James Mensch

conciliation behind. How do the Ukrainians forgive the Russians for the famines they caused? How do the blacks reconcile themselves with the whites that were once their oppressors in South Africa? What of all the countries that suffered from German or Japanese occupation in the last world war: How do they forgive? How does one ask for forgiveness? These are the questions that occupied Derrida towards the end of his life. With the Pope asking forgiveness of the Jews and Clinton in Africa apologizing for slavery, Derrida decried the inflation in the concept of forgiveness. He remarks that were we “to accuse ourselves, in asking forgiveness, for all the crimes of the past against humanity … there would no longer be an innocent person on earth.”[i] Given its essentially Christian origins, “the ‘globalization’ of the concept of forgiveness,” he writes, “resembles an immense scene of confession in progress … a process of Christianization which has no more need for the Christian church.”[ii] The religious basis implicit in this process becomes clear when we reflect that in many cases the victims are no longer alive. They cannot forgive. Yet forgiveness primarily involves the victim and the offender. It is a face-to-face encounter that becomes impossible with the loss of either. “This,” Derrida remarks, “may be one of the reasons … why forgiveness is often asked of God. Of God … because, in the absence of the singularity of the victim who is sometimes no longer there to receive the request or to grant forgiveness, or in the absence of the criminal or the sinner, God is the only name, the name of the name of … the absolute substitute. Of the absolute witness”[iii] The religious notion, then, is that of God as “the absolute substitute.” Even when the victim has died and the criminal and the surviving witnesses have passed on, God, “the substitute,” will forgive

Having asked, “What, then, is time?” Augustine admitted, “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.” We all have a sense of time, but the description and explanation of it remain remarkably elusive. Through a series of detailed descriptions, Husserl attempted to clarify this sense of time. In my book, I trace the development of his account of our temporal self-awareness, starting with his early 1905-1909 lectures on time consciousness and proceeding through the 1917-18 Bernau Manuscripts, the Analyses of Passive Syntheses of the 1920’s and ending with the C, B and E manuscripts on time and instincts of the 1930s. Although my book covers all the stages of Husserl’s account of temporality, it is nonetheless systematic in its approach. It is organized about a number of basic topics in the theory of time and presents and critically appraises Husserl’s positions on the issues pertaining to each. • THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF TIME: Is time objective or subjective? Is it “out there,” a part of external reality or does it have a merely subjective existence, residing only in our memories and anticipations? Does Husserl’s “subjective” account presuppose ob-jective time? • THE “PRESENCE” OF THE PAST AS PAST: Memory, if it is to be distinguished from a direct, sensuous perception, must grasp the past as past. It must somehow “see” what no longer exists as no longer existing. The issue is: how do we do this? The same question arises with regard to our grasp through anticipation of the future as future. • THE TEMPORALITY OF OBJECTS: For Husserl, the apprehension of any sort of extended event, such as a melody, involves the synthesis of the “retentions” (the short term memories) of its notes and the anticipations these retentions awake in us. The question, here, is: what exactly is involved in this synthesis of retentions and anticipa-tions? How can these elements come together to present a single, individual object rather than presenting us with merely a collection of disparate presentations? In other words: How does temporal synthesis accomplish this presentation? • THE TEMPORALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Husserl asserts that consciousness, in placing its object in time also places itself in time. How does it do this? What is the relation between the consciousness that places itself in time and the consciousness that is placed in time? How do we unify them? • THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF TIME-CONSTITUTING PHENOMENA: Husserl claims that “time-constituting phenomena are evidently objectivities fundamentally different than those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them.” This assertion raises a number of questions about the ontological status of these time-constituting phenomena. If we cannot apply the predicates of individual objects to them, what is the nature of their being? Given that such phenomena com-pose the field of consciousness, what is the ontological status of consciousness? Furthermore, if our apprehension directs itself towards individual objects, how can our consciousness grasp the pre-individual, time-constituting phenomena that make it up? At issue here is the status of Husserl’s own descriptions of consciousness and the temporal process. Does his theory undermine the possibility of the evidence he presents for it? • THE RELATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE EGO: Our sense of self involves more than our consciousness, more than the memories, perceptions, and anticipations that give it its content. It involves our sense as the subjective referent of every act, as the person to whom the world appears, as the one who is affected by the world and who acts with regard to it. What is the relation of this sense of self to our time consciousness? How does the simultaneous constitution of consciousness and its object result in the presence of the I that is the subject of consciousness?

This study proposes a double thesis. The first concerns the Logische Untersuchungen itself. We will attempt to show that its statements about the nature of being are inconsistent and that this inconsis tency is responsible for the failure of this work. The second con cerns the Logische Untersuchungen's relation to the Ideen. The latter, we propose, is a response to the failure of the Logische Untersuchungen's ontology. It can thus be understood in terms of a shift in the ontology of the Logische Untersuchungen, a shift motivated by the attempt to overcome the contradictory assertions of the Logische Untersuchungen. In this sense our thesis is that, in the technical meaning that Husserl gives the term, the Logische Untersuchungen and the Ideen can be linked via a "motivated path. " We can, by way of an introduction, clarify our theses by regard ing three elements. The first is the relation of epistemology to ontology. The second is the notion of motivation as Husserl conceives the term. The third is the fundamental distinctions that are to be explained via the notion of motivation. 1. We should begin by remarking that the goal of the Logische Untersuchungen is explicitly epistemological; it is that of answer ing "the cardinal question of epistemology, the question concerning the objectivity of knowledge" (LU, Tub. ed. , I, 8; F. , p. 56V For Husserl, his other questions - i. e.

