Scholar’s Symposium: The Work of David Carr

Abstract

This essay begins by situating the work of David Carr in relation to the reception of phenomenology in the United States. It addresses Carr’s early (and continuing) contributions to the philosophy of history, especially as this topic emerges in Husserl’s middle and later writings. The idea of point of view as this emerges in Carr’s own writings on history is examined, with special attention to differences between its spatial and temporal instantiations. Carr’s emphasis on the primacy of temporality in human experience is contrasted with an approach that is more appreciative of the role of place in this experience. It is suggested that place offers an important alternative to time as a basis for the understanding of history and narrative.

I

David Carr has been a good friend and close fellow philosopher since we first met as freshmen at Yale University. Both of us majored in philosophy, and both of us were already on the way to phenomenology by the time we graduated together in 1961. This way was neither easy nor predictable. Other, more likely ways to practice philosophy at the time included American pragmatism, metaphysics in the wake of Whitehead, and analytic philosophy: we had strong teachers in each of these areas (e.g., Richard Bernstein, Paul Weiss, and Wilfrid Sellars) and might well have followed in their inspiring path.

Why did we pursue phenomenology? For my part, I was always fascinated with the close description of things and events—I was then also an aspiring painter, and the two enterprises are inherently linked—but David doubtless had better reasons. Already as a junior, he had studied in Germany, reading Heidegger’s Being and Time on the deck of the ocean liner on the way back. I felt that he was already far ahead of me. I’m still catching up, almost half a century later. David was a far better linguist than I—he is still perfectly fluent in German as well as French—and, more important, he was a serious student of philosophy: he was impressively ernstlich while I (and my fellow students who had never been East of East Haven) seemed fickle and flippant in comparison, rank beginners and fresh recruits. Nevertheless, I took some cold comfort from Husserl’s sage advice that in phenomenology everyone is a beginner. I also took some comfort in the fact that at the New School for Social Research, not far from New Haven, was to be found a hotbed of phenomenological activity on the part of Aaron Gurwitsch, Dorion Cairns, Hans Jonas, and (by contagion at least) Hannah Arendt. True to form, David got wind of this first, and he was already teaching there in 1968, as a visiting assistant professor—when I had left the east coast for Northwestern and the University of California at Santa Barbara, moving ever further west as David put down deep roots on the eastern seaboard. I was to rejoin him in New Haven, where a few years later we were both aspiring young professors who were encouraged to teach phenomenology to our hearts’ content—until the arrival of Ruth Barcan Marcus in the mid-1970s put an end to our fledgling careers at our alma mater, sending David to the rude red soil of Oklahoma and me to the sand dunes of Long Island. While still in New Haven, we became among the first co-directors of SPEP, holding an annual meeting in that city that was attended by few enough people to fit into my rowhouse living room for the opening reception. From that occasion and one other, we co-edited a volume, Explorations in Phenomenology (1973), which represented one of the first collections of papers from those first meetings of our Society.

But in recounting this shared history, I divert—though perhaps not inappropriately, given David’s lifelong passion for history. The question remains: why phenomenology? In David’s case, why Husserlian phenomenology in particular? If we could answer these basic questions, we would have come a long way toward understanding the remarkable lifetime accomplishment of David Carr in the field which he and I (and now so many others in America) share—an achievement which I am pleased to honor in the following essay.

II

David’s draw to the field had everything to do with how phenomenology and history converge in the later writings of Husserl. Less attracted to the early (i.e., logical–epistemological) and middle (i.e., flagrantly and formally transcendental) phases of Husserl’s thought, he was drawn from the very start to those late efforts of the aging Husserl to merge the unabashed empiricism of history—its sheer successiveness, its obsession with fact, its openness to the unexpectedly unfolding event—with the rigor of the eidetic and the concretely transcendental (e.g., immanent structures, founding agencies, guiding teloi, and inherent rationalities). It is no accident that David’s first major publication was his superb translation of Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, published in 1970, and that his own first book, published 4 years later, was entitled Phenomenology and the Problem of History (PPH) which devotes fully three chapters to an explicit treatment of the Crisis, whose presence is felt throughout the book.

I take it as telling that David recently sent me a new paper, still forthcoming, with the title “History in Husserl’s Crisis: Phenomenology and the ‘Idea of Europe’.” This shows amazing and admirable persistency! Such dedication to a single cluster of ideas, over more than four decades, is not evidence of obsession but of philosophical dedication: for it just is (and still is) a major mystery as to how history, that messy phenomenon that seems to spill over all set borders, can be contained eidetically—how it can have any kind of essence, much less a rigorously maintained one—as well as be grounded in human subjects, that is, in some founding event or meaning-giving agency. A double mystery, in short, and one that calls for a lifetime of reflection such as David Carr has been eager to devote to it. Not that he hasn’t had other preoccupations in philosophy: he certainly has, most notably: narrativity, time, and the character of the self; but these flow forth from his own first ruminations on the issue of history as raised by Husserl’s great work of the mid-1930s—a work which, as David writes laconically in the abstract for the recent paper, “has many facets.” Carr’s own treatment of Husserl’s text itself has many facets in the course of his evolving and deepening discussion of it.

