358
DOC.
364
JULY
1917
To
elaborate
clearly
on
consciousness,
my paper
must address
the
concept
of
time
in
particular,
with which
you
have been
so
much
concerned,
albeit
in
another
sense.
When
I
mention
your
name
at
the
end,
I
am
admittedly
only
pointing
to
a
very
remote
analogy
of
thought.[11] Bergson
has shown
that
the
immediately given
duration
of
consciousness has
no
metric
qualities.[12]
He is
unfamiliar
with this
mathematical
form of
expression, though.
In
my paper,
I
show
much
more extensively,
through
the
fictitious reversal
of
the
accepted
course
of
consciousness, (without
even changing
the
contents,
which
we
call
after-effects),
which
is particularly
difficult to
imagine,
that the
apparent
asymmetry
of
the
order
of time
is
merely
based
on
the
qualitative
contents,
and
that the
concepts
of earlier
and later
have
no
absolute
meaning independently
of these contents.
You
will
understand this
and
my exposition
in
the
paper,
although
I
fear that
most
philosophers
will not
be able to do
so.
Finally
I
show,
however,
that the
order of states of consciousness in time
can
be dissolved
altogether,
since
only
the
current
state of consciousness forms
a
unit. If
nothing
were
to
exist outside of
this
state,
it
would not notice
anything.
Because
the
state of consciousness would
not notice
at all
if
nothing apart
from itself
existed,
no
order
of
states
external
to
it and
independent
of it
can
be
immediately given
for
it
either,
no more
than
for
another
state.
All
consciousness
of
the
world,
regarded
purely
as
such,
is
therefore
none
other than
an
aggregate
of such
states
of consciousness without
any ordering
relation
for
them.
A temporal
order for states of consciousness
is
just
as
inappropriate
to
pure
consciousness
as a
spatial
order,
which has
long
since been
abandoned,
of
course.
It
is
not assumed
anymore,
that
anything
psychic
exists somehow in
space.-
My
theory
can
be
understood
in
a
double
sense,
either
merely
as a
description
of
the
directly
given
reality
of
consciousness,
or as a
worldview,
if it
is
presumed
that
the
reality
of
consciousness,
which alone
is
really
known
to
us,
is
the
only
kind of
reality
that
exists,
and
that
physical
objects,
if
anything
at
all, correspond
to
something analogous
in
our
consciousness
to
real
being.
If
the
theory is
taken
merely
in
the
first
sense,
this
nevertheless
does
not
prove
that
metaphysical,
temporal,
or
spatial
ordering
of elements of
consciousness
do
not
exist;
rather,
it
just
reveals, despite
the
apparent “flow”
of
our
consciousness,
that the
same
relations exist for
the
temporally
external
order
of the states of consciousness
as
for
the
spatial
one,
that
both,
if
they
exist,
should
not be
considered, by any
means,
to
belong
to
pure
consciousness
as
such,
and
that
if
one
wants to describe
the
consciousness of
the
world
purely
as
such,
one
must
speak
of
a
quantity of unitary
states of consciousness
through
abstraction
of
any
ordering
relation. The
temporal
order
is
merely
fabricated
by
us on
the
basis
of
the
qualitative
contents;
on
this
basis, however,
the
unity of
consciousness
can
be
imagined
as
also ordered
in the
spatial continuum,
at
the
place
where
we
set
the
corresponding
brain
in
the
construction
of
the
physical phenomenal
world.