Phenomenology, Description, Narration

Husserlian Phenomenology is generally accepted to be a descriptive method, which distinguishes it from doctrines that are prescriptive, even if it implicitly entails evaluations, such as 'accuracy is better than inaccuracy'. But, also in contrast to description is another mode of linguistic presentation, one that is also factual, not normative--narration. Narration might seem completely inappropriate for Philosophical discourse, but that would be an arbitrary judgment. For, Hegel's Phenomenology is fundamentally a narrative--it itself is the locus of the sequences that it presents. In contrast, despite the centrality of Temporality to lived experience, according to Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, each of their accounts of it are synchronic, entailing processes of only elaboration, elucidation, or clarification, but not, as is the case with Hegel, development. For each, the subject of the account is the Phenomenological gaze, a "moment of vision" in which "nothing occurs", as Heidegger describes it, and an "ultimate consciousness" that is "timeless", as Merleau-Ponty puts it. Heidegger attempts to redeem the moment by further characterizing it as a "waiting-towards". But, while he, or either of the others, is waiting for Time to begin again, a quick gaze at the writing on the page in front of him will reveal the ultimate nature of Time--Time stops, and the nothingness beyond it is Space. Or, as narration demonstrates more immediately than any Phenomenological description--Time is in the telling.