All these facets may be understood as responses to the compelling question stated so forthrightly in David’s first book: “Who are ‘we’ who are so ‘thoroughly’ historical?” (PPH, 54). The question is clear, even if answers are not easy to come by. What does it mean for human beings to be so deeply historical that they cannot not make history at every turn, with every action they take and every word they utter? Husserl had maintained that humans are not just contingently but essentially “historical beings”(historisches Wesen)—in the phrase of the septuaginarian German philosopher that so struck the young American philosopher in his mid-20s. Husserl had come to see in the self-awareness of human historicity “the deepest kind of self-reflection aimed at a self-understanding in terms of what we are truly seeking as the historical beings we are” (cited at PPH, 72). Not only this—a lesson we could also learn from Dilthey or Heidegger—but philosophy itself becomes for Husserl a matter of “teleological-historical reflection” (cited from Crisis, 3, n.1), thoroughly historical all the way through and shaped in terms of certain ultimate ends. What this means concretely is that history is no longer background or merely introductory but part of the philosophical enterprise itself—indeed, even part of the transcendental aspect of this enterprise. Where earlier, Husserl had invoked the history of philosophy as a merely preliminary exercise for a discussion of his own form of transcendental philosophy—for example, in his lectures on Erste Philosophie in 1923–1924—a decade later he took historical reflection to be integral to transcendental phenomenology itself. As the young Carr put it so lucidly: “... what is important and new about the Crisis ... [is that] the pursuit of transcendental philosophy gives rise, of its own accord, to the problem of historicity.”¹ In other words, reflection on history is “a necessary and not merely a possible component in the business of ‘establishing’ philosophy” (Carr 66). Moreover, historical reflection of the sort, which the Crisis undertakes “becomes, in its own right, an introduction to transcendental phenomenology.”² “In its own right” (eigenständig): here is a crucial clue, a precious pointer. By uttering it, Husserl has inaugurated a quiet revolution in philosophy; and by underlining its significance, Carr has achieved two crucial things in one stroke: he has helped us to read Husserl differently than we ever had before—to see a dimension of his work that had been hidden from our sight when we thought he was only proposing yet another form of transcendental philosophy in the wake of Kant—and to set before himself a lifetime of continually renewed meditation on history for his own part.

In a certain sense, the last gesture of Edmund Husserl becomes the first move of David Carr: the Endstiftung of the former becomes the Erststiftung of the latter. This link across entire continents and generations is itself an instance of “teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation.”³ It signifies not just continuity of tradition but an active and creative taking-up of a tradition and carrying it forward in a new key: a key that increasingly assumed Carr’s own distinctive modulation. The “teleological” here signifies not a fixed goal (much less a system) but rather a nascent nisus in history that works itself out in historical events and that can be understood by the self-reflection of historical actors, philosophers, and historians alike. Carr detected this nisus in Husserl’s truncated text, which he set before English readers for the first time and then interpreted and extended in his own book. These are already great gifts; but Carr himself, never one to rest on his laurels, took it as a spur to thinking out the philosophy of history on his own terms in his subsequent works. Fresh and original as these works are, they would not have been possible without his early ruminations on Husserl’s model of history in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

In these ruminations, Carr was in effect asking himself (and thus urging his readers to ask themselves) such questions as these: What does being a “historical being” really mean? It does not mean merely being part of history, being a mere player in it—where “it” implies some magisterial, impersonal process. Nor does it mean only to write and read history as “historiography” in Heidegger’s perjorative sense. And it is certainly not a matter of identifying with the intentions of actors in other historical eras, as Collingwood argues. If we follow Husserl’s lead, it is to be self-reflective about our own historizing, that is, the way in which we, as embodied and co-dependent persons, together bring history forth—in the form of events that we share—while knowing, at some level, that we are doing so. But at what level? And what kind of knowing is this? What does such sharing signify? These questions were to haunt—and actively to inspire—all of David Carr’s later writings.

III

From History to Place—a not unlikely transition, given that David and I have shared so much history and so many places (not only New Haven but more recently Wuppertal and New York City). In this second phase of my comments, I want to focus on two particular essays of David’s that are quite indicative of where he stands more recently as well as of where we begin to part ways philosophically. I refer to two essays published in the last few years: “Place and Time: On the Interplay of Historical Points of View” (2001) and “Time Zones: Phenomenological Reflections on Cultural Time” (2004).

“Time Zones”explores the idea of “point of view” as what ties together cultural and historical time and space alike. At first, such time and space are contrasted by saying that cultural space separates us: say, my geography from yours: “whereas the absolute here separates me from you, us from them, the absolute now seems not to function in this way ... Perhaps time is the dimension of human existence that is destined not to divide us, as space does, but to unite us all.” (“Times Zones,” 7–8) But soon after, this first and all too tempting line of thought is reversed by saying that in fact “we share the absolute and universal now with everyone and everything in the universe in the same sense that we share universal and objective space with everyone and everything” (p. 9; my italics). This is “something we know” (ibid.; his italics), even if we do not experience it as such. What we do experience is something more deeply shared, namely, “differences of perspective, differences of points of view.” (Ibid.)

