According to the deliberative view of democracy, the legitimacy of democratic politics is closely tied to whether the use of political power is accompanied by a process of rational deliberation among the citizenry and their representatives. Critics have questioned whether this level of deliberative capacity is even possible among modern citizenries--due to limitations of time, energy, and differential backgrounds--which therefore calls into question the very possibility of this type of democracy. In my dissertation, I counter this line of criticism, arguing (...) that deliberative democrats and their critics have both idealized the wrong kind of citizen deliberation. Citizen deliberation should not be concerned with the indeterminate project of "translating" abstract democratic principles and values into everyday cases of political problem-solving. Instead, deliberation should take the form of analogy, just as we already find it in everyday politics and affairs. When ordinary citizens use analogies, they do not derive decisions from general principles or values, but they still reason nonetheless. Seen from this analogical perspective, deliberative democracy is already a practical reality to a large degree. When an election is on the horizon, a campaign season arises in which debates, forums, and "barstool" dialogues exponentially increase the amount of citizen deliberation. In these settings, citizens can readily be seen to be mapping analogous past candidates, elections, issues, and problems onto those currently on the ballot so as to reason about them. Consequently, analogical reasoning allows citizens to treat the majority rule mechanisms that proliferate in real politics as "deliberative outlets," which is to say, as catalysts of deliberation akin to the "creative outlets" that catalyze self-expression in the arts. While citizens may recognize majority rule mechanisms as catalysts of deliberation, many democratic theorists will hesitate to embrace this vision of the practical reality of deliberative politics. Isn't analogical reasoning too low in rigor to be placed at the heart of the deliberative ideal? I develop two arguments to explain the foundational role analogy plays in deliberation and to counter such critics. First, I draw on the explosion of research on analogical reasoning over the past two decades to show that it is far more rigorous and systematic than many suppose. Second, I argue that to the extent that citizen deliberation is concerned with rational planning, rather than just reasoning in general, analogical reasoning is logically superior. When we reason about what to do, we make plans that incorporate predictions about what is likely to ensue when a given course of action is selected. However, as soon as predictions enter into deliberation, its underlying logic changes as well. The reason for this change in logic is that as our probabilistic reasoning expands, the probability of its conclusions degenerates. Therefore, when assessing probabilities, we no longer should seek decisions derived from long, elegant chains of reasoning that connect our various options to generalities like values and principles. Instead, what we need is "short and sweet," or terse, humble lines of reasoning, which are more congruent with this form of deliberation. Thus, to the extent that democratic deliberation is involved in rational planning, it calls not for the elegant, deductive kind of reasoning idealized by proponents and critics of deliberative democracy alike. Instead, democratic deliberation calls for the "short and sweet," analogical kind of decision-making we associate with ordinary citizens already. After all, as research has shown, analogies are a much preferred and rigorous way by which even experts engage in probabilistic reasoning. By focusing on analogical reasoning, I therefore conclude that the practical reality of deliberative democracy should be recognized in ways that might ordinarily be dismissed. (shrink)

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of the relationship between regret and episodic memory, the temporal structure of ‘regretful memory’, the affective and evaluative dimension of regretful memory and the counterfactual dimension of regretful memory. Based on Husserl’s phenomenology, I offer an analysis of regret’s complex structures of intentionality and time-consciousness. Husserl held that episodic memory requires two temporal orientations on one’s own experience: the past now that one relives and the present now in which one does the reliving. If (...) memory generally entails two temporal perspectives, regretful memory brings in a third point of temporal reference: that now that could have been. Drawing on Hoerl and McCormack, I give an account of regret as a mnemic and counterfactual form of intentional consciousness that confronts an alternative past and attempts to negotiate between two essential yet conflicting features of its actual past: its contingency and its irreversibility. On this basis, I then draw on Bagnoli to offer a phenomenological theory of regretful memory as an emotional mode of valuing possibilities that belong to the past. (shrink)

Although there has been a great deal said about Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, little attention has been specifically paid to future-consciousness. This article gives an Husserlian account of future-consciousness. It begins by arguing that protention should be understood as a future-directed version of retention and so that future-consciousness should be understood as perception. This account is developed in two ways: the future need not be determinately given in protention and so future-consciousness can be vague; cases when the future turns out (...) to be other than we perceived it to be can be understood as temporal illusions. This account of future-consciousness both illuminates some of Husserl’s more obscure remarks on time-consciousness and provides a means of understanding an often neglected phenomenon of independent philosophical interest: our awareness of the future. (shrink)

