130 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012) 117–153

Temporality, Transcendence, and Difference: Some Reflections on Nicolas

de Warren’s Husserl and the Promise of Time
Nicolas de Warren. Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcen-
dental Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi +
309 pp.

A number of commentaries focused on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of

time-consciousness have appeared recently, among them studies by Toine Kor-
tooms, James Mensch, Luis Niel, and the work that is the subject of this
review, Nicolas de Warren’s Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in
Transcendental Phenomenology. Each has its virtues. The strength of de War-
ren’s work lies in its meditative reflection on the nuances of Husserl’s position
and the significance of the awareness of time for Husserl’s phenomenology as
a whole. De Warren is concerned with setting forth Husserl’s account of how
the consciousness of temporal passage is possible and with examining the ways
in which temporality is fundamental to the constitution of the life of the tran-
scendental subject, a focus that takes the reader straight to the heart of Hus-
serlian phenomenology. Time-consciousness, de Warren argues, is not one
phenomenological issue among many; it is the foundational issue, presumed
in one way or another by all the others.
Phenomenology, the author reminds the reader, is a matter of seeing or
intuiting. This is particularly the case in the study of time-consciousness.
While struggling with a set of particularly thorny temporal phenomena in
1911, Husserl wrote that “one can say nothing further here than ‘look’ ” (Hua
X: 77).1 This is a compelling injunction and one that should be heeded, but
Husserl was well aware that matters of temporality play hide-and-seek with
the philosopher’s gaze, which is why he described the “wonder” of time-
consciousness as the most difficult of all phenomenological problems. It takes
peculiar effort to bring the deepest reaches of temporal constitution to evi-
dence and to find adequate words in which to express them. De Warren suc-
ceeds admirably at this task, at least as far as the temporal phenomena
themselves permit. These phenomena include the interlocking dimensions of

1)
Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed.
R. Boehm. Husserliana X (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966); hereafter cited as Hua X; trans-
lated by J. Brough as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917),
vol. 4 of Husserl, Collected Works (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/156916412X628784
 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012) 117–153 131

transcendent temporal objects, particularly objects of perception; immanent

temporal objects (acts of consciousness and sensory contents); and what Hus-
serl referred to as “the absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness”
(Hua X: 73). The latter is the ground of time-consciousness and self-awareness
and, therefore, the “ultimate foundation or origin” (252) of conscious life.
Wisely, I think, de Warren does not follow Husserl’s lead (or perhaps the lead
of Edith Stein, who was the first editor of Husserl’s early texts on time) in
referring to these three dimensions involved in time-consciousness as “levels”
(Stufen [Hua X: 73]). There has been considerable debate among his commen-
tators about whether Husserl in fact meant to claim that time-consciousness
deploys itself on three distinct levels of awareness, or if he did, just what the
division means and whether it is defensible. De Warren does not overtly take
a stand in this debate. He does, however, bring the differences into play by
referring to them, felicitously, as “structural distinctions” rather than levels.
He thus avoids stratifying consciousness and interpreting the deepest reaches
of self-awareness in terms of the act/object distinction, which is perfectly suit-
able for understanding the relation between acts and transcendent objects or
between reflecting acts and reflected acts, but as an account of self-consciousness,
leads inevitably to an infinite regress. I take his notion of structural distinct-
ness to mean the discrimination of moments that, within the whole that is
consciousness, stand in inseparable relation to one another and mutually con-
stitute conscious life in its variety and depth. On de Warren’s reading, time-
consciousness is the intertwining awareness of transcendent objects, immanent
objects, and the absolute time-constituting consciousness itself.
De Warren does not pretend to offer an exhaustive account of the devel-
opment of Husserl’s thought about the experience of temporality. He con-
centrates on the notes and lectures published in Husserliana X, which come
mainly from 1905 through 1911, and on the Bernauer Manuscripts from 1917
and 1918, published in Husserliana XXXIII, and on other material from the
same periods. He touches on Husserl’s final reflections on time-consciousness,
found mainly in the C-Manuscripts from the late twenties and the early to
mid-thirties, only in passing. While one might want to hear more about Hus-
serl’s last thoughts on the topic, it is reasonable to claim that the key issues
and positions involved in Husserl’s analysis were in place and had matured by
1918, and that de Warren’s neglect of the C-Manuscripts does not undermine
his conclusions. Furthermore, he says enough about Husserl’s developing
analysis of temporality to show that its zigs and zags are philosophically sig-
nificant and not of merely historical interest. His discussion of Brentano, for
example, is unusually thorough and revealing, drawing not only from Husserl’s
132 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012) 117–153

