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I
The purpose of this essay is to investigate the notion of memory in Merleau-Ponty, suggesting to possible interpretation of the time and memory within Merleau-Ponty’s genetic phenomenological analysis. Ultimately, our hypothesis is that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the problem of representation and perception - particularly the problem of retention - places an ethical ground in perception. In order to pursue this objective, it will be necessary to first clarify some of the terms that Merleau-Ponty takes from Husserl's “Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time”, specially the notion of retention and recollection. Those are not, however, the only concepts that Merleau-Ponty will incorporate into his analysis, and in the first part of this paper we attempt to give a throughout analysis of Husserl's conception of time. Husserl's “Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis” was also consulted, as it is relevant to the later period of Husserl's phenomenology and to our investigation on Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty is our focus, since his notion of temporality as incarnated in the “Phenomenology of Perception” brings an interesting point of view to Husserl's analysis. Our main pre-occupation then is to both situate Merleau-Ponty as a phenomenologist that is incorporating Husserl's and Heidegger's language into his own account while forwarding a peculiar, unique take, on both time and memory in the context of the lived-body. In this context, our aim is to clarify what is meant by both Immanence and Ek-Stasis in Merleau-Ponty, and where his own take on this subject will draw a distinction with both Heidegger's ontology and Husserl's phenomenology. The study undertaken on the concept of immanence follows an Aristotelic reading of the subject, and our focus is on the re-appropriation of Aristotelic discourse in Spinoza, which seems to pave a way into Phenomenology for Merleau-Ponty1. Lastly, our hypothesis is that Merleau-Ponty's take on Husserl's Passive Synthesis, though based on embrionary texts of Husserl's development of a Genetic Phenomenology, allows for a reading of a level of constitution of values in the retentional level. Such possibility would insert an ethical level of analysis that is certainly not present in Heidegger's take on time and is heir to some of Husserl's insights on the subject2.
In guise of conclusion, we will suggest that the phenomenological approach to memory might pave a different undertaking of morals as constructed in the living-present. Our objective is then to point a moral dimension to the process of presentation-representation that happens in consciousness, and establish that our way into the comprehension of values has both a passive and active (intended) dimension that is often underdeveloped in studies of how we establish moral and political convictions3.
II
Husserl writes that the investigation of how time is phenomenologically presented in consciousness as something is “perhaps the most important [matter] in the whole of phenomenology”4. He also points that it might be the most difficult point to be clarified5. In this paper, the strategy taken in order to clarify such difficult matter is to investigate Husserl’s comprehension of memory in terms of Primary Memory, or retention6, and of Secondary Memory, or recollection in turns, showing how the notion of primary memory collapses with the notion of perception in Husserl, and how Secondary memory is a recollection of a past memory not as such, but as intended association in the living-present. In order to elucidate what is meant by primary and secondary memory, we will approach the different takes of these concepts in Husserl's transitional phase, in “The Phenomenology of Internal Time”, and his generative/genetic period in the “Analyses concerning passive and active synthesis”.
a) Primary Memory: Retention and perception as connected.
die Erinnerung ist selbstgegeben, aktuell.7
Retention, for Husserl, is a presentation of the past as ‘just having been’, as something that is perceived as being-past, such as a progression of tones that constitute a continuum. This retention is not yet a representation of something, but a pre-predicative perception, in which one experiences something that is not yet intended as such - it is a primitive constitution of the past that is retained, that might be later recalled as a re-presentation.
Fresh memory still belongs to the spectrum of perception8, and as it is retained it is retained as an event that has just been past. So this is a perceptual point that is extended in consciousness, constituting the perception of something as something that endures in time. Husserl will describe retention in terms of an “unique kind of intentionality”: retentional consciousness retains the past, but it is not really intentional, “since it does not have the form of being-directed toward something”9. It is the manifestation of an aspect of intentionality, but it does not unfold as a complete intended sensation or memory, but rather a fading, a dying-away “when perception proper passes over into retention”10. Any retention presupposes a corresponding perception or primal impression11, in short, a retention must have something to retain. It is not yet retained as a memory, but as a present that has just come past. Something is perceived as ‘now’ in the context of a continuity of retentions: if we listen to the sounds of a violin, for example, whatever we are listening ‘right now’ is retained in perception, the ‘now-tone’ is already retained as the chords progress.