“Place and Time ” elaborates this point by making “point of view” central to the experience of history. It demonstrates that Ranke’s celebrated dictum, “... zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen,” conceals the formative importance of point of view—which belongs intrinsically to the historical actor and shapes his or her present and sense of past and future alike. However subjective the idea of point of view may seem to be at first glance, it is in fact a very active factor in the way that history is undergone by the actor, formed by his actions, and eventually recounted by historians. Moreover, Carr shows that point of view has much more scope than we usually attribute to it: it is not just a narrow “perspective” in the ordinary sense of severely limited view, but involves the “whole sweep of [the agent’s] future horizon”(“Place and Time,” 6). We know this, adds Carr—ever the phenomenologist!—“not just theoretically... but as an extension of our ordinary way of dealing with other people” (p. 22).

All of this is fine and good, and it represents a signal contribution to the philosophy of history which cannot be gainsaid. But in the end I would insist that there is a deeper asymmetry at stake than Carr acknowledges. This is the asymmetry that PLACE brings with it. Here we have to ask the basic question: is there anything truly correlative to place in the experience of time? Granting that time and space are correlative with regard to something like the absolute here and now, is there a comparable parallel to be found between time and place? It is certainly not to be found in date, as in the ordinary locution “date and place” (cf. Carr’s usage at “Place and Time,” 2). Date answers to what Carr calls “a certain place on the globe” (ibid., 4) or “real location” (3, 5). But these latter are precisely not genuine places: they are species of what Whitehead calls “simple location” and what I prefer to designate as “site,” that is, the dessicated residue of place that is at play in any attempt to objectify place, for example, in modern cartography. I would argue that place is as fully lost in any such reduction to location as is time when it is considered to be nothing but a member of the “now series” (Jetztfolge) taken to task by Heidegger in Being and Time.

One begins to suspect that the very search for isomorphism between space and time (a characteristically modernist venture whose sources are to be found in Leibniz and Kant) comes to grief when we compare time and place—and that this says something important and interesting about both of these latter. At another point in “Place and Time,” Carr draws a parallel between the “setting” of “the time of an action” and the “surroundings” of its place. (See ibid., p. 9.) But is there any such exact parallel? Let us consider the matter further.

On the one hand,the temporal setting of an event (ultimately, an entire era as a coherent group of events) is notably amorphous. The historical actor does not know its limits, proximal or distal. For example, we do have a sense of when “post-modernism” as an architectural or philosophical movement was born—i.e., sometime in the 1960s—but do we know where it will end? Do we have even an inkling of the latter? Barely, if at all. Not just because it hasn’t happened yet but because there is something intrinsically indeterminate about it. The same is true of most other events in time: my life, yours, that of my domestic animals, etc. Beyond physical death, there is lingering at the level of influence and memory. How we are situated in time, anything beyond its nearest zones of today or this week, distends indefinitely: which is doubtless why we need an awareness of particular events—“marker events”—to situate us more definitively within its ample reach.

On the other hand, of the placial setting (as we may call it, lacking an adjective for “place” in English) we do have a better sense, and even of its outer limits: say, the bioregion we are now in (say, the greater Salt Lake area), indeed the whole continent in which we are placed (North America). One effect of this more shapeful placialization is that we do not need geography as desperately as we need history: we may need it for finding precise locations when we travel, but we need it less when it comes to being basically oriented in place—which has always already happened in some significant way (unless we are indeed completely lost). With this exception, human beings are more securely in place than they are in time—and that may help to explain the acute anxiety that is so often associated with being in time. Will my plane to Salt Lake make its connection in Atlanta? I worried about this much more than whether I was in fact present in one or the other of these cities, or how their airports were experienced as places.

We can admit a certain likeness between time and place at the level of discrete event and particular thing (in Carr’s own chosen terms). Each of these latter is more or less circumscribed: to each we can assign a date and a location. Here, in the “near sphere” (in Husserl’s expression), there is a felt symmetry between the two. Further, each is manifestly temporal-spatial (even if “event” sponsors the temporal more fully, and “thing” exhibits the spatial more completely). The differences accrue when we change scale: when the event becomes a “historical event” and the thing part of an encompassing place—when we go beyond the limited domain of this event and this thing, that is, when we go into their respective horizons. Then and there we find differences abounding. Above all, we find that the inner horizon of place is more determinate than that of time: as I look out my window in New York, my view comes to an end with the George Washington Bridge and the Palisades just beyond. I see this determinate limitation even as I know that the landscape continues toward the Catskills on the other side of the Palisades. When I sense that the end of the afternoon is coming, I experience a very different inner horizon, which will be marked by nothing as definite as my view coming to a peremptory end but instead announced by a gradual diminution of light as the sun sinks in the west. Here the felt inner horizon is immensely porous, so much so that it seems utterly arbitrary to say that the afternoon’s end will come at precisely 7:43 p.m. (i.e., the moment of the sun’s disappearance over the horizon), whereas the fact that the George Washington Bridge could be measured in its exact distance from my apartment at 110th St. does not betray my experience of this bridge as a placial or regional horizon—even if it also does not capture it fully either. The comparative definiteness of the placial experience colludes more easily with the objectivity of measurement than does the indefiniteness of the temporal experience, while neither (let me emphasize) can be construed as an adequate representation of their respective experiential modalities.

