How can a passing moment belong to a whole?

What you will work out

• Distinguish present impression, retention of the just-past and protention of what is coming.
• Explain why retention differs from recollection and from a lingering sensory after-effect.
• Assess Husserl’s claim about the structure of temporal experience without treating it as a theory of clocks or a test of anyone’s capacities.

More than one thing after another

Suppose someone understands a short phrase as it is spoken. By the time the last word arrives, the first is no longer being said, yet the last word is heard as completing that phrase. The earlier words belong to what is being understood now, though they are no longer arriving now.

Putting the words in chronological order does not yet explain this. A recorder could register one sound after another, and we would still have said nothing about an experience of their succession. The philosophical question concerns a relation within the experience: how is the last word given as following the others?

If each moment of awareness contained only what was happening at that moment, with no relation to what had gone before, there would be no experienced passage from one word to the next, only a succession of isolated encounters. An account of understanding the phrase must explain how the encounters belong together while preserving their order. Making all the words sound at once would give us a different case. What needs explaining is how an earlier word can still belong to the experience as earlier.

Husserl approaches this problem through a melody and through simpler sequences of sounds. A temporal object is something whose unfolding belongs to what it is: a melody, for example, has its notes in an order, and does not merely happen to be encountered on a particular afternoon. His question is how such an object can be given as one event. The previous lesson called the connection through which something is experienced as a unity synthesis; here we examine its temporal structure.[1]

What has just passed

Husserl calls awareness of the phase arriving now primal impression. We can call it present impression, provided we do not confuse it with an opinion formed about the event: it is the giving of the current phase as current. As that phase passes, its relation to the now changes, and what was given as present comes to be given as just past.

Retention names this continuing awareness of what has just passed. When the next word arrives, the preceding word belongs to the experience as preceding; it has not become a second current word. The awareness is occurring now, but what it retains is given as having been.[1]

As the short sequence continues, its earlier phases recede together in an ordered relation, the first word becoming further past as the second becomes just past. Husserl describes a continuous modification: the earlier phase remains intended while its distance from the arriving now changes. Retention is therefore more than holding the last item until its replacement arrives; it preserves the passage from one phase to another. The retained event can also grow less distinct as it recedes, and this account supplies no fixed span within which everyone must retain the same detail.[1][7]

The distinction between present and just past can suggest two separate compartments, but Husserl’s account is of a continuous transition. Even a sustained note has phases: its beginning has passed while it goes on sounding. Take a shorter stretch of that sound and there is still an earlier part and a later one. The pure now is an ideal limit that analysis reaches, not a separate little experience that first exists alone and then acquires a past.[1]

Retention is intentional in the sense introduced in the first lesson: it is awareness of something in a particular way. Here the way is “as just past.” No decision to remember is required. What the distinction picks out is what makes the experience an experience of succession, rather than a chain whose members have no relation within awareness.

Why a fading sensation is not enough

A lingering sensation might seem to offer a simpler account. Perhaps the first sound remains weakly audible while the next one arrives, and this overlap holds the phrase together.

Husserl distinguishes retention from that case. A reverberating sound is still heard as sounding, however faintly, and an after-sensation, if there is one, is likewise a current sensory occurrence. Retention concerns the earlier sound as no longer now. A faint present sound and a loud sound retained as past therefore differ in more than intensity.[2]

A continuing reverberation and an awareness of the original sound as past could both be present, but their coexistence would not make them the same thing. To describe a sensation as an after-effect of an earlier event already involves a relation to that event; the after-effect’s current presence cannot, by itself, explain how the earlier event is given as earlier.

None of this denies that sensory processes have causes. It identifies what a causal account would still need to explain about the experience. Adding a weak sound to a strong one does not yet give us the relation “this followed that.” We have to account for their temporal positions, not merely for their presence or strength.

Perhaps, then, retention is a very quick act of recollection. Such an act could occur during a phrase, but it would itself unfold: its own phases would have to be experienced together, and its relation to the continuing phrase would still need explaining. Appealing to further acts of recollection for each of those connections would pass the same problem from one act to the next. It would not explain the connection on which recollection already depends.[4]

Husserl distinguishes the continuing awareness of the just-past from a new act that brings an earlier event back to mind. Retention does not have to wait for us to turn back toward the earlier word; it belongs to how the next word is encountered as next. A corresponding question points the other way: how can an event be experienced as still unfolding when its continuation has not arrived?

