"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past."
(T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton)
One way of understanding Husserl's notion of intentionality is by looking at the temporality of consciousness. To do this, we must first examine time itself. What is time? Is it essential to consciousness? Can consciousness in some way get beyond the temporal flux? "Intentionality" is the capacity to overcome this dispersal and grasp a unified object.
We start with a phenomenological description of our experience of time. The phenomenological method requires that we suspend all speculative dogmas about the nature of time and our experience of it, then intuit the phenomenon itself, and finally describe what we intuit in words. That is, we must start by performing the reductions, as Hume and Descartes failed to do.
For a description of the reductions needed before intuiting our experience of time and Hume and Descartes' failure, see this page.
Next we intuit and describe two particular, concrete experiences of temporal objects, that is, objects for which time is essential.
The essence of time, at least of internal temporality, can nowbe abstracted from these two factual examples. Time has a basictri-partite structure made up of retention, the NOW point, andprotention. Other essential laws can also be intuited.
There are three interrelated dogmas which may stand in the way of us grasping this temporal structure, and which must be suspended by the reductions: the dogmas of punctuality, of homogeneity and of content. (This is not quite the way Husserl himself puts it.) Husserl rejects these dogmas in his description of our experience of time and claims that a true description of our experience reveals differences primarily of form rather than of content. The past is actually 'present' or given to us, though in a different form than the now.
In other words, that consciousness is punctual, and formally homogenous is a dogma which an examination of experience does not bear out. When we come to actually describe our experience of a temporal object, we find that, far from being a absolutely simple now-point, consciousness is a highly articulated structure in which many different phases are present, though most of them have undergone the formal "modification" of the past, that is, they are present-as-absent.
In Husserl's own words,
It pertains to the essence of intuition that in every point of its duration it is conscious of what has just been and is not mere consciousness of the now-point of the objective thing appearing as having duration ... Retentional consciousness includes real consciousness of the past of sound ... and is not to be resolved into sensed sound and apprehension as memory." (Husserl, Internal Time Consciousness, p.53-54.)
Time is part of the essence of consciousness. We can perceive an object such as a melody or a sentence only if our consciiusness is, as it were, dispersed in time, spread out over the past and future as well as the present. Only a temporally structured consciousness, made up of retentive, actual and protentive phases can grasp a temporal object, or any object, for that matter, as Plato already realized in the Philebus.
In Husserl's own words,
"It pertains to the essence of intuition that in every point of its duration it is conscious of what has just been and is not mere consciousness of the now-point of the objective thing appearing as having duration....Retentional consciousness includes real consciousness of the past of sound ... and is not to be resolved into sensed sound and apprehension as memory." (Internal Time Consciousness, p.53)
To be conscious of one, self-identical object, is to unify or integrate the temporal phases of our experience. The capacity to experience a melody, rather than just an instantaneous note, is INTENTIONALITY, that is, the ability to be conscious of an object as an entity which endures through the flux of time.
In this way of explaining intentionality, temporal openess is presented as analogous to spatial openness. Instantaneous, punctual consciousness is "closed," so no time flow is allowed in it; it is modeled on eternity. Husserl's consciousness is OPEN in time, reaching beyond the NOW to the retentional past, not homogenously, but with a structure. That is what it means to say that Husserl's consciousness is "of an object," i.e., intentional.
In Husserl's own words,
If one speaks of the self-evident givenness of an immanentcontent, it is obvious that this self-evidence cannot meanindubitable certainty with regard to the temporal existence of a sound at a point. Self-evidence so grasped (as, is admitted by Brentano, for example) I would hold to be a fiction. If to be extended in time belongs to the essenceof a content given in perception, then the indubitableness of the perception can mean nothing other than indubitableness with reference to the extended existent. And this signifies again that any question directed toward individual existence can find its answer only by means of a regress to perception which gives us individual existence in the strictest sense. To the extent that perception itself is yet mixed with what is not perception, to this extent perception itself is still doubtful. However, if it is a matter of immanent content and not of empirical materialities, then duration and alteration,coexistence and succession are completely and entirely to be realized in perceptions, and enough are actually realized. It happens that in perceptions those which are purely intuitive are perceptions which in the true sense are constitutive of the enduring or changing contents as such. These are perceptions which in themselves contain nothing further that is questionable.
We are led back to these perceptions in all questious regarding origins, but they themselves exclude any furtherquesfion as to origin. It is clear that the much-talked-ofcertainty of internal perception, the evidence of the cogito,would lose all meaning and significance if we excludedtemporal extension from the sphere of self-evidence and truegivenness.
(The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Section 41: "Self-Evidence of the Immanent Content-Alteration andConstancy")
This series of pages on Husserl was originally provided here by the Philosophy Department of the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Very minor editing has been performed to prepare the text for its use in this commentary on Eliot's Four Quartets.