What we see, in the “Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time”, is a collapsing of primary memory with a primal impression. As the primary memory presupposes the primal impression, it also becomes perception12; it is the act in which all constitutive intentionality is made possible. However, such perception is not yet a sense, it is not yet intended as something, is just presented as something that might later on be re-presented. For now, what we have is the perception of a moment, that is given like a comet's tail13. If we keep on with the example of the violin, we'll see that the progression of tones-past is included in the now-tone; consciousness integrates the perception of the previous tones of the violin with the actual tone. The melody, as it is presented, is the actual object of perception, but as it is perceived, it is also retained in consciousness - so it is given both as ‘now’ and ‘just past’; hence the example of the comet-tail.
The present, then, is the limit-point (Grenzpunkt) of the perception of phenomenological time. A number of impressions are “carried” with the actual perception of something - “a continuum of the past that terminates in the now and continually terminates in an ever new now14”. At this point, it is important to stress that in “The Phenomenology of the consciousness of Internal time”, Husserl is in a transitional phase of his works: the strategy undertaken in the treatment of objects and consciousness is still too abstract to be considered within the context of a generative analysis15. So, if this concept of retention is first undertaken in a transitive period between Husserl's static and genetic periods, is it ever understood in a fully genetic sense by Husserl?
It seems that we have such undertaking of retention within the context of the Phenomenon of Affection in “Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis”, as one learns that essential functions of affective forces are disclosed in the consciousness. This disclosement of affective forces happens as a double gesture, since it has an intentional unitary tendency toward the future and a retentional tendency in regards to what is just-past. More importantly, this protention-retention primordial spectrum constitutes the sphere of the living-present as such, where we have stronger affective tendencies that emerge and are project into the future (protention) and weaker affective forces that are presented and immediately retained as perceived but not intended16 (retention). In the primordial level of retention and protention, however, the constitution of a background and a foreground is still passive17, they'll become active as they are awakened in the living present, as a reproductive association rather than an affection.
b) Secondary memory: the re-presentation and memory as intentional
It's been advanced that secondary memory, or recollection, is the re-presentation of a retained past that only comes at play of a primary constitution of something as past has already taken place. What we have, then, is a matter of a reference point: in primary memory what is retained is something as just-past without an intentional awakening of the whole of the past event. Conversely, in secondary memory, instead of a retention that attaches itself to a present perception18 we have a re-presentation of a phenomenon though phantasy (or later on Husserl's work, reproduction) that recalls the past event ‘as it were’ in reality. What we have, then, is no longer present as in the moment of retention, it is rather intentionally reawakened as an “immanent or transcendent enduring objectivity”19. There's an intentional and constitutional character to secondary memory that is not typical to primary memory.
At this point, Husserl will differ between two modes of accomplishment in secondary memory. First we have an intuitive emergence of a retained past - a continuum of representations come to consciousness as a Déjà-vu. Tentatively, one could call this first mode of givenness of memory an inadequate reawakening20 which is given by intuition - however, this reawakening is already intentional since it is a re-presentation of the whole of a perceived past.
Proceeding now to the second mode of “re-presentation proper” we have a mode of memory that is a spontaneous (instead of intuitive) reawakening of a past event that is given ‘as it were’. The givenness of this past present points back to an original givenness and reproduces in the mind as it were given when it was presented. Hence, it is an adequate memory21.
Still, there are some points that need further clarification before an investigation of Merleau-Ponty's studies on time can be approached. First, it is necessary to say more about the role of presentation in both primary and secondary memory, and how adequat22 perception of an object is always situated in time. Finally, we need to approach the matter of immanence in time, and how this will have implications for what we have already said about the intentionality proper to secondary memory and the double-fold aspect of intentionality in primary memory - both of which will be integrated in the flow of consciousness.
