Continental Philosophy Review (2023) 56:577–593

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09610-6

Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of

human and animal consciousness

Yamina Venuta1

Accepted: 2 April 2023 / Published online: 12 May 2023

© The Author(s) 2023

Abstract
My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Edmund Husserl’s views on the differences
between human and animal consciousness, with particular attention to the experi-
ence of temporality.
In the first section, I situate the topic of animal consciousness in the broader
context of Husserl’s philosophy. Whereas this connection has been often neglected,
I argue that a phenomenological analysis of non-human subjectivities is not only
justified, but also essential to the Husserlian project as a whole.
In the second section, I introduce two notions Husserl resorts to when describing
the essential difference between human and animal subjectivities, namely “strata of
consciousness” and “person.” Drawing on textual evidence, I argue that Husserl
does not simply see animals as excluded from the sphere of personhood. Rather,
he draws a distinction between two modes of personal life, one of which is said to
be unique to human adults.
What holds these two modes apart, according to Husserl, is a subject’s relation
to time. In the third section, I delve deeper into this topic, asking how we should
understand Husserl’s claim that animals live in a “restricted temporality.” I argue
that this has less to do with an inability to remember, imagine, or anticipate future
events, and more with an inability to explore temporal horizons stretching before
one’s birth or after one’s death. By contrast, humans gradually overcome these limi-
tations during ontogeny, thanks to the practice of linguistic communication. This
also has consequences for our capacity to engage in genuinely theoretical thought.

Keywords Husserl · Animal consciousness · Temporality · Personhood

Yamina Venuta
[email protected]

1
Universität zu Köln, Cologne (Köln), Germany

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578 Y. Venuta

1 Introduction. A phenomenology of animal subjectivities?

For those who aim to understand the experience of other living beings, the phenom-
enological tradition might not seem like the most obvious place to look. On the one
hand, those who are unfamiliar with the phenomenological movement generally
regard it as an entirely introspective enterprise, unlikely to further our understanding
of the human mind, and much less of animal consciousness—assuming there is such
a thing.1 If one were to endorse this position, any attempt to apply phenomenology
to the study of other species would turn out to be hopeless: Surely, one cannot intro-
spect one’s way into the mind of a different subject, let alone into that of a different
sort of subject. Phenomenologists, however, firmly reject the identification of their
discipline with a form of introspection, and call attention to the role of eidetic varia-
tion and intuition in their analyses: Their methods and descriptions are concerned
with the essential structures of phenomenality, not with idiosyncratic psychological
processes.2 From this perspective, phenomenology appears as a powerful tool for elu-
cidating key aspects of normal and pathological human experience, and much work
has been done in recent decades to bring phenomenology into a mutually enlighten-
ing relationship with disciplines such as psychiatry and the cognitive sciences. Little
thought, however, has been given to the question of how our ways of thinking, feel-
ing, and perceiving might compare to those of non-human subjects.
There are, of course, good historical and methodological reasons for privileging
a phenomenological investigation of our own experience over that of other species.
From a historical point of view, it is worth recalling that in the founding text of
the tradition, Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–1901), phenomenology was
originally presented as nothing more than descriptive psychology, and as a prepara-
tory step to the theoretical researches of (human) psychology itself.3 Husserl came
to regret this definition as early as 1903; yet, the damage had already been done.4
After the publication of Ideas I (1913), many of those who had gathered around him
rejected his “transcendental turn,” refusing to engage with the broader, non-psycho-
logical dimension of his philosophical project.5 It is precisely within this broader
context, however, that other species came to attract Husserl’s attention. As far as
methodology is concerned, on the other hand, one could rightly argue that other liv-
ing beings are always disclosed to us as objects for our consciousness. In this sense,
1
See, e.g., criticism by John Searle, Thomas Metzinger, and Daniel Dennett, discussed in Gallagher and
Zahavi (2008, pp. 3, 22).
2
In the words of Gallagher and Zahavi, “an account of subjective experience” should be distinguished
from “a subjective account of experience” (2008, p. 21). Phenomenologists, moreover, have always
stressed the need to overcome the naïve metaphysical picture that sees consciousness as a “box,” with
phenomena located inside the mind and the world existing outside: see, e.g., § 23 of the Second Logical
Investigation (Husserl 2001, p. 275), but also Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, pp. 21–23).
3
See, e.g., Husserl (2001, p. 176): “Phenomenology is descriptive psychology. Epistemological criticism
is therefore in essence psychology, or at least only capable of being built on a psychological basis.”
4
See Dermot Moran’s introduction to Husserl (2001, pp. xxxiv-xxxviii).
5
Similarly, contemporary attempts to bring phenomenology into dialogue with the natural sciences often
appeal to a bracketing of its transcendental dimension. What we are left with, however, is not phenom-
enology as a genuinely philosophical enterprise, but rather a “phenomenological psychology” carried out
within the natural attitude: see, e.g., Zahavi (2004, pp. 338–340).

