Philip received his M.A. in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published five books of poetry, Mirror Images and Shards of Glass, Dark Images at Sea, I Never Finished Loving You, Falls from Grace, Favor and High Places, and Forever Was Never On My Mind. Three novels, Caught Between (Which is also a 24-episode Radio Drama Podcast https://wprnpublicradio.com/caught-between-teaser/), Art and Mystery: The Missing Poe Manuscript, and Far From Here. Philip also has a column in the quarterly magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.
I was that awkward girl who did not get much interest from boys. I was gangly, tongue-tied, unattractive, and I was okay and fine. I helped my mom in the market to sell her perishable goods. I was hardworking, and people would always tell my mother, “Oh your daughter works so hard like a boy. You are so lucky.”
My mother would smile and nod, and I would keep my face blank.
It was almost a good thing that I hardly got serious attention from boys, until Chima appeared. Chima with his dark muscular build and charming smile. Chima had machines that ground things in the market for him, things like pepper, tomatoes, corn, cassava. His shop wasn’t far from my mother’s, and he even had boys working for him, boys who did most of the messy work for him. It was either they were learning work, or they were hired as proper workers.
I had always been happy with myself, gangly or not, beautiful or not. I didn’t bother about makeups, it just wasn’t my thing. If anyone would ever have something to do with me, that person should be acquainted with the real me. Not hating on people who use make-up, though. I’m just saying it wasn’t my thing. The highest I did while going to church on Sundays was to apply black tiro – the ones I imagine Nollywood actresses used in their epic, culturally-rich movies, and on some dramatic Sunday mornings I would stand in front of our large mirror and mimic the voices of Nollywood actresses. I would start with Ngozi Ezeonu commanding a palace maid, and I would end with Chioma Chukwuka flirting with a cute, muscular black man beside a quiet stream.
I didn’t know that Chima was interested in me until I gave him an envelope for our church harvest. Every year we were given large envelopes in church to share with people we knew, family, friends and well-wishers, and they were supposed to put money in those envelopes for the work of The Lord. When I went to take it back, Chima had put ten thousand naira in it. Other people had put five hundred naira, one thousand naira highest, but Chima put ten thousand naira. I was startled. I had never been interested in anybody’s money, except for business. Right from a young age I was getting money, I hustled with my mother in the market. What else did a young girl need? I was properly fed, I had come out of secondary school. Nobody was talking about going further, my mother wouldn’t afford that, so I was content with myself, doing business with my mother, trying to be a succor to her soul as a woman who left an abusive husband – my father – many years ago. I was twenty-two when Chima picked interest in me, but never been in a serious relationship before. Somehow I thought things would unfold on their own, but the way mine unfolded scared me.
Chima started giving me money every weekend, without me asking him for it. I never knew how to ask, by the way. I had always been satisfied with my mother’s financial coverage, and with the little income I made. I took Chima’s money for weeks. I saved it. Because of Chima I added a little more effort in the way I dressed to the market. At least I tried my best. The market wasn’t a place where one needed to dress extravagantly while going out for the day, but I tried my best to look very good or sharp, in the Aba slang.
Ahịa Ọhụrụ market wasn’t like working in the bank, or in an office where you could dress yourself daintily. Here in the market you dress in a certain way, in a subtly rugged way because anything could happen. A fight might break out. A barrow pusher might hit you, somebody might look for your trouble, a rogue might try to steal your goods, so one came to the market with a certain kind of dressing void of superfluity.
Chima got more friendly with my mother, and I wondered if my mother suspected anything.
Then I started visiting Chima in his house. Many months had passed, and yet Chima was still giving me weekend money as though I was working for him, as though I did anything for him. It started with him saying, “You never ask me where I live. You never bother to just pay me a visit.”
That was how I started visiting Chima, me the unattractive, skinny girl. The first day I visited him was the day I took a proper look at myself, really observed that I didn’t have a robust nyash – buttocks – like a proper girl should have, a proper Igbo girl, if there was any such thing. I just observed it, but I did not pity myself. I was not the type that wallowed in self pity. I was ready for anything. What was the worst that could happen? The worst that could ever happen was Chima to stop being interested in me, to stop giving me money, and to stop grinning too widely when he spoke with my mother. That was the worst that could ever happen, and I was ready for that, in case it happened.
