Chapter 20

From the Perceptual Image to the Image

This chapter represents what Klages himself calls "a Copernican reversal" in philosophy. Where sensationalism gives us a world of abstract qualities attached to things—redness, smoothness, roundness—Klages shows us a world of living images, manifestations of beings whose transformations constitute the very meaning of the cosmos.

The stakes remain existential. We are not merely correcting an academic error but recovering the reality of experience itself—what Klages calls "the world's image"—from its reduction to thing-properties and mental constructs.

Klages begins by diagnosing sensationalism's fundamental error: the inability to distinguish between experiencing and what is experienced. Like all scholasticism, sensory scholasticism exchanges reality with being and therefore fails to grasp the polarizing nature of the life process.

Consider what we call sensory qualities—colors, sounds, smells. These share space as the element of their appearance and, indirectly, even time as the element of their transformation. We say we perceive the brightness of a lamp. But if the change in brightness belongs to the impression of brightness—which continues even with an unchanged light source—then we must also perceive the passing of time itself. To deny this requires denying the perceptibility of brightness altogether.

If sensory impressions possess reality as events, they are unique and unrepeatable. The experienced yellow of a rose in summer belongs not only to its scent and the blue of the sky, but also to the unrepeatable life-period filled by this impression. The experienced yellow of a withering tree belongs not only to the whole autumn, but to the uniqueness of place and hour that no future autumn can restore.

Without knowing these experience-contents more closely, we sense they must embody a rhythm of life—otherwise similarities between experience-contents could never become noticeable to retrospective consciousness. But here is Klages' crucial point: it is fundamentally indifferent whether this rhythm serves to compare experienced autumns or experienced qualities of yellow. It would be no less permissible to establish a science of "autumn perception contents" than a science of "color perception contents"—if either were justifiable.

The sensation theorist will object: autumn is merely a concept, while color is something perceivable. But Klages asks: what about experience-contents like night, twilight, dawn, distance, height, depth, sultriness, cloudiness, shine, transparency, moisture, wind? Does one seriously deny that day and night are immediate impressions just as much as smell, taste, or color—notwithstanding that concepts for them belong to humanity's oldest?

Why, then, has nothing been heard of "day perception contents" and "night perception contents"?

The reason seems obvious: colors appear intimately paired with things, sometimes inseparably attached, sometimes temporarily clothing them. Whereas describing what day and night, dawn and twilight are in relation to things would require extensive description.

Whatever reasons explain why color impressions relate to things more easily than twilight impressions, these reasons cannot mitigate the essential difference between impression-contents and thing-properties. Therefore, Klages examines the most unlike impressions to reveal that feature by which they are all something actually experienced.

Consider twilight. If we tried describing it by considering things, we would face immediate difficulties. We must envision an immensely large variety of things, each equally affected by twilight's onset. Defining it as "a certain degree of darkness" merely introduces new concepts—darkness, brightness—whose relation to things requires exactly the same clarification as twilight itself.

Moreover, all colors are affected differently depending on their distance from us. The transition from closeness to distance involves transitions from lighter to darker, from relatively yellowish to relatively bluish. We must incorporate temporal progressions of lightening or darkening with varied color plays—natural twilights differ between evening and morning, under changing cloud cover, during solar eclipses.

Yet twilight appears to us as something completely definite. The source of this definiteness must lie elsewhere than in thing-properties.

Here Klages introduces the fundamental concept whose deeper meaning now becomes vivid and convincing: the image (das bild). The experience of twilight is an aspect of the world's image, as are experiences of day and night, evening and morning, sultriness and moisture—and no less the experience of all sensory qualities.

Smells, tastes, colors, sounds, temperatures, when experienced, are also aspects of the image. The word "image" (das bild) does not imply mere representation or just visual imagery—this is crucial to understand.

How do thing (das ding) and image (das bild) resemble and differ from each other?

The image shares with the thing its appearance as something real to us. However, the distinguishable aspects of images, even as they help identify thing-properties, are not identical with them. First, because they change more or less quickly and are never identical to thing-properties. Second, not even regarding types of situations, despite the similarity of names.

Everyone recognizes twilight does not count as a thing. Yet twilight belongs to the perceptual image of a fluttering pennant in twilight—and the fluttering pennant belongs to the perceptual image of this twilight.

In the perceptual image, substrate and property can be exchanged. The concept of property applies only analogously to phenomena. The pennant's appearance would not be what it is without the fluttering, nor the fluttering without the pennant, nor the fluttering pennant without the twilight, nor the twilight without the fluttering pennant.

This unit of meaning—"a fluttering pennant in twilight"—forms a perceptual whole that cannot be composed from the separate meaning-contents of twilight, fluttering, and pennant, nor disassembled into these three or any number of properties.

If we had not become accustomed to immediately relating perceptual images to things, the notion of the dreamability of "a fluttering pennant in twilight" should suffice to prove we cannot attribute its appearance solely to bodily processes. The eye, the receiving organ, is closed during sleep and largely out of function.

If the sense of sight differs from hearing, and both differ from touch, then visible, audible, and tangible thing-properties are objectively insurmountably different. We do not see the ticking of a clock, do not hear the white color of its dial, do not feel either through touch.

Conversely, if a fluttering pennant is not merely seen but also undoubtedly heard, then the process enabling this has not stopped at the boundaries of the senses. Therefore it does not coincide with any process through which eye-sensitivity differs from ear-sensitivity, nose-sensitivity, and so forth.