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Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of human and… 579

an analysis of the structures of our own experience is a necessary precondition for

an epistemologically sound investigation of any other aspect of reality, including the
study of other organisms.
Acknowledging this historical and methodological precedence, however, should
not lead to set the issue of animal consciousness aside indefinitely, especially if one
is committed to the overarching goal of the phenomenological tradition—a transcen-
dental clarification of knowledge, objectivity, and truth, beginning with an analysis
of the structures of consciousness and subjective experience. Indeed, already by the
time of the Second Edition of the Logical Investigations (1913), Husserl came to
regard the analyses offered in his first major work as being true of humans and ani-
mals alike—and, at the same time, as being directly concerned with neither:

Phenomenological assertions on thought and intuition, on signifying intentions

and fulfillments and so on, say nothing about humans and animals, about ani-
mated beings in this factual world, rather they are about that which a priori
belongs to these lived experiences, by virtue of their pure species grasped in
intuition.6

If one wants to avoid the pitfalls of psychologism, and of relativism as a whole,

phenomenological inquiries cannot be restricted to an understanding of human sub-
jectivity—rather, we might say, their results must hold true for men, animals, angels,
and gods alike.7 Husserl’s aim is to spell out the structures of consciousness and of
lived experience in a way that has an a priori and universal validity, over and above
a preoccupation with concrete empirical species.
A step forward in this anti-anthropocentric direction is carried out in the second
section of Husserl’s Ideas II, whose aim is to describe the rules governing the con-
stitution of animal or animated nature (animalische Natur). Throughout the section,
the German terms animalisch and Animal are taken to designate not just humans,
but other living beings as well.8 What Husserl offers is here an analysis of the essen-
tial character of “psychic reality,” as opposed to mere inanimate nature. Against this
background, Husserl undertakes a study of the way we experience our bodies, as well
as of the way such bodies function in allowing us to perceive material objects and
other living beings. What we find here is therefore a survey of the features shared by
all conscious subjects, human and non-human, stemming from their common nature

6
Husserl (1984, p. 793): “Phänomenologische Feststellungen über Denken und Anschauen, über Bedeu-
tungsintention und Bedeutungserfüllung u. dgl. sagen gar nichts aus über Menschen und Tiere, über ani-
malische Wesen in dieser faktischen Welt, sondern über das, was derartigen Erlebnissen a priori vermöge
ihrer intuitiv erfaßten reinen Artungen zukommt.” Emphasis added.
7
Cf. Husserl (2001, p. 79): “What is true is absolutely, intrinsically true: truth is one and the same,
whether men or non-men, angels or gods apprehend and judge it”.
8
As Ciocan notes, a gap is here opened between the notions of “animated beings” (Animalien) and “ani-
mal beings” (Tiere); such a distinction “is frequently blurred in the translations that indistinctly render
both Animalien and Tiere by ‘animals’” (2018, p. 4). The concepts of Animal and of animalische Natur,
we should also note, are not coextensive: As I will mention in the second section of this paper, plants are
part of the latter, but not of the former.

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580 Y. Venuta

as embodied beings.9 To give a brief overview, every Animal is said to have a mate-
rial body (Körper), which is also a lived body (Leib); through its mediation, subjects
are placed in a causal as well as intentional relation to their surroundings. The body
acts as a zero-point of orientation in space, and as the bearer of sensations of vari-
ous kinds (visual, tactile, kinesthetic, of pleasure/pain, and so on); every Animal has
power over its movement (Ich kann) and is the subject of a series of experiences (or
“acts”) temporally linked to one another, in the form of a stream. It is only through
the body that consciousness gains access to a surrounding world, making use of the
regularities between its kinestheses and other information provided by sensibility to
give a coherent organization to what would otherwise be a chaos of sensations.
Once he acknowledges the crucial role played by the living body in constitutive
processes, however, Husserl is faced with a new problem. If it is true that human and
animal consciousness share a necessary relation to a material body, there are still dif-
ferences in the specific ways in which each body guides, and sets boundaries on, the
way we experience the world. Through its senses and practical organs, every species
has access only to a limited range of “hyletic data,” the raw sensuous material on
which our intentional experiences are built. Humans are no exception. As Husserl
remarks, no species can claim to have access to an “optimal experience,” that is to
say, one in which all things of the world would appear in perfect clarity, with all their
determinations lying in plain sight.10 Our embodied nature, we might say, always
brings with it a sort of partiality. It is precisely for this reason that entering a com-
munication with other species can enrich our world, making us indirectly aware of
elements we had not yet perceived, or of things we might in principle never be able
to perceive.11
“Real being,” as Husserl writes in 1921, is nothing but “an index for consciousness,
for every existing monadic consciousness, an index for possible development”12; “the
world can only be in so far as it develops itself, in so far as the absolute subjectivity
develops itself.”13 From the perspective of transcendental phenomenology, the world