It's already been approached how presentation has a retentional aspect. However, there is an aspect of presentation that is not retentional insofar it is intentional. This so-called adequate perception of a temporal object presupposes a retention that constitutes this object in time, but is not had in the consciousness as intended. As this object is reawakened in the consciousness, it is had throughout an adequate act of meaning, an act of signification that will insert content into the bare form that was had as ‘retended’. In this sense, perception is had insofar the mode of givenness of an object is given as ‘just-past’ (retented) or apprehended (insofar they are intended as something in the present).
Regarding the secondary memory, or recollection, there is a relation to perception insofar there is a re-presentation of the past “as it were the same, but nonetheless modified”23. So that which was given as just-past is now given as a ‘phantom’, as an immanent reproduction of the past in the present. But what exactly is an immanent reproduction? Husserl writes in a development to the “Phenomenology” that we must understand the sense of the immanence, as far as the Phenomenological Method is regarded, as a phenomenological reduction where saying that one perceives something adequately means that there is a perception of something as being-disclosed - which is to say that we perceive a trail of memory that is immanent, and that intends a former perception:
das vergangene Sein muﾟ sich in diesem Jetzt als solches repräsentieren, un das tut es durch die im Empfindungspunkt terminierende, nah der anderen Seite vage verschwimmende Abschattungkontinuität. 24
In the ‘now’ point, we recall this past event as an appearance, and accordingly to Husserl, we might recall it as an improper memory, that is just an intuition of an event past that is reproduced as a phantasy - hence the example of paramnesis or Déjà-vu to illustrate this; or a re-presentation proper, where the immanent past is reproduced as it were. Both of these appearances in secondary memory are nevertheless intentional, insofar they regard a reawakening of a past that is signified as something in the living-present, whereas the retentional phase only has a mere presentation of an object as ‘being-past’ or ‘just-past’.
Can we say, then, that we experience a retentional memory? Or are retentionals not experienced, since they are not intented - if so, how can we say they are perceived? Husserl writes that “every experience is itself experienced, and to that extent also 'intended'”25, it seems clear now that one could not say that one retains something unintentionally and yet experiences it. The key word in Husserl's sentence, however, seems to be “and to that extent”, which is used to limit the scope of intentionality in experience.
The experience of a retention is intentional in the living present, and it becomes a protention that integrates both the ‘just-past’ and the possible future in the living present, as an instant that is ‘being-past’. However, there is something that remains and that is not integrated, a residuum of the ‘being-past’ that is not yet intended, and that is the point of retention that is reawakened in secondary memory26, while it is connected to a secondary kind of perception that “presents something that is not present itself”27.
At this point, the notions of primary and secondary memory start to collapse into each other in the context of internal time - or “the flowing sequences of my experiences”28. Both in primary and secondary memory there is an appearance that is posited in time and either retained or reproduced in by consciousness. In primary experience, as it's been demonstrated, there is a double-intentionality at play that both retains the object as ‘just-past’ and presents it as in motion - so there's a string-like quality to the ‘event’ in the living present, where our consciousness extends a duration by a continuity of retentions and protention. Conversely, in secondary experience the whole of this previous ‘instant’ is reawakening as ‘past’ and is intended as a full event that is then re-presented.
These notions start to collapse as the spectrum of the living-present extends in a fashion that integrates both retained and reawakened memories in the flow of the consciousness. Both retention and recollection are had as conscious of time in the present. The difference is at the level of consciousness that presents something; with retention, we have an unintentional presententional experience that allows the perceiver to see something as ‘elapsing’, with recollection, there is a re-presentation of something in the living present that is not however elapsing in the present, it is intentionally brought as a full-fledged memory.
At this point, it is possible to move into Merleau-Ponty's investigation on time, since most of the terms that are used in the “Phenomenology of Perception” to refer both to time and to memory have been clarified to the extent of this article.
