Death and time in Husserl's C-manuscripts

James Dodd

pp. 51-70

in: Dieter Lohmar, Ichiro Yamaguchi (eds), On time, Berlin, Springer, 2010

Abstrakt

This paper outlines a reading of Husserl's late writings on time and temporality (above all in the C-manuscripts) that aims to fix how Husserl formulates the problem of death from a phenomenological perspective. The guiding question to this end is: what can death tell us about time? The paper explores the possibility of approaching this question by considering first what life has to tell us about time, with the working thesis being that the problem of death bears precisely on how egoic life is conscious of itself as a "whole," or how the whole of a personal "life" is a given unity of sense for an ego. This approach also promises to illuminate why the theme of death is pursued by Husserl in conjunction not only with the question of birth, but with that of sleep and sedimentation as well, since all of these themes form the basic parameters of Husserl's conception of egoic life. This paper is meant to be a preliminary exploration of possible ways to approach Husserl's late writings on time, and concludes with the suggestion that Husserl takes a very different course than other phenomenological philosophers, such as Sartre and Heidegger, who lay much more emphasis on the "ekstatic" character of lived time.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Heidegger Martin

Sartre Jean-Paul