How do we relate animate to inanimate temporality? Animate temporality is teleological. Our present actions are determined by the future that we want to accomplish. The determining factor for inanimate objects, however, is what happened in the past. In the material world, the past determines what happens in the present. The paradox, then, is that of time supporting two different directions. How is this possible? The claim of my paper is that this paradox arises from trying to think of time apart from space. Space, I argue, provides the common framework that unifies the temporality of the animate and inanimate.

Hannah Arendt’s notion of public space is one of her most fruitful, yet frustrating concepts. Having employed it to analyze political freedom, she claims that such space has largely disappeared in the modern world. In what follows, I am going to argue that this pessimistic assessment follows from Arendt’s exclusion of labor and work from the public realm. Against Arendt’s claim that such activities are essentially private, I shall argue that they, like action, manifest our embodied being-in-the-world. When we think of public space in terms of our embodied presence, it becomes a concept applicable to modern democratic politics.

A striking feature of post-modernism is its distrust of the subject. If the modern period, beginning with Descartes, sought in the subject a source of certainty, an Archimedian point from which all else could be derived, post- modernism has taken the opposite tack. Rather than taking the self as a foundation, it has seen it as founded, as dependent on the accidents which situate consciousness in the world. The same holds for the unity of the subject. Modernity, in its search for a single foundation, held the subject to be an indissoluble unity. Post-modernism’s position, by contrast, is announced by Nietzsche: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? ...My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity.” Given this, there is a natural correspondence between the success of post- modernism and the current interest in multiple personality disorder. In the latter, we actually have the experience of a “multiplicity of subjects” in their interaction and struggle. The subject stands there before us “as multiplicity.” It gives us a concrete case, one which raises some of the pressing questions associated with the post-modern denial of the subject. Confronting it, we ask: how real are the personalities composing the multiplicity of this disordered self? What, in fact, does this multiplicity tell us about the self? about its genesis and status? What does it reveal about “our thought and consciousness in general”? I plan, in the short compass of this paper, to sketch some answers to these questions. §1. A brief description of MPD. The American Psychiatric Association gives two criteria for (MPD) multiple personality disorder. First, and most obviously, there is “the existence within the person of two or more distinct personalities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern

Socrates taught that philosophy begins with conversation, with the questioning and response that marks dialectic. This book also developed through a serious of conversations. Thus, acknowledgment is above all due to those with whom I shared and developed the themes of the present work. I am grateful, first of all, to Dr. Barabara Weber of the University of Regensburg, with whom I worked out the conceptions of the central chapter of this book, “Public Space, during a daylong conversation in Strasbourg. Dr. Michael Staudigl and I worked on the theme of violence during my stay at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. My gratitude goes out not just to Dr. Staudigl, but also to the Institute for its hospitality. I also would like to acknowledge Prof. Branko Kuln of the University of Ljubljana for the many insights he shared with me on the theme of politics and religion. I wish also to thank Prof. Ernst Hankammer of Bonn-Mehlen for his friendship and the many political discussions we have had over the years. Finally, I must express my gratitude to my wife, Josephine. Without her careful proofreading and suggestions for improving my text, it would not have reached its present form.

A constant theme in human self-reflection has been our ability to escape the control of nature. As Sophocles remarks in his Antigone, “Many are the wonders, none is more wonderful than what is man. He has a way against everything.”[1] A list follows of the ways in which man overcomes the limits imposed by the seas, the land, and the seasons. We do this by creating new environments for ourselves. These environments condition us. Thus, we do not just escape nature by building cities. We, in turn, become city dwellers. The fact that we determine ourselves by determining our world has led thinkers like Hannah Arendt to describe us as conditioned beings. In her words, “Men are conditioned beings because everything they come into contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” This includes “the things that owe their existence exclusively to men.” They too “constantly condition their human makers.” [2] Since Hegel’s time, such self-conditioning has been understood to include our very nature. Our ability to determine our environments, i.e., escape being determined by nature, has been taken to mean that our nature is our own creation. There are, in other words, no external limits to the freedom we have to determine who and what we are. This freedom, to put it paradoxically, is ground-less. There is nothing prior to it that determines it. “Freedom,” here, does not signify some nature or essence, but rather the lack of such. As Heidegger writes, “Freedom is the abyss (Ab-grund) of human existence (Dasein).” It is our character as ground-less beings.

In his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty explored the fact that we believe that perception occurs in our heads and, hence, assert that the perceptual world is in us, while also believing that we are in the world we perceive. In this article, I examine how this intertwining of self and world justifies the faith we have in perception. I shall do so by considering a number of examples. In each case, the object in itself will turn out to be neither within us nor outside of us, but rather at the intersection set by the intertwining. I will then turn to what this disclosure of this object reveals about human temporality and, indeed, about human being as a place that permits disclosure