9
For this sphere, Depraz (1995) proposes the term “transcendental animality” (animalité transcendan-
tale). For a more extensive treatment of this point, see, e.g., San Martín and Peñaranda (2001, pp. 355–
362). Just what living beings can be considered subjects of a life of consciousness from a Husserlian
perspective is a difficult question. Granted that the distinction between “lower” and “higher” animals is
in itself a phenomenological problem (cf. Bailey 2011), Husserl certainly takes some “lower” organisms
to have an experiential life that falls within the scope of phenomenological analyses (see the jellyfish
example in Husserl 1973a, pp. 112–119). On some rare occasions, he even goes as far as to suggest
that unicellular organisms should be seen as embodied and as poles of egological acts (cf., e.g., Husserl
1973b, p. 173). Nonetheless, he never seems to have reached a definitive position on the matter: in a late
manuscript from 1936, for example, he reaffirms that “lower” animals and plants pose the most difficult
problems to phenomenologists (cf. Ms. K III 18, p. 20a; cited in Di Martino 2013, p. 24). On this topic,
see also Marosan (2022).
10
Cf. Husserl (1973a, p. 135).
11
In Husserl’s example, a hunting dog co-constitutes a world with his master, enlarging his horizon of
experience (Husserl 1973b, p. 167): Thanks to its superior olfactory abilities, the dog can report the pres-
ence of prey which would otherwise escape the hunter’s attention.
12
Husserl (1973a, p. 128): “Das wahre Sein ist nur ein Index für Bewusstsein und für jedes existente
monadische Bewusstsein, ein Index für mögliche Entwicklung.”
13
Husserl (1973a, p. 136): “Die Welt kann nur sein, wenn sie sich konstitutiv entwickelt, wenn die abso-
lute Subjektivität sich entwickelt.”

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Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of human and… 581

does not exist “in itself,” but only as part of an intentional correlation, as that which is
brought to manifestation in the lived experiences of a totality of conscious beings. As
consciousness develops, as different sorts of subjects make their appearance in this
world—and perhaps it might not be a stretch to think of this “appearance” or “devel-
opment” in evolutionary terms—the world itself acquires new determinations. In this
light, an inquiry into the life of consciousness of other species becomes a necessary
task for phenomenology. Failing to take into account the experiential worlds of non-
human animals, Husserl remarks, would leave a considerable field of indefiniteness
at the core of our understanding of reality.14
Moreover, another concern seems to call for a careful study of animal life: If our
species cannot be said to represent the absolute norm for constitution, to what extent
can phenomenological insights (which always derive from our own experience)
describe consciousness in general, rather than our specific ways of experiencing?
To what extent are we justified in applying these assertions to subjects whose bodily
structures are very different from our own? Such questions require us to take a closer
look at other organisms and call for careful methodological considerations, aware
of the risks and also of the necessity of anthropomorphism. Indeed, there is no other
way for us to encounter other species than starting from our own (human) embodied
perspective. In this sense, anthropomorphism serves as an essential structure of our
experience, and, as such, it can never be fully surpassed.15 This is not to say, how-
ever, that our empathic understanding of other animals cannot be refined: As we gain
knowledge of their bodies, behaviors, and individual histories, we become progres-
sively more familiar with them and with the elements that make up their experiential
worlds.
We might speak of a feedback process here, or maybe of a hermeneutical circle.
On the one hand, we need to observe other species to discern which structures are
exclusive to our consciousness and our mode of embodied being; on the other, we
need to recognize these specifically human structures in order to approach animals on
their own terms, without projecting upon them our own ways of experiencing.
Several interesting remarks scattered across Husserl’s research manuscripts, espe-
cially those in which he is concerned with the notion of “normality,” and with the
question of how a single shared world can emerge from the perspectives of many
different subjects, pave the way for this kind of inquiry.16 As early as 1921, Husserl
began to devise a methodology, that of Abbau and Aufbau, which aimed to com-
bine phenomenological analyses with empirical clues coming from the natural sci-
ences, with the purpose of reconstructing the different experiential worlds of other
organisms.17

14
See Husserl (1973b, p. 626–627). Incidentally, we might say that every time a species goes extinct, our
understanding of reality is left impoverished, as we lose the opportunity to make sense of the world from
that point of view.
15
The same, however, holds for any other subject: Every Animal perceives the world from the vantage
point of its own species, and understands other organisms as anomalous modifications of its own mode
of embodiment.
16
See, e.g., De Palma (2008, pp. 75–76).
17
The method of “constitutive deconstruction” (Abbau and Aufbau) first appears in Husserl (1973a, pp.
112–119). For an overview, see Evans (1990).

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582 Y. Venuta

This vast research project, I believe, has not yet received sufficient attention from
phenomenologists.18 In what follows, however, I will not enter the details of Hus-
serl’s methodology; rather, I will focus on some of his broader reflections concerning
the essential differences between our own consciousness and that of other species.
The starting point will be the notion of “strata” of consciousness, first sketched in
Ideas II. I will then try to shed some light on it by drawing on the 1925 Phenomeno-
logical Psychology lectures and on Husserl’s later writings on the topic of intersub-
jectivity, asking whether a “personal stratum” can be said to set humans apart from
other animals. What I hope to have shown in this section is that a phenomenology of
animal subjectivities, although perhaps counterintuitive at first, constitutes an inte-
gral part of the Husserlian project.