presentation and criticism of his mentor’s position but also from Brentano’s
own texts. He points to the latter’s innovative notion of “proteraesthesis,” which
literally means the perception or sensation of the immediate past, specifically
in relation to what is being sensed as now. Unfortunately, in his developed
account of the consciousness of temporal succession, Brentano departs from
the literal meaning of proteraesthesis and substitutes the imagining of what is
just past for the perceiving of it. One thus perceives the now-point, but only
imagines the immediate past in the form of a phantasm “originally” associated
with and attached to the perceived now. Time-consciousness would thus be an
amalgam of perception and imagination, and one would not actually perceive
the succession or duration of temporal objects. One would perceive the now-
point of a melody, for example, but not the melody in its temporal extension.
Husserl, on the other hand, while agreeing with Brentano that the conscious-
ness of succession requires an awareness of the immediate past together with
the perception of the now, insists that the consciousness of what is just past is
perceptual, not the product of imagining or of remembering in its usual sense
of recalling the more distant past. Husserl had come to understand by 1905
that every perception includes what he initially called a “primary memory”
of what is just past, and that this primary memory, as opposed to ordinary or
secondary memory, has a perceptual character. De Warren also observes that,
thanks to William Stern’s notion of “mental presence-time,” Husserl came
to see that the act of perceiving a succession must itself be successive, that
is, must be temporally distended. Again, this represented a critical departure
from Brentano’s view that the imaginational and perceptual “contents” that
make the consciousness of temporal succession possible must be simultane-
ously present in the actual moment of time-consciousness. Husserl argued, to
the contrary, that Brentano’s phantasms, the supposed surrogates of the past
deposited like eggs in the present, could not in fact be apprehended as past
because they were actually there in the present moment of consciousness just
as much as the perceptual contents.
Husserl had therefore reached a position early in the last century according to
which temporally extended objects—melodies, trains arriving in stations, and
so on—are genuinely perceived and are apprehended in temporally extended
acts. He had also established that successive or enduring objects are grasped
in their temporal extension by three inseparable time-constituting moments
belonging to each phase or slice of the distended perception: original impres-
sion, which intends the now phase of the transcendent object; primary memory,
later called “retention,” which is perceptual rather than imaginative conscious-
ness of the object’s just-past phases and is therefore the genuine proteraesthesis
 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012) 117–153 133

that escaped Brentano; and protention, the immediate awareness of what is

yet to come. De Warren refers to these moments as collectively forming a
threefold “declension.” “Conjugation” might be a more appropriate metaphor
than “declension,” however, since these three time-constituting moments are
instances of intentionality and therefore more “verbal” than “nominal.” They
involve some degree of activity accompanied by inflections of tense. “Conjuga-
tion” also suggests connection and synthesis, which, as de Warren rightly notes,
join intentionality as essential aspects of time-consciousness.
While the perceptual act intends a transcendent temporal object, the act is
a temporal “object” in its own right, though an immanent one. Furthermore,
we are aware of it in its temporality. As de Warren puts it, “the consciousness
of an object in time is at the same time a consciousness of oneself as experienc-
ing time” (110). It is at this juncture that Husserl’s analysis becomes less trans-
parent and more complex, but also richer. The awareness one has of one’s acts
in their temporality is a form of nonobjectivating self-consciousness. It is not
itself a perceptual act, nor is it an act of reflection. It is a matter of erleben or
“experiencing,” which is the term Husserl commonly uses for the nonobjecti-
vating awareness we have of our immanent acts and sensory contents. The act
of consciousness that is experienced or “erlebt” is an Erlebnis or “lived experi-
ence,” in de Warren’s translation. Objects in the plenary sense are perceived or
imagined or remembered, not experienced. They can be enduring or succes-
sive temporal items in the world, such as people or events, or they can be ideal
objects, omnitemporal or transtemporal, such as works of art (within limits)
or mathematical theorems. The acts intending them, on the other hand, are
not perceived, except in a reflection that one might or might not undertake.
They are, however, experienced; in living through them we are conscious of
them nonobjectively as immanent temporal unities.
How is the awareness of the immanent act constituted? What are the struc-
tural distinctions that make it possible? Husserl’s response is that it is the
absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness that accounts for the prere-
flective and nonobjectivating awareness I have of my own acts. De Warren
argues that when Husserl first began struggling with the idea of an absolute
consciousness, he conceived of it along the lines of the objectivating model of
perception. His early and tentative efforts to capture the distinction between
the flow and the immanent acts it constitutes, as de Warren nicely formulates
it, “mirrors structurally the distinction between constituting act and consti-
tuted (transcendent) time-object” (137). It is this mirroring, however, that
raises the specter of an infinite regress, something Husserl himself realized. If
the absolute consciousness were itself a kind of perception and therefore an
134 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012) 117–153

