On the Nonindependent Parts of Time-Consciousness: Husserl’s Early Phenomenological Investigations and the Perception of Melody

Drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, I apply the laws of mereology—the study of parts and wholes—to the analysis of time-consciousness in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), arguing that Husserl’s phenomenological solution to problems raised by empirical psychology in the late nineteenth century concerning the relation between subject and object was inspired by a rethinking of the notion of intentionality in terms of an extensional whole. Turning, then, to descriptions from Husserl’s careful analyses of tone and melody in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), I claim that melody’s structure of expression pertains specifically to retention (which I distinguish from recollection) as a nonindependent part of a flowing whole. This mereologic reformulation helps us think through the problem of how a melody is perceived in time. Furthermore, I show how, according to Husserl, there is a unity of the sensation of “tone” and the “flow of consciousness,” and I argue that by understanding this unity as a whole of nonindependent parts, we grasp a significant insight that illuminates phenomenology’s overall aim of considering the evidence of empirical science together with the formal laws of logic.