So on that first day of me visiting him in his house I prepared myself and went, wearing a new gown I had bought in Ariaria market. It was a bit loose, the gown, modern, and a bit churchy. And I went, feeling confident and reserved at the same time.
Isaac Aju is a Nigerian writer whose works have appeared in Poetry X Hunger, Writers’ Journal -New York City, The Kalahari Review, and is forthcoming in Flapper Press. He lives in Aba where he works as a fashion designer.
To the echo of footsteps fleeing toward the light.
O freedom, are you a mirage
We chase through dark alleys?
Or are you a sun born
When we shatter the shackles buried in our veins?
I will write your name upon the wall of the wind
And let the echo carry
My voice to the coming dawn.
One day,
I will stand atop the sun
And dance with the light,
Free
As the wind was in a pure time!
—
THE AGE of CHAINS DOES NOT LAST
Stretch your hands toward the horizon,
Like the surge of waves rising against the shore.
Do not fear the darkness,
For stars are born from the womb of night.
Tell the wind to carry your song
And scatter it over the balconies,
For when a branch is broken,
It grows from pain flowers that never die.
I am the child of open skies,
I do not belong to fences
Or closed doors.
Freedom is rooted in the soul,
Not in locked squares.
I will walk on water if the earth narrows,
And I will carry in my wound
A flower of dreams.
If you are imprisoned today,
Tomorrow is your meeting with the light.
Give hope its wings,
And walk beneath the rain.
Freedom is not granted—
It is seized from the jaws of time!
—
A DREAM UNCHAINED
Freedom has no door,
Nor does it love walls.
It recoils from iron
And despises the color of chains on the wrist.
It is a wave racing toward the horizon,
Breaking yet returning stronger.
It is a cloud refusing to trap its rain,
A flower blooming in the palm of the wind.
Do not ask where it dwells,
For it lives in the eyes of birds,
In the breath of children’s laughter,
In the voice of a song that knows
No language of submission.
Every wall,
No matter how high,
Will one day be nothing but a fleeting shadow.
And the river, which embraced the soil for too long,
Will return to the sea at dawn.
If you cannot find it around you,
Search within yourself.
Perhaps you are the bird
Who has yet to discover his wings!
Short Biography:
TAGHRID BOU MERHI is a distinguished Lebanese-Brazilian Poet, Author, Essayist, Editor, Translator, and Media Professional known for her profound literary contributions across multiple languages. She currently resides in Brazil, where she has built a remarkable career in poetry, translation, and cultural journalism.
With a Master’s degree in Law, Bou Merhi has established herself as a versatile intellectual figure, seamlessly bridging the worlds of literature and academia. She is fluent in five languages in addition to her native Arabic, which has enabled her to translate and publish an impressive body of work. Her translations include 43 books and over 2000 poems, and her writings have been translated into 47 languages.
Bou Merhi has authored 23 books, both in print and digital formats, covering a range of genres, including poetry, short stories, haikus, critical studies, articles, and children’s literature. Her literary influence extends beyond writing, as she serves as the editor of the translation department for 12 Arabic magazines and a Spanish magazine Azahar Poetic and Reverence Cultural poetry. Additionally, she has written introductions for 40 books and contributed to more than 220 National and international books and anthologies.
Her exceptional contributions to world literature have earned her numerous international accolades. She was named among the top 50 women shaping modern literature in Asia and one of the top 20 media professionals in the region from Legacy Crown. Chinese television CCCV ranked her among the top 10 poets globally for her mastery of language and poetry.
Currently, Bou Merhi serves as the head of the Lebanon branch of the International Chamber of Books and Artists and holds key cultural relations roles in five international and regional organizations. She has also been an international judge for the Walt Whitman competition for three consecutive years.
