ABSTRACT
Once introduced, the notion of sensation distorts any analysis of perception. Already a ‘figure’ on a ‘background’ contains, as we have seen, much more than the qualities presented at a given time. It has an ‘outline’, which does not ‘belong’ to the background and which ‘stands out’ from it; it is ‘stable’ and offers a ‘compact’ area of colour, the background on the other hand having no bounds, being of indefinite colouring and ‘running on’ under the figure. The different parts of the whole-for example, the portions of the figure nearest to the background-possess, then, besides a colour and qualities, a particular significance. The question is, what makes up this significance, what do the words ‘edge’ and ‘outline’ mean, what happens when a collection of qualities is apprehended as a figure on a background? But once sensation is introduced as an element of knowledge, we are left no leeway in our reply. A being capable of sense-experience (sentir)—in the sense of coinciding absolutely with an impression or a quality-could have no other mode of knowing. That a quality, an area of red should signify something, that it should be, for example, seen as a patch on a background, means that the red is not this warm colour which I feel and
together make up a whole to which each is related without leaving its place. Henceforth the red is no longer merely there, it represents something for me, and what it represents is not possessed as a ‘real part’ of my perception, but only aimed at as an ‘intentional part’.1 My gaze does not merge with the outline or the patch as it does with the redness considered concretely: it ranges over and dominates them. In order to receive in itself a meaning which really transfuses it, in order to become integrated into an ‘outline’ which is bound up with the ‘figure’ and independent of ‘background’, the atomic sensation ought to cease to be an absolute coincidence, which means ceasing to exist as a sensation. If we admit ‘sensation’ in the classical sense, the meaning of that which is sensed can be found only in further sensations, actual or virtual. Seeing a figure can be only simultaneously experiencing all the atomic sensations which go to form it. Each one remains for ever what it is, a blind contact, an impression, while the whole collection of these becomes ‘vision’, and forms a picture before us because we learn to pass quickly from one impression to another. A shape is nothing but a sum of limited views, and the consciousness of a shape is a collective entity. The sensible elements of which it is made up cannot lose the
opacity which defines them as sensory given, and open themselves to some intrinsic connection, to some law of conformation governing them all.