III
En revenant aux phénomènes on trouve comme couche fondamentale un ensemble déjà prégnant d'un sens irréductible: non pas des sensations lacunaires entre lesquelles des souvenirs devraient s'enchâsse, mais la physionomie, la structure du paysage ou du mot, spontanément conforme aux intentions du moment comme aux expériences antérieures. Alors se découvre le vrai probléme de la mémoire dans la perception, lié au problém général de la conscience perceptive.29
In the beginning of his “Phenomenology of Perception”, Merleau-Ponty brings the issue of temporality situated insofar the context of a field horizon. We see that there is a way in which it is possible to investigate time - and memory - that is not as linear and formal as the general empiricist take on the subject. Consciousness modifies the retended memories as it recollects them. Regarding the phenomenons we find (En revenant aux phénomène) in experience, they are situated in a field-horizon which gives the perceiver a situation which is temporal - and later on ‘temporalized’ as past-present-future. Temporality provides an identity over time in which the object endures. However, this is not only a mere enduring over time. There's not an Ek-static permanence of the object in time, but an orientation to the object - the unfolding of the object goes in a particular direction in time, according to its past-present apprehension. The problem of memory and perception, then, is situated along the problem of a perceptive consciousness that is able to situate objects in the past and protain objects into the future: in the course of time, consciousness modifies the apprehension of a structure, every experienced once presented, can be re-opened, re-presented in a horizon, in an act of re-collection. Merleau-Ponty first mentions these distinctions, that of recalls what has been said about Husserl before, in the context of a phenomenology of association. It is interesting to point that at this moment, Merleau-Ponty seems to rely in the early texts on time by Husserl, especially the 1905 lectures. Until we reach the chapter on time in the “Phenomenology of Perception”, there is little mention of the passive level of analysis that is typical of the Generative period in Husserl - up until this moment, Merleau-Ponty is still in a formal, abstract level of analysis regarding time-consciousness and how objects are constituted in the field-horizon.
Further on, these constituted horizons start to collapse into each other in a synthesis of horizons, as we posit object in the world we see that they are detached from an objective time and placed in phenomenological time - which is the time where we have the consciousness of something. At the same time, our present perception is never just a present perception, it is the perception of the whole of a lived-time. Every time something is presented to consciousness, we go beyond the limits of the actual experience by representing former experiences related to the actual - there is a perspective inherent to perception, and so every time we perceive, we integrate the retained past in the living present. We are able to isolate ‘events’ of our perception, and place them in an objective sense. Phenomenologically, however, all events are part of a flow of time, of a duration that is the very life of the perceiving subject. Still, the object exists as something definite and as something for our perception, consequently there is a level of determination and another of implication. Our power to posit objects in the world presupposes a pre-predicative level where one has the object to be intended - but the intentional thread that signifies the object as something, needs a consciousness that places one's own body in the objective world. And
comme la genèse du corps objectif n'est qu'un moment dans la constitution de l'objet, le corps, en se retirant du monde objectif, entraînera les fils intentionnels qui le relient à son entourage et finalement nous révélera le sujet percevant comme le monde perçu.30
Temporality is then brought up in the context of the phantom limb in the body schema. In this context, we have first the ability of repression of a function - this repression can only repress something that is temporal. Then, temporality allows for personal time, one can say that temporality is sublated in personal time. There is, however, an ambiguity in being-in-the-world that is related to the past that dominates it, so temporality enables the process of transcendence as it takes up the past and gives it a new signification. In this sense, there is a turning away from the bodily perspective into the spatial perspective, as movement constitutes space and time.