Taghrid Bou Merhi has received numerous international awards, honors, and certificates for her literary and translation work. Some of the most notable include:
•Naji Naaman Award (2023) – Recognizing her excellence in literature.
•Nizar Sartawi’s Translation Award – For her outstanding contributions to translation.
•First Prize in the Nian Zhang Cup (2023) – A prestigious international poetry award.
•Top 50 Women in Modern Literature (Asia) – Honored for her impact on contemporary literature.
•Top 20 Media Professionals in Asia – Recognized for her influence in cultural journalism.
•Top 10 Poets Worldwide by CCCV (China) – Acknowledged for her mastery of language and poetry.
•Judge for the Walt Whitman International Poetry Competition – Serving for three consecutive years.
Additionally, she has received many certificates of appreciation from international cultural organizations and literary institutions for her contributions to poetry, translation, and cultural exchange.
Cal Performances presented the Bay Area premiere of William Kentridge’s new collaboration, The Great Yes, The Great No, on a recent chilly, rain-sprinkled March evening, to a standing ovation in a warm, dry, and packed Zellerbach Hall in the “People’s Republic of” Berkeley.
Truly, it was manna to the baffled left these days of a monstrous politics. And a stimulus and wonder even to skeptics of both progressives and reactionaries; echoes of Cavafy, Dante, and Carlyle were clearly not unintended. Even of Coleridge and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; even of the Narrenschiff – the “ship of fools” of the Middle Ages and Katherine Anne Porter’s bleak, modern fable.
The work, co-commissioned by the ever-questing Cal Performances for its Illuminations series (the theme this year is “Fractured History” – a timely phrase, as we threaten to crumble into a humblingly fractured present), is the latest in the South African artist’s theatrical undertakings, culminating most recently in Berkeley with the amalgam of fantasy and prophecy Sybil two years ago.
In Kentridge’s new work, we are introduced to a cargo ship repurposed for refugees, ploughing the seas of midcentury on a voyage to escape a Nazified Europe for temporary asylum in the New World. In March 1941, the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle left Marseilles for the Caribbean French colony of Martinique, bearing several hundred refugees, including luminaries such as “the pope of Surrealism” André Breton, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, novelists Victor Serge and Anna Seghers, and the anthropologist and founder of structuralism, Claude Levi-Strauss: a ship of geniuses, culture avatars, and anti-imperialists fleeing a continent of psychopaths for the utopia of the irrational, of “revolution,” of “freedom.”
A curious but relevant fact about Martinique: it was the one island Napoleon allowed slavery (according to the libretto) when he abolished it throughout the Empire – and why? Because of Europeans’ insatiable desire for the sugar Martinique was known for and could not produce “economically” without its slaves.
Kentridge haunts his ship with figures from multiple eras binding the imperial center to the tiny Antillean island: the Martinican poet, and father of anti-colonialist theories of negritude, Aimé Césaire, and his wife Suzanne; the fellow Martinican sisters Nardal, whose Parisian salon incubated negritude with the Césaires and African writers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas; and other relevant phantoms: Napoleon’s beloved Martiquinaise Joséphine Bonaparte and the Martiniquais, and future revolutionary theorist, Frantz Fanon.
We were treated with Kentridge’s characteristically virtuosic blend of spoken word, dance, dream scene and song, surreal cartoon and reversed film sequence, liberated signifiers, extravagant costumes and portrait masks for each of the avatars, dancing tools and animated utensils (including one of his signature mottos, a twitchy, goofily animated typewriter), in this modern version of classic singspiel.
It took off on a wildly surrealist ride across time and geography, with a collage libretto combining quotations from the figures named and such notable subversives as Bertolt Brecht. Narrative is not Kentridge’s strong suit, and his attempts in that direction usually run aground on pancake-flat characters and prosaic plots (he has yet to quite realize that a story without logic (his explicit pet peeve, in this work, being reason and all its affiliates) is like a decalcified hippo: somewhere between a glob and a blot. He is at his best when indulging his imagination and letting poetry suggest where prose merely deafens.
