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Dr. Louis
N. Sandowsky
Time and the Constitution of
the Self
Course Outline
Autumn Semester – 2002-2003 – MA
We
all know what time is until we begin to talk about it. The most significant
philosophers of the Occident have flexed their intellectual muscles over the
problem of time and its articulation. This course charts the various forms of
temporal discourse that have evolved from the pre-socratics to the contemporary
era of Husserl, Heidegger, and Einstein.
Similarly, we all know what we mean when we make
reference to the Self – or do we? The old conception of the ‘essential’
existence of a monolithic “I” that is presupposed by any act of consciousness
fails to take into account the temporality of its constitution. The
contemporary shift from the ‘essential’ viewpoint to that of a ‘genetic’
account of the structuration of the Self through time focuses on the
pre-conditions of its possibility. This presents us with the thought of the
Self as a function of a unity of a life history / memory – a style of
Being-in-the-world – where the temporalization of consciousness at a
pre-egological level is that which always already precedes the Self as the
primordial condition of its possibility.
The two issues of time and the constitution of the Self
are really two facets of the same issue – where the consciousness of
temporality is its own temporalization.
This series of lectures and seminars will focus on
Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking writing on the temporal constitution of
experience: The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time.
As well as discussing the necessary conditions of the possibility of the
constitution of linear time – which must always be presupposed by any discourse
on the Self ‘as that which abides through time’ – the aim of this course is to
facilitate awareness of the pluri-dimensional and non-linear temporalities that
are also in operation. The unity of the Self is constituted by vertical
(linear) and horizontal (non-linear) relations by which the “I” relates to
itself through time as the same but non-identical – since the continuity of the
Self is also structured through the tracing out of radical discontinuities.
Such a form of unity actually bears more resemblance to a community rather than
to the trace of a monolithic entity. It is along these lines that
existentialism and deconstruction have made enormous contributions to
contemporary philosophical discourse on Time and the Self in terms of the alterity
that always already inhabits oneself. In this regard, the work of Martin
Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques
Derrida will come under discussion.
Course Requirements
1. Two written assignments (in English).
Each essay must be approximately five pages in length. It is possible to
present a seminar paper, which will count as one of these assignments.
2. One research paper (in English) –
approximately ten pages in length. Material may be utilized from the first two papers.
The two three-page assignments can
total one third of the course credits.
The final research assignment
carries the most weight.
E-mail: cafedifferance@yahoo.com
The main text, On The Phenomenology
of the Consciousness of Internal Time, by Edmund Husserl, is in the
reserved section of the library (shmurim). It is also available as an
electronic text (for which access numbers will be provided). I will provide
most of the other reading material as the course progresses, or it will be
available for photocopying. Other selections of texts may be provided by
e-mail.