The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness Book

The butler did it. That is, I perceived the butler doing it. In the perception of the butler doing it, each successive moment in the continuum of the experience of "the butler doing it" moved on into the just-past moment. The whole of the experience "the butler doing it" is the consciousness of the butler doing it as a continuum of each passing time-point in the series, and of the just-past time-points in retention with the ongoing and current perception. Each moment in the series continuously runs off into the just-past, but as part of the continuous experience of "the butler doing it" is intended through retention.

This must be contrasted with the memorial recollection of the butler doing it, or, more accurately, the butler having had done it. (That is to say, the perception of "the butler doing it," unified through the retention of each just-past as the current now runs off into the past, must be distinguished from the recollection of the past event, "the butler did it," as a posited memory of a past experience.)

None of this, of course, tells us anything about the so-called empirical facts, that is, the reality of the objectively posited series of events. The perception of "the butler doing it" in imagination is just as much intended as a continuous flow of experience as the real perception of the real butler "doing it."

Sic transit gloria husserliana.