act, it would be a constituted object in immanent time, just like the acts it
constitutes, and it would have to be constituted by a still deeper “constituting
act of absolute consciousness” (203), and so on, without end. No amount of
clear-eyed phenomenological “looking” could solve that problem. One might,
of course, attempt to escape the regress by claiming that the absolute con-
sciousness does its constitutional work unconsciously, behind a curtain, as it
were. But it would be odd, de Warren observes, to find something altogether
unconscious at the very foundation of conscious life. Husserl’s early attempts
to explain our awareness of immanent acts and contents accordingly left him
with what de Warren aptly describes as “an impossible puzzle.”
De Warren thinks that Husserl solved the puzzle (“solving” here should not
be confused with making all the puzzle pieces and their connections dazzlingly
clear) through his mature notion of retention, which appeared toward the end
of the first decade of the last century. De Warren’s careful analysis of retention
is thoughtful and rich in detail and makes an important contribution to the
understanding of Husserl’s position. While Husserl had earlier made primary
memory either a part of an act or a component of the absolute consciousness
still conceived on the pattern of an act, his mature view takes it to be an expe-
riencing moment that, along with original impression and protention, belongs
to each phase or Querschnitt (slice or cross-section) of the absolute flow. With
this structural realignment, the term “retention” largely replaces “primary
memory” in Husserl’s texts.
According to this new conception, retention enjoys a “double intentional-
ity”; that is, it is conscious of the just-past phases of an immanent object, such
as an act of perceiving or judging, but also of the elapsing phases of the flow
itself: “absolute time-consciousness,” de Warren writes, “retains itself and is
itself retaining” (203). Husserl seems to have developed the idea of retention’s
double intentionality from his understanding of the double intentionality of
ordinary memory. My memory of a loud noise made by a folding chair falling
to the floor at a meeting in Paris two years ago involves awareness of both the
noise and my original perception of the noise. My memory of a past event can
only occur because I can become aware of the past segment of my conscious
life in which I originally encountered it. Robert Sokolowski pointed out this
connection between Husserl’s conception of the double intentionality of
memory and retention some years ago,2 but de Warren does a fine job of
expounding and developing it.

2)
Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974),
153, 157.
 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012) 117–153 135

An ordinary memory, of course, is an independent, constituted conscious

act. Retention, as a dependent moment of the constituting flow, is not. The
flow, its phases, and their three intentional moments of original impression,
retention, and protention do not begin and end as acts do, and they do not
appear as one object or unity constituted among many in immanent time. The
double intentionality of retention is therefore not a case of one constituted act
intending an elapsed act and its object, as happens in memory. Ordinary
memory is the consciousness of an already constituted episode of conscious
life that is complete and no longer continuous with the present. Retention is
the consciousness of earlier phases of the flow and what they intend in their
process of elapsing. De Warren stresses Husserl’s insistence that retention is an
“intentional relation of phase of consciousness to phase of consciousness”
(Hua X: 333), not an unmediated consciousness of an elapsed object, whether
immanent or transcendent. It is through the retention of elapsing phases of
the flow of consciousness that one can be conscious of elapsing objects. Reten-
tion, and protention as well, understood as the intentional relation of phase of
consciousness to phase of consciousness, ensures that the flow is aware of itself.
This solves the puzzle of the infinite regress. No deeper consciousness is needed
to account for my awareness of the absolute flow: the flow simply is the
awareness of itself in its flowing. It is the ultimate origin and foundation of
itself and of the constituted intentional acts and objects that make up our
conscious lives.
In retention, one lives in the midst of the creation of an act. In ordinary
memory, one goes back to what has already been created, a fully constituted
act and its object. Retention, as a moment of the absolute consciousness,
together with original impression and protention, is the source of acts, includ-
ing the act of ordinary remembering. There is also a further sense, de Warren
notes, in which retention is foundational with respect to memory. He stresses
the distinction between “near” retention, the retaining of the immediately
elapsed phases of consciousness and what they intend—the act of perceiving I
am now living through, for example—and “far” retentions, the completely
empty retaining of what has faded away into the oblivion of the distant past.
Far retention constitutes “an original forgetting and sedimentation” (256),
which make possible ordinary memories of the slumbering past. Forgetfulness
and memory form a pair, the latter presupposing and overcoming the former,
with both depending on retention.
De Warren offers other important insights into Husserl’s position. One
concerns the openness of time-consciousness. This is already implied in the
idea that the absolute flow is not an act, and therefore not something with a
136 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012) 117–153

