First we must suspend our beliefin an objective time outside of our experience. Some haveclaimed that time is not real, that it is an illusion, "maya." Other's say time is different for schizophrenics than for therest of us. But how time is for others, or how it is in itself,or whether it exists at all are questions we leave aside byperforming the Phenomenological reduction. Even after thissuspension, we still find time in our experience, "inner time" or"internal time consciousness," and this is the time whose essenceHusserl sets out to describe.
Secondly, we must suspend scientifictheories of time. Many assume that time is what is measured byclocks, that it goes on objectively at the same rate whetherobserved or not. Newton thought of time as an absolute quantity,a measurable attribute of God's sensorium. Einstein says thattime is a fourth dimension, mathematically similar to the otherthree, but relative in its quantity to the velocity of observers. Hawkins says that time starts with the big bang and was hugelyaccelerated during the first seconds of the universe. Thephenomenologist, without denying any of these theories of cosmic,external or objective time, suspends belief in them in order tobe able to achieve a pure description of how time is actuallygiven to us in our experience.
Finally, and this is by far themost difficult, we must suspend all philosophical theories aboutthe nature of time and of temporal experience.
Hume, for instance, like Husserl, claimed to start fromexperience. He claimed that each moment of experience involved aset of isolated (sense-) impressions. This too is an unsupporteddogma, for Husserl points out that we don't in fact experienceimpressions. Hume claimed to be an empiricist, but was prejudicedby a philosophy of atomism and failed to actually do the hardwork of looking at experience itself.
Hume's error is actually based on a more crucial prejudicewhich he inherited from Descartes. Descartes presents his cogitoas a momentary experience valid only for the instant. Everymoment of conscious life is an isolated, separate event,unrelated to the past and the future except by the creative powerof God. Nothing in the present state of our consciousnessintimates anything about the future, even that there is one. Theworld is created anew every moment by divine miracle.
In Descartes' own words, "a lifespan can be divided into countless parts, each completely independent of the others, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now ... For it is quite clear to anyone who attentively considers the nature of time that the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing anew if it were not yet in existence." (Meditations, no. 3)
Descartes seems to conceive of consciousness as a point,unextended in time as in space, relying on external factors suchas bodily memory or divine intervention to relate to the past andthe future. I suspect this notion of consciousness depends uponPlato's notion that the soul must be absolutely simple andunified. Descartes' mind seems to be modeled on his notion of anabsolutely simple, and so eternal, God, who can grasp things intheir unity because she is herself without any dispersion, eitherspatial or temporal. I will call this, our most misleading,prejudice, "the dogma of punctual consciousness." Husserl says wemust not assume without investigation that consciousness isrestricted to a durationless now. Don't assume, look and see!