2 “Strata” of consciousness and the question of personhood

We have mentioned that other organisms always appear as objects for our con-
sciousness. According to Husserl’s theory of empathy, when something bearing a
resemblance to our physical body manifests itself in our perceptual field, a kind of
transposition of sense takes place, by virtue of which we apprehend it as not just
another material object, but as another lived body endowed with subjectivity.19 In
other words, we transpose on it those same features we highlighted in our previous
discussion of animal nature: We see it as a pole of egological acts, as the bearer of a
stream of consciousness in which experiences temporally flow into one another, and
so on. This transposition, however, can only have a limited scope, for we also imme-
diately recognize that not all subjectivities are equal: It is one thing to recognize an
object of my perceptual field as another experiencing subject; it is quite another to
ascribe the same sort of experiences that make up my stream of consciousness to it.
Is there any way to express these differences among different kinds of subjectivity in
phenomenological terms?
Husserl first confronts this issue in a brief and partly puzzling passage of his Ideas
II (§ 32). The first section of this book analyzes the constitution of material nature,

18
The task of employing a Husserlian methodology for a systematic reconstruction of the differences
existing among animal species must be distinguished from that of delivering a historico-philosophical
reconstruction of Husserl’s views on the anthropological difference. While the former path appears largely
untrodden, many excellent studies have already addressed the latter topic, and will form the basis for
the following discussion. Among the contributions cited in the next pages, De Palma (2011), Di Martino
(2014), and Vergani (2021) offer what perhaps is the most comprehensive treatment of the issue of ani-
mal consciousness in Husserl. Other studies certainly worth mentioning are Depraz (1995), San Martín
and Peñaranda (2001), Lotz (2006), Painter (2007), Bailey (2013), Heinämaa (2014), and Ciocan (2017).
Toulemont (1962, pp. 79–82, 192–198) remains an invaluable source for those wishing to find their way
around the various Husserlian manuscripts devoted to these topics.
19
This was already true for the early sketches of Husserl’s theory of empathy, which can be found in
§§ 43–47 of Ideas II (Husserl 1989, pp. 170–180). A more refined account is offered in the Fifth Cartesian
Meditation, as well as in the Intersubjectivity volumes I am here discussing (Husserl 1973a, b). How strong
must the resemblance be for empathy to be possible at all? Not much, at least according to the same text
in which Husserl introduces the methodology of Abbau: All it takes is “an analogy with a skin sensitiv-
ity and with movements of reaction” (Husserl 1973a, p. 118). On this topic, see also Marbach (2018, pp.
144–145).

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Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of human and… 583

that is, the way things in the physical world reveal themselves to our conscious-
ness. The topic of the second section, as we have seen, is animated nature, or the
realm of psychic or ensouled things—plants, animals, and humans. In the introduc-
tory remarks to this second section, which list a series of differences between mate-
rial and psychic reality, Husserl points out that material things can always be broken
down into multiple parts, while the soul or psyche “has no places, no pieces. It is
absolutely not a fragmentable unity.”20 Looking back to the ancient doctrines of the
“parts of the soul,” however, Husserl acknowledges the necessity of introducing a
“certain partition” even on the level of living beings, namely a distinction between
Seelenschichten, “strata in the soul, corresponding to strata of consciousness.”21 A
distinction between living things and mere material objects was already in place;
now, within the realm of living beings, we are invited to distinguish between a soul
which is “constantly sleeping”—a “subjectless psyche,”22 attributed to plants—and
the kind of soul to which a psychic subject capable of active positioning belongs. The
latter is said to belong to every Animal, human or beast. A brief annotation follows:
“Another example is the soul of the brute animal, in which the stratum of theoretical
thought in the pregnant sense is lacking, etc…”23
After this, Husserl quickly moves on to other considerations, failing to provide a
detailed characterization of the different “kinds” of soul or psychic life. One is then
left wondering: What, exactly, are animals lacking? Is Husserl’s conception of the
“soul” of other beings Aristotelian through and through, as it might appear from this
passage, or is there perhaps something innovative in his remarks about animals—
something that sets him apart from the previous tradition, as well as from later phe-
nomenological reflections on animality? To answer these questions, I will now turn
to Husserl’s later writings, drawing upon his reflections on intersubjectivity from the
years 1920s and ’30s.
A particularly fruitful way of approaching the topic of the differences between
human and non-human subjectivities, I believe, is through an analysis of Husserl’s
concept of Person. In Ideas II, the discussion of animated nature is followed by a
third section about the spiritual world, which includes “the Ego as person or as mem-
ber of the social world.”24 The Ego as Person, Husserl writes, is the “subject of a sur-
rounding world”—a world in which objects appear not merely qua physical, as parts
of an “objective” nature, but as endowed with practical, aesthetic, and cultural values
relating to our wants and needs, to our possibilities for action, and to the social envi-
ronment we are immersed in.25 The soul or psyche (Seele) discussed in the section on
animated nature was part of an objectivist picture of the world; it was consciousness
as seen through the eyes of the natural scientist, that is to say, it was the object of the
naturalistic attitude. The world of spirit (Geist), instead, only appears within the per-
sonalistic attitude—in other words, the attitude in which we naturally find ourselves
20
Husserl (1989, p. 141).
21
Husserl (1989, p. 142).
22
Husserl (1980, p. 103).
23
Husserl (1989, p. 142).
24
Husserl (1989, p. 184).
25
Husserl (1989, p. 195).