Merleau-Ponty will speak of temporality in terms of a perceptual tradition, connected to the density of the perceiver. Rather than a genuine history, we have a pre-history that is the essence of time - we could say that time has a constituted dimension that will later be also constituting. In regards to to this point, Merleau-Ponty explains the lived body in terms of its primordiality as an absolute here. Following the Husserlian tradition, Merleau-Ponty is speaking of the spatiality of the situation in its perceptual tradition, as a “comet’s-tail”. Such approach brings questions regarding the absence of an absolute now connected to this absolute here. Again, as the absolute now becomes an absolute flow in the chapter on time, we see that - as did Husserl - Merleau-Ponty also engaged a transition between a formal and a more organic sense of time, in Husserlian terms we are speaking of the distinction between a formal and a transcendental analyses. What remains to be investigated here is how organic is Merleau-Ponty's take on time. Does he ever abandon a linear view of time for a more integrated view of past-present-future as the idea of lived-time and absolute flow is advanced? Before this issue is taken on comprehensively, it is necessary to elucidate how time and movement are related.
If one considers the body, one can see how its movement constitutes space and time. Time is brought up in the context of movement. Temporality, then has a sexual-erotic history, the sexual world is projected in a temporal manner as body-memory, or habit: the synthesis of an object is temporal, it is a synthesis of a temporal horizon. This might be connected to Husserl’s passive synthesis. The object unfolds in time and is now constitutive of subjectivity. This is a pre-predicative sense that makes temporality possible to the self. One is temporalized by events - as in the case of anachronism, for instance. One can say that objects endure because of this synthesis. The body creates time through movement, it assumes and possesses it, and now it constitutes time as it moves. Movement is then a way in which we constitute temporality. Temporality is also measured in terms to its connection to space. Merleau-Ponty will argue the priority of time over space, which one could see as counter-intuitive in the context of the book - this comprehension of temporality is particularly important as we investigate how time is understood in the context of the phenomenology of perception, and whether or not Merleau-Ponty has followed a coherent line in his treatment of time.
Now that the bodily and spatial sense of time have been clarified, it is possible to proceed to the investigation of the chapter on time itself, and whether Merleau-Ponty will remain in a pre-generative understanding of time, or if he ever moves into a more organic sense to the generative power of memories and phantasies in the living present.
As Merleau-Ponty returns to the level of the transcendental aesthetics, we can see how logos will be understood as rooted in predicative thought - so in the third chapter of the “Phenomenology of Perception” Merleau-Ponty turns back to the previous undertakings in Kant in order to go further in his analysis. That is, it is no coincidence that Merleau-Ponty alludes to Kant at the beginning of the chapter on Temporality. This seems to follow the context of the Husserlian analysis of “Passive Synthesis” and the Krisis. The clarification of the body, then, is on the way to the clarification of subjectivity, and Cogito, time and freedom are the main structures to be clarified - structures peculiar to subjectivity in a more “active” sense as rooted in the lived-body. Merleau-Ponty is investigating these topics so he can later take on the problem of truth and embodied subjectivity.
Indeed, our way into subjectivity appears to be the main concern of the third part of the “Phenomenology of Perception”. For Merleau-Ponty temporality is as important as spatiality and sensuality, and temporality is also connected to it. For human beings, time is not subordinate to space, but placed in connection to it. It is by investigating time that we can have new ideas, new notions of truth, reality and the self. Merleau-Ponty will criticize the empiricist (linear) conception of time, as well as the idea that time is a series of ‘nows’. Opposed to the psychological-intellectual view, Merleau-Ponty will dispute the idea of time as a state of conscious. We have not made sufficiently clear, at least until now, why Merleau-Ponty's own conception of time is not somehow linear. If one follows the description of time-consciousness approached until now, it seems that the past-apprehension that is signified in the present and protained into the future is rather linear. Still, we must further analyze the string-like quality of time consciousness in Merleau-Ponty, in order to see if this particular reading of time that take in consideration Husserl's passive synthesis, does not tackle the subject in a more generative, and hence non-linear, sense.
It seems that this consideration of an organic sense of time is the point Merleau-Ponty is trying to forward as he talks about the need to consider time itself in order to revise the idea of the subject. There is a connection between the appearance of an event and a subject capable of perceiving something as an event, this movement of signification inserts content in bare and atemporal forms that are present objectively. Thus, “le temps suppose une vue sur le temps”31, in order to signify something as ‘elapsed time’ we need a lived-past, a ‘view’ of the time that has come past. Without a view about time, we only have an objective, raw appearance that is not really placed in a flow of consciousness. Hence the importance of primary and secondary memory in this context, since primary memory will have the presentational characteristics that retain an object and enable us to perceive it as “flowing” and the re-presentation characteristics that enable us to verify something as a full-fledged event in the lived-past at a living-present. Finally, “(...) la conscience déploie ou constitue le temps”32.