In an effort to reassess the status of Phenomenology of Perception and its relation to The Visible and the Invisible, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's text and his discussion of the “field of presence” in La temporalité are intended to think through the field in which time makes its appearance as one of passage. Time does not show itself as presence or in the present but manifests itself as Ablauf, as lapse or flow, an écoulement that is (...) simultaneously an explosion, an éclatement. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in these pages is thus legible as recovering the primordial experience of time as a self-differentiating déhiscence in its dual power of articulation and erosion. Time is thus simultaneously the vehicle of the world's appearance and of its “disarticulation”, the passage of a rhythm of affirmation and disintegration. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in Phenomenology of Perception is oblique, somewhat fragmentary and circuitous.11 References to Merleau-Ponty's works cite the French followed by the English translation. I will use the abbreviation PhP for Phenomenology of Perception and VI for The Visible and the Invisible. Other texts by Merleau-Ponty will be referenced by the title. References to Husserl and Heidegger use the German followed by the translation. I will use the abbreviations ZB for the Zeitbewußtsein lectures; FT for Formale und transzendentale Logik; EU for Erfahrung und Urteil; and SZ for Sein und Zeit. View all notes While of course this phenomenon comes under close scrutiny in La temporalité, a brief inspection of this text as a whole finds it to be virtually everywhere.22 The theme of temporality is introduced as early as the Preface to Part I, “Experience and Objective Thought” and appears again in almost every subsequent chapter: the first chapter of Part I ; in his discussion on number blindness and Goldstein's patient known as Schneider in La spatialité du corps et la motricité ; in the sexuality chapter ; in the discussion of memory in La corps comme expression et la parole ; in Le sentir ; in the discussion of depth in L'espace ; in La chose et le monde naturel ; in Autrui et le monde humain and in Le cogito. Rather than providing the perhaps much called for synopsis of these scattered accounts of time or trying to locate a unified account in Phenomenology of Perception through such a synopsis, this essay will focus only on La temporalité, particularly the discussion of Husserl's diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein and the “champ de présence”. View all notes It is this apparent ubiquity that will motivate scholars such as Renaud Barbaras to claim that “… the entire structure of Phenomenology of Perception rests on a chapter devoted to temporality”.33 Barbaras The Being of the Phenomenon, 218. View all notes In spite of this ubiquity and apparent centrality, however, the treatment of temporality seems to neglect a systematic and thoroughgoing approach, and whether this work manages to address this theme with a sufficient degree of rigor remains open to debate. Furthermore, beyond the scattered and fragmented appearance of temporality in the text, the chapter devoted to its exploration contains numerous, well-recognized problems.44 Merleau-Ponty's misinterpretation of Bergson in this chapter has received much warranted attention. Alia Al-Saji, for example, has criticized Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in this chapter of Phenomenology of Perception for this misreading as well as its perhaps too uncritical infatuation with Husserl and his emphasis on presence. See Lawlor Thinking Through French Philosophy, Al-Saji “The Temporality of Life” and “A Past Which Has Never Been Present” and Barbaras “The Turn of Experience”. View all notes Among these difficulties, Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's lectures on time-consciousness, the Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins,55 The 1928 publication of the Zeitbewußtsein, edited by Heidegger, is what appears in the bibliography of Phenomenology of Perception. This version, from the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologishe Forschung, as Brough notes, appears as “Part A” of Husserliana X. The notes that constitute this version of the text, furthermore, as Heidegger mentions in his preface to the Jahrbuch version and which Brough repeats were heavily edited by Husserl's assistant at the time, Edith Stein. Merleau-Ponty's references to the Zeitbewußtsein cut across various moments of the text and do not focus on one section in particular, and in fact, he actually references section 11, “Urimpression und retentionale Modifikation”/“Primal impression and retentional modification” in his discussion of the field of presence. As Al-Saji has noted, the extent to which Merleau-Ponty's account of time in La temporalité centres the account of time on “the living present” can be shown to be at play behind the misreading of Bergson. While I do not wish to dispute the specifics of her compelling reading, it is nonetheless worth noting that Al-Saji's reading of the Zeitbewußtsein only focuses on Appendix V, “Gleichzeitigkeit von Wahrnehmung und Wahrgenommenem”/“Simultaneity of Perception and the Perceived”. View all notes looms large, as it seems that his discussion of what he designates as le champ de présence or “field of presence” commits him to the ontological primacy of the present in his account of time. As a result, this earlier work appears to confine itself to a metaphysics organized around the privilege and authority of the present in establishing the structure of time.66 Leonard Lawlor has convincingly argued against this interpretation. Following the famous remark at the end of Le Sentir about “a past which has never been present”, Lawlor argues that precisely because Merleau-Ponty's critique of Bergson is a straw man – that is, because his critique of Bergson is based on a misreading – a closer inspection of Le Sentir and La temporalité shows Merleau-Ponty to be committed to the ontological primacy of an “originary” past. See Lawlor Thinking Through French Philosophy, 89. Marratto, following Lawlor, takes up the charge of a metaphysics of presence in Phenomenology of