Place and time contrast further when we ask whether the very structure of “point of view” obtains with equal valence in the two instances: a theme to which I shall also return later on.

• (a) When we speak of a “temporal point of view,” we refer to something that involves a moment of deep immersion in the unfolding of time that is intensely and intimately tied to consciousness and, more generally, to mind. It was not for nothing that Husserl spoke of “Zeitbewusstsein” in the lectures that inaugurated phenomenology as we know it today. This is so even though time is also historical in its more expansive reaches: it is as if the factor of consciousness or, more fully, mind here leaves its individuated state and is relocated on the vaster scene of historical subjects who act and interact on the stage of history proper.

• (b) If we turn to a properly “placial point of view,” we find something rather different: namely, an alliance between an outlook into place and our existence as bodily beings. Adopting such a viewpoint tempts us much less to enter into the inwardness of mentation—of remembering or recounting—and precipitates us instead into bodily comportment: how we move, where we stand. If I am still in my apartment, the issue is always how I shall dispose of my body: shall I continue writing this paper at my desk, pause to make coffee, look out toward Harlem or the Hudson, or leave to go shopping? These are the most immediate options available to me in this place, and each of them brings with it a shifting placial point of view: never a view from nowhere, always a view from the very place I am in: a view of this table, through this window, into this part of the urban landscape. My experience is of living through my corporeal intentionality as it engages with the places of my near sphere—and as they in turn nestle within the containing horizon of my immediate place-world.

It follows as a direct corollary that history, as we usually understand this term, is mainly a matter of human actors who engender events which they simultaneously internalize in mind and memory and that it is only exceptionally that we speak of a “history of the body” or a “history of landscape.” The exceptions—Braudel, Scharma, Duden—are precisely that: exceptions and, if my assessment here is correct, always will be.

In all this, I am not implying that time and place are easily dissociable from each other—far from it! They come not only paired but deeply implicatory in each other. But I am saying that, despite their mutual immanence, they diverge in certain basic ways which the appellation “point of view” fails to address. It is important, perhaps even necessary, to start from this locution, but it is also desirable to take the analysis one stage further, especially if we are to escape that temporocentrism from which moderns and postmoderns, philosophers and non-philosophers, suffer so unremittingly down to this day.

IV

Having cursorily considered very early and very recent writings of David Carr’s richly evolving oeuvre, I shall now move more concertedly to its middle period and in particular to the year 1986, when his splendid and influential book Time, Narrative, and History (TNH) was first published. In this bold and beautifully succinct text (about which one can say what can be said so rarely of any book in philosophy: not a word is wasted) we will see many of the same issues at stake as those on which I have so far commented, now writ large as it were. They will provide me with the opportunity to clarify and extend my earlier remarks and reservations, now with a focus on a much more intimate phase of human experience.

Take, to begin with, Carr’s opening exposition of the temporality of “passive experiences.” Here it is a matter of “small-scale phenomena” (TNH, 43) and, in particular, of the retentional–protentional structure of these experiences. This structure was famously first uncovered by Husserl, who in his first descriptions of it resorted to spatial images: most notably, “horizon” and “field.” Retentions in particular possess horizons as they sink down and back into the periphery of conscious awareness, and, merging with the retentions of other original “impressions,” they form a coherent temporal field that becomes the slowly amassing fund of my primary memory. Extending his analysis to protentions as well, Carr remarks that “Like the spatial horizon, the horizons of the future and the past recede indefinitely... what distinguishes retention from recollection, and protention from ‘secondary expectation’, is not the length of their term but their functioning as horizons for ongoing, present experience.” (TNH, p. 24) Comparable claims are made for the idea of “field of occurrence” (22, 23) and for the isomorphism between now and here (25). In every case, asserts Carr,”the parallel with spatial perception holds: the temporality of my experience of a temporal object (event) is like the spatiality of my perception of the spatial object.” (26; his italics) Carr admits that he here employs spatial analogy “even more than Husserl does” (23), and he warns us that we must “remind ourselves constantly of the limits of the analogy even as we continue to profit by its use” (ibid.). One such limit, he notes in an echo of an observation of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, is to be found in the irreversibility of experienced temporal sequence in contrast with the modifiable order in which I perceive the different sides of something spatial. Despite such a difference, we invoke parallels in space to grasp inner time—not just for purposes of more lucid visual representation but because of salient phenomena like horizon and field that are exemplary for analogical structures in temporal experience.

