Temporality, Stream of Consciousness and the I in the Bernau Manuscripts

LUIS NIEL

Tampere

Congreso; Annual Meeting of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology; 2009

Nordic Society for Phenomenology (NSOP)

The following article concentrates on the phenomenological analysis of the I carried out in two texts (No. 14 and 15) from Husserl’s Bernau Manuscripts. More precisely, it focuses on the relationship between this I to the stream of consciousness and on the problems which result from this relationship--for example, the relation of the I to time and its position in time, its ‘nature’ and possible intelligibility. By means of these shorts texts about time, the stream of consciousness, and the I, we will follow the trend of this phenomenological description, in order to underline some central phenomenological results. The following theses summarise the outcomes of our analysis: 1) The I as pole is a central and necessary pole of the stream of consciousness. 2) The I is not to be identified with the stream of consciousness, nor with a moment of it; the I is a necessary center of the concrete life of consciousness, which is found there (i.e. in the stream of consciousness). 3) The I as such is supra-temporal (i.e. it does not have a determined position in time (Zeitstelle) and it should not be reduced to its individuations; it ‘flows above’ the stream). 4) According to the phenomenological principles, the I must be given by intuition and described through reflection: out of this analysis arises an ‘object-I’. 5) However, this I, ‘objectualized’ through reflection, points to myself, to my own I itself, which is not really an object, but a primal-state-I (Urstand-Ich) or an ‘operating I’, a living center of every objectivity and every experiencing. 6) This original I discovered through phenomenological description, as self-identical content-less, is to be understood as ‘primal-I’ (Ur-Ich), i.e. as the ultimate level of I-ness (Ichlichkeit), as a necessary original ‘mine-ness’ or necessary life-‘subject’ of all my experiences, which should not be confused with other perspectives of the I, which arise from ‘higher’ phenomenological levels (e.g. the transcendental concrete ego). 7) This primal-I, in its phenomenological concreteness, is never alone as substrate in itself. On the contrary it is only given together with the original constituting stream of life (both of them making up the concreteness of original life), as a first, innermost and equally original primal-correlation between stream and I.