temporally individuated and limited being. The flow is instead an open pro-
cess: open through protention to what is to come but not yet determined;
open through original impression to the present, which is the decisive moment
of fulfillment; and open through retention to the immediate past, which has
been decided but whose wake shapes the consciousness of the present and of
the immediate future. Thanks to this openness, the flow is not trapped in the
consciousness of the present, a condition that would make it a dead rather
than a living present. It is true, as de Warren observes, that the living present
is “standing” in the sense that it always embraces the retained, the impression-
ally given, and the protended, but it never possesses them in stagnant form.
On the contrary, it is always “streaming.” What is given as now or just past or
just coming perpetually changes (119). The original impression is “the renewal
of consciousness itself ” (128). The now of which it is aware is the place where
novelty erupts (267), the locus of ceaseless renewal (266), and therefore “of an
ever renewed sense of the difference between past and future” (257).
De Warren notes that in Husserl’s early investigations of temporal experi-
ence much is said about retention and relatively little about protention and
the dynamic interweaving of retention, protention, and original impression.
In the Bernauer manuscripts from 1917 and 1918, however, Husserl widens
the discussion of protention and shows that the three constitutive moments
of the absolute flow are caught up in perpetually changing relationships of
filling and emptying. It is important to realize that in these relationships the
three moments do not succeed one another temporally. They are, rather, given
together in or as the phase of the absolute consciousness. Original presenta-
tion is the moment of the flow in which empty protentions are fulfilled. It
is an “ ‘edge consciousness’ lodged within the entwinement of retention and
protention” (195). It fulfills, but also stands between two moments marked
by different degrees of emptiness. Protention, like retention, has near and far
forms. Near protention finds its fulfillment in original impression. Original
impression, which may also be described as fulfilled protention, has the des-
tiny of immediately and inevitably fading away in the gradual emptying-out
that marks retention. In emptying the original impression, retention shows
itself to be a “counter intentionality,” as de Warren describes it, fulfilling the
destiny of original impression by emptying it, thus constituting the original
givenness of absence. In the process, what is retained motivates “the contin-
ued protentional intention of the now-yet-to-come” (196). In de Warren’s
succinct formulation, Husserl conceives of “original time-consciousness as
an ‘intertwining’ or ‘weave’ of retentions and protentions” (194). This inter-
play of fulfillment and emptying is the key to understanding the metaphor
of the “flow.”
 Review Articles / Research in Phenomenology 42 (2012) 117–153 137

A many-faceted motif running throughout the book, which de Warren

develops very nicely, is the absolute flow’s character as self-transcending, self-
differentiating, and self-unifying. Thanks to the threefold intentionality of
original impression, retention, and protention, time-consciousness transcends
itself toward present, past, future. Since at its origin time-consciousness is the
absolute flow, this transcendence is self-transcendence. Consciousness is not
an unannounced flash of presence leaving no residue. If it were, it could not
be self-aware or aware of anything else. To be conscious, whether of oneself or
of objects that are not oneself, is to meld presence with absence. The absolute
flow can be the origin and foundation of conscious life in all of its temporal
and substantive variety only by “escaping itself,” by always “being too late for
itself ” in retention and, in protention, being “too early for itself in so far as it
anticipates itself, and, in this manner, takes itself to be what it is not yet”
(255–56). Husserl’s absorption of absence into the heart of consciousness is
his recognition that the absence of myself to myself is fundamental to
being a self.
One can also express the self-transcendence of the flow, de Warren notes,
as self-differentiation: I transcend myself toward what I will be but am not
yet, toward what I have been but am no longer, and toward the objects
that I am not. My being is stretched across time and replenished in ever-
new nows. Through this constant self-differentiation and renewal, I strive to
become myself. This striving, in de Warren’s judgment, “is the true hope, or
promise, of time” (290). But it is not solipsistic. Time-consciousness is the
“origin of consciousness in its essential constitution as ‘other-directed’ and
‘self-directed’ ” (273). Through time-consciousness and its self-transcendence
and self-differentiation, I manifest myself as subject and also display the world
and its time.
There is much more in de Warren’s investigation than I have been able to
discuss here. He has interesting things to say, for example, about the connec-
tion between genetic phenomenology and time, and about Derrida and Hus-
serl on temporality. Although the book is not always easy reading, it will richly
reward the Husserlian scholar who gives it the time it deserves.

John B. Brough
Georgetown University
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