience. He wants to get at the

whole phenomenological time-field of the pure Ego as a unified experience; he has thus

defined phenomenological time as “this unitary form of all experiences within a single

stream of experience (that of one pure Ego)…” (Husserl 1962, 215, emphasis added). As a

matter of fact, the only way for Husserl to unify time after having excluded the time of the

world is precisely to reduce time to an absolute dimension of the Ego, and then to

subsequently derive objective time from the absolute flux of consciousness. However, the

radical separation performed at the start prevents a unification of the experience of time

situated in any worldly, social or corporeal context.

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I suggest that to go beyond Ricoeur’s conceptual criticism and to get at the heart of

the question of social basis of the aporia of time in Husserl, we need to enquire in more

depth into his operation of phenomenological reduction. This might shed more light on the

crucial question of what is objective worldly time for Husserl. Brough’s meticulous analysis

of the textual constitution of Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal

Time is key in analysing this issue (Brough 1991, xx-xxiv). As Brough explains, this

publication by Husserl came after some important editing work, not so much from

Heidegger, even though he is mentioned as the editor of the original publication in 1928 and

did perform editing work on the manuscript, but more importantly from Edith Stein, who

acted as Husserl’s assistant in Freiburg from 1917 to 1919. Stein’s work has been criticized

on the grounds of significant changes that were made, not the least of which was the pasting

together of notes which were written as far apart than 1901 and 1917, and the addition of

conceptual terms from Husserl’s mature writings on notes written earlier in his career. This

is not the place or time to embark on extensive considerations on this specific instance of

editing, but one interesting point stems from all of this, a point that might get lost in a

reading that does not take these issues into account.6 Simply put, Husserl’s Auschaltung, the

“phenomenological reduction” that structures his philosophy and his enquiry on time, is not

a philosophical operation defined once-and-for-all. Rather, it has evolved and come to

maturity only progressively in the course of his intellectual evolution. Consequently, the

phenomenological reduction with respect to the analysis of time does not bracket away the

same thing throughout Husserl’s writings. Precisely what is bracketed away changes in the

development of his thought on the matter and it is this development, in short, which is

obscured by Stein’s editing techniques.

6 Ricoeur, who is otherwise acutely aware of such details, does not take this into account (in all likelihood because Husserliana X was not available to him).

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Brough identifies as many as four stages in this development, the last two of which

are important here as what Husserl brackets away changes from one stage to the other. In

the third stage, around 1905, what Husserl posits as outside of phenomenological time is a

conception of objective time akin to the empirical side of the experience of time, its factual

dimensions, governed by natural laws. This leads him, in this period, to statements such as

“one cannot discover the least thing about objective time through phenomenological

analysis” (Husserl 1991, 6). In other words, what Husserl brackets away here is natural

time, the time of the empirical objective natural world. In the fourth stage however, situated

by Brough after 1909, what Husserl brackets away is not “natural time” taken as an

objective feature of nature, but rather, very importantly, the techniques and instruments

employed in time-measurement. What Husserl is here leaving outside of the analysis of time

are not objective natural processes, but rather social practices, techniques and institutions

that produce an objectivated form of time: namely clocks, watches, chronometers. It is here

more precisely clock-time which forms the “other”, the outside, of the phenomenological

inquiry of time. It is thus more straightforwardly social time, and not merely natural time,

which is the object of the phenomenological reduction.

Brough reads Husserl here as attempting to distance phenomenology from the

physical sciences, clocks and chronometers being described by Brough as instruments

employed by the natural sciences in determining time (Brough 1991, xxii). However, what

Brough overlooks is that clock-time is not a mere scientific instrument in Husserl’s socio-

historical context, but rather embedded in a hegemonic form of social time relation. As such,

what appears first as bracketed away from human experience, and then merely derived

from consciousness, is not merely natural time, or even “instruments of the natural

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sciences,” but time’s very social form and objectivity.7 In this sense, it is a socio-historically

constituted form of time that Husserl brackets away from his analysis, before making its

objectified features a product of consciousness. This entails serious limitations for Husserl’s

concept of time, as well as situates it historically. In order to clarify this further, some

historical contextualization is needed.

The Rise of the Modern Time Regime: Abstraction, Alienation,

Standardisation.

