Definitions and the Now Field, Husserl, para 96-97, 106, Supplementary B1 to: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time

by Corry Shores
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Definitions and the Now Field

Edmund Husserl

On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time

B: Supplementary Texts

I "On the Introduction of the Essential Distinction between 'Fresh' Memory and 'Full' Recollection and about the Change in Content and Differences in Apprehension in the Consciousness of Time"

No. 15

Time and Memory.

Perception of the Now, Memorial Perception and Phanstasy-Memory. Transferring of the differences into the Mode of Apperception.

Quoting Husserl:

Paragraph 96

Memory is customarily pictorial apperception, just as expectation is.

Perception is the apperception through which the object appears as there itself and now present. Adequate perception presents the object itself; the meaning is not mere meaning. Inadequate perception implies pictorial and symbolic elements.

Perception in the customary sense is perception of the now.

The memory of something further past is symbolic memory if, for example, it is merely verbal memory. It is phantasy-memory if it is memory grounded on a phantasy-representation. It then stands on a level with the intuitive now-positing of something that is not perceived. For example, I now represent the street in phantasy: the image emerges and I apprehend it as the representation, in phantasy, of the street – that is, of the street as now existing.

Paragraph 97

Now there are also other situations in the case of memory. There is a memorial perception in which the past object is given itself, as past. The same sensuous content is apprehended as past in relation to what is present in some perception or other. The object may appear as exactly the same, only modified, but the modification does not touch the sensuous content and therefore does not touch that which constitutes the object as far as its matter is concerned.

Paragraph 106

The point of most distinct seeing: the now, etc. [Footnote 24: In the case of space, this point is surrounded by a space; in time’s case, the now is the border of a given time rather than its center.] Well, that may be so. But the point of distinct seeing is really not a point but a small field; and the point “now” is also a small field, and this alone comes into question. Within this field there are different modes of apperception, and this differentness makes up the form. As consciousness advances, the original temporal field belonging to the adequate perception of time is filled over and over again; and the new now currently emerging turns the still-living now of the earlier moment into the past by virtue of the form of relation, the configurational form. (last sentence spans 181-182)

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Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Vol 4 of Edmund Husserl: Collected Works. Ed. Rudolf Bernet. Trans. John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.