We witness here a studied collusion between David Carr’s meditations on the experiential bases of history and the opening moves made by Husserl in what is arguably the first fully phenomenological text, his lectures on inner time-consciousness. Carr’s motives for his own recourse to this level of experience differ from those of Husserl, to be sure: Carr wishes to show that already on this most primitive level there is something like a proto-narrative structure at work. (More on this shortly.) To build his case he endorses analogical arguments comparable to those which Husserl had employed eighty years earlier, posing the question for us: do they hold up?

Here my take is two-fold. On the one hand, space and time are at this level more deeply affine than either “analogy” or “parallel” can suggest. On the other, they are also deeply disparallel and divergent. They are both at once. How can this be so?

As to the disparallels, let me mention only three of these:

• (i) In the realm of the spatial we sense ourselves coming up against resistance in very particular ways that have no parallel in the temporal: I refer not just to the sheer bulk of material things but also to the obdurate surfaces and edges that make up “the annoying orneriness of things” in Carr’s striking phrase (43). This is the domain in which what Peirce calls “Secondness” rules. It is all that is outright oppositional in sensing and feeling. In the experience of time, there is no comparable resistance; we glide through hours and days, except in cases of trauma—in which case, the spatial re-intrudes (i.e., as an ineluctable dimension of the traumatic event itself). This may explain why we speak of time as a “dimension” or a “medium,” and why (as we have seen) it is so often associated with “mind.”

• (ii) There is something about spatial proximity for which there is no exact analogue in time. By “proximity,” I do not mean horizon, or even what Carr sometimes calls “background” (22, 23) or “surroundings” (46). These latter do obtain for time: in Carr’s and Husserl’s own favored example, in the midst of hearing a melody we sense that we are surrounded by sounds and the previous notes form a background for new developments. But proximity is something else; it is a special form of close contact, a peculiar kind of juxtaposition in which our sensing body is on a par with that to which it is relating proximally. Instead of a fading penumbra of sounds, now I feel that my body forms a pair with the proximal item—at once over against it and up against it, as when my hands push open a door or my feet step over rough ground.

• (iii) Finally, there is something we have we just considered under the heading of “point of view” and which in Time, Narrative, and History is called “vantage point.” Carr’s description of it is revealing: “My perception is not an object (or configuration of objects) in space for me, as it could be for an external observer, but it does comprise a vantage point (my body) which is its own ‘lived through’ spatiality. Like the vantage point in spatial perception, the temporality of an experience of a temporal object is not itself an object but a structured feature of the experience.” (TNH, 26) Notice that “vantage point” is here linked not just to lived space (and in particular to place as its leading instance) but to the body that is the subject of such space. Once again, as in the case of proximity, the body counts for something special that is not characteristic of temporal experience—in which we are not disembodied but less immediately enmeshed in the stance and thrust of my body at any given moment: less engaged in its heft and concentrated insertion into a particular corner of space. A vantage point that is provided by the lived body is more than a mere perspective (which suggests something merely subjective, our “viewpoint” on something); it is more like a commitment to the configuration of things at the moment. If this is true, then I doubt that we can extend the term to temporal experience, as does Carr shortly after introducing it: “we are always ‘located’ at one ... point at a time. In both action and experience, however, this ever-changing point is a vantage point from which the other phases of the sequence, future and past, are grasped.” (40; cf. 41 for “perspective”). As earlier in the case of “point of view,” we see that there is dissymmetry between the role of such a term in spatial and temporal settings (where “spatial settings” include not only specific places but other phenomena such as neighborhoods and regions).

Despite these disparallels between the respective roles of time and space within human experience at its “pathic” level (in Bernhard Waldenfels’ term), there is also, and at the same time, a remarkable affinity or convergence between these roles that manifests itself in three very different ways:

• (i) First, there is a sense of enclosure that both the space and time provide (not to be confused with what Carr calls “closure,” which is a form of finitude: see TNH, 41, 47); any given experience, or action for that matter, comes enclosed in a spatial or temporal whole that is no mere husk but a sheltering presence; this is the sense that we are somehow in space and time as immediately surrounding media, that we always already “inhabit” them in Merleau-Ponty’s word; it is only because of such ongoing inhabitation that we can speak of the part-whole relation which they both provide: namely, that the part of time or space in which I am now situated is no isolated stretch but an integral part of something more encompassing to which we give the generic and abstract name “time” or “space”: “God’s infinite sensoria” in Newton’s phrase. Such parts are not detachable but inherent—they are Teile rather than Stücke in Husserl’s words—in space and time regarded as enclosing structures. (For Carr’s own discussion of the part-whole structure, see 28, 41.)

• (ii) Space and time are affine in their most intimate spheres as worlds for the experiences and events that take place within them; it is striking that Carr does not want to talk of “world” at this primal level; but if notions like “life-world” or “being-in-the-world” are to retain a global resonance, they require that some significant sense of world is already operative in this closest experiential sphere—that it is already present there in some recognizable but finite format: examples are such world-wholes as cityscapes and landscapes and seascape and skyscapes.