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584 Y. Venuta

“when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with one another in
greeting, or are related to one another in love and aversion, in disposition and action,
in discourse and discussion.”26
In a much-cited text from the 1930s, animals, too, are said to have something
like an Ego-structure, though, as Husserl remarks, “we still lack the proper terms to
describe it.”27 Looking back at the threefold distinction between material, animated,
and spiritual nature, one might therefore ask: Is their Ego a personal Ego, as Husserl
maintains in the case of the human being? In other words, are animals persons?
The topic does not cease to spark discussion among scholars. Throughout his
reflections, Husserl comes back to this question multiple times, seemingly contra-
dicting himself on more than one occasion. According to Lotz, for instance, “Husserl
does think that animals lack the constitutive layer of personality and spirit [Geist]”:
Animals are psychic beings, but not spiritual ones, in the sense that they have no
individual history and only manifest “typical” behavior.28 Di Martino follows Lotz
in arguing that “what the self or the subjectivity belonging to animals lack is pre-
cisely this personal layer.”29 A switch from the naturalistic attitude to the personal-
istic one, Ciocan maintains, reveals that while every Animal has an animated body,
“we understand the human body precisely as a personal body, while animals cannot
be understood in this way.”30 Animals, it would seem, cannot be conceived within
the personalistic attitude.31 Vergani adopts a more nuanced position, maintaining
that “Husserl hesitates to extend the status of personhood to animals, continuously
advancing towards and retreating from this frontier.”32
Finally, Bailey invites us to consider the possibility that there might be not just
one, but two concepts of person in Husserl’s thinking.33 In a more qualified sense
of the term, personal life might only pertain to adult human beings, as it implies an
engagement with historical and cultural values. In a larger and more fundamental
sense, however, animals, too, might be persons, since they are “subjects of a sur-
rounding world.” Their relation to the surroundings is not merely causal—rather,
it is motivational. In the case of spiritual beings, it is not simply what exists, but
what the subject knows of, that guides its actions, thoughts, and feelings. This brings
about, among other things, the possibility of errors and misjudgments. For instance,
a subject might ignore a real threat, if it fails to recognize it as such, or it might flee
in the face of a merely imagined danger. In the case of purely psychic beings, on
the other hand, every movement is fully dependent on causal interactions with the
environment.

26
Husserl (1989, p. 192).
27
Husserl (1973b, p. 177).
28
Lotz (2006, p. 196).
29
Di Martino (2014, p. 61).
30
Ciocan (2019, p. 7).
31
Cf. Lotz (2006, p. 196).
32
Vergani (2021, p. 67).
33
Cf. Bailey (2013, p. 226): “La possibilité qu’il y ait non pas un, mais bien deux concepts de personne
dans la pensée husserlienne.”

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Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of human and… 585

The key to solving this tension has been overlooked, and can be found, I will now
argue, in Husserl’s 1925 lectures on Phenomenological Psychology, and specifically
in § 21 (Stufenbau des Seelischen). Here Husserl goes back to the notion of “strata”
of the soul, already introduced in Ideas II, yet again emphasizing the necessity of dis-
tinguishing between a “psychic passivity” and a higher, “specifically spiritual” level,
which covers the realm of acts “centered on the Ego.”34 This distinction, he remarks
once again, “holds for animals (at least for the higher ones) as well as for human
beings.”35 Animals—at least the “higher” ones36—are therefore, without a doubt,
spiritual beings, actively engaging their surrounding worlds. Nowhere does Husserl
subscribe to the Cartesian notion of bête-machine, which sees animals as unminded
creatures, blindly and passively tied to the dictates of their biological instincts.37 A
difference, however, is still in place: “In human beings this higher level includes the
entire personal life and, based upon it, the entire sociohistorical living and producing
which transcend the single persons.”38 What allows one to distinguish the specifi-
cally human way of being from that of other species has something to do with the
temporality of our egological acts, with our ability to take a stance on our life as a
whole and on the life of our community and species.
A crucial element with respect to previous discussions of this topic, moreover, is
that at this point Husserl himself regrets that no satisfactory terminological distinc-
tion is available to make the difference between two modes of personal life readily
apparent. He writes:

Unfortunately we lack a most broad concept of ‘person,’ which is indispens-

able, one which includes also the higher animal life and which designates only
a being which is active or affected in spontaneities pertaining to an I and as such
an I has enduring I-properties.39

Bailey is therefore certainly right in invoking a distinction between two concepts of

Person. However, it is worth noting that the author himself was well aware of this

34
Husserl (1962, p. 130 [99]): “Zwischen dem Seelischen der unteren Stufen, seelischer Passivität und
dem spezifisch Geistigen, nämlich dem in ich-zentrierten Akten verlaufenden Leben.”
35
Husserl (1962, p. 130 [99]): “Das gilt für Tiere (mindestens für die höheren) wie für den Menschen.”
36
The reason for this limitation, which will characterize the rest of our discussion, seems to be method-
ological: as Bailey (2011, p. 58) notes, “whereas Heidegger thought the essence of animal life should be
uncovered by considering animals as remote from human life as possible, Husserl thought we should start
with the familiar and proceed toward the unknown.” Accordingly, many of Husserl’s examples in this
phase concern mammals, for example cats, dogs, lions, and monkeys. Only in his later years did Husserl
try to move from a generic concept of animality to a more detailed description of different animal species,
including less familiar ones, “pluralizing” the threshold that divides humans from other organisms. For a
thorough reconstruction of this shift, see Vergani (2021).
37
For a more detailed discussion of this point, see also De Palma (2011, pp. 223–225).
38
Husserl (1962, p. 130 [99]): “Bei dem Menschen befaßt diese höhere Stufe das ganze personale Leben
und von da aus das gesamte über die einzelnen Personen hinausreichende gesellschaftlich-geschichtliche
Leben und Leisten.” Emphasis added.
39
Husserl (1962, p. 130 [99–100]): “Es fehlt leider ein allerweitester Begriff von Person, der unentbeh-
rlich ist, der auch das höhere Tierleben umgreift und nur ein Wesen, das in ichlichen Spontaneitäten tätig
ist oder affiziert wird und als ein solches Ich bleibende Ich-Eigenschaften hat, bezeichnet.”