Research in the fields of sociology and anthropology of time has shown the existence

of a vast array of diverse and multiple conceptions and practices of time, as well as time

institutions, across the history of human societies (Among others: Gell 1992, Zerubavel

1981, Hannah 2009, Aveni 2002, Durkheim 2007, Evans-Pritchard 1939, Dohrn-van

Rossum 1996, Bourdieu 1977, Birth 1999). Critical time studies have also shed light on how

different social settings display institutional forms and time regimes that reflect underlying

social time relations based on varying social relations of power and property (Elias 1992,

Hassan 2009, Thompson 1993, Adam 1995, Tomba 2013, Postone 1993, Glennie and Thrift

2009, Davies 1990). Calendars, for example, or other techniques and institutions of time,

regulate temporal organisation and the time metabolism in societies and between them and

their environment while articulating power and property relations in time regimes that

establish times for agricultural activities, payment of taxes, curfews, markets, times of

worship, feast and carnivals, payment of debt, political life, etc. Political and religious

7 It is remarkable that in this context, Husserl avoids the topic of clock-time altogether by explicitly excluding it form the enquiry, whereas other important thinkers at the time, Bergson and Einstein, for example, engage with the question of clock-time.

19

authorities have notably reproduced their social power through the institutionalisation of

certain time relations.

Brought about through a variety of economic, political and cultural processes, the

advent of modernity was also marked by a profound change in the history of social time

regimes. Based on abstract time forms introduced by the innovation of clocks in 14th

century Western Europe, an abstract form of standard time developed historically in

parallel with the emergence of modern market economies, and later the rise of industrial

societies (on the innovation of clocks and abstract time, see Landes 1983, LeGoff 1977,

Dohrn-van Rossum 1996, Postone 1993). The advent of modern society was fuelled by the

coming into being of a standardized, abstract and impersonal time regime, which had been

in the making throughout a protracted process of hegemonisation of social time practices

and concepts by clock-time reaching back to the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance

period. In the early modern period, market mechanisms found their temporal infrastructure

in the abstract time-form of clock-time, perfected through the increasing precision of clocks,

and propagated to an ever growing number of social practices in Europe. These processes

led to the formation of a quantified, rationalized and reified social time system. As it

reached global scope concomitantly with the spread of capitalist markets, World Standard

Time took over local time systems predicated on unequal hours in the last decades of the

19th century. The Meridian Conference of 1884 epitomizes this process of global

consolidation of modern standard time relations (On the rise of standard time : Martineau

2015, 125-131, Kern 1983, 11-16, Adam 2004, 117-119, Zerubavel 1982, 14-16, Nguyen

1992).

The historical trajectories of both clock-time and market relations have therefore

evolved until a crucial qualitative leap where they met directly, coming with the

20

consolidation of capitalist societies and the building of the temporal infrastructure of

market operations and relations on a time system predicated on abstract, equal and

homogenous time-units, unprecedented in the history of time-forms. Modern markets

require a standardization of social time, and operations of valorization, distribution, and

competition require abstract time-units which can temporally measure and quantify key

processes in the production and distribution of commodities. In short, modern market

relations are built on a form of time characterized by the abstraction and equalization of

time-units (On the relationship between abstract time and capitalism : Postone 1993,

Tomba 2013, Tombazos 2013, Martineau 2015). As time itself becomes a commodity

bought and sold on a market in the form of abstract labour-time, a form that systematically

quantifies and abstracts time inputs, systemic temporal alienation and reification in

contemporary social time relations reproduce an aporetic structure between the objective

worldly existence of standard time forms and the subjective concrete temporalities of lived

experience which remain of an irreducible qualitative nature. Globalized standard time in

its modern form is experienced by agents as an objective category with a linear rhythm of

its own, out of the reach of humans, out of sync with their inner experience of temporality,

and detached from concrete processes observable in nature.

In a capitalist context, social time relations reify lived time by constructing an

abstract time-framework that compels individuals’ concrete times to attune to the

requirements of abstract time-units, especially in the context where abstract labour-time is

bought and sold on the market. Processes of temporal alienation tend to pervade the social

realm as the valorization of quantified time becomes a broader cultural value and is

internalized by agents (Thompson 1993, Weber 2001). Conceptions of time formulated in

this modern context tend to express and mediate the temporal alienation specific to market

operations in capitalist societies in one form or another: in the sense of a radical separation

21

between “inner,” “private” or “concrete” experiential time and “outer,” “public” reified time,

which in its abstract form is often seen and experienced as fundamentally alien, inauthentic,

or out of reach.

It is this historically specific separation between the abstract time of market

valorization, the modern – reified – “time of the world,” and the concrete times of lived

realities and experiences, “lived time,” which is reflected in the aporetic conceptual

structure identified by Ricoeur. While Ricoeur anachronistically superimposes this aporetic

structure on pre-modern time conceptions, it is indeed a specifically modern feature of

social time regimes. This modern aporia of time, rooted in social time relations shaped by

the advent of market practices, has become an inescapable framework structuring

philosophical enquiries on the question.

