Chapter 18

The Sensualistic Subjectivization of the World

Klages is confronting a philosophical tradition that claims our knowledge of reality derives from discrete sensory units called "sensations." This doctrine—sensationalism, sensualism, the sensation theory—holds that colors, sounds, tastes, and other qualities are mental constructs produced by our sense organs responding to external stimuli.

What Klages demonstrates is that this theory, far from being modest empiricism, actually annihilates the world of appearances itself. Sensationalism represents nothing less than "the annihilation of the universe of images through the extra-spatial temporal point"—a nihilism that drains the cosmos of its qualitative richness and replaces it with ghostly mechanism.

At issue is not merely a technical dispute about perception, but the reality of the world as we experience it—the shining, ringing, colored, sounding cosmos that presents itself to living beings. Sensation theory threatens to declare all of this unreal, a subjective projection onto a colorless, soundless mechanical universe.

Klages begins by addressing a predictable defense from sensation theorists. When confronted with objections, they often retreat to a seemingly modest position: sensations are merely abstractions, conceptual tools for organizing experience, no different from concepts in any science.

Klages grants the obvious point—thinking requires division and objectification. We must conceptualize to understand. However, he insists this does not justify imposing our classification of object properties onto sensory experiences themselves. The sensation theorist has committed a fundamental error: confusing the conceptual apparatus we use to think about experience with the structure of experience itself.

The sensation theorist then offers what appears to be compelling evidence. Close your eyes—colors vanish. Plug your ears—sounds disappear. Burn your tongue—taste is extinguished. Therefore, our knowledge of object properties must depend on specific sense organs and the qualities they perceive. This seems undeniable, the very foundation of any empirically responsible philosophy.

Consider how persuasive this sounds. We cannot deny the correlation between sense organs and experienced qualities. The blind man experiences no colors. The deaf man experiences no sounds. Surely this demonstrates that sensory qualities depend on the apparatus that receives them?

But this apparently solid foundation conceals a fatal incoherence.

The sensation theory relies heavily on the disparity between different senses—what Klages calls "sensory zones." Visual sensations differ from auditory sensations, which differ from olfactory sensations, and so forth. This disparity seems to provide a reality basis for the theory. We can mix colors with colors and get new colors, sounds with sounds and get new sounds, but we cannot mix colors with sounds to produce anything at all.

However, Klages argues this very disparity reveals an insurmountable difficulty. Consider what actually happens when we mix sensory qualities. If I mix red with yellow, the result is not red beside yellow, but a new, indivisible quality: orange. Add black, and I obtain yet another indivisible quality: dark orange. The compound names we use linguistically do not change the phenomenological fact that each resulting quality is experientially unitary and irreducible.

The same holds for sound. Whether or not I can analytically discern individual tones in a C major chord, the chord's quality is something indivisibly new, just as the quality of the note E is irreducibly different from the quality of G. Two tones of identical pitch but different timbres differ from two different pitches on the same instrument—yet all these differences are qualitative differences that cannot be further decomposed.

The common talk of "elemental sensations" or "simple sensations" confuses the qualitative content of what is sensed with its mechanical and physiological causes. This confusion reaches its peak when we consider sensory zones themselves.

We cannot use seeing to determine what counts as "the colorful," nor hearing to determine "the sounding," because we have derived the concept of seeing from the colorful, and the concept of hearing from the sounding. The argument is circular.

How do we know that red and blue both belong to "vision" while trumpet sounds and drum beats belong to "hearing"? Not by inspecting the qualities themselves—red tells us nothing about blue except that both are somehow related. We group them together only because we have already abstracted the concept "color" from our experience of seeing, and "sound" from our experience of hearing.

Within sensation theory, the difference between sensory zones must rest on groups of corresponding stimuli. But sensations themselves can never be composed—only their conditional stimuli can be. The disparity between sensory zones does not concern experienced qualities at all, but rather differences in stimuli, which are properties of things, not properties of experience.

Sensory zones cannot be defined by reference to the qualities themselves, only by reference to their external causes—but these external causes are precisely what sensation theory claims to derive from sensations.

There are no factually similar qualities alongside factually dissimilar qualities. There are only factually dissimilar qualities.

The sensation-content "red" is as factually dissimilar to "blue" as it is to "trumpet sound." If we cannot convey a notion of color to someone born blind, we equally cannot convey a notion of redness to someone completely red-blind. Each quality is absolutely singular.

Consider what this means phenomenologically. When you experience red, you experience something that cannot be reduced to anything else, cannot be explained in terms of anything else, cannot be composed from anything else. The same holds for blue, for the sound of a trumpet, for the taste of salt, for the feeling of warmth. Each is irreducibly what it is.

But if all experienced qualities are factually different and thus utterly incomparable as qualities, a profound question emerges: by what right do we subsume all these life-processes under the single concept of "sensation"?

Why do we categorize together the experience of red, blue, saltiness, storm noises, heat, wetness, violet scent—treating them as instances of one type of mental event called sensation? What justifies this subsumption?

The obvious answer—sensation is a life-process receptive to stimuli—immediately encounters another problem. Even psychologists who admit only two feeling qualities (pleasure and displeasure) have always refrained from defining sensation in a way that distinguishes it phenomenologically from feeling.

