Spaier

Spaier’s contribution is a compact account of how knowledge can already be turning toward an image before an image fully appears. The author uses his description of consciousness economizing with the image to clarify a distinction central to the discussion: incipient imaging is not simply sign knowledge, but neither is it yet the completed image. Spaier’s importance here lies in identifying this intermediate phase and the pressure toward completion that characterizes it.

Place in the Account of Imaging Knowledge

The author prefers Spaier’s expression dawn of the image to the more general phrase dynamic schema. The preference is conceptual: the dawn names an early phase that remains continuous with the image that follows. Imaging knowledge may be empty, in the sense that a full image is not yet present, while still being specifically directed toward becoming one. The knowledge is not merely waiting in an undifferentiated way; what it awaits is its own transformation into an image.

This continuity makes Spaier’s formulation useful for distinguishing imaging knowledge from pure sign knowledge. The author argues that the difference between those two forms is greater than the difference between imaging knowledge and the image in full bloom. Spaier’s term keeps the intermediate state connected to the image without collapsing it into the finished image. It thus gives the account a way to describe an incipient act of imaging as a distinct form of consciousness rather than as either a bare meaning or an already complete representation.

The Economy of the Image

Spaier’s brief observation is that consciousness may have a tendency not to go all the way to the image. It economizes, moving faster by contenting itself with the image’s dawn. The image is therefore not simply absent: its arrival is anticipated, and the consciousness can proceed on that anticipation without completing the process. Spaier’s formulation draws attention to a difference between the direction of an act and its completed result.

The example immediately preceding Spaier’s comment makes this distinction vivid without making the two accounts identical. A subject reports knowing what was wanted before the word rich emerged: an inner release, an increasing noise compared to a siren, and a sense that understanding was coming precede the word itself. This is an account of meaning arriving before verbal expression, not evidence that the subject has formed a visual image. Spaier’s observation follows as a related account of incompletion: consciousness can stop short of a fully developed image, just as the reported understanding can be present before its word appears. The parallel helps situate Spaier’s point, while preserving the difference between the subject’s verbal example and imaging knowledge.

Relation to the Author’s Inquiry

The author uses Spaier’s formulation as part of a broader effort to determine what changes when knowledge passes from the state of meaning into the imaging state. The central issue is not simply whether an image is present, but what kind of consciousness exists before it is fully formed and how that consciousness differs from sign knowledge. Spaier’s image of an economical movement toward the image supplies a concise description of one feature of that passage: the process can be underway without being carried to completion.

The discussion then turns to reports by the Würzburg psychologists and to cases of empty consciousness, including an initial awareness corresponding to the concept of a geometrical figure in which the word is not present. That context reinforces the author’s interest in consciousness that cannot be reduced to an explicit word or a complete image. Spaier’s remark does not, by itself, settle the nature of every such state; instead, it helps mark the question the author wants to pursue. Its significance is methodological as well as descriptive: the unfinished phase must be examined on its own terms, because it is neither simply a sign nor merely an incomplete version of an image already present.