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What is Husserl’s “retention”, and how is it different from simply remembering?

Agnieszka Malinowska Contributor
· 5 replies · 150 views
ConsciousnessContinentalMedieval ChristianPhenomenologyEdmund HusserlHenri Bergson#music#phenomenology#retention#time-consciousness
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I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory. Every Sunday I play hymns the congregation has sung hundreds of times, and every Sunday the same puzzle comes back to me.

When the third note of a melody sounds, the first two are not gone. If they were, I would hear three separate sounds, not a tune. But I am not remembering them either, not in the way I remember last Sunday's sermon. They are somehow still there, fading, while the new note arrives. And I am already leaning towards the fourth note before it sounds; if the organist plays a wrong one, the whole church flinches.

Augustine noticed something like this in Book XI of the Confessions, when he recites a psalm he knows: part of it is in expectation, part has passed into memory, and his attention stretches across both. I'm told that Husserl took up the same example of a melody and gave the two sides names, "retention" and "protention".

I have tried to read Husserl's lectures on the consciousness of internal time and I find them very hard going. Could someone explain, simply:

  1. What is the difference between retention and ordinary remembering (I think he calls it recollection)?
  2. Is Husserl just saying what Augustine said, or something new?
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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Kenneth Leung Chi-ho

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Retention is part of the present perception. When the third note sounds, the second is given to you as just past, still in your grasp, slipping away. You are not calling it back; it has not yet left. Husserl sometimes compares it to a comet's tail attached to the present moment. Without it you would hear isolated sounds, never a melody.

    Recollection is a new act. When you remember last Sunday's sermon, you re-present a past experience: you bring it back, as if living it again, from the standpoint of now. It can be voluntary, and it can be distorted.

    Protention is the matching forward edge, the open anticipation of what is about to come. That is why the church flinches at a wrong note: everyone's protention was set for something else.

    On Augustine: Husserl acknowledged him and admired him. What is new is the analysis. Augustine describes the mind stretching between memory and expectation; Husserl distinguishes retention, which belongs to the present, from recollection, which does not, and argues that the second depends on the first. You can only recollect what was first retained. His larger point is that the present is not a knife-edge instant but has a thickness, and that thickness is what makes experiencing time possible at all.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Agnieszka Malinowska

      Contributor

      Kenneth, thank you. "Retention belongs to the present, recollection does not" is the sentence I needed. It also explains why a congregation can sing a hymn it could not recite: the melody is carried by retention and protention, note to note, not by recollecting the whole.

      Helpful · 2

Other answers

  1. Parisa Moghaddam

    Contributor

    I cut films for a living and this is the grammar of editing. A cut only works because the viewer is still holding the previous shot in retention when the next arrives, and is already leaning into the next with protention. Cut too late and the retention has faded; too early and the protention hasn't formed. I had no words for it until I read this thread.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Bergson would agree about the thickness and disagree about the analysis. Husserl divides the stream into phases, retentions of retentions and so on; Bergson would say that dividing lived duration into phases is already laying time out like a line in space. As a translator I'd add that Husserl's German terms are technical coinages and Bergson's French is deliberately ordinary. The difference in style is part of the disagreement.

  3. Lars Eriksen

    Fellow

    William James had a name for the same thickness: the "specious present", a term he took from a writer called E. R. Clay. Physics has no place for it; in our equations "now" has no width at all. That mismatch is one reason I find the phenomenologists worth reading. They describe something any physics of time eventually has to make room for.

    Helpful · 1