ABSTRACT
In the last chapter we have encountered a fourfold or fivefold ambiguity attaching to the word 'presentation'.
Presentation as act-materialor matter, which can be readily completed into: Presentation as the representation underlying the act, i.e. the full content of the act exclusive of quality. This concept also played a part in our treatment, though our special interest in the relation between quality and matter made it important for us to lay special stress on the latter. The matter tells us, as it were, what object is meant in the act, and in what sense it is there meant. 'Representation' brings in the additional moments lying outside of the intentional essence which determine whether the object is referred to in, e.g., a perceptually intuitive or imaginatively intuitive fashion, or in a merely non-intuitive mode of reference. Comprehensive analyses will be devoted to all this in the first section of the next Investigation.
Presentation as 'mere presentation', as qualitative modification of any form of belief, e.g. as mere understanding of propositions, without an inner decision leading to assent or dissent, surmise or doubt etc.
Presentation as nominal act, e.g. as the subject-presentation of an act of assertion.
Presentation as objectifying act, i.e. in the sense of an act-class necessarily represented in every complete act since every 'matter' (or 'representation') must be given primarily as the matter of such an act. This qualitative ground-class includes acts of belief, whether nominal or propositional, as well as their counterparts, so that all presentations in the second and third of our above senses are included here.
The more precise analysis of these concepts of presentation or the experiences they comprise, and the final determination of their mutual relations, will be a task for further phenomenological investigations. Here we shall only try to add some further equivocations to those affecting the term under discussion. To keep them sharply apart is of fundamental importance in our logical and epistemological endeavours. The phenomenological analyses indispensably needed to resolve these equivocations, have only been partially encountered in our previous expositions. What is missing has, however, often been touched upon, and indicated to an extent that makes a brief list of headings possible. We therefore continue our enumeration as follows:
Presentation is often opposed to mere thinking. The same difference is then operative that we also call the difference between intuition and concept. Of an ellipsoid I have a presentation, though not of a surface of Kummer: through suitable drawings, models or theoretically guided flights of fancy I can also achieve a presentation of the latter. A round square, a regular icosahedron 1 and similar a priori impossibilia are in this sense 'unpresentable'. The same holds of a completely demarcated piece of a Euclidean manifold of more than three dimensions, of the number π, and of other constructs quite free from contradiction. In all these cases of non-presentability 'mere concepts' are given to us: more precisely, we have nominal expressions inspired by significant intentions in which the objects of our reference are 'thought' more or less indefinitely, and particularly in the indefinite attributive form of an A as the mere bearer of definitely named attributes. To mere thinking 'presentation' is opposed: plainly this means the intuition which gives fulfilment, and adequate fulfilment, to the mere meaning-intention. The new class of cases is favoured because in it 'corresponding intuitions' are added member by member and from all sides to thought-presentations — whether these are purely symbolic meaning-intentions or fragmentarily and inadequately mixed with intuitions — presentations which leave our deepest cognitive cravings unsatisfied. What we intuit stands before our eyes in perception or imagination just as we intended it in our thought. To present something to oneself means therefore to achieve a corresponding intuition of what one merely thought of or what one meant but only at best very inadequately intuited.
A very common concept of presentation concerns the opposition of imagination to perception. This notion of presentation dominates ordinary discourse. If I see St Peter's Church, I do not have an 'idea', a presentation of it. But I do have the latter, when I picture it in my memory, or when it stands before me in a painting or drawing etc.
