William Stern on the "psychical time of presence". Historical and theoretical study of a cognitive model of time perception and autonoetic consciousness

David Romand
[Journal für Philosophie & Psychiatrie, Juli 2011, Supplement]

"... the fluid cradle of events (time)..."
W. Faulkner

Introduction

William Stern (1871-1938) is nowadays known mainly as being one of the pioneers of differential psychology and a foremost representative of genetic psychology during the first half of the 20th century. He remains particularly reputed for having contributed to formalise the Q.I. test. For historians of psychology, Stern appears above all as the founder of the "critical personalism" - a philosophical-psychological system dealing with the foundations of individuality and the development of the individual in interaction with his/her environment, one of the main schools of psychology in Weimar Germany (Stern, 1930; McLeod, 1938; Spoerl, 1938; Bühring, 1996; Lamiell, 2003, 2010; Romand, 2009). Stern's early scientific production has actually little to do with the formal and rather speculative conception of psychology that his name is generally associated to. Until about 1900, Stern dedicated himself exclusively to theoretical and experimental psychology studies that regard fundamental aspects of cognition and that are closely related to the theory of knowledge. The evolution of Stern's thought appears in this respect as a figure-head of the anti-positivistic and holistic shift of German-speaking psychology in the beginning of the 20th century (Mandler, 1964; Ash, 1995; Harrington, 1996; Romand, 2009). Among his early contributions should be notably mentioned a remarkable paper on experience of time, which was published in 1897 in the Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane - one of the leading psychological journal of that time in German-speaking countries (Stern, 1897a). This paper corresponds in reality to a section of Stern's Habilitationsschrift (second thesis for professorship accreditation) on "psychology of change apprehension" (Psychologie der Veränderung-Auffassung) tutored by Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) and issued in 1898 (Stern, 1898, summarised in Stern, 1897b). Stern did not publish any other research specifically dedicated to the question of time experience. The conceptions developed in the 1897 paper will be re-used in a number of his further publications and eventually integrated into his personalistic system (see for instance Stern 1911, 1917, 1935).

At the end of the 19th century, the question of time perception has already become for a long time a topic of theoretical and experimental investigation in psychology, and especially in Germany. Many psychologists before Stern tried to highlight the psychical processes by which we succeed in apprehending the relationships between mental phenomena which occur at different moments of our conscious life (for the question of time perception in the 19th century psychology, see Nichols, 1890; Wundt, 1911; Boring, 1929; Fraisse, 1957/1963). For Stern as for his predecessors, the fundamental question of time perception is that of experience of succession of conscious phenomena. The issue is here to explain our ability to perceive the flow of mental contents (or representations) in consciousness, i.e., to solve the counterintuitive problem of how psychical entities which do not exist at the same time in consciousness can nevertheless be perceived together through a single act of thought. If we were unable to experience our mental phenomena in their successiveness, our conscious experience would be indeed absolutely meaningless. The latter would be in that case nothing but a mere succession of single experiential moments, independent from each others and therefore devoid of any connection with the rest of our conscious life. The question of time perception as expressed by 19th century psychologists is in fact closely related to the problem of the continuity of conscious experience. The continuity of conscious experience implies that we are able to perceive what occurs at a given moment in consciousness in relation with what occurred merely before and what will occur immediately after, but also to confront the events of our actual conscious life with the events we experienced in a more or less remote past and those we expect to experience in a more or less remote future. The solution brought by Stern to the question of time perception and the continuity of conscious experience contrasts with those which were previously proposed by German psychologists. It was until then traditionally admitted that temporal relationships could not be apprehended but indirectly. According to this view, the succession of representations is perceived insofar as successive representations are reproduced together and then apprehended simultaneously in consciousness. This conception of time perception is based on the notion that consciousness is a succession of instantaneous experiential moments. For Stern, on the contrary, we are able to apprehend directly the flow of psychical events by means of a temporally-extended act of consciousness [1]. The succession of representations is perceived because consciousness consists in a succession of experiential moments which have themselves some duration. Mental phenomena which are apprehended through the same act of consciousness are said to share the same psychical time of presence (psychische Präsenzzeit): they are all experienced as being present in consciousness in the form of a unified and homogeneous content. From this model, Stern tries to explain our ability to experience not only the relations of the succession but also any other kind of temporal relationships between mental phenomena. The theory of the time of presence permits in particular to account for perception of the past and the future. According to Stern, experiencing the past and the future consists in "projecting" into the time of presence (i.e., reconstituting in actual experience) events we previously perceived or we expect to perceive, and differentiating them by means of a psychical factor which confers them a special temporal coloration. Generally speaking, the theory of the time of presence appears as an investigation of the different types of memory (short-term and long-term memory, retrospective and prospective memory) involved in the manifestation of conscious experience. From a relatively simple theoretical scheme, Stern proposes a particularly elegant solution to the difficult problem of the continuity of conscious experience and the structure of the stream of consciousness.

Stern's theory of the psychical time of presence was briefly discussed by a number of psychologists and philosophers (Husserl, 1894-1917/1985; Schumann, 1898; Mabbott, 1951/1968; Miller, 1984; Bernet, 1985; Gallagher, 2003; De Warren, 2005; Romand, 2009), but has, to the best of my knowledge, never been studied systematically until now. The 1897 paper, though translated in English some years ago, has not been yet the subject of any detailed commentary. Moreover, neither the context nor the epistemological significance of Stern's ideas was sufficiently analysed. Thus, I suggest revisiting systematically the theory of the time of presence in its both historical and theoretical aspects. My paper is divided in five parts. The first part will be dedicated to the theoretical context of emergence of the theory of the time of presence. On the one hand, I will discuss the late 19th century German psychologists' theoretical investigations on the apprehension of the relationships between sensory contents and on the psychical foundations of the unity of conscious experience. The contributions of Fechner, Stumpf, and Ehrenfels will be studied successively. On the other hand, I will analyze in details the most representative 19th century psychological conceptions of time perception, namely, the models elaborated by Herbart, Lotze, and James. In a second part, I will make an extensive commentary of Stern's 1897 seminal paper on the psychical time of presence. I will present and analyze the main theoretical issues developed in this paper, i.e., the criticism of the so-called "dogma of the instantaneity", the question of the temporally-extended apprehension of mental contents, the concept of the "projection" into the time of presence, the question of the relationships between time of presence and memory, and the question of the duration of the time of presence. In a third part, I will proceed to a critical examination of the theory of the psychical time of presence. I will compare the latter with the other 19th century theories of time perception and show that Stern's solution to the problem of experience of temporal relationships is much more convincing. Moreover, I will discuss the theory of the time of presence in the light of the theoretical debate regarding the structure of the stream of consciousness. I will defend the notion that Stern's "segmental" model of consciousness is a simpler and more consistent solution than the "overlap model" to the problem of the continuity of conscious experience. Nonetheless, I will highlight the difficulties that are inherent to the theory of the psychical time of presence and will try to understand how and to what extent they may be resolved. In a fourth part, I will demonstrate that the issue of perception of date and duration, which has been unsatisfactorily handled by Stern, constitutes in reality a fundamental aspect of the theory of the time of presence. In a fifth and last part, I will insist on the scientific importance of Stern's assumptions and show their close relatedness to current cognitive research on episodic memory. The theory of the time of presence, as I will underline, lays the foundations of a general model of time perception and autonoetic consciousness.