Perception in dialogue with Derrida. Marratto argues that Derrida's reading selectively overlooks “the very imporant dimensions of difference, discontinuity, and delay and non-self-presence in Merleau-Ponty's descriptions”, located particularly in the latter's theory of subjectivity. I agree with Marratto's assessment, and my aim here is to deepen it by turning in more detail to La temporalité. View all notes This apparent commitment to the ontological primacy of the present, for some readers, has also functioned as an index for tracking the revision of Phenomenology of Perception that is said to figure in The Visible and the Invisible, where a metaphysics of the present is replaced with a commitment to the primacy of an original past, signalling a significant break in the development of Merleau-Ponty's thought.77 This has bearing on the debate mentioned above as the question of temporality and Merleau-Ponty's evolving relationship with Bergson are also cited as part of the index for tracking the differences between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. What we see, according to this reading, is Merleau-Ponty move away from a more strictly phenomenological orientation of Phenomenology of Perception, an orientation that is said to adversely mediate his early, critical stance with respect to Bergson, toward a progressively less Husserlian and more Bergsonian stance in The Visible and the Invisible. While he does not specifically address Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Bergson, Marratto's reading also places a special emphasis on the significance of the past, specifically Merleau-Ponty's reference to a “past which has never been present”. It is also not my intention to enter into the question of Merleau-Ponty's relationship with Bergson. Rather, I will restrict my remarks specifically to Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl and the Zeitbewußtsein in La temporalité in order to show that there are grounds for at least questioning one of the premises of the interpretation mentioned above, namely that Phenomenology of Perception is unequivocally legible as committed to the ontological primacy of the present. As will become clear later in the essay, I also dispute interpretations that would place the emphasis on the ontological primacy of an original past. For my own views on the significance of a “past which has never been present”, see Whitmoyer “The Primary Silence of the Past”. View all notes In considering the manner in which the Zeitbewußtsein figures in La temporalité and Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the field of presence, it will do to think about the parameters in which his engagement with Husserl is staged more generally. It seems that Merleau-Ponty never considered his task in terms of the perhaps false alternative of fidelity and heresy, because “any commemoration is also a betrayal”, and because the task of the interpreter is, as he famously notes, thinking through that “unthought-of element … which is wholly his [Husserl's] and yet opens out on something else”.88 Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 203/160. This methodological dictum is developed in more detail in the notes to the course offered on Husserl's Origin of Geometry in 1959–1960. “We are saying not that Husserl was that, but that Husserl was not only what they say, was also another, bearer of an unthought”. View all notes Following Merleau-Ponty's own indications, we could suggest that Husserl's text, rather than a source of orthodoxy, functions as a point of orientation through which Merleau-Ponty marks out his own theory of temporality.99 I will not, therefore, address the question of the “accuracy” of his interpretation of Husserl because, according to Merleau-Ponty himself, this question presupposes that the author, in this case Husserl, has a privileged access to his thought, as if there is some kernel or essence of what a philosopher thought that interpreters can either get right or wrong. As the remarks in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” make clear, interpretation can never really avail itself of this presupposition and in this manner the question of accuracy is precisely the wrong question. View all notes This essay argues that his discussion of the Zeitbewußtsein in Phenomenology of Perception does not offer an account of time that “centers around the living present”, as some have argued,1010 Al-Saji “A Past Which Has Never Been Present”, 42–44. View all notes but that the discussion of the field of presence and what follows are rather intended to account for the field of temporal phenomenalization – not as a presence – but as écoulement, passage and flux. Time, therefore, does not appear in the present or as presence, but manifests itself as a flow and movement that is simultaneously an éclatement, an eruption, and a self-differentiating “dehiscence”.1111 A favorite word of Merleau-Ponty, borrowed from botany, where it designates the splitting open of a seed-pod or flower as well as medicine, where it refers to the splitting open of a healed or partially healed wound. The idea here is that, in its flow and passage, time splits open in a process of differentiation – which is simultaneously a process of degeneration, decay, and what Merleau-Ponty will term in The Visible and the Invisible, “disarticulation”. View all notes Time's passage is not determined, organized and oriented in advance in accordance with a transcendental synthesis that would give it shape and form, privileging one temporal dimension over another, so much as it is understood in terms of a splitting open, or to use another favoured locution of Merleau-Ponty, a “deflagration”.1212 In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “deflagration of being”. Metaphors of explosiveness and dissonance populate his attempt to think being otherwise than as structure, form, and stability. Here I will focus particularly on écoulement, flux and éclatement, eruption, because these are the terms he uses in his discussion of time in La temporalité. See Merleau-Ponty L’Œil et l'esprit, 64/369. View all notes To this extent, Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in