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586 Y. Venuta

necessity: It is only due to an insufficiency of language that Husserl appears at times

to oscillate between two ways of thinking about animal subjectivities. If read in light
of this passage, his earlier and later discussions of animal life appear quite coherent;
he consistently attributes personhood to other species when he is discussing the wider
sense of the term, and consistently excludes animals from the personal sphere when
it comes to the second, more qualified, sense of the word.
What other species lack, in short, is not the personal (or spiritual) layer—rather,
it is just one of these layers. The level of spirit should not be regarded as monolithic,
but as internally differentiated. Moreover, it seems to me that animals can and must,
beyond doubt, be conceived within the personalistic attitude, since the latter appears
primarily related to the wider notion of Person. It is the attitude we ordinarily find
ourselves in before the emergence of any theoretical interest, and in which everyday
practical and communicative activities take place. Indeed, whenever Husserl dis-
cusses topics related to communication and sociality (including questions about the
formation of so-called “personalities of a higher order”), he always takes his remarks
to concern other species as well.40 One might also add, with Painter, that the person-
alistic attitude is precisely the one we share with animals, since the naturalistic one
results from a kind of abstraction and objectifying thinking which seems unavailable
to non-linguistic beings.41
With this remark, however, we circled back to our first mention of the notion of
“strata of the soul” in Ideas II. There, as we saw, the difference between humans
and animals remained somewhat mysterious. There was no mention of a personal
Ego—rather, the distinguishing feature of human subjectivity resided in a “theoreti-
cal stratum,” whose nature was not clearly defined. We will now have to ask whether
this stands in contrast with, or perhaps in addition to, what we saw in the 1925 Phe-
nomenological Psychology lectures. What I will argue is that we can devise a tight
relation between the experience of time and this theoretical layer, with linguistic
communication acting as a mediating term. First, however, I will try to clear up a
possible misunderstanding concerning Husserl’s views on the temporality of animal
consciousness.

3 Time and language

While discussing the distinction between two concepts of personal life in Husserl,
we mentioned that humans differ from animals by way of their peculiar relation to
time. According to Husserl, it seems, other species live in a “restricted temporality.”42
We have yet to enquire, however, into the details of this restriction. In our case, for

40
See, e.g., Husserl (1962, p. 110; 1973b, pp. 56, 181–183, 478). Discussions of community, on the other
hand, only seem to concern human beings: As Drummond (1996, p. 238) notes, “wherever there is a com-
munity, we find the personal and the social, but we do not find a community wherever we find the personal
and the social.”
41
Painter (2007, p. 101). The natural scientist, it will be recalled, always takes his departure from the
world as it appears in the personalistic attitude, but then proceeds to strip it of all of its use- and value-
predicates, since these have no place in an objectivist picture of nature.
42
Husserl (1973b, p. 405): “In einer beschränkten Zeitlichkeit.”

13
Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of human and… 587

instance, the present moment always appears surrounded by horizons of past and
future we can freely explore through acts of recollection and anticipation. Can we
say the same about other species? Can some non-human animals perform acts of
imagination? Can they intuitively represent future goals? Or should we maybe main-
tain that all of their actions are performed “in the dark,” in a continuous transition
from instinct to satisfaction? Do other species, too, enjoy the freedom to distance
themselves from their actual and immediate surroundings, in order to choose among
different courses of action?
Husserl raises these and similar doubts in a text titled Welt und Wir (1934), one of
the latest occasions in which he deals extensively with the topic of animal life. It is
on this manuscript that recent discussions of animality in Husserl invariably draw. In
a word, the issue seems to be whether other species have access to re-presentations
(Vergegenwärtigungen)—the phenomenological term under which acts of memory,
phantasy, and anticipation, as well as dreams, are collected. The general tendency
is to interpret Husserl’s questions as purely rhetorical. According to Di Martino, for
instance, “for Husserl, the animal. . . does not possess ‘authentic’ recollections, nor
does it have intuitive representations of phantasy.”43 What non-human animals are left
with, it seems, is a form of “primary recollection”44: At most, objects might appear to
other species as “already familiar,” with no indication of when or where they encoun-
tered them in the past. In the case of animals, thus, conscious life would appear to
be restricted to the “living present”: primal impression, retention, and protention.45
This interpretation, however, is far too hasty, as it tends to conflate Husserl’s views
with the position expressed by Heidegger in his 1929/30 lectures on the Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics. Here, the distinguishing character of animal life is cap-
tured by the notion of Benommenheit—a state of stupefied “captivation,” of “being
driven from one drive to the other,”46 in which the possibility of adopting a reflective
stance towards the present moment seems completely ruled out. Only humans, Hei-
degger maintains, can rise above captivation with everyday tasks and perform genu-
ine action; other species, in contrast, merely behave in reaction to stimuli that make
up their “disinhibiting ring,” incapable of engaging with the environment outside of
the limits imposed by their biological instincts.47 In an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of
anthropomorphism, Heidegger lets “lower” animals guide his descriptions: His chief
examples in these lectures are bees, lizards, snails. As Bailey notes, however, the so-
called “higher” animals “never come back into the equation,” an erasure that allows
him to speak of an “abyss” separating human existence and animal life.48