At the head of the ship stood its captain, an African version of the classic Greek Charon, boatman of the underworld ferrying souls to their final ends. The captain (a brilliantly insouciant Hamilton Dhlamini) dropped many of the evening’s most provocative lines. Another performance especially shone; Nancy Nkusi as Suzanne Césaire, whose recital of the verses of her spouse Aimé, from his poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, provided much memorable imagery. Not least was her haunting appearance in a black-and-white film scene, crawling across a banquet table surrounded by tuxedoed gentlemen with the heads of coffeepots and the cannibalistic appetites of all empires.
A constellation of quotations were projected or spoken or sung, or all three, across the magic lantern–like astrolabe that backed the stage: “The Dead Report for Duty,” “The Boats Flee, But to Where?” “The World Is Leaking.” “These Are My Old Tears.” “The Women Are Picking Up the Pieces.”
And a Chorus of Seven Women sing, dance and comment on the mystico-political voyage throughout, translated into the native languages of the singers: Sepedi, Setswana, siSwati, isiZulu, in the music of Nhlanhla Mahlangu.
A small, tight musical ensemble accompanied the proceedings throughout, led by the percussionist and composer Tlale Makhene.
For all the cornucopia of imagery, word wonder and music, my feelings about the evening were obstinately mixed. What I loved were the endlessly inventive visuals Kentridge can always be counted to magic out of the bricolage of his imagination, the 360-degree projections of the ship, the gimcrack costuming, the slants of film and dashes of music, the rich, sly humorous poetry, both visual and verbal, that illuminates, in flash after flash, as much as it entertains.
But there was also an element of agitprop, of heavy-handed prose hectoring and editorializing as it blundered into the show – the poetry, singing, told us endlessly more than the political prosing, shouting, which performed the bizarre act of shipwrecking itself. And when there are positive references to such monstres sacrés as Trotsky and Stalin, I, for one, am out. An artwork makes a poor editorial: when it trades poetry for slogans, it thrills only a few converts.
There is, unhappily, an even more serious point to make. Something about the enterprise rubbed me the wrong way from the start. Late winter 2025 on planet Earth hardly seems the best time and place to be celebrating “the irrational.” Whatever we are facing, politically, historically, it cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination a “tyranny of reason” or the authoritarianism of the bourgeoisie. In the current moment, I, and I suspect many others, feel trapped inside a global surreal nightmare from which we may not be able to escape. A surrealist fantasy celebrating unreason seems perhaps not the most appropriate message for a world on the verge of shipwrecking on the reef of insanity.
Those of us cursed with a reflexive skepticism may not care much to embark (without security guarantees) on so dubious a journey. For every “Great Yes,” there is sometimes a small but potent “no.”
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist and author of numerous books, including A Spy in the Ruins (celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2025) and The Socialist’s Garden of Verses. He is founder and lead editor of the webzine Caveat Lector and recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Can I buy you a drink?” the tall, rumpled man asked the petite woman in the tavern. She was a looker, he thought, lightly licking his lips.
She narrowed her green eyes at him, looked him up and down and replied, “I don’t know, can you?”
Ralph became newly conscious of his shabby street clothes. He was still attired in the garb he favored when working undercover for the police department. But, his thirst for a beer had been so great that he’d dropped in without going home and changing first.
He managed to respond, “When your students get it wrong, do you make them do it over again until they get it right?” He’d noticed the “Teacher of the Month” ribbon affixed to her top.
She couldn’t suppress a smile. “Do you always answer a question with a question? But, I guess I just did that too. Never mind, buy me a drink – it’s been a tough day. May I buy you a drink? From the way you are dressed, I imagine I can afford one better than you.” She was ribbing him, he thought.
Ralph called out “Garcon, we would like to order drinks. She’s buying me your cheap beer. What am I buying for you, dear?”
“I’ll have an atomic gin – I mean gin and tonic – sorry for my name for the drink. Drink enough and they are atomic – blow your mind.”
