Horse

Horse appears not as a character or as an animal whose life is narrated, but as an example through which a phenomenological analysis distinguishes an object, an image of that object, and a concept. The discussion uses Horse to show how a class can take different forms in unreflective thought: as an individual image, as an indeterminate class-object, or, with abstract effort, as a symbolic schema of relations. A separate experiment involving a horse race demonstrates how an image may recur through an accidental association rather than through any essential connection to the thought at hand.

Method and the Image

The account begins from a distinction between attending to an imaged object and reflecting on the act by which it is imaged. When someone produces an image of Pierre, Pierre is the object of consciousness; while that consciousness remains unchanged, its attention is directed to Pierre as imaged, not to the image as an image. To describe the image’s characteristics requires a second act of consciousness, reflection, which turns attention from the object to the way it is given. That reflective act makes possible the judgement that one has an image.

Reflection, in this method, supplies certain data, whereas explanatory hypotheses about the image remain probable. The diversity of psychological theories is attributed to psychologists’ tendency to leave immediate reflective knowledge implicit and instead construct accounts of the image’s nature. The proposed first task is therefore descriptive: produce images, reflect on them, and identify and classify their distinctive characteristics before advancing hypotheses. This framework matters for Horse because its appearances are treated as forms of consciousness, not as evidence that a little picture of an animal is stored inside the mind.

Horse as a Concept

Horse helps illustrate the claim that a concept can appear in unreflective thought in several distinct ways. A person seeking a concept may first orient themselves through individual objects that belong to it. The thought then takes the form of such an object, rather than presenting the concept directly. In this initial mode, a particular horse-image could serve as an approach to the concept Horse, just as the discussion gives a particular man as a possible route to the concept man.

A second mode presents the class itself as an object in space. It is not an individual horse, but an indeterminate Horse: a fleeting awareness of the class without a decision about the look, colour, or height of any particular animal. Its lack of individual features is not an accidental omission; indeterminacy is the defining character of this way in which the class appears.

A third mode grasps a concept in comprehension, as a system of relations. The concept then appears through a symbolic schema: spatial determinations that serve to present those relations rather than to depict a particular animal or a collection of animals. The text cautions that concepts such as Horse and man are so charged with sensible content and so poor in logical content that this abstract mode is uncommon for them. The schema comes with an effort of comprehension, when thought turns away from things considered as individual objects or collections and toward relations.

These are not, in this account, three separate kinds of concept, one consisting of images and another of pure thought. Rather, a concept may appear as pure thought on the reflective terrain and as an image on the unreflective terrain. Horse makes that distinction concrete: its individual depiction, its appearance as an undetermined class, and its possible presentation through relations belong to different attitudes of consciousness.

The Horse-Race Association

In Experiment 53, a subject asked to give a brief, essential characterization of Zola instead experiences a representation of a horse race. Asked what the representation has to do with the requested characterization, the subject explains that a detailed description of a race was once read in Nana and that, since then, the image regularly arises at the name Zola.

The example separates the occurrence of an image from the meaning of the thought it accompanies. The horse race has a personal associative history: it is linked to Zola by the subject’s remembered reading, not because the race supplies the essential characterization being sought. Its recurrence shows how an image can make something sensible while its relation to the thought remains fortuitous and external. Horse therefore figures in two different analytical roles: as the class through which conceptual thought is examined, and as part of a particular representation whose arrival is explained by association.

Scope and Significance

The examples place Horse within a broader inquiry into what reflection can establish about image-consciousness. The analysis aims first to describe how an object is given in consciousness, rather than to decide through speculative theory what an image is made of. Its later metaphysical question asks whether the capacity to imagine is merely a contingent feature of consciousness or a constitutive structure of consciousness as such. Horse helps prepare that inquiry by showing how imagination can present not only an individual object but also a class, and how an image may arise in thought without carrying the thought’s essential content.

The discussion does not treat Horse as an independently acting subject, and it makes no claim about the experience or cognition of actual horses. Its significance is methodological and conceptual: Horse provides a sensible example through which the analysis distinguishes image from concept, individual from class, and associative recurrence from essential meaning.