John B. Brough

Temporality and Illness: A Phenomenological Perspective

In ordinary living, we are absorbed in the routine of our days, focused on objects that momentarily hold our attention, on tasks that must be done, and on a host of other activities that distract, delight, and sometimes disturb us. In the midst of this busy engagement, we scarcely give a thought to time. True, calendars are ubiquitous in our lives — How many days are left before Christmas? When does spring break begin? — and we consult our watches in anticipation of an appointment with the doctor or glance at the clock to see whether it is time to take our medicine. This common attending to time, however, is largely oblivious to the myriad ways in which time permeates our experience. All of the tasks and objects and activities that form the stuff of our daily lives are soaked with time. Collectively, they form the realm of temporality; and our consciousness of them, whatever else it may be, is timeconsciousness. We ourselves are not only beings in time but beings whose very fabric, mental and physical, is temporal. We compare our consciousness to a stream, and we know and feel that our bodies age. Both we, and the world we experience, are temporal through and through, though this remains, for the most part, veiled from us.

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)

The founder of the phenomenological movement is not known as an aesthetician, but he exerted decisive influence on a number of important philosophers of art working within that tradition. Furthermore, posthumous texts reveal that Husserl himself had important and interesting things to say about art and aesthetic consciousness, which, while not amounting to a full-blown aesthetic theory, chart directions in which one might be developed.

Notes on the Absolute Time-Constituting Flow of Consciousness

Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness is an effort to understand conscious life in its identity with temporal awareness. Central to this understanding is what Husserl called the “absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness.” This essay intends to serve as a partial primer for the flow and to discuss some of the difficult and perplexing questions that surround it. It begins by collecting evidence that Husserl distinguished three levels involved in time-consciousness: first, an ultimate or primal level, the absolute flow; second, the level of immanent temporal unities or experiences, such as acts, which the flow constitutes; and third, the level of transcendent objects in world time constituted by the acts. The essay then examines the connections among the levels, as well as the structure of the absolute flow that enables it to constitute both itself and immanent temporal experiences. This is followed by consideration of a series of issues concerning the flow, many of which arise from Husserl’s sometimes paradoxical statements about it. Among these: whether and in what sense the flow can be said to have a temporal character; the difficulties in finding a vocabulary suitable for describing the flow; whether the consciousness belonging to the flow is intentional in character and how it differs from the objectivating consciousness of acts such as perception; the sense in which the flow and what it constitutes are distinct but inseparable, and whether Husserl introduces needless complexity into consciousness by distinguishing between the absolute flow and the stream of experiences it constitutes in immanent time. The essay concludes with some reflections on the absolute flow as the living present or nunc stans, formulations that capture the constant and centering role of the flow in our conscious lives.

Image and Artistic Value

The difficulties facing the philosopher who wants to reflect on art today are daunting. In 1900, the aesthetician would have had to worry about paintings, which could be on canvas, on wooden panel, on walls in mural form, and on objects of use and decoration; or about works on paper, such as watercolors, drawings, and prints in various media; or about sculptures, which would be shaped by the artist himself or by his assistants in bronze, stone, wood, plaster, or wax. In all of these works, the visual image would enjoy pride of place. The dramatic changes on the picture plane and in sculptural form that began to occur shortly after 1900, although certainly posing difficulties for traditional philosophy of art, did not threaten the central role of the image in any fundamental way. The threat was not long in coming, however. In retrospect, one finds it in the Dada movement, and particularly in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the first of which was “produced” in 1913. The readymades, ordinary manufactured objects such as a snow shovel or urinal—selected by Duchamp, usually inscribed by him with some sort of title, and inserted into the context of the art world—are now widely taken to be works of art. The readymades and the Duchampian spirit they represent have had countless heirs in contemporary art. The readymades are, of course, visual objects, in the sense that one can see them, just as one can see any snow shovel. Whether or not they and their progeny, such as the works of conceptual artists, are visual images, however, is another matter.

Plastic Time: Time and the Visual Arts

In his Elements of Criticism, published in 1761, Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, advanced the view that “a picture is confined to a moment of time, and cannot take in a succession of incidents.”1 A few years later, Lessing, an admirer of Kaimes, drew a sharp distinction between the arts of time—poetry, above all—and the arts of space—painting and sculpture. “. . . Succession of time,” Lessing wrote in Laocoon, “is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter.”2 A few innocent incursions of one of these two sorts of art into the territory of the other might be tolerated, but the integrity of each finally depends on its keeping within its own bounds. Thus painting, if it seeks to include time at all, must present only a single moment of a body or bodies in action; and poetry, if it intends to paint a word-picture of an object whose features exist simultaneously in space, must do so by describing the temporally extended action by which the object came into being, as Homer did in the case of Achilles’ shield.

Picturing Revisited: Picturing the Spiritual

Robert Sokolowski writes in his essay on ‘Ticturing”1 that a cardinal thing we human beings do is to let things appear. This achievement of letting things appear takes many forms, and one of these is picturing.

The Curious Image: Husserlian Thoughts on Photography

This paper develops a Husserlian analysis of photography. Based on Husserl’s account of the constitution of images and image-consciousness, the photograph can likewise be understood as constituted according to the tripartite distinction image-thing, image-object, and image-subject. As this essay argues, however, the mechanical production of (traditional) photography is a mirror of memory that enjoys a special phenomenological relation to the past.