The two limits of the investigation of the temporal genesis proper to the intentional object

Husserl's account of how the eidetic possibility of an object's intentional unity contains the sedimented history of its own constitution is guided by two limits that are bound up with and therefore indicated by this possibility. These emerge in his critical analysis of the universal eidetic form of the intentional genesis of each such object's unity, that is, in the analysis of internal temporality. The first limit concerns the general substratum of consciousness that the continuous modification of the retentional consciousness approaches, and beyond which the “prominence [Abgehobenheit]” (CM, 80) of the object flows away. The second limit concerns the past history of the original presentation of the object itself. Both limits point to sedimented meanings that can be awakened such that the intentional genesis of the meaning in question is reproduced as the history of its constitution, a history that, of course, does not take place within natural time.

Two “histories”, then, are initially at issue in Husserl's phenomenological account of the eidetic possibility of an object's intentional unity. The first history concerns the possibility of such an object retaining its unity as an enduring “presence” once it has been presented to consciousness. This history concerns the object's intentional genesis as an objective prominence, its persistence throughout the temporality that is the essential characteristic of its (the object's) experience.