The next part has not yet arrived

An unfolding event can be experienced as going somewhere before its continuation is given. Protention is this orientation toward what is coming. It need not be a deliberate forecast or a clear picture of the next item: one may anticipate that a phrase will continue while leaving its next word unsettled. A familiar pattern can give that openness a more definite shape.[3]

Husserl calls the anticipation empty insofar as what is coming has not yet been given in perception, yet it can still have a definite direction. Expecting another part of a phrase is different from expecting one particular word to complete it. The horizon of the experience consists of possibilities implicated in it but not yet fully given, so within this case an open horizon and a definite forecast can be told apart.

Suppose a familiar sequence begins again and its ending is anticipated. If that ending arrives, the anticipation finds fulfillment: what was only anticipated is now encountered. If a different ending arrives, it may fulfill the more open anticipation that another part is coming while disappointing the particular expectation of what that part would be. The event goes on, but differently. The correction changes how it is understood; it does not remove the disappointed expectation from the history of the experience.

The same contrast separates expectation from evidence. Imagining a continuation can clarify what one is waiting for, but the continuation’s arrival plays a different role. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl distinguishes anticipative clarification from the further determination supplied by continuing perception, including determination as otherwise than expected.[3]

Retention, impression and protention are therefore distinguishable relations within an unfolding experience, not three separate acts that take turns occupying the present. What has passed, what is arriving and what is coming belong together without being given in the same way.

Remembering is another event

Later, someone recalls the sequence. Husserl calls this recollection, or secondary remembrance: an earlier event is brought back as previously experienced. The act of recollecting is happening now; the event recollected is not happening again merely because it is remembered.[4]

A recollection can itself unfold, and then there are two courses to keep track of. Within a remembered phrase, one part may be given as the part reached “now,” with other parts already passed or still to come. These are the temporal relations of the event as remembered.

The act of remembering has its own course as well, happening now: its earlier phases have just passed and its later phases are arriving, and retention belongs to this course too. The original event has not simply been held unchanged until the later recollection; a new act now presents it as past. Recollection therefore cannot replace retention as the explanation of temporal unity. The new act itself needs the connection between passing phases.[4]

A recollection need not replay an entire event. Husserl also describes a memory that emerges briefly or presents only a favored moment. What matters is the mode in which the past is given, not how long ago the event occurred, how vivid the memory is or whether the recollection was chosen.[4]

Recollection also raises a question about order. Remembering A and then remembering B is not yet remembering that B followed A; the two acts might occur in that order even if the original events did not. A memory of their succession must include the remembered relation between them. Husserl makes this point explicitly: the order of the present acts and the order presented as past must be distinguished.[4]

Anticipation can appear inside recollection too. Recalling a surprising ending, someone may remember having expected the familiar one while knowing now how the sequence actually ended. The remembered openness and the present knowledge are different features of the account, and a recollection need not put its subject back into complete ignorance of what followed.[5]

Does the example establish a necessity?

Husserl means these distinctions to reveal more than a convenient way of describing a melody. He argues that awareness of something as just past necessarily refers back to an impression, and that an experience of a temporal object must contain temporal differences within its own structure. A series of self-contained nows could not supply those differences. In Cartesian Meditations, he gives internal time-consciousness an even wider role, as the fundamental form through which conscious life is unified.[2][6]

This is an essential-structure claim: a claim about what an experience of the relevant kind must involve. Its force does not come from counting several phrases and finding retention in each of them. It comes from asking whether removing the relation to what has passed would remove the very experience of succession we were trying to explain. The previous lesson’s question about necessity returns here in a more definite form.

Locally, the argument is strong. One event can happen after another without being experienced as following it; if an experience does present that relation, an account containing only isolated current items has left something out. Husserl offers retention as an original awareness of the earlier phase in its passing, and protention as an openness to what is coming, not as judgments added to otherwise complete instants. His claim is that they belong to the constitution of temporal experience itself: to the connections through which an unfolding object can be given as such.[1][6]

But rejecting isolated nows does not, by itself, establish that Husserl’s account is the only possible account of those connections. A critic can accept that succession must somehow be given within the experience while asking what establishes this particular description of its structure. A familiar phrase has already been selected as something followed coherently, and its successful description cannot quietly become evidence that every experience is organized in the same way.