Moreover, Klages has already shown there are as many diverse feeling qualities as sensation qualities. Sensation theorists themselves acknowledge that every sensory impression carries a special "feeling tone"—effectively positing a multitude of feeling qualities at least equal in number to sensation qualities.

Therefore, sensation cannot be distinguished from feeling by any qualitative characteristic. The attempt to isolate "sensation" as a distinct type of experience has failed.

All attempts to characterize sensation distinctively move in a completely different direction. We hear that sensations are "elements of the objective content of experience" or "objective consciousness experiences" or "carriers of objectivity functions."

Klages notes these definitions actually refer to something other than what they declare. Objects are objects of thought—virtue, world history, the future. But no sensation researcher believes in the "sensibility" of virtue or world history. What they actually mean to assert is not the objectivity of the sensed, but the consciousness-externality of all objects capable of stimulating sensations.

Yet here is the problem: sensation always falls under the category of consciousness experiences. But consciousness-externality characterizes not only perceptions mediated by sensory processes, but also dream images and phantasms—soul experiences that occur precisely excluding sensuality.

Insofar as sensation requires sense organs, consciousness-externality cannot delineate its distinctive character.

Extreme sensation theorists might object that dreams are merely variants of sensation, pointing to experiments showing dream contents depend on sensory contents—the sleeper dreaming of a theater fire when candlelight strikes closed eyelids. But even if stimuli always caused dream phantasms, this would not erase their difference from sensory contents. A candle beam, no matter how confusedly perceived, is certainly not a theater fire.

If we modify the definition to say that through sensation the mind receives impulses to comprehend the foreignness of its objects, we would state something accurate—but nothing about the different nature of sensation itself. The question would immediately arise: by what peculiarity does sensation enable such achievements?

Every attempt to define sensation distinctively ends in failure. Either the definition is too broad and includes what it should exclude, or too narrow and excludes what it should include, or circular and presupposes what it claims to derive.

Unable to solve these problems, sensation theory makes a catastrophic move. Rather than distinguish feelings from sensations by making feelings external, it removes the character of externality from what is sensed.

The true sensualist does not distinguish sensation from the sensed object, granting colors, sounds, smells, and tastes only an inner-conscious reality. The doctrine of "specific sensory energies" seriously asserts the production of qualities in the human sensorium.

The entire universe would exist outside us—but it would lie with its millions of suns, moons, and planets in impenetrable darkness and deathly silence. Meanwhile, in our bodies, though they are themselves soundless and colorless, the impacts of oscillating atoms would create, when striking the eye, a magnificent play of colors beyond description, and when striking the ear, the most glorious symphonies.

How mild the Eleatic denial of movement seems compared to such frightful unrealization of the world of appearances! One turns the ringing and shining of the cosmos into "idle magic" without pausing before the question of what witchcraft enables consciousness to find outside the human body what supposedly exists only within it.

This inexplicability forms only one side of sensation theory's unanswerable questions. Even disregarding how sensory content emerges, the qualities themselves, considered as qualities, contain nothing spatial. The difference between two colors or sounds has no share in the difference between two places or shapes.

But then how do we place the cause of sensory qualities in space while not placing feeling qualities there? Why does the complete dissimilarity of the three main senses not lead to three separate spaces—visual space, tactile space, auditory space?

Why do we think we see the redness of a red ball in the same place where our hand feels its smoothness, although red and smoothness are entirely incomparable qualities? Why do we believe we taste sugar's sweetness in the same object appearing to our eye as form-defined white, although no conceivable relationship exists between these qualities?

And crucially: how can purely inner-conscious states, which the sensualist takes sensory qualities to be, be spatially interpreted by consciousness at all?

Faced with these questions, the sensation philosopher makes a Kantian confession. We have no space organ or time organ as we have a visual organ—therefore consciousness must overlay space and time onto sensory qualities.

With this move, the universe becomes despatialized and detemporalized, just as it was previously desounded and delighted. What remains is a spectral construction—colorless, soundless, qualityless—onto which consciousness projects the entire phenomenal world.

Klages' final judgment: "Panlogism, Kantianism, Sensualism: they are just three variations of one and the same nihilism, three forms or modes of the annihilation of the universe of images through the extra-spatial temporal point."

What unites these philosophical positions is the reduction of living, qualitative experience to abstract logical forms imposed by consciousness. Whether through pure reason, transcendental categories, or sensory mechanisms, each system drains the world of its immediate, given richness—its colors, sounds, textures, and felt qualities—replacing it with a spectral construction generated by mental operations.

Against this nihilism, Klages defends the irreducible reality of the image-world, the cosmos as it appears in its qualitative plenitude. His critique of sensationalism is not a retreat into irrationalism but a defense of experience itself against theories that, in claiming to explain it, actually explain it away.

The world shines, rings, blazes with color and sound. This is not a subjective projection but the very reality we encounter. Sensation theory, in attempting to ground experience in mechanical processes, destroys the possibility of experience altogether. It commits the same fundamental error we have traced throughout: the substitution of timeless being for temporal reality, the replacement of living experience with dead mechanism, the denial of soul in favor of spirit.