Whenever something is given to and encountered by the senses in some kind of order, it is given and encountered within a pre-view of the basis on which it is and can be ordered.

In the case of the spheres, the pre-viewed basis-on-which could be color. Then all the spheres of the same color, [285] regardless of their size and material quality, are grouped according to specific colors. Those colors are taken from out of the given manifold before us, because I would hardly order them in terms of green if I found no green spheres in the manifold.

Therefore: (1) A pre-viewing is constitutive for ordering. (2) In the present case, the pre-viewed basis-on-which [viz., “color”] is to be drawn from the manifold in front of me. But that is not required. For example, I could order the spheres serially in terms of the order in which they catch my eye each time I cast my glace directly at the manifold. In this case the pre-viewed basis-on-which is not a determination that belongs to the spheres themselves, but is a possible mode of a particular way of encountering them, the mode of “immediatelycatches-my-eye.” The fact that some specific element of their make-up is why they catch my eye does not change the fact that the pre-viewed basis-on-which is drawn not primarily from the thing itself, because I am prescinding from whatever it is that makes a sphere catch my eye. The only “norm” at work each time I cast another glance is: “whatever-catches-my-eye-first.”

A basis-on-which that is drawn simply from the things themselves is distinct and different according to the ontological regions that the objects belong to. If the task is to put Bach’s fugues in order, color would certainly be excluded as a possible basis-on-which, as would material quality.

Here we cannot go into the various ways a pre-view comes to be generated and achieved. Instead, let us keep this firmly in mind: In any concrete act of ordering, it doesn’t matter whether or not I am explicitly aware of pre-viewing, or whether or not I’m committed to having such a view. All of that is irrelevant to whether a pre-view is present and operative in that concrete act of ordering or not. The fact that a pre-view [necessarily] belongs to an act of ordering is prior to all the ways in which one might carry through that fact or demonstrate it.

It is a given that experience is always ordered experience. Just why that is constitutive of human existence and its way of being will be shown later. [286] Underlying such experience is (antecedently and constitutively) a pre-viewing. This pre-viewing entails that, even when it is explicitly enacted in the process of carrying out an act of ordering, the pre-view does not thematically focus on the basis-on-which I order those things. Pre-viewing the basis-on-which I order things is constitutive for carrying out the ordering, but in the process it is equally unthematic.