“It is ultimately through one's own body that one is able to begin to understand the world”33, the perceiver subject, situated in a living-present first has his apprehensions of the world in a bodily level, there is, it seems, a level of embodied memory, that is connected to primary perception and primary memory - a level where we carry significances within ourselves34. This level of a ‘field of presence’ where time is constitute in a string-like quality is an interesting point to investigate how Merleau-Ponty will appropriate the notion of Passive Synthesis in primary memory and Active Synthesis in secondary memory.
Le présent lui-même (au sense étroit) n'est pas posé. Le papier, mon stylo, sont là pour moi, mais je ne les perçois pas expliciment, je compte avec un entourage plutôt que je ne perçois des object, je prends appui sur mes outils, je suis à ma tâche plutôt que devant elle. Husserl appelle protension et rétentions les intentionnalités qui m'ancrent dans un entourage. Elles ne partent pas d'un Je central, mais en quelque sorte de mon champ perceptif lui-même qui traîne après lui son horizon de rétention et mord par ses potensions sui l'avenir. Je ne passe pas par une série de maintenant dont je conserverais l'image et qui, mis bout à bout, formeraient une ligne. A charque moment qui vient, le moment précédent subit une modification: je le tiens encore en main ,il est encore là, et cependant il sombre déjà, il descend au-dessous de la ligne de présent; pour le garder, il faut que je tende la main à travers une mince couche de temps.35
This passage is especially dense, and specially telling insofar the present investigation. First, it seems to implicate an intentionality in retention (“Husserl appelle protension et rétentions les intentionnalités qui m'ancrent dans un entourage”). One could argue, as it is been mentioned in the case with Husserl, that if we wish to say that there is an intentional characteristic to retention, to fresh memory, it is the fact that a part of it is projected into the future, as the continuing of an event. However, there is still a part of retained experience that is had as a residuum which is not intended as an event until it is re-presented. What is being described in this passage is the flow of time, the continuity of successions that constitute a ‘present’. However, in retention there is a “paradoxical”36 passive synthesis of a present experience, that works as a primordial, transcendent unity that constitutes past and future as “fresh”, as presented in the living-present.
There is a system of retentions that constitute the present as ‘being-presented’, and the objective now presented further becomes ‘just-presented’, and in this way a perceiving consciousness is able to situate a flux of time. This flux, this phenomenological time, is the immanence of a primordial, objective time that is Ek-static. It's been noted to a certain extent the importance of this double-appearance of time in our investigation of Husserl, but perhaps it is still not clear what is this Ek-static quality to objective time.
Merleau-Ponty moves from Husserl analysis about time into Heidegger's, and trusts the reflection at II.iv.68 and II.iv.69 in “Being and Time”, that links the temporality of being in the world to the transcendence of the world itself. We see at this point that authenticity and inauthenticity are forms of being that are related to time, to relations with time - again, it will be necessary to mention both Aristotle and Aquinas insofar the relation that is necessary to the understanding of things as such, or in Spinozist vocabulary, to adequate understanding37.
