The Phenomenon of Expectation

Abstract

We now turn our attention toward a new fundamental direction concerning the lawful regularity of association. It will already have occurred to you that I have, so to speak, kept dead silent [185] about the long familiar phenomenon of protention and of expectation in general—so essential to the structure of every original experience, and thus, to the sphere of the living present. All formation of unity and every nexus in experience is rooted in homogeneity, formal and material. Or, as we can also say, in uniformity or similarity. Homogeneity effects the institution of the unity of experience only in impression and retention, specifically, in the temporal form of the present and past in the constitutional form: enduring coexistence and the sequence of something enduring. The future, however, which as a more or less prefigured horizon belongs to the constituted objectlike formation, arises from the continuous and discrete protention according to the laws of the formation of expectation. The future does not fashion the unities of experience in the original sense, it presupposes them.