The Perception Of Time And Its Schema

Time is one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy,and the discussion of the essence of time has never ceased for thousands of years.Our habitual view of time compares it to a river,which,in Merleau-Ponty's view,is a reversal of the relationship of time:time comes from the future and then disappears in the past,rather than from the past to the future.Merleau-Ponty argues that time is neither in the objective world nor in the consciousness,time is actually a dimension of the subject.The causes of habitual view shall be attributed to regarding body as a monad as well as the wrong reference system.In the analysis of the consciousness of internal time,Husserl outlined the temporal structure to us.The temporal field of consciousness is the three-dimensional composition of retention-primal impression-protention,which is the basis of objective time.Husserl interpreted the primal process as an interweaving of retention and protention in Die Bernauer Manuskripte Uber Das Zeitbewusstsein,at the same time,he pointed out that protention is a replicate of retention.However,in order to explain the direction of the primal process,Husserl had to introduce the concept of"absolute flow",which has incurred quite a few critics.Merleau-Ponty had pointed out that in the temporality,the perception is more fundamental.He transforms the basis of temporality from consciousness to body.In compare with consciousness,the body is more passive——body bears the time,and then produces the direction.With the final schema given by Husserl in Die Bernauer Manuskripte Uber Das Zeitbewusstsein,we can manage to work out a new schema for Merleau-Ponty,to illustrate how the direction of time consciousness is formed by means of time perception.Benjamin Libet provided proof of experimental data to support that the body itself has temporality,thus retention and protention have their physiological basis.Our temporal field is a perceptual field,which is the structure of body,but not constructed by consciousness.With the help of the new schema,we can reinterpret the mechanism of recollection,as well as a series of phenomena of conscious time.