Husserl, para 7, Supplementary B1 to: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time

by Corry Shores
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Edmund Husserl

On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time

B: Supplementary Texts

I "On the Introduction of the Essential Distinction between 'Fresh' Memory and 'Full' Recollection and about the Change in Content and Differences in Apprehension in the Consciousness of Time"

No. 1 "How Does the Unity of a Process of Change that Continues for an Extended Period of Time Come to Be Represented?

Intuition and Re-presentation"

Paragraph 7

Before we discussed instances when melodies stop in the middle, and we could feel their incompleteness. The fact that we felt the absence of the melody’s remainder in a way indicates that we presupposed it. So the feeling of incompletion in this sense represents the whole thing. But it does so not in the usual sense of representation. For, the rest of the melody is not represented as it is in its presence, but rather it is represented as an absence. So Husserl calls such feelings of incompletion “nonpresentative representations.”

Repräsentationen is Husserl’s term for the way that these sorts of representations come-about in our minds. So it is their “psychological genesis.” But we noted that this kind of representation does not represent the intuited thing in its presence. Rather, it represents it in its absence. Nonetheless, we form these representations by the same means as we do many other types of representation. And, we can find plenty of examples of nonpresentative representations not only in cases of melody-abortion, but also in a variety of other experiences as well.

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Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Vol 4 ofEdmund Husserl: Collected Works. Ed. Rudolf Bernet. Trans. John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.