Abstract

The theme of this dissertation is to investigate the cognition of objects in time. As a preliminary, a three-way distinction is drawn within consciousness between inwardly directed receptive subjectivity, outwardly directed spontaneous subjectivity, and reflexive or lateral subjectivity. The latter is identified as a distinct but accompanying form of conscious awareness. ;Next, perception is discussed as an act which intends objects through the direct intuition of their sensible or perceivable attributes. These attributes are distinguished from the objects that bear them and from the real structures in which they are grounded by the fact that they represent simple, unitary phenomena which are whole and complete whenever they are encountered--as opposed to the object itself which is never given wholly and completely in any conscious act. ;In Part Two, memory is discussed as a "reactivation" of past experiences and distinguished from retention as a phase within the act of perception itself. Two forms of memory are considered: "active" memory, which makes past experiences available to the mind as a background to present consciousness; and recollection, in which we reanimate past experiences to gain access to former intentional objects. ;In Part Three we return to the problem of the cognition of temporal objects, and Husserl's theory that we retain earlier phases of a perception while experiencing later phases is critically discussed. The structure of time is investigated and the restriction of all intuitive actuality to the present moment is distinguished from the metaphysical actuality which the past continues to possess as the ontological basis for the present. Finally, the phenomenon of retention is explained as consisting in the discrepancy between the presence to the mind of the unitary data of our intuition and the presence to the act of perception of the objective structures upon which the experience of those data is founded