43
Di Martino (2014, p. 63).
44
Husserl (1973b, p. 184).
45
The availability of a horizon of retentions and protentions accompanying the primal impression, on the
other hand, is never put into question—otherwise, the whole edifice of constitution would crumble down:
cf. Di Martino (2014, p. 63) and Vergani (2020, p. 74).
46
Heidegger (1995, p. 247).
47
For a more detailed discussion of Heidegger’s view of animals, see, e.g., Kuperus (2007) and Costa
(2002).
48
Bailey (2011, p. 52).

13
588 Y. Venuta

Husserl’s account, I believe, is more nuanced. First, on more than one occasion he
explicitly rejects the idea that the passive sphere exhausts the conscious life of other
species in its entirety. Far from being blindly tied to their instincts, animals lead a
spiritual life, freely performing acts “centered on their Ego.” Moreover, those who
feel tempted to interpret the questions of Welt und Wir as Husserl’s final word on the
topic of animal re-presentations, should also pay careful attention to its concluding
paragraphs:

Is such a crude distinction correct? How can we understand why the animal
does not have proper memories, no intuitions repeating in the form of repeating
perceptions with the capacity of the “over and over again,” and so no constitu-
tion of existents in a temporal form of being?49

Claiming that animals are unable to access a horizon of re-presentations, Husserl

seems to acknowledge, would also amount to denying that they can constitute a world
of objects displaying permanence in time. Although this might turn out to be accu-
rate, at least in some cases, what could ever be the reasons for such a difference?
As no answer is offered to these doubts, Husserl’s questions remain far from being
purely rhetorical. Rather, they must be read in the context of his other research manu-
scripts, in which his opinions undergo a constant process of redefinition. In a different
series of notes dating from 1934, for instance, he presents a different view on the mat-
ter, asserting that other species experience the world as a unity of appearances in the
present, but also “in a retentional and to some extent also intuitive past and future.”50
The mention of intuitiveness hints at the possibility of an exploration, albeit limited,
of past and future horizons.
“The man,” Nietzsche wrote in the second of his Untimely Meditations (1874),
“says ‘I remember’ and envies the animal, who at once forgets and for whom every
moment really dies, sinks back into night and fog and is extinguished for ever.”51
While Heidegger might have looked favorably at this depiction of animal life, I think
we have good reasons to doubt that Husserl would have subscribed to Nietzsche’s
position. To be sure, he still views other species as living in a restricted temporal-
ity. This, however, does not necessarily amount to living in the mere present, in the
sense of having limited access to one’s own past and future experiences. Far more
reasonable from both an exegetical and substantive perspective, I believe, is the idea
that other animals live among those present—that is to say, in a world that is only
shared with their contemporaries.52 In this respect, as we will see, they are more

49
Husserl (1973b, p. 184): “Ist das so als schroffe Scheidung richtig? Wie ist es verständlich zu machen,
warum das Tier keine eigentliche Erinnerung, keine wiederholenden Anschauungen hat als wiederholende
Wahrnehmungen und mit dem Vermögen des „immer wieder“, eben damit keine Konstitution von Seien-
den in der Seinsform der Zeitlichkeit?” Emphasis added.
50
Husserl (2006, p. 210). Emphasis added.
51
Nietzsche (1997, p. 61).
52
A discussion of scientific evidence concerning the extent to which different species are able to detach
themselves from the present, e.g. recalling past events and planning future actions, would go beyond the
scope of the present paper. For an overview, see Clayton and Dickinson (2010), Viera and Margolis (2019).

13
Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of human and… 589

similar to children, which Husserl equally excludes from the more restricted notion
of personhood.53
The point here at stake is the ability to experience oneself as a member of a tradi-
tion, of an open-ended chain of generations extending endlessly in past and future
directions.54 From a merely biological point of view, of course, every organism
belongs to this chain; what sets adult human beings apart from other subjects, how-
ever, is an awareness of being part of a generative sequence. How, then, is this aware-
ness acquired? How does one become a person in the strongest sense of the term?
Husserl’s answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is: through language.
I mentioned above that objects in the spiritual world are endowed with practical,
aesthetic, and cultural values. Some of these values simply correspond to what we
would today call affordances in the Gibsonian sense: the possibilities for action tied
to the bodily makeup of a specific organism. Other values, however, are cultural and
historical: They refer to the meanings that other subjects bestowed upon a category
of items. Just like the former set of values, historical determinations are “invisible”:
They are not part of an objectivist picture of the world. Unlike the former, how-
ever, they can only be “reactivated” by a subject who holds an appropriate body of
knowledge.
It is here that communication and language enter the picture. From the moment
we are born, we are users of objects and cultural formations devised by others. At
first, however, our engagement with such practices is merely passive. In Husserl’s
example, we are unaware that the toys we play with and the fairy tales we listen to
are part of a tradition; we have no awareness of the fact that they have been handed
down to us over the course of generations.55 Only through countless communicative
exchanges with those older than us do our experiential worlds gradually acquire their
historical sense. As we grow up, we come to take that tradition upon ourselves; we
become aware of it and accept the task of perpetuating it. As Steinbock points out,
then, growing up and becoming a person means appropriating the historical elements
that make up one’s cultural world.56
What about animals? Just like human children, their young go through a kind of
“spiritual development,” gradually learning how to make sense of their surrounding
worlds. Such a development, however, does not lead them to an awareness of their
historicity. It could hardly be otherwise, since other species, Husserl remarks, show
no trace of historical becoming: Whereas the human world is “constantly evolving,”
“every animal generation in its present as a community repeats a specific surround-
ing world with the typicality that is proper to its species.”57 Human life, too, follows