• (iii) I would propose that these latter are not separate worlds, just as they are not separate enclosures—that we experience (or better, feel, sense) them as spatio-temporal matrices which I prefer to designate as “place-worlds,” since it is my view that places, better than anything else, bring together space and time in various avatars. In such worlds, space and time are no longer just analogous; they are concrescent modalities of one and the same world, whose inner surface is experienced as an enclosure (hence the locutions “well-placed,” “securely in place,” etc.) Once we take this step, we are no longer confined to picking out resemblances between spatial and temporal features of our deep-lying experience as if they were separate attributes across which descriptive bridges have to be built. The bridges have already been built; every place-world is one with respect to its spatiality and temporality—which, rather than diverging, closely configurate with each other, becoming distinguishable but inseparable.

As unlike in their particularity as they are alike in their generality, space and time show themselves to be something more than analogous—and this something more is what they are as coeval presences in particular place-worlds.

V

But what of the larger units of experience and action—those precisely from which narrative and history, Carr’s ultimate concerns, are built up? It is one thing to show the intimate interplay of space, time, and place at the micro-level from which Husserl (in his earliest descriptive-phenomenological phase) and Carr (in the middle years of his career) take their departure. But surely when we rise to full-scale narrativity—when we write out or tell to others what is only implicit at the most basic level—things will be very different and my strictures will not apply.

Much of the ingenuity and originality of Time, Narrative, and History is to be found in its claim that the transformation from one level to the other is not so extreme as we might have expected—that the narrativity of history and of literature alike are nascent in the very same low-lying layers I have just been discussing. Against those who claim that narrative structure is laid down from above upon mute and messy temporal process—a thesis maintained by narratologists and structuralists alike—Carr holds the view, as novel as it is timely, that already at the most primal layer something like narration is going on. This “something” is not articulated as such; it is as tacit as it is pre-discursive and pre-thematic. But it is at once necessary to all articulated narrative—which could not exist without it—and already narrational in its own way: its own way of “constitut[ing] a temporal closure, which can only be expressed by speaking of a beginning, middle, and an end,” for in fact “an event, an experience, or an action [at the very first level] is something that begins and ends.” (TNH, 47) Such deep structuring (“temporal configuration” is Carr’s preferred word for it: 44, 47, 49) also includes “departure and arrival, departure and return, means and end, suspension and resolution, problem and solution” (49).

Now it is revealing that when he singles out this configurational relation of temporal ordering, Carr is no longer tempted to indulge in any spatial analogy or parallel. He says explicitly that such a relation, which he considers “most fundamental” to primal experience, “is a strictly temporal ordering principle, and it is a serious confusion to describe it as if it resided in a non-temporal domain. Other ordering principles may resemble it superficially [e.g., a syllogistic argument or the sequence of an alphabet], but none of these features become beginnings, middles, and ends unless the order in question is deployed in time, run through in sequence, whether in thought or action”(51). This is a very assertive claim, and I want now to examine its merit in the light of my own conviction that a factor of space, or at least of place, infiltrates even the purest redoubt of time, thus experience at the primal level.⁴

Two of Carr’s leading examples of what contrasts with the proto-narrativity of primal experience are telling: a sheer linear design (or decorative motif) and a written text. Even if such a design “may have a middle point between its top and bottom” (51), it does not count as narrative or even as proto-narrative, while “a text is [quite different]: without time it can have no beginning, middle, and end. Its sentences are spatially arranged ... and its pages are numerically ordered, but unless it is gone through temporally it neither begins nor ends. It just sits there on the shelf. And its only middle is a spatial point equidistant from its edges.” (51; his italics) It is significant that Carr adds that “the written text, as a collection of marks or sentences, is all there at once” (51; my italics). Carr here uses words that are directly reminiscent of Husserl’s phrase at the end of section eight of the First of his Logical Investigations: “in the same moment (im selben Augenblick).” In both instances, one that of the written text and the other that of internal monologue, a claim for an unsullied moment is made, except that this moment is temporal for Husserl and spatial for Carr—who allows pure temporal structure to be found only in the tripartite sequence of beginning, middle, and end (and its variations such as suspension-resolution, means-ends, etc.). In this way, Carr keeps strictly separate the spatial simultaneity of a text (i.e., regarded as a physical object) and the temporality of its narrativity once animated by being read. Our question then becomes: Can we afford to subscribe to this separation, or is it the case that the deep structure of time is not independent of the intrusion of space and, more especially, of place?