If we follow the line of investigation of the concept of time in Aristotle, Aquinas and Spinoza we see that there is an objective time which is Eternity, an absolute time that encompasses the very possibility of time38. Let us focus, for a minute, in Spinoza: there is a Phenoumenical time that is the metaphysical reflection, or counterpart, of eternity in an order of appearances. The Eternal or Naturing Time, is not what we would recognize as duration, it is the whole that is perceived in duration by finite beings, and in this sense it is Ek-static. In the Ek-static order we have an absolute essence that is then immanent in the Common Order, in the order of existences and appearances. Not only do we have an adequate and inadequate movement (action/passivity) and an adequate and inadequate striving (knowledge/imagining), we also have an adequate and inadequate perception of time in the common order. We have an adequate perception of time insofar we conceive things in relation to the eternal order, we see that the flowing of time shows us the appearance of something as it is in the eternal order, and we are able to explain the whole of what we see, as a matter without residuum - we are able to build an artifact, and by the time we finish building it, we see that there are no pieces left that we did not know where to place. Conversely, in an inadequate perception of time we see things, and we conceive them as something, but we are not able to see the whole of an object in relation to our mind and in relation to eternity - we have an artifact, but there are either pieces that seem to be missing or too many pieces. There is a residuum that we are not able to situate. What's been described here as the “adequate” perception of time in the Common Order, is what is described in EtVp2939 as true or real, because it relates to the absolute reality, to the perfection of naturing nature. The second form is stuck in a mode of forgetfulness of the realm of being as being, and sticks to the object as a mere appearance, without its relation to a superior order of signification that would give us the being presented as it actually is. Finally, these modes of being in time are related to forms of existence as adequate and inadequate for finite beings. And in this modalizations of adequate and inadequate body, mind and time are collapsed as adequate or inadequate forms of living. Spinoza takes Aristotelic Eudamonia and Aquinas notion of Beatitute to a new level when he writes that living as a free man is to live, insofar our limits as finite beings allow us, in relation to an action of the body and understanding of the mind that are had in a time that is related to Eternity. To live in bondage, conversely, is to live tied to passivity and slaved to images of what the real might be like, in a duration that never quite approaches the Eternal Order because it does not involve any relation to the things as they actually are had in Eternity, but as they are imagined by a broken intellect in the Common Order.
Now, this last part of our distinction between the Ek-static and the Dynamic in Spinoza could be very well the level of forgetting in the “Phenomenology of Perception”, or the level of inauthenticity in “Being and Time”. Also, as one recalls the distinction that Husserl draws between adequate and inadequate memories in the level of recollection and phantasy, it is difficult not to establish some sharp similarities that are at play.
Obviously, the notion of an Eternal substance is not sound for neither of the phenomenologists we have mentioned so far, and Merleau-Ponty takes issue with the notion of a naturing and natured body along the “Phenomenology of Perception”. But once we follow Heidegger's quote in Merleau-Ponty's understanding of time, “Zeitlichkeit zeitligt sich als gewesende-gegenwärtigende Zukunft”40, if the Spinozist reading is not obvious, as far the notion of an Ek-stasis is concerned, it is at least defensible, insofar it is inserted in the context of the Aristotelic coherentism that Heidegger adopts in the notion of “relatedness”. This is precisely the point of Heidegger famous statement that “it is only on the basis of a comprehension of Being that Existence is possible”41. It is also in this sense that [1] subject and time are one, since there is a need for a conscious perceiving subject that constitutes time as a dynamism, as a flow42 and [2] an ultimate consciousness that is without time43, since it is Ek-static. Merleau-Ponty, by the end of the chapter on time, summarizes it beautifully:
Ce qui est vrai seulement, c' est que notre existence ouverte et personnelle repose sur une première assise d'existence acquise et figée. Mais il ne aurait em être autrement si nous sommes temporalité, puisque la dialectique de l'acquis et de l'avenir est constitutive du temps44.
If in the Ek-static sense of a Spinozist or Aristotelic view, the passive level is always negative, in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty there seems to be a constitutive level inherent to Passive Synthesis.
Conclusion: Towards an ethical understanding of time and perception
The history of phenomenology, particularly Husserlian phenomenology, is the history of an attempt to make sense of the structure of reality, and at times a reflection on the possibility of speaking about such structure. In this sense, Husserl’s text has an experimental character. It is almost as if he had passed his career attempting to test different arguments and different possibilities to reach a conclusion regarding the question of structure. Most often, this discussion will be held under the rubric of phenomenological reduction, but as we go through Husserl’s work the methodological tool used to make sense of the issue changes dramatically.