53
Cf. Husserl (1973b, p. 141).
54
See, e.g., Husserl (1973b, p. 181).
55
Cf. Husserl (1973b, p. 140).
56
Steinbock (1995, p. 227). This appropriation, however, need not necessarily take the form of an accep-
tance of already-existing norms. On the contrary, a key element of personal life (in the narrow sense) is the
possibility of rational critique and renewal of one’s tradition (cf. Rotundo 2021, p. 353). In its most radical
and comprehensive form, this critique becomes an absolute one, a critique of reason and a clarification of
knowledge down to its phenomenological sources.
57
Cf. Husserl (1973b, p. 180).

13
590 Y. Venuta

a general pattern that remains unchanged over time—across the centuries, humans
invariably eat, sleep, form associations, and reproduce—but the concrete way in
which these unchanging needs are met evolves over time: Some forms of human
action are abandoned, some others arise all of a sudden or building upon previous
achievements. Here, language also plays a pivotal role: Not only it allows new sub-
jects to enter an already established cultural tradition, but it enables the creation
of a tradition in the first place. Every subject endows the world with new spiritual
determinations; however, it is only through communication—be it in oral or written
form—that such determinations become intersubjectively available and survive the
death of those who originated them.58
With the mention of death, we finally reach what I take to be the crucial point
in Husserl’s discussions of personhood and temporality. Only through language,
and through the tales of those older than me, I am able to realize that the world
existed before I was born, and that it will keep on turning long after I am gone. Only
through language can I come to appreciate birth and death as essential necessities for
every living being. To the eyes of a human adult, then, the surrounding environment
appears as part of a common world in the highest sense—a world shared not only with
those who are perceptually present at a given moment, nor with the totality of one’s
contemporaries, but with an open-ended multiplicity of past, present, and future oth-
ers, many of whom are “absent in their very essence.”59 This and only this can be a
world “for everyone,” an objective world, not tied to a particular subject or historical
community.
How does this relate to the question of the “theoretical stratum” mentioned in Ideas
II? To put it briefly, it is only in a world so constituted that the practice of science,
and of theoretical thought in the pregnant sense, becomes meaningful. The possibil-
ity of scientific judgments rests on an understanding of the historical and generative
character of human existence, and of the natural world as something that persists
through an enchainment of generations. Scientific laws aim to universal validity, both
in space and in time; theoretical determinations and values that arise as the product of
the scientific or naturalistic attitude are handed down from one generation to the next,
and progressively refined in the process. Only persons in the narrow sense of the term
can partake in these collective endeavors.
Just like the spiritual layer of consciousness, then, so too must the world as its cor-
relate be conceived as internally differentiated, and its constitution as a process that
occurs in multiple stages. This process, as I tried to show, is strictly tied to the exer-
cise of communicative abilities. Through language, subjects gain “second-hand expe-
rience”: As they inherit additional knowledge on the shared world, they gradually
overcome the initial narrowness of their temporal horizons.60 They dig further and
further into the past, gaining knowledge of events that happened before their birth,

58
Cultural determinations can then not only survive, but also accumulate modifications over time. In this
regard, Husserl’s reflections seem to point to what comparative psychologists would today call “ratchet
effect”: compare, e.g., Husserl’s sixth appendix to the Crisis (On the Origin of Geometry: Husserl 1970,
pp. 353–378) with Tennie, Call, and Tomasello (2009).
59
Cf. Heinämaa (2014, p. 138).
60
Cf. Husserl (1973b, pp. 222–224).

13
Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of human and… 591

and speculate on the future, going so far as to consider the possibility of death—not
just their own, but that of their own species.61
Precisely this kind of experience seems precluded to non-human beings. Animals
might well be capable of remembering every moment of their lives, of imagining,
and of sharing information about things of the world with other individuals. In the
absence of a powerful linguistic medium, however, what non-human subjects can-
not explore or reconstruct is the temporal horizon that stretches before their birth
and after their death. That task, Husserl seems to suggest, is open to our theoretical
capacities alone.

Acknowledgements I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Professors Alfredo Ferrarin, Danilo
Manca, and Thiemo Breyer for their guidance and support during the writing of this paper. I am also
grateful to Agnese Di Riccio, Erik Norman Dzwiza-Ohlsen, Cristián Mauricio Martínez Bravo, Federico
Maviglia, Lukas Nehlsen, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on
an earlier version of this article.

Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

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