Chapter 17

Self-Contradictions of Sensualism

Although in the extremely numerous directions in which the misunderstanding of life diverges, the fundamental error is always the same, it appears nowhere as completely undisguised as in the sensualist one. Hence there has hardly been any doctrine that has entangled its adherents so much in contradictions and already split into so many factions as the theory of so-called sensations.

Although we cannot naturally completely avoid touching on certain basic concepts of sensation psychology, it is not our subject, but rather the sensualist worldview, which admittedly shares a not small range of views with it.

Apart from that, what is actually to be understood by "Sensualism" can only be indicated in approximations given the extraordinary conceptual confusion that prevails in the sensualist camp.

At least this much is likely to receive the approval of all sensualists: the whole world consists of sensations or rather of sensory contents. Sensations are sensory experiences or "receptions" by means of the senses. "To be is to be perceived."

Since most sensualists do not distinguish at all between what is sensed and the act of sensing, the little question-and-answer game that we now follow considers both doctrines equally.

The coherence of sensualism as a worldview is about to collapse before our eyes.

Sensations are within us. Is the sensed also within us? Some affirm and declare the external world to be a bundle of "ideas" with the special feature of spatiality. Some deny and conversely make the impression a function of the impression-giver. Others say half yes, half no: Smelled, tasted, heard, seen are indeed within us, whereas touched is outside us.

Or: everything that can be sensed has its place in space and time. Are space and time therefore also sensed? Some affirm, at least space is somewhat sensed. Others deny, such is rather due to a reflection that aims to explain the simultaneity of impressions.

Or: what can be sensed is always also a condition or property of persistent things. Are these then also sensed? Here, most likely deny. However, to the further question of where such things come from, some declare them to be real substrates of which one can know nothing further. Others say they are bundles of ideas created through habitual association of ideas. Others say they are rules of idea connection inspired by God.

Or: for there to be sensation, there must be a sensor. Is this also sensed? Some respond that it's again a falsely objectified bundle of ideas. Others say that it is rather a Cartesian res cogitans.

Or: in sensing, the sensor is passive or undergoing. Does it also undergo the connection of sensations? Some affirm, following the "habit" of "associating." Others deny, this arises from the self-activity of the sensor.

The world is a bundle of representations, the representing is also a bundle of representations, the bundle is again represented—the bundle is "given" by things, matter, by God, and it is not given, but added from apparently erroneous habit—representation is a suffering, and representation is an activity of the representer.

One could go on for pages and in the end find incomprehensible the fact that the theorists of sensation are carried by the unshakeable conviction that they have replaced the playful thinking of scholasticism with solid and seemingly reality-saturated research for the first time.

Every question receives contradictory answers. The doctrine has no coherent core.

We want to show the error at its root. However, since we will present our own solution later and for now content ourselves with stating a thesis, we thus explicitly declare in advance that in our conviction, the undoubtedly real life function of sensation has not yet been discovered.

Therefore, in the sense of our view, we must ask to always add a "so-called" to the supposed sensation we are now dealing with.

Since at least the original concept of sensation does not distinguish sensation from perception, we initially use both in the same meaning.

If, therefore, the color red were sensed or "perceived" or recognized, it is advisable to remember from the outset that what is actually perceived is, for example, a red raspberry, a red drop of blood, the sunset glow.

These are firstly three different kinds of reds, not only numerically but also in kind. Secondly, reds of three different objects. And thirdly, reds in three different places, from which it follows that in order to find redness, we must have overlooked the location of the red thing, then the thing itself to which it belongs as an adhering or illumination color, and finally the specific nature of the redness.

Suppose now there is something in our experience that enables us to form the general concept of "redness" or the even more general "color," we will not search for an element or atom of this experience that combines with other experience atoms to form the unique impression we get from a red raspberry, a red drop of blood, the red evening sky. Therefore, against a doctrine that appears to undertake such, we would harbor suspicion from the outset that it substitutes the knowledge of the objective for us as an experience partial cause of the experienced.

Sensualism confuses the concept "red" with the experience of this raspberry's redness, this drop of blood's redness, this evening sky's redness. It mistakes the mental abstraction for the living impression.

To examine this more closely, let us imagine someone perceiving the same red of a red ball lying before them, and ask about the nature of their experience, as far as it pertains to this red.

Here, modern sensory research has first and foremost provided compelling proof of the necessity of change which every sensory content, especially visual sensory content, undergoes regardless of the uniformity of the perceived object, from each change of auxiliary sensory contents.

