ABSTRACT
We may now ask what this ‘functioning’ really stands for, since we have it as an a priori possibility that the same content, bound up with the same quality and matter, should function in this threefold manner. It is plain that it can only be the phenomenological peculiarity of the relevant form of unity that can give a phenomenologically discoverable content to our distinction. This form specially unites the matter to the representative content, since the representative function is unaffected by change in the quality. Whether, e.g., an imaginative picturing claims to be the calling up of a real object or to be merely imaginative, makes no difference to its pictorially presentative character, that its content bears the function of an image-content. We therefore call the phonomenological union of matter with representative content, in so far as it lends the latter its representative character, the form of representation, and the whole engendered by these two moments the representation pure and simple. This designation expresses the relation between representing and represented content (latter = the object or part of the object represented) by going back to its phenomenological foundation. Leaving aside the object as something not phenomenologically given, and endeavouring merely to express the fact that, when a content functions representatively, we are always differently ‘minded’, we may speak of a change in interpretation (Auffassung). We may also call the form of representation the interpretative form. Since the matter after a manner fixes the sense in which the representative content is interpreted, we may also speak of the interpretative sense. If we wish to recall the older term, and at the same time indicate an opposition to form, we may also speak of the interpretative matter. In each interpretation we must therefore distinguish phenomenologically between: interpretative matter or sense, interpretative form and interpreted content; this last is to be distinguished from the object of the interpretation. The term ‘apperception’ is unsuitable despite its historical provenance, on account of its misleading terminological opposition to ‘perception’; ‘apprehension’ would be more usable.