Phenomenology of Perception cannot be said to orient itself in terms of the ontological primacy of any one temporal dimension – past, present, or future – but is more accurately understood as an attempt to recover the primordial experience of time as the simultaneity of écoulement and éclatement – an account that thinks time in its dual power of phenomenalization and erosion, the “pulse [pulsation] of my existence, its systole and diastole”.1313 Merleau-Ponty PhP, 337/332. View all notes Time is the vehicle of the world's appearance, and at the same time of its “disarticulation” [désarticulation],1414 This is a term Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the Invisible in a well-known working note entitled “ Transcendence – forgetting – time”. See Merleau-Ponty VI, 247/197. View all notes the vehicle through which “becoming” – rather than being – shows itself. This process of phenomenalization, precisely because it is temporal, never achieves the density of fully realized being – the sense of this becoming is never fully articulate – but is perpetually subject to a temporal erasure that necessitates its repetition and reiteration. Time, in other words, is the principle of the world's eloquence – it is that thanks to which things have and make sense and simultaneously the principle of the world's murmuring stutter, the principle through which the sense of things remains incomplete and even erodes, decays, and degenerates. To begin, I will turn to Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl's diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein, which opens his attempt to “arrive at authentic time”.1515 Merleau-Ponty PhP, 477/483. View all notes Rather than simply rehearsing Husserl's discussion of primal impression, retention and protention, Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the diagram provides an opportunity for raising two problems: the problem of time's representability and the problem of its synthesis. Rather than through an “act intentionality” carried out by a transcendental subjectivity, time appears in accordance with an “operative intentionality” always already under way. Turning to the section of La temporalité aptly entitled “Passive Synthesis”, we see that Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the diagram leads him to the paradox of passive synthesis and what he calls, following Husserl, “transition synthesis”. Time does not show itself punctually – time appears neither as presence nor in the present – but only in the dual movement of its flux, its écoulement, and its éclatement, its explosive, self-differentiating unfurling. These reflections, finally, bring Merleau-Ponty into dialogue with Heidegger on what the latter called the Zusammenhang des Lebens. The “unity of a life”, accordingly, is not a question of any “resolution”, but is a function of our immersion in this temporal dehiscence. The important lesson to be learned from Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's Zeitbewußtsein is not something about the ontological primacy of one temporal dimension over another but what Merleau-Ponty famously calls in The Visible and the Invisible the “passivity of our activity”1616 Merleau-Ponty VI, 270/221. View all notes and our immersion in time's power of disarticulation. (shrink)

I draw upon Edmund Husserl’s classic text, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, in order to reframe some of his insight regarding the structures of inner time-consciousness and lay the groundwork for a few claims of my own. First, I show how musical expression is constituted in relation to the flowing movement of absolute subjectivity. Moreover, by carefully distinguishing between retention and recollection, I clarify, on the one hand, music’s ability to support access to memory proper and, (...) on the other hand, its ability to keep the past “in play,” so to speak. In this way, we come to understand how music offers a unique memorial capacity—it makes possible the life of the past, as the vital movement of absolute subjectivity. Throughout the essay, I refer to Josquin’s motet Ave Maria…virgo serena in order to clarify the specific temporal structures that are at issue. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the issue of how our personal life is given to us in experience as a whole to be actively shaped and determined. I examine in detail Husserl’s analysis of the kind of experience responsible for this achievement, which he terms Überschau and which thus far has never been addressed by scholars of phenomenology. First, I locate Überschau in the context of self-determination and highlight the difference between the unthematic pre-givenness of life in the phenomenon of (...) self-awareness and the actual, i.e. thematic givenness of life in acts of Überschau. Second, I contextualize Husserl’s discovery of Überschau in his analyses of ethical life and the possibility of a universal epoché. I argue that for Husserl the very possibility of ethical life and of phenomenology itself rest on the totalizing apprehension of one’s life rendered possible by Überschau. In the third section I spell out the essential characteristics of Überschau by contrasting this peculiar kind of consciousness with reproductive forms of consciousness such as recollection and expectation, which otherwise might be easily conflated with Überschau. In section four I reply to a possible objection to the very possibility of Überschau based on the consideration of the infinitely open stream of time-consciousness. I argue that the possibility of Überschau is tightly connected with the egological nature of consciousness as understood by Husserl. The ego does not coincide with its own conscious acts and thus enjoys a special vantage point on the totality of its own life. To conclude, I advance a speculative suggestion about the phenomenological origin of Überschau in the structure of self-awareness. This opens up a variety of possible lines of research that would connect Husserl with philosophers such as Augustine or Heidegger who are more immediately associated with the issue of personal life and its unity or lack thereof. (shrink)