Abstract

A critical appraisal of husserl's lectures on internal time-Consciousness and passive synthesis (touching the theme of memory) is followed by an appreciation of merleau-Ponty's "problem of passivity". I argue that husserl's descriptions of memory processes embody prejudices stemming from the 'objective time' he claims to have bracketed out and that his phenomenological method is itself a phenomenon of the mathematical imagination. The latter pursues inherited ideals of clarity, Evidence, Immanence and presence which distort all mnemonic phenomena. Merleau-Ponty eschews the representational thought, Objective-Linear time, Evidence and immanence of husserlian epistemology. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of ambiguity responds with greater suppleness and subtlety to the most ambiguous of phenomena--Memory