Alexander Schnell
Critique and Humanism
Eurozine
Critique and Humanism
Intentionality and temporality in Husserlian phenomenology
Alexander Schnelly
The present study aims at presenting the fundamental stages of the
Husserlian phenomenology of time. Such an analysis needs to clarify the
method first, which characterizes it in proper. The phenomenological method, far
from simply depending on the psychological attitude of the philosophizing subject,
consists in a specific attitude in view of the meaning of being of the object
(phenomena), as well as of the subject himself. This attitude (that Hussserl
names transcendental or phenomenological) allows having access to the properly
phenomenological phenomena, which are not, as Heidegger thinks, ontological
structures, but rather intentional and pre-intentional structures of the
transcendental consciousness. Our study thematizes these structures in view of
the problem of temporality, thus revealing the phenomena constitutive of the
consciousness of time. This analysis consists of two stages: first of all, it
describes the components belonging to the immanent sphere of consciousness
(impressions, retentions, and protentions) before thematizing the phenomena
constitutive of the latter. (cf. The Manuscripts of Bernau (Husserliana XXXIII)).
On the basis of these phenomena it becomes possible to depict the "original
process" (Urprozess) with its structure in nucleus - prolegomena to what we
could identify as "phenomenology of nucleus.
Thus, it turns out that the Husserlian project inscribes itself in the critical
perspective of Kant in so far as it reinforces the formal status of time. It, however,
opens a new perspective, for this phenomenology of time leads to a radical
disconnection between temporality and objectivity - a position which is radically
opposed to what Kant had established in the chapter on the Analogies of
experience in the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as to the usual comments on
the Husserlian phenomenology of time which deal in an unilateral and simplifying
way with the objectifying aspect of the intentional acts.