Anticipation makes the problem especially clear. An unfamiliar sequence might be experienced in its order without any particular ending being expected. That defeats the stronger claim that temporal experience always requires a determinate forecast, but it does not directly refute Husserl’s account, which allows protention to remain open. His reply distinguishes the claimed structure from one familiar form it takes. The question that remains is how to establish that even this more open orientation is indispensable, rather than simply finding it in the case we selected.

Husserl also analyzes the phases within a sustained sound, so removing a familiar pattern would not dispose of his whole argument. Even so, the step from these descriptions to his claim about all conscious life needs a warrant of its own, and a critic may press that step without returning to isolated nows or dismissing the local distinctions. Our stipulated cases, for their part, establish no general facts about everyone’s sensory, imaginative or recollective abilities.[7]

Nor has a physical clock been explained or corrected. We have been distinguishing the ways an event is given as current, past or coming; we have not measured its duration or established what controls a clock’s rate. And knowing how anticipation enters a short sequence does not tell us what someone should hope for, value or make of a life. Those questions need further premises.

Try the distinction

Imagine Rowan following a display that presents one word at a time, each word disappearing before the next appears. The first sequence is red — blue — red. The display then begins the same way again: red — blue. Rowan follows it as one unfolding sequence and expects red next. Instead, green appears, and Rowan recognizes the changed ending. Later, away from the display, Rowan recalls the second sequence as red — blue — green and remembers the surprise. Take these details as given; you do not need to perform or imagine the sequence yourself.

Explain how the earlier words belong to the experience when green arrives. Locate the disappointed anticipation, and distinguish retention from a possible after-sensation. Explain what changes when Rowan later recollects the sequence, including the difference between recalling its order and merely having recollections one after another. Assess what the case supports, and offer an objection or an alternative description where it allows one. Does it settle either the speed of a clock or Rowan’s priorities in life? You may read the answer without writing a response.

A possible response

When green arrives, Rowan encounters it as the ending of the second sequence. Red and blue are no longer on the display, yet they belong to the experience as the parts green follows. On Husserl’s account, present impression concerns green’s arriving phase, while retention preserves the earlier phases as past. Their order matters: this was red followed by blue, not an unordered collection of words.

The disappointed anticipation belongs to the last word. The first sequence gives the expectation its context, but its existence alone would not prove that Rowan expected a repetition; the case tells us that Rowan did. Just before the last word appears, the particular anticipation is directed toward red in that final position, and when green appears instead, that anticipation is disappointed. The more open anticipation of a continuation is fulfilled: there is another word. What arrives corrects the expected content without turning the earlier red or blue into different words or erasing Rowan’s expectation.

Retention also has to be kept apart from a possible after-sensation. If Rowan had a lingering sensory impression after a word vanished, that would need its own description, and its mere persistence would not explain why the vanished word is experienced as past. A present after-sensation and retention of the earlier word could coexist. But the case does not tell us that an after-sensation occurs, and the explanation should not invent one to do retention’s work.

The later recollection is a new act concerning the second sequence. Rowan may go through its parts again in memory, but this does not put those words back on the display; the remembered green is given as an earlier ending. The act of remembering now has its own beginning, continuation and passing phases, and retention connects the phases of this act too. The recollection is neither the original sequence occurring again nor the original retention simply lasting until Rowan turns attention to it. If it unfolds part by part, its present course and the remembered event’s course must both be described.

Recalling the order is different from having recollections one after another. Suppose Rowan first recalled green and only afterward recalled red: the order of those recollections would not establish that green originally preceded red. A recollection of the sequence must include which word followed which. Successive acts of recollection therefore cannot, merely by succeeding one another, explain either the original experience of succession or its later recollection.

Rowan can remember the disappointed expectation of red while recalling now that green appeared. There is no contradiction between knowing the ending now and having been surprised then; indeed, changing the remembered anticipation to green would lose the surprise the case specifies. The distinction does not make all recollection accurate. It explains what this stipulated recollection is about.

Whether Rowan also silently formulated “red comes next” is left open, and here an alternative description is possible. Such a judgment could make the anticipation explicit, but it would not replace the connections through which that judgment and the arriving word belong to one experience. The story permits a description that includes this extra act and one that does not, and neither warrants identifying all protention with deliberate prediction. A sequence with no definite expected ending would challenge that identification without automatically defeating an account of more open anticipation.

