Retention and protention
This article may meet Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion, but no reason has been given for why it qualifies. Please ensure that your reason is based on one of the speedy deletion criteria. Replace this tag with {{db|1=some reason}}.
If this article does not meet the criteria for speedy deletion, or you intend to fix it, please remove this notice, but do not remove this notice from pages that you have created yourself. If you created this page and you disagree with the given reason for deletion, you can click the button below and leave a message explaining why you believe it should not be deleted. You can also visit the talk page to check if you have received a response to your message. Note that this article may be deleted at any time if it unquestionably meets the speedy deletion criteria, or if an explanation posted to the talk page is found to be insufficient.
Note to administrators: this article has content on its talk page which should be checked before deletion. Administrators: check links, talk, history (last), and logs before deletion. Consider checking Google.This page was last edited by Unit17 (contribs | logs) at 22:24, 9 February 2008 (UTC) (16 years ago) |
stub
Retention and Pretention are key aspects of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of temporality
In The Specious Present : A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness, 1997, Francisco Varela defined them as follows
"Retention is the attribute of a mental act which retains phases of the same perceptual act in a way that is distinguishable from the experience of the present, (but that is not a re-presentation, as we just saw). The key feature for it is retention that is its direct contact with earlier perceptions making perception at any given instant contain entities that show up as temporally extended. As we discussed, under reduction duration has a speciousness, it creates the space within which mental acts display their temporality.
Similarly (but not symmetrically) another distinction seeks future threads or protentions."
Merleau Ponty describes retention in the Phenomenology of Perception as follows:
"Husserl uses the terms protentions and retentions for the intentionalities which anchor me to an environment. They do not run from a central I, but from my perceptual field itself, so to speak, which draws along in its wake its own horizon of retentions, and bites into the future with its protections. I do not pass through a series of instances of now, the images of which I preserve and which, placed end to end, make a line. With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change: I still have it in hand and it is still there, but already it is sinking away below the level of presents; in order to retain it, I need to reach through a thin layer of time. It is still the preceding moment, and I have the power to rejoin it as it was just now; I am not cut off from it, but still it would not belong to the past unless something had altered, unless it were beginning to outline itself against, or project itself upon, my present, whereas a moment ago it was my present. When a third moment arrives, the second undergoes a new modification; from being a retention it becomes the retention of a retention, and the layer of time between it and me thickens."