They engaged in getting-to-know-you small talk for some time, consuming several libations in the process. Ralph didn’t reveal his occupation; he saw no reason to tell “Annie” that he was a cop. It was partially defensive; a lot of citizens were turned off by his choice of careers. Besides, he was enjoying the charade of being mysterious. After all, it was part of his lifestyle.
Finally, Annie put the question to him: “What do you do for a living, Ralph?”
He smiled. “Ah, but that would be telling.”
“Can you at least tell me if you’re legally employed?” Annie asked, with a little pout.
“Very legally, if there is such a thing. I don’t like to talk about myself unless I’m being paid, which has never happened, but I would like to know more about you, Annie.”
“I educate business men.”
“Just men?”
“Mostly men, but quite a few women have liked my lessons.”
“What do you teach those men and women?”
“You might need some lower level introduction before you would understand…” Annie realized she might be talking down to Ralph and stopped talking.
In the midst of an awkward pause, into the tavern walked Ed, who, like Ralph, was a vice cop. He worked a different precinct, however.
“Hey, bro’,” said Ed in greeting, slapping Ralph on the back. Suddenly Ed caught sight of Annie and drew up short. “You’re a little out of your territory, aren’t you?” he asked archly. Annie looked daggers at the man.
“Hey,” Ralph spoke up. “Do you two know each other?” He pointed alternately at the pair. “Ed?” he prompted.
“A lifetime ago,” replied the other man. Turning to Annie, he remarked, “You’re looking good.” Annie said nothing. Getting the message, Ed said, “I’ll check you later,” and he drifted off.
“How do you know Ed, Annie?” asked Ralph curiously.
“It was a…business relationship.,” she said shortly.
Warning signs began going off like fireworks in Ralph’s brain. How would he ever live down being taken in by a hooker? He must be losing his touch, he thought, and shook his head.
Annie became aware of Ralph’s sudden coldness and said, “Excuse me; I have to visit the little girls’ room.” She hopped off the barstool and vanished in the direction of the restrooms.
Ralph, meanwhile, with his cop’s intuition for the dark side of human nature, walked across the bar to find his fellow detective, Ed. He found him talking to a stunning brunette. He excused himself to the woman and drew Ed away from her.
“Hey, man,” he said once he had the other man to himself, “what’s the deal with Annie?”
Ed, annoyed at breaking the rhythm of his seduction of the other woman, said, “what do you want to know?”
“Where do you know her from?”
“It was a business transaction,” replied Ed.
“Damn,” exclaimed Ralph. “You mean she’s a pro?” He was mortified. It was as bad as he’d thought.
Ed’s face showed his amusement. “Relax, Ralph,” he said. “Annie is a professional–businesswoman. She taught a seminar last fall. You remember when I was considering retiring from the force and starting my own business? Well, afterwards we dated and I’m afraid it didn’t end well. In all events, there were hurt feelings all round. Excuse me, a lady is waiting for me, and I’d hate to disappoint her.”
When Annie returned, Ralph felt bad about suspecting her of being a prostitute. It was clear she had put two and two together and read his thoughts. She was decidedly colder now. He felt like he had to come clean.
“I’m apologize, Annie” he said. “I jumped to the wrong conclusions and I am sorry.” He saw her features soften. “Can we start over?” he implored.
A small smile blossomed on Annie’s pretty face and she said, “Alright. Everyone deserves a second chance.”
Ralph sighed with relief. “Do you think you might have a drink with me next Saturday?” he asked.
“If I say yes, can you leave the vice cop at the door?” she asked. “I’d hate to be on the scene of a bust,” she said wryly.
“Promise,” said Ralph. “How about Doug’s place, inthe central west end?”
“Ok, I’ll meet you there.” Annie felt relief at the now relaxed vibe.
Out of the blue, Ralph asked, “Are you worried that I drive a car that matches the way I dress?”
“Ok, let’s just drop all that, but you could dress for a possible second date. By the way, I don’t mind dating a cop.”