Aristotle suggests that this separation and independence do not obtain. In Book Ten of his Physics, he asserts that the before and after in time (which surely underpins any deep narrative structure of beginning/middle/end) are dependent on the relation between relative position in space and more particularly in place (topos): “The beforehand/afterward is first of all in place; therein, however, in respect to position... But then in time too [we find] the beforehand/afterward, through the ever-corresponding of the one [of time and motion] to the other [i.e., place]. But [in time] the beforehand/afterward is in motion; what is being at the time is motion ... we recognize time when we have defined/identified the motion determining/horizoning the beforehand/afterward; and we then affirm time to have happened when we take perception of the beforehand/afterhand in the motion” (Manchester 156–7). In other words, we could not begin to tell the difference between events (experiences, actions) that come before other events/experiences/actions, their position in McTaggert’s B series of time (i.e., before/after; earlier/later), unless we had a prior acquaintance with the difference between the forward and backward parts of a given place (say, what is near versus what is far from our bodily stance), that is to say, their position (thesis) in relation to each other (ultimately, perhaps, the back and front of a given physical thing). It is all the more remarkable that Aristotle is here discussing the nature of time as “the number of motion according to the beforehand/afterward”(219 b 2–3) and not place as such (which is taken up in chapters four and five of Book Ten of the Physics)—and yet just here in the midst of discussing such seemingly different topics as time, motion, and number he invokes place as primary—in keeping with what I like to call the Archytian Axiom: to be (at all) is to be in place (somehow).⁵

Now I invoke Aristotle and Archytas, those ancient forebears, in order to reinforce my conviction that recourse to immanent temporal structures such as those which David Carr so cogently argues underlie story-telling and the writing of history—those that are “basic” (TNH, 43, 52) to these more articulate activities—cannot exist without reliance upon, and at least covert reference to, spatial and in particular placial features of experience (and action) at this primary level. My insistence on this point is itself a response to the strength of the temptation to believe that at this level one might expect to find purely temporal phenomena—for which space and place would furnish at best only analogies and parallels. This was certainly Husserl’s belief, and I think that it is Carr’s as well—though he never claims it in so many words.

In all fairness I should make clear that Carr allows that the basis for the analogy to lived time is “not the conceptualized or objective space of geometry... but precisely lived or experienced space” (TNH, 23). To his credit, Carr does not attempt, as does Heidegger, to deduce lived space from Dasein’s temporality as in section 70 of Being and Time. Yet no more than Heidegger does Carr integrate the presence of such primal spatiality with the underlying temporal structures of experience and action.⁶ He leaves the spatial element on one side, as if it could be safely neglected. I have argued, however, that it cannot be set aside—not if the very ideas of horizon, field, nearness as proximity, enclosure, world, and vantage point are to be acknowledged, and precisely at the deep level that is supposed to be pristinely temporocentric.

One response to my own lococentric interventions is to concede some, and even most, of what I here claim, and gesture instead to more advanced levels of the problematic of narrative—where more complex concatenations of experiences, events, and actions are in play: in other words, the proper province of the writing of history and the telling of stories. When Carr makes this move in the second chapter of Time, Narrative, and History, he singles out the factor of Besinnung or reflective awareness as essential to bringing about these larger units—“in which the larger-scale action or event becomes thematic as a whole.” (TNH, 57) Carr shows adroitly how this factor sews together a diverse set of threads that stretch over longer periods and ultimately (especially in the case of written history) many lives. In this move, have we not left the domain of highly subjective and highly individuated time-consciousness, bound as it is to personally specified minds and to single bodies and their place-specific orientations—and thus entered a realm that is much less likely to be vulnerable to the kind of critique I have been entering? Precisely as a synoptic act of surveillance, collecting discrete episodes and stitching them together—even, at the limit, one’s whole life in that Zusammenhang des Lebens of which Dilthey spoke—does not the recourse to Besinnung, along with the more capacious narrative structures it makes possible, leave the primitive place-world in the dust?

I think not, and once more on three grounds. (i) First of all, as Carr himself avers, the character of configurations at any such more sweeping level “is substantially the same at this level as before, [still] comprising such features as temporal closure, begining-middle-end, means-end, suspension, resolution, etc.” (TNH, 57; cf. also 49, 55). It is just that the scale and scope of these features have now become more encompassing. Indeed, it is precisely this claim for continuity of temporal structure between all levels of the narrational enterprise that is Carr’s central thesis—and that distinguishes his view from so many others who are anxious to detect disruption between the lived-through and the explicitly narrated: i.e., those who hold that the temporality of one’s lived life is one thing and that of story and history are quite another.

With this bold thesis I am in complete concord: narrativity holds across the broad board of temporal experience, whose two epicenters are inner time-consciousness and historical and literary texts, with story-telling situated somewhere in between. Indeed, I could even agree that such pandemic narrativity is something like a temporal condition of possibility for all events and experiences on the one hand and story-tellings and historical writings on the other: a new transcendental in short! But to this major move I would want to add a comparable counterthesis regarding place, regarded as a material a priori and forming its own transcendental condition. For what I have said about the indispensability of place at the first level of human experience and action obtains, mutatis mutandis, at other levels as well. If it is true (as Carr asserts) that “the configurational character of the events of ‘real life’ is maintained at the level of longer-term, larger-scale, and more complex phenomena” (57), then integral to the same character is the implacement of these same phenomena—only now we would have to speak of such higher-order configurations as landscapes, regions, and whole place-worlds rather than of stories and histories. Surely the con- of “configuration” is as much placial as it is temporal—at any level of experience or action. There is no such experience or action without the active ingredience of place. Instead of narrativity primarily, much less exclusively, we need to acknowledge placiality as equiprimordial with temporality at every level.

