Time, Phenomenology of

Philosophers since the early Greeks have speculated on the nature of time, often with diverging views. Aristotle gave a clear and detailed definition of time, saying it represented a numerical measure of change between the past and the present. Plotinus later disagreed and saw time as more than counting and as related to eternity and the soul. Since then, philosophers such as Baruch de Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel have proposed a variety of approaches to understanding the nature of time.

The phenomenological attempt to understand time began early in the 20th century when Edmund Husserl developed the major precepts of phenomenology. Husserl believed one should study specific phenomena—love, death, time, and the like—divorced from the traditional scientific method of gathering and analyzing data. Because phenomena are perceived by the senses, it is inevitable that there will be confusion and a dilution of the true description of each phenomenon because of ingrained presuppositions and attitudes. To understand a phenomenon fully, it must be reduced to its essence, removing any natural attitudes about it, relying instead on a subjective approach. In the [Page 1297]case of time, this requires discarding any preexisting ideas concerning time as well as any scientific beliefs about the physicality of time. Any objective evidence of time at all has to be reduced to a relationship to consciousness, which in turn is defined by intentionality, a flow from the now to the new now. In a converse relationship, this also means that intentionality is basically time-consciousness, which originates with perception.

The first step on the way to understanding is to ask how a nonmaterial object such as time, viewed as a subjective phenomenon, can be made evident by a philosophical approach that opposes naturalism or objectivism, which our current technology and science embrace and have done so for more than 500 years.

Phenomenologists might respond that only by relying on a priori descriptions can one apprehend an explanation of the causes or purposes of elements. What then, is an a priori description of time? It is a concept of the living present, which implies another and more fundamental level of consciousness: the absolute flow of time-constituting consciousness, or the consciousness of immanent temporal objects. To study time from a phenomeno-logical point of view is to attempt to understand time not in terms of physics or mathematics, but solely to describe it in nonempirical, philosophical terms.

A simple way to introduce the phenomenology of time is to think of time as a fountain—not the physical construct that creates the fountain, but the beingness of the fountain that exists only while it is running and throwing water up in an arc. The water changes, but the fountain remains as a fountain because the water, in its successive iterations, retains the form of the fountain. This idea of retention is integral to the phenomenological understanding of time consciousness. Retention, for Husserl, is a deeper concept than simply keeping something in memory. Rather, it implies intentionality; not simply an echo, but a consciousness of the past. In this sense, the common metaphor for time as a river leads to some confusion about how we perceive time. If the metaphor is extended, then the river begins with a glacier or melting snow, which proceeds from mountain to valley to the sea and then ends in a different entity—the ocean. Yet time, in a phenomenological sense, cannot be said to have a beginning or end. Time simply is, as the fountain <>

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