Husserl’s time in context

Husserl is therefore thinking about time in the context of a specifically modern

social time regime characterized by the very height of a process in which the valorization of

quantitative time has meant a historically unprecedented alienation of concrete

temporalities pertaining to human consciousness, bodies and natural processes. Traces of

this socio-historical context of alienated time relations can be seen in Husserl’s treatment of

time and in his failure to provide a unified account of it. In fact, the very Auschaltung of

objective time which forms the a priori structure of his enquiry reflects the alienated aspect

of the abstract time regime of clocks in the modern context. Socio-historically speaking,

then, Husserl expresses a fundamental aspect of the modern temporal experience, in

radically separating social time from time consciousness, in treating social time itself as

something to be put aside, bracketed away, eliminated, suspended (Auschaltung) from the

22

inquiry of time consciousness. Indeed, Husserl’s “objective time,” the positions of which “we

can determine by means of a chronometer” (Husserl 1991, 7) is clock-time, which is itself

not a universal “time of the world,” but a socio-historically constituted social time form

which produces experiences of time as reified and objectified. What Husserl has initially

bracketed out, and later reintroduced as a product of the internally produced chain of time,

is therefore a social time form characterized by abstraction and impersonality, a time which

in Husserl’s context, became the hegemonic time form in the modern temporal experience.

On another level, such a socio-historical insight in the formation of concepts of time

is lacking in Husserl’s own enquiry on time. “Disregarding all transcendencies,” (Husserl

1991, 24) Husserl is unable to sketch out any kind of socio-historical mediation between

consciousness and the world. He does not see consciousness as a historico-natural product,

but rather as an a-historical and universal Ego. He overlooks the fact that evolution and

social history are not “outside” of conscious experience - on the contrary, consciousness,

evolution and history mediate each other in human experience. Consciousness is itself a

product of “world time,” of the time of natural evolution of human bodies of which

consciousness is an organic product, and social life and history which shapes and provides

categories through which consciousness operates (McNally 2001, 79-110, Durkheim 2007).

Therefore, world time cannot be merely derived from time consciousness, rather

consciousness and world time co-constitute each other through the mediation of social time

forms. Husserl brackets all of this away and posits time as belonging essentially, immanently

to consciousness. The essence of time, then, is looked for in an a-historical Ego. Time

becomes “my time,” the time of absolute consciousness, disregarding that “my time” is

inseparable from nature and sociality, or, as Barbara Adam puts it, “a moment of ‘my’ time,

is never just that. It is inseparable from ‘our’ times, the times of the environment and the

social collectivity” (Adam 1995, 19). The very categories through which Husserl thinks the

23

triadic form of lived time have been constructed, as Norbert Elias noted, through

generations of human timing activities (Elias 1992, 174-179), but Husserl’s Auschaltung,

itself an expression of a systematic and historically produced separation between objective

time and lived time, prevented him from considering the source of time as common to the

interaction between human bodies and socio-historically produced time relations.

As such, the Husserlian derivation of “objective time” from the absolute flux of

consciousness not only fails at establishing any form of socio-historical mediation of the

temporal relationship between humans and their world, it also fails at providing a unitary

conception of time, i.e. a conception that can account for the socio-historical constitution of

forms of social time relations, and as such for the socio-historically specific and transient

forms of time-consciousness. Bracketing away historically situated forms of social time that

inform and shape human temporal experience prevents Husserl from grasping how human

consciousness of time can undergo many variations and adopt many guises. Historical

nuance and depth are irretrievably lost once socio-historical time-forms are excluded from

the picture. As a result, the specific way in which modern time creates a separation between

concrete lived times and abstract standard time is at the same time obscured and

reproduced by Husserl. It is obscured on the one hand because his Auschaltung of world

time creates a transhistorical concept of phenomenological time, at odds with the myriad of

socio-historically specific embodiments of time consciousness. It is reproduced on the other

hand, because modern time relations are precisely this context of social time relations in

which there is a radical separation between inner experiences of time and worldly time.

Ultimately, as is the case with truly great thinkers, even Husserl’s flaws are

important and give us much food for thought. Even if his project encounters serious

limitations, it still represents a valuable tool to enquire into modern time relations precisely

24

by the way of what it explicitly excludes, and by the insights it provides on the play between

concrete inner times of human consciousness and the production of objectified temporal

subjectivities. In all these ways, Husserl’s time, through its very conceptual limits as well as

the methodological operations that guided its elaboration, is distinctively modern, and

indeed illuminates times that still shape us in many ways.

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