To speak of "representation," however, is to move beyond the thought of the ancient world to the modern period, in which the concept of idea would undergo vigorous further development.
I speak of representation.
Now while Wundt is forced to speak of representations and representational acts as distinct, he is nevertheless clear that they are merely different aspects of a single flowing process.
The notion of a degree of representing allows Herbart to speak of representations "rising" and "sinking", and of representations lying more or less deeply beneath the limen (SW V: 293).
On Herbart's view, rather than thinking of Vorstellungen as static, image-like things or products of an antecedent act of representing,[12] we should instead think of them as individual conscious activities, i.e., atomic represent-ings.[13] Thus he can speak of the representation's "activity" persisting even when its "effect"—i.e., my awareness of it—"is held back by something alien to it".
In what follows, the philosophical mentalese terminology will generally be favored, but readers should be aware that most of the psychological authors discussed in fact speak of propositional representations.
This distinction will be employed here, with the result that these traditional theories of art will be spoken of as theories of representation rather than of imitation.
Normal speech consists of sequences of spoken representations of words, conveyed from the speaker to the listener.
(We speak of experiences rather than representations in deference to those who doubt that we experience in representations, or need to do so: we wish to be neutral on this issue).
It's a useful reminder that the self-portrait was not always "a statement about the hero-artist in all his singularity, poetically apart from the world that gave him work": De Brailes's self-representations speak of patronage and piety in the visual language of their time.