Early on, Husserl seems to tune his argument to the song-structure of logical positivism, particularly the discussion on the nature of semantics and logic in Frege and the over-scientific approaches of French-Positivism. If we follow the introduction of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, we will see that it was not necessary, for Husserl, to abandon the idea of structure or even the idea of reality, to criticize the objectivism of positivistic sciences and philosophy. In fact, when Husserl adopts the idea of intentionality (which he will never really abandon) he points at a tension between the objectivity of external reference and the open character of constitution for external reference while holding some ground for more or less “adequate” modes of constitution. At first, this might seem contradictory. How does one sustain the possibility of speaking of a permanent structure of external reality, while defending an open character for the process of meaning-constitution?
Husserl himself was very honest about the limitations and inherently frustrating character of trying to account for dynamic and non-dynamic aspects of knowledge and constitution. But the problem of truth mattered a great deal for Husserl and his obsession with securing some ground for reason and to some grounding aspects to the process of constitution that would allow us, for example, not to point at the processes of meaning formation as only context-dependent and contingent. In the “Logical Investigations”, perhaps because of the aforementioned influence of Carnap, Husserl is still close to an almost objectivist and static understanding of consciousness and, specially, of reference. Though the notion of intentionality mitigates this objective orientation of early phenomenology, focusing on the operation of individual consciousness and the first person perspective, the tension between conditions of possibility for all perspectives and the attempt of pointing at elemental conditions for an object ‘q’ to be comprehended as ‘q’ remains.
It’s become commonplace to say that Husserl had defined, alongside Brentano, consciousness as consciousness of something. Though this is a vague statement, it indicates something important for the understanding of intentionality and the comprehension of the structure of consciousness in Husserl: it requires a reference point, an object that is something for consciousness. Where monism had found a direct immanence of nature which would be reflected by understanding, and Kant inserted a normative standpoint to bridge a gap between world and consciousness, Husserl finds an ideal unity between expression and indication which paves the way for the construction of a social framework. It is true that in the logical investigations the question of the construction of a social framework is not the main concern for Husserl and the subject of intersubjectivity is hardly brought into play from a social perspective, but the emergence of a self that becomes conscious of one’s own voice as a form of expressing the reality of external objects, and even inserting meaning on external objects, brings a social issue with it, which is the passage from singular forms of conceptualizations of reality into a manifold of conceptualizations. In that sense, Husserl replaces the problem of the gap between world and consciousness with a problem of super-imposition of a form of signification as dominant over others.
Merleau-Ponty connection of passivity and spontaneity, which we have investigated throughout this paper in his notion of representation, might offer an interesting way out of this imposition of a first-person perspective within phenomenology: if in being-in-a-situation there is a constitutive level that is passive, that is of being-affected, this level has direct consequences to our form of deciding about our situations in the world.
The position of the self, and the form in which one is affected by this force of temporalization that both constitutes and obliges the subject into decision is, one claims, an Ethical position. If subject is temporality45, we are at the same time affected by a flow of time and in the flow of time, and the consciousness of the reality of the world as such is not possible, or better yet, makes no sense, if it is not inserted in this time. Our being-passive is our being-affected by the flow of time and being helplessly constituted by it. We come into being and immediately into time. It is in this time that we invent ourselves as individuals, as members of a community, as supporters of this or that political doctrine. We choose, but the possibilities of our choice are given in time and by the situation in which we are inserted when we come into being.
Our decision process has a relationship with the past, but we choose now. The constituting level can be overcome, we can re-present the past and re-signify our experiences. Meanwhile, presentations also keep on re-constituting us. The relation that we have to the world has an intentional structure that presupposes a non-intentional condition that affect us before decision, that makes it possible for a decision to happen. There is a pre-objective present that is the basis for our freedom and to our possibility to invent a social being for ourselves - in order to have a world we must have first this un-welt, this quasi-world that serves as a beginning, as the development of a process of becoming that is intrinsically ethical and always in process.