Musings on Husserl’s Personal Transcendental Phenomenology
Husserl’s own personal phenomenology was unique in many ways. He wrote, like others, of meaning and consciousness, but added his own individual flavor in giving us the noema, sense data and other concepts, virtually all of which, one could assert, have combined to withstand the test of time.
A key idea of Husserl’s circulates around the concept of meanings. He writes, “Everything that is logical falls under the two correlated categories of meaning and object.” (Welton 47) And what does he mean by this? First is the idea of mental acts or processes as the bearer of meanings (bedeutungen). One meaning can be instantiated or carried by many different mental acts or states. Further, meaning and objects are interrelated. States Husserl, “Meanings constitute … a class of concepts in the sense of ‘universal objects’.” (50) In just what sense did Husserl think such objects exist? Most likely, as objects of consciousness.
Second, is the idea that particular unities exist between mental acts – unities of meaning (somewhere between voicing and perceiving). He sees a perhaps-necessary intention to express meaning (content) in some form. This idea carries three “intentions.” First, is the voicing intention – for example, the production of certain sounds. Second is the meaning intention, in which some state of affairs is meant to be expressed by the sounds in question – content expresses the expressive act. At this point, there is a relation between meaning intention and meaning fulfillment. Third, is perceptual intention, in which sensations must become involved.
However, as Barry Smith notes, “it is important to stress that meanings as thus conceived by Husserl are not the objects of normal acts of language use. Meanings can however become the objects of special types of reflective act.” (20) It is this type of act that forms the basis of Husserl’s logic. Does that imply that Meaning is then Truth? J. N. Mohanty states, “truth, as correspondence of meaning with its object, is to be understood as the coincidence (deckung) of the meaning and its fulfilling intuition.” (50) Truth then lies in the theory of perceptions, of concept-formation, of “truth-in-itself,” as Smith argues (416). Finally, “One can analyze the meaning of … experience, and thereby investigate its intentional content…. It is meaning or sense that provides consciousness with its object-directedness.” (Zahavi, 22-23) Meaning is defined by the logic of truth via a perceptual state or process.
From his concept of meaning, Husserl shifts to the idea of description in building his “science” of phenomenology. Husserl writes,
In a certain way, we can thus distinguish “explanatory” phenomenology as a phenomenology of regulated genesis, and “descriptive” phenomenology as a phenomenology of possible, essential shapes (no matter how they have come to pass) in pure consciousness and their teleological ordering in the realm of possible reason under the headings “object” and “sense.” (318-319)
Having briefly touched on Object, let’s address sense in Husserl’s concept of description. The word “I” applies to the thinker of “this thought”; the description of self applies to oneself. “I” can be so described. What is it exactly to refer to or think about myself as myself? (Or could one perhaps ask which reality is the real reality?) Through sense and the reference of “I” the thing that satisfies description “D” can be viewed in two ways: “I” thoughts refer by way of some description of their reference, and the “I” in I-thoughts is a disguised (abbreviated) “definite description.” I-thoughts are referential. Husserl combines various sorts of references into one single reference in a fusion of separate objects. As Zahavi states, “reference is determined by the sense, that is … reference is effectuated via the sense.” (58) (Husserl often uses the term “sense-data”.) Of sense, Husserl writes,
Like perception, every intensive mental process—just this makes up the fundamental part of intentionality—has its “intentional Object,” i.e., its objective sense. Or, in other words: to have sense or “to intend to” something … is the fundamental characteristic of all consciousness which, therefore, is not just any mental living whatever, but is rather a <mental living> having sense, which is “noetic.” (89-90)
And of the the noetic (or the noema)? Zahavi argues,
It is widely acknowledged that the noema is something that is only discovered through the epoche [bracketing] and the reduction. It is only then that we thematize the intended qua intended, that is, the object exactly as it is meant and given. But does the epoche imply that we parenthesize the transcendent spatio-temporal world in order to account for internal mental representations, or does the epoche rather imply that we continue to explore and describe the transcendent spatio-temporal world, but in a new and different manner? Is the noema, the object-as-it-is-intended, to be identified with an internal mental representation—with an abstract and ideal sense—or rather with the givenness of the intended object itself? (58)
The noema ties in with meaning. Jaakko Hintikka contends “there is a temptation to isolate noemata conceptually from their objects far too rigidly, to assume that we can find out all we need to know about intentional meaning by examining the mediators of this meaning, the noemata.” (79) However Hintikka continues, “no analysis of the structure of the noema, however detailed and accurate, can tell you what its relation is to its object.” (79)
One can make at least three distinctions regarding the noema, perhaps by using a violin tone as a (unique) example. First, there is the tone, which is real and frankly foundational. Second, one should put aside questions of material reality of the tone, creating a tonal, spatial “phantom” (while forgetting about the source). Third, spatial apprehension can then be suspended and it becomes mere sense datum. Peter Simons puts it a different way though: “each noema has a kernel or nucleus which consists of three elements: a substratum, a set of qualitative moments, and modes of fulfillment of these qualities.” (127) The noema circles back to the idea of objects. Whatever the case, it can be agreed there are real objects appearing in various ways (as in physical sounds), the appearance through which real objects appear (such as auditory appearances), and finally, hyletic data (sense contents, or sensations).
