Excursus IV - Transcendental Reflection: Time Synthesis and the Role of the “I”

Summary

Phenomenology of time-consciousness underwrites Dante’s entire experience of the letters appearing successively to him in the Heaven of Jupiter and forming a whole only in his mental synthesis of their event. Dante takes the “I” as organizing framework and originary principle of the poem. But this I and the poem itself are put forward as mediations of a higher being, that of God. The situation is thus fundamentally different from that in modern phenomenological tradition, where the “I” as mediation of otherness is centered in itself rather than in a divine Other. The self in the perspective of Dante’s poem is a structure serving to relate to God as the absolute Other rather than simply encompassing all possible reality within its own parameters. Whereas in modern philosophy from Descartes to Husserl, otherness has typically been comprehended as no more than a detour back to self and thus as an indirect mode of self-relation, we need to stand this insight on its head (or turn it inside out) in order to see things from Dante’s perspective. Not the I, but God, is the ground and principle in Dante’s theocentric world-view. The reality of the “I” is derivative: it consists of being “made in God’s image.”