(ii) An example of such ingredience of the placial is found in the expanded role of vantage point at the higher levels. There, it is multiplied in the form of the various points of view of characters, actors, story teller, authors (imputed or real), and readers, and is in each instance gathered into one loosely unified skein by acts of Besinnung. Carr makes the very valid point that even for the individual experiencer or actor points of view may be multiplied, as when I look back upon an emerging action of mine from the standpoint of its possible completion. (See TNH, 60) Carr observes trenchantly that even here, within my own experience or action, there is a kind of spontaneous reflection “in which I (the narrator) tell or remind or explain to myself [the reflecting subject] what I (the character [in my own life-drama]) am doing.” (63) Either way, then, whether the proliferation of points of view is found in an elaborate story or text or whether it happens already in the sort of self-address that concerned Husserl in the First Logical Investigation, there is the necessity of a significant temporal synthesis of these various viewpoints. I would maintain, however, that such a synthesis must also be placial—that each vantage point is ineluctably placial, implying that I (or the author or the character or, for that matter, the reader) is occupying some particular place, even if this place is not stated as such. Each standpoint, mine or another’s (or other places of mine in the case of self-address), is anchored in a given place as much as it occurs at a certain moment of time. Each engages in some modicum of implacement; it enjoys some toehold in the place-world, however tacit this hold may be. Here I am building on Carr’s striking thesis of the continuity of levels of narration to claim a comparable continuity of implacement across all the same levels as those for which the deep structure of narrativity obtains.

(iii) Finally, let me mention the intriguing idea of implotment. This is a higher order configuration emphasized more by Aristotle and Ricoeur than by Carr; it involves, minimally, the assemblage of otherwise disparate events or episodes in one drama – one coherent “doing” that is, in Ricoeur’s phrase, a “synthesis of the heterogeneous”(cited at TNH, 15, from Ricoeur’s Temps et récit, vol. I, p. 102). The plot of a given narrative is a “configurational act” (in Louis Mink’s phrase) that “transforms the [narrated] events into a story by ‘grasping them together’, and directing them toward a conclusion or an ending.” (TNH, 64; the phrase is from Ricoeur, op. cit., p. 105). I don’t need to invoke the origin of the English word “plot” in plat, ‘flat place’ (Middle English ‘plot’ meant ‘patch’ or ‘piece of ground’) to make the fundamental point that what most effectively holds together diverse episodes or actions is the place in which they occur—or, if there are several episodes or events differentially located, the region in which they co-occur. In the case of theater—where the term “plot” often carries the most resonance—this place is embodied in the “scene” or “setting,” ultimately the stage on which the drama is displayed and its diverse “acts” set in a series. But no such literal staging needs to occur for a plot to be effective as the placial basis of a historical or literary narrative—only some sense of setting, however amorphous or disconnected. In short, implotment entails implacement. The mere fact of greater complexity (here in the form of diverse settings) does not evade the Archytian Axiom: to be (an implotted drama) is still to have to have a place in which to be (presented or represented). When Carr adds that at both the pre-reflective level of “short-term or simple experiences and actions, and as reflective and explicitly narrational at the level of more complex experiences and actions ... temporal multiplicity is spanned, gathered, or held together” (TNH, 64), he ought to have admitted that such complexity and multiplicity are at least equally “spanned, gathered, or held together” in a plot that entails a place.

David Carr’s distinguished contributions to continental philosophy are as manifest as they are manifold. They range from making Husserl’s The Crisis of European Philosophy and Transcendental Phenomenology available to English-speaking readers to explicating and interpreting this work (and others of Husserl’s, notably in the collection of Carr’s essays entitled Interpreting Husserl: Critical and Comparative Studies) to his own original and path-breaking books and articles wherein Carr develops his own notions of time, history, subjectivity, the self, and the transcendental (I have not even mentioned the important book of 1999, The Paradox of Subjectivity).

In my assessment, I have addressed three phases of these rich and subtle contributions—early, middle, and late: thereby telling my own tale, spinning my own narrative, of Carr’s accomplishments to date. I have insisted on the ingrediency, indeed the necessity, of place in the very heart of temporality and narrativity, and even when Carr does discuss place explicitly, as in his latest work, I have still quibbled with him. But such cavilling on my part should not obscure the very great respect and admiration I have for the writings of my eminent colleague from Emory University. Nor should it conceal the very great pleasure I have taken in reading through his assembled corpus and finding pure gold on every page.

Let me concede in closing that in a certain definite sense time will doubtless triumph over place: for in the end only time will tell who was right in the running debate between the two of us as to the comparative primacy of time and place in human experience. However this debate turns out, I am delighted here to celebrate the life-work of David Carr, my longest philosophical friend, my genial and generous rival, the person from whom I and so many others have so much still to learn in the ever-expanding wake of Husserl within continental philosophy today.