A presentation has just been identified with the concrete act of imagination. But, looked at more narrowly, a physical thing-image is also called a presentation or representation of what it depicts, as, e.g., in the words 'This photograph represents St Peter's Church'. The word 'presentation' is also applied to the apparent image-object, in distinction from the image-subject or thing represented. This is here the thing appearing in photographic colours, not the photographed church (image-subject), and it only presents (represents) the latter. These ambiguities carry over into the straightforward pictured presence of memory or mere imagination. The appearance of the fancied object as such in experience is naively interpreted as the real containment of an image in consciousness. What appears, in its mode of appearing, counts as an inner picture, like a painted picture presenting the imagined object. In all this it is not realized that the inner 'picture' is intentionally constituted, and that so is the way in which it and other possible pictures present one and the same thing, and that it cannot be counted as a real moment in the imaginative experience. 2
In all cases of this ambiguous talk of presentation, where a picturing relation is supposed, the following thought also seems active. A very inadequate picture 'represents' a thing and also recalls it, is a sign of it, and this last in the sense that it is able to introduce a direct presentation of it that is richer in content. A photograph recalls an original, and also is its representative, in a manner its surrogate. Its pictorial presentation makes many judgements possible, that would otherwise need a basis in a percept of the original. A sign remote in content from a thing often fulfils similar functions, e.g. an algebraic symbol. It arouses the presentation of what it stands for, even if this is something non-intuitive, an integral etc.; it turns our thought towards this, as when we represent to ourselves the complete definitory sense of the integral. At the same time, the sign functions 'representatively', surrogatively, in a context of mathematical operations: one operates with it in additions, multiplications etc., as if the symbolized were directly given in it. Previous discussions have shown this mode of expression to be rather crude, 3 but it expresses the governing notion in our use of 'presentation', which here means representation in the double sense of provoking presentations and doing duty for them. Thus the mathematician drawing on the blackboard says: 'Let OX represent (present) the asymptote of the hyperbola', or, calculating, 'Let x represent (present) the root of the equation f(x) = 0'. A sign, whether it depicts or names, is called the 'representation' ('presentation') of what it stands for.
Our present talk of representation (which we do not wish to erect into a fixed terminology) relates to objects. These 'representative objects' are constituted in certain acts, and acquire a representative character for new objects in certain new acts of transcendent (hinausdeutenden) presentation. Another, more primitive sense of 'representation' was mentioned under (1): this made 'representatives' experienced contents receiving an objectifying interpretation in such representation, and in this manner helping to present objects, without becoming objective themselves.
This leads to a new ambiguity.
The distinction between perception and imagination (which latter itself shows important descriptive differences) is always confused with the distinction between sensations and images. The former is a distinction of acts, the latter of non-acts, which receive interpretation in acts of perception or imagination. (If one wishes to call all contents which are in this sense 'representative', 'sensations', we shall have to have the distinct terms 'impressional' and 'reproductive sensations'.) If there are essential descriptive differences between sensations and images, if the usually mentioned differences of liveliness, constancy, elusiveness etc., are sufficient, or if a varying mode of consciousness must be brought in, cannot be discussed here. Anyhow we are sure that possible distinctions of content do not make up the difference between perception and imagination, which analysis shows, with indubitable clarity, to be a difference of acts qua acts. We cannot regard what is descriptively given in perception or imagination as a mere complex of experienced sensations or images. The all too common confusion between them is, however, grounded in the fact that at one time a 'presentation' is understood as an imaginative idea (in the sense of (6) and (7)), at another time as a corresponding image (the complex of representative contents or imagery), so that a new ambiguity arises.
The confusion between an appearance (e.g., a concrete imaginative experience or a 'mental picture'), and what appears in it, leads us to call the presented object a presentation (idea). This applies to perceptions, and generally to presentations in the sense of mere intuitions or logically interpreted intuitions, e.g. 'The world is my idea'.
The notion that all conscious experiences (contents in the real (reellen) 4 phenomenological sense) are 'in consciousness', in the sense of inner perception or some other inner orientation (consciousness, original apperception), and that with this orientation a presentation is eo ipso given (consciousness or the ego represents the content to itself), led to all contents of consciousness being called 'presentations'. These are the 'ideas' of the English empiricist philosophy since Locke. (Hume calls them 'perceptions'.) To have an experience and to experience a content: these expressions are often used as equivalent.