Another concept Husserl emphasizes is the constitution of temporal objects and of time itself. Husserl writes, “Objects of this kind become constituted in a multiplicity of immanent data and apprehensions, which themselves run off as a succession.” (186) Schematic objects equate to appearances and are not located within the stream of consciousness. The highest level of objectivity is the community. Further, there are two judgment contents: the noetic and noematic.
Two idea-thoughts occur: 1) sense impressions are the impressional side of the retentional side; 2) the concept of double intentionality – the intentionality of retention of the past. The consciousness of past consciousness of duration.
Husserl writes at length on these concepts:
Time-constituting phenomena … are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them. Hence it also can make no sense to say of them … that they exist in the now and did exist previously, that they succeed one another, and so on. But no doubt we can and must say: A certain continuity of appearance—that is, a continuity that is a phase of the time-constituting flow—belongs to a now, namely, to the now that it constitutes; and to a before, namely, as that which is constitutive … of the before. (213)
Is Husserl being overly idealistic in his concept of constitution? Perhaps, but Husserl’s idealism differs from the traditional. As Zahavi illustrates, for Husserl:
Constitution is a process that unfolds itself in the structure subjectivity-world. For that reason, constitution cannot be interpreted as a contingent animation of some meaningless sense data, nor as an attempt to deduce or reduce the world from or to a worldless object. (74)
Husserl wrote on many concepts and ideas. However, it was his own personal phenomenology that set him apart from so many other philosophers, both at that time and on into the future. While his theories surrounding meaning and objects, sense data, noema and the like are addressed in these musings, many more essential Husserlian phenomenological components await discussion, among them time-consciousness, hyle, intersubjectivity, pure logic, lifeworld, transcendental idealism and so on. These and Husserl’s interrelationships, ethics, objectivity insights and impactful real-world views combine to assure Husserl a reliable place in the realm of philosophy, as well as a continuing influence in numerous fields and among many philosophers, thinkers and scholars.
Scott C. Holstad has authored 60+ books with such publishers as HarperCollins, Sterling House, Chiron Review Press, Lummox Press, Texas Review Press, Gothic Press, Longman & Pearson. He has appeared in the Minnesota Review, Exquisite Corpse, Pacific Review, Santa Clara Review, Long Shot, Wormwood Review, Chiron Review, Kerouac Connection, Palo Alto Review, Wisconsin Review, Lullwater Review, Southern Review, Arkansas Review, San Pedro River Review, Gangan Verlag, Sivullinen, Ink Sweat & Tears, Mad Swirl, Misfit, Bristol Noir, The Beatnik Cowboy, PULP, WIREWORM, Synchronized Chaos, Horror Sleaze Trash, Ashville Poetry Review & Poetry Ireland Review.
He holds degrees from the University of Tennessee, California State University Long Beach, UCLA & Queens University of Charlotte. He currently lives near Gettysburg PA.