What, then, does the case support? It gives Husserl’s account something definite to explain: Rowan experiences the words as following one another, which isolated current items would leave unexplained. That is a reason to take the account seriously, but not yet a demonstration that these distinctions provide the only possible account, or that they have the universal reach Husserl claims. A defensible response can reconstruct his argument and still dispute that further step.

The case settles neither the speed of a clock nor Rowan’s priorities. Nothing in this description determines the display’s measured timing or a clock’s rate. Knowing that Rowan anticipated red also gives no reason to say what Rowan should value or pursue. Explaining the anticipation of a word supplies no standard for choosing among a person’s purposes.

One question remains. This experience and this recollection belong to Rowan, yet the sequence they concern need not be Rowan’s private object. How can an experience belong to one person without making what it intends a private object? The next lesson takes up that problem.[6]

Sources and limits

[1] Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, translated by James Churchill (1964), as selected in Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, eds., The Phenomenology Reader (Routledge, 2002), pp. 109–123, for impression, retention and experienced succession. The section sign (§) marks a numbered section. §§11 and 16, pp. 109–110 and 114–116, explain impression, retentional modification and the perception of a temporal whole; §18, pp. 117–118, examines experienced succession. Page references here are to the anthology, whose credit line names pp. 50–80 of the Churchill volume; they are not a page-by-page concordance with that volume.

[2] The time selection, §§12–13, pp. 110–112, for retention as distinct from after-effects and for the precedence of impression. §12 distinguishes retention from reverberation and after-images. §13 argues for the necessary precedence of impression over retention; it also distinguishes having perceived an object from establishing that the external object existed. The lesson does not turn that argument into a claim that every report of the past is infallible.

[3] The time selection, §14, p. 113; §16, p. 114; and §24, pp. 120–121, supply the clear terminology of protention. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns (Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), §§19–20, pp. 44–49, develops horizons and their explication; page 45 distinguishes imagined clarification from fulfillment and possible correction in continuing perception. The changed ending is this lesson’s application of those distinctions.

[4] The time selection, §§14–18, pp. 112–118, for recollection. §14 distinguishes the remembered event from the present act of remembering; §15 allows both brief recollection and an unfolding recapitulation. §§16–17 use “perception” in two senses: narrowly, for awareness of what is now, and more broadly, for the direct giving of an event, including its just-past phases. In the broader sense, retention belongs with perception, and both differ from bringing the event back in recollection. §18 distinguishes a memory of succession from successive memories; its claims about recollection at will are not adopted here as general facts about people’s capacities.

[5] The time selection, §§24–26, pp. 120–123, for anticipation within recollection. §24 distinguishes the original anticipation from its modification in recollection. §25 places recollection within a temporal context rather than treating it as an isolated duplicate. §26 distinguishes the fulfillment of expectation through perception from the clarification of recollection, and separates the question of what was experienced from the reality of the appearing thing. Rowan and the word display are original teaching cases, not Husserl’s examples.

[6] Cartesian Meditations, §18, pp. 41–43, with its notes, read in the context of §§19–20, for the wider role of time-consciousness. Husserl distinguishes the temporality of the appearing object from that of its appearing, and gives internal time-consciousness a fundamental role in synthesis. The author’s marginal note on p. 43 says that further supplementation concerning intersubjective time is needed. “Intersubjective” concerns the relation among subjects; a shared temporal order cannot simply be inferred from the account of one stream of experience, and the present lesson leaves that further problem open.

[7] The anthology’s displayed selection contains §§11–19 and §§24–26. Section 19 is abridged, and §§20–23 are absent; none of their omitted arguments is reconstructed here. At the end of the selection, note 1 concerns a diagram not reproduced in these pages and considers an ideal possibility of unrestricted retention; it supplies no empirical measure of memory. Note 2 refers to §19 without supplying its omitted text. The doubtful word “protection” printed on p. 115 is neither used as evidence nor silently corrected; the clear passages identified in note 3 supply the relevant term. The objection about the example’s reach and the assessment of Rowan’s case are this lesson’s own reasoning. The source supplies neither an empirical memory test nor a rule for how anyone ought to live.