The red ball looks different on a black background than on a white one, and significantly different on both than on a red one. If we give it a green background, then a so-called contrast experience would cause such an increase in the saturation level of the redness that anyone who had not observed the process would be inclined to doubt the uniformity of the objects.

But even simultaneous sound impressions, as has been confirmed by experiments, and simultaneous temperature, smell, and taste impressions, as can be concluded with no less certainty, have a modifying effect on the visual impression.

And what applies to the simultaneity of impressions applies just as fundamentally to the succession of impressions: the nature of what I am currently experiencing proves to be dependent on what I had just previously experienced.

If auxiliary sensations can already be subject to the greatest change, then with regard to pre-sensations, at least an approximate equality can only be artificially established under very special circumstances. Apart from that, it generally never occurs, from which alone it follows that the impressions caused by the same red are never completely identical in two people or in two moments of a single person's life.

The supposed atomic sensation—the pure, isolated experience of "red"—never actually occurs. Every experience is a confluence of innumerable factors, no two of which are ever identical.

The process of perceiving red, and thus the visual sensation in general, is therefore a conceptual thing, the determination of which was only achieved through at least two omissions: firstly of simultaneously occurring auxiliary sensations, then and above all of the course of sensations.

However, we would still have made a presupposition error in characterizing the momentary content of experience if we limited ourselves to sensory data, even if they were perceived far more accurately than through the usual concept of sensation.

It seems that the entire external world, including the red ball, is always immersed in the inner color of the viewer's mood, even if it is just the gray of indifference.

Who would deny that the redness of the sphere has a different "effect" on those highly sensitive to color than on those highly sensitive to sound, appears more "glorious" to a child than to an old person, and more "engaging" to the rested than to the utterly exhausted?

For all three cases, examples could be multiplied infinitely, so much so that ultimately there is no character trait, no age stage, no degree of freshness and fatigue, indeed no thought just passing through my mind without an unrepeatably peculiar "mood color."

For example, it has long been noted that there is an affinity between depression and a preference for blue, between elation and a preference for red, according to which the redness which pleases the euphoric feels somewhat bothersome to the depressive.

There must naturally be reasons that make it possible to repeatedly find a red of a specific hue, and we will have to deal with that in detail. But as we see now: it cannot, or at least not without limitation, be something to be experienced anew, what is found again in such a way.

If in the perception the side of a life process were recognized, whose other side would have to be called "mood" or in today's terminology "feeling," then by virtue of this reverse side the entire process would appear as so embedded in the course of life of its bearer that each content of perception would gain a particular aftertaste from the sequence position of the life phase within which the perception would take place.

The form of dependence of the present impression on the history of the impression receiver which is most familiar to science, although by no means thought through to the last consequences, is the loss of consciousness for the contents of such sensations that repeat themselves often enough.

The object of perception which makes an "impression" endowed with the character of novelty loses the ability to do so in proportion to its familiarity, until it finally does not come to the consciousness of the one completely "accustomed" to its presence at all.

Whether one looks at the red of a red ball for a quarter of a second or five minutes, the impression is in both cases a flowing event for which there are not two mathematical time points where it would be identically the same.

What we previously demonstrated in other ways has emerged anew from the consideration of the so-called sensory contents: that neither the process of sensing nor what is sensed by means of it is of a nature of time-resistant units from which something could be bundled together.

When we still attempt to objectively estimate colors, temperatures, shapes, sizes, and other qualities, this is done solely with reference to already-subordinated conceptual objects, more precisely, to existing things, and the intended measurement, although always mediated by life processes, does not relate to lived experiences but to their objective basis.

By overlooking this, sensualism of all shades confuses sensory experiences with their transcendental causes or with the sensed, as far as it distinguishes it, the supernatural property of things.

Without accounting for it, it posits as an article of faith a world of things, properties, and functions to then spin them out with elaborate expenditure of artificial apparatus from the experience.

Just as the Platonizing philosophy supposedly deals with spiritual life processes but in truth with judgments and concepts, so the sensualistic philosophy supposedly deals with sensory life processes but in truth with mechanisms. Hence today there is hardly anything more unknown and misunderstood than human and animal sensibility.

The atomic sensation is a fiction. Experience flows. Sensualism mistakes the conceptual reconstruction of experience for experience itself, the thought-thing for the living process. It commits precisely the error we have traced throughout: the substitution of timeless being for temporal reality, the replacement of life with logical construction.