THESIS
2017
ix, 444 pages : illustrations ; 30 cm
Abstract
A traditional formulation of the question of time is what Augustine states in Confessions:
"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." 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 internal
time in three aspects: the adequate memory, the con...[
Read more ]
A traditional formulation of the question of time is what Augustine states in Confessions:
"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." 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 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.
Post a Comment