r0b’s Reviews > Husserl's Account of Our Consciousness of Time > Status Update

...our being in the world, which is also “in” us, never gives us the distance to fix the lived experience. Our being in a world that is also in us is such that we can never stand outside the circle of affecting and being affected by this world.’

...There is always a divergence between the “aerial view of life” which fixes essences and “life, which is inherence in the world.” For Merleau-Ponty, then: “If one takes this residue into account, there is no longer identity between the lived experience and the principle of non-contradiction: the thought, precisely as thought, can no longer convey the lived experience”. Behind this incapacity, is the fact that...

‘When we act, we affect our situation and the result—the excess that our action has created—affects us. In other words, everything we do changes our situation and, hence, affects our description of it.
Our being affected by our situation, insofar as it changes us, changes the way we affect our situation, which changes its action on us. Because of this, there is always a residue....

...He “is the one who placed the arbitrariness of the sign and the differential characterof the sign at the foundation of general semiology, particularly linguistics. And these two motifs—arbitrary and differential—are inseparable in his view. There can be arbitrariness only because the system of signs is constituted by differences [between the terms], and not by the [intuitive] fullness of the terms”.

‘...the signified concept is never present in itself in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself”. If we grant this, then we are faced with a network of signs referring to signs, without any anchoring intuitions. In the absence of the latter, the significance of a sign is purely arbitrary. It depends on the system of differences in which it is located. This, for Derrida, was Saussure’s great insight....

‘​Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Levinas, initiates the French tradition of seeing Husserl from a Heideggarian perspective.’

‘What underlies our temporalization and, with this, our ability to engage in constitution is, according to Heidegger, not presence but radical absence. This insight marks the fundamental divide that distinguishes his account of temporalization and, hence, of selfhood from Husserl’s position.’

...What Heidegger does not stress is that my being subject to death is an aspect of my organic functioning. As such, the same claims can be made about its other aspects. It is, for example, equally true that no one can eat for me, go to sleep for me, go to the bathroom for me, and so on.’

‘That there is another, non-communicable level, one that is essentially private is evinced by Heidegger’s statement, “Insofar as it ‘is,’ death is essentially, in every case, mine,” (SZ, p. 240). His point is that no one can die for me. It is something that I must do by myself. Death, in other words, is irremediably private....

‘Here, Husserl seems to feel that as long as there are sentient beings, the absolute expresses itself through them as a “stationary remaining form” of primal aliveness.’