One might say the thing designated by "pennant" appears to both eye and ear. But even if we had not proven that things are inevitably reference-points of enumerable varieties of perceptual images and simply incapable of appearing—it would still be impossible to see how, without the perceptual image of a pennant, the same-named thing would ever be found or correctly interpreted.

The appearance of the fluttering pennant, detached from connection with intelligence, does not contain the demand to see merely a condition of the pennant in the fluttering. Nor does it enable recognizing the bearer of the process in the perceptual image of the resting pennant.

Perceptual meaning-units do not necessarily coincide with the things, properties, and processes into which we habitually divide the world's content. Klages cites linguistic evidence: the Ewe language has no name for the meaning-unit "walking" but specific names for a child's walk versus an adult's walk, for staggering, fast, slow walks, for walks of someone loaded with luggage. The perceptual unit of a walking person does not distinguish walker from walking any more than the fluttering pennant distinguishes pennant from fluttering.

The Klamath Indians distinguish movements entirely by visual relationship to the speaker—different sounds for movement in straight lines versus sideways, away versus toward the speaker. They have special pronouns depending on whether something expresses distance or proximity, visibility or invisibility, presence or absence. They use numerous prefixes incorporating into object-designation its shape, position, posture, form of movement, and immediate surroundings.

Strictly speaking, linguistic units in living speech correspond not to things but to presentations.

Mathematics distinguishes straight from curved lines, measures lengths and angles, reveals laws of triangles, quadrilaterals, polygons, circles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, cubes, spheres, cones. Its decomposition of such figures has progressed so far that surely no one claims it remains in infancy.

But even if these line-shapes existed in reality—one might counter with the crystal world—those very lines would tell us something entirely different when grasped in terms of their graphic properties.

For in terms of graphic properties, we inevitably see in the line a motion not present in its material properties. Any stationary line-shape is, graphically considered, a motion that can be characterized in detail but not in geometry's language.

An art scholar writes: "The line sneaks, runs, flows, rises, rears, falls, crashes, stretches, plays loose and free"—pure movements the author rightly assumes can be observed merely by looking at the line's shape.

Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil: "Only the preacher knew in Germany what a syllable, what a word weighs, to what extent a sentence strikes, leaps, crashes, runs, runs out..." Perhaps colorful and bold, yet immediately understandable—describing the sound-appearance of sentences with words scarcely less suitable for a harlequin.

Acoustics deals with tones and tone-connections, but we never hear tones, only noises—even pure tuning-fork tones always reach the ear together with noises. Language knows no tone-quality designations at all but distinguishes countless noises: howl, whiz, rustle, roll, roar, rumble, thunder, bellow, crash, clink, clatter, crack, stamp, splash, rattle, clack, knock, call, clamor, scream, whimper, sigh, groan, moan, sob, crunch, wheeze, screech, wail, snivel, bellow, whine, complain, cough, growl, grumble, yap, stammer, whisper, babble, murmur, rustle, whisper, chat, chatter, laugh, giggle, snap, sing, yodel, cheer, exult, hum, chirp, purr, snore, snort, bark, chatter, squeak, bleat, yap, croak, crack, rustle, knock, chime, buzz, ring, yell, echo.

Due to immediate comprehensibility, each differs for us even without considering methods of production. Not even "whiz" completely equals "rustle," while none can be resolved into acoustics' material tones.

Consider the verse: "And it swells and boils and roars and hisses." The first verb might primarily denote movement, while each other mainly refers to noises. But the unbiased listener perceives an event that only appears in those noises and thus simultaneously becomes visible and tangible.

One suspects, partly regarding the boiling, partly through familiarity with the ballad, a certain water-event. But the required water would not be chemistry's water but, bluntly stated, water filled with demonic powers—as indeed it says in Schiller: "The waters she swallowed down—The Charybdis now roared back."

Language has gained dominance in poetry, from which we can read image-consciousness, contrasting it point-by-point with the nature of things:

First: The perceptual image of "boiling, roaring and hissing" is an event. The thing figures in the event only as its unchanging component.

Second: Events are types of occurrences, and all occurrences are spatio-temporal. In the perceptual image—whether of swelling and hissing or even just a resting line-shape—real space and real time are immediately present to us. Both are polar, interconnected, indivisible and without location, formed but unlimited. In the thing, however, we find space and time only indirectly, as mere relations of the in-itself extratemporal point. Both as simultaneity and succession are relatable but no longer interconnected.

Third: However necessary keeping these differences in mind, they remain completely in the dark regarding what actually closes reality itself into the most determined state despite all changes. We receive the answer from considering that the happening we're dealing with is alive through and through.

What every image-consideration soon points to with peculiar, object-related names, are living and thus animated powers. In the world of perceptual images, a reality of beings appears.

Things are fixed points in space and time, with which positionless universals—redness, roughness, roundness—attach as properties, thought to "grow together" (note the word "concrete"), thereby underpinning occurrence with computational units that merely signify the perceptually real.

But perceptual images are manifestations not of things—which truly cannot appear—but of beings or souls, whose cloud-like becoming, growing, and passing is the fate of the world's meaning.

The unity of the thing is unity forced by mental imposition. The only improper unity of the perceptual image is based on the experienced dependence of all features and sides of a transforming entity on the inner nature of the ruling being within.

Any attempt to define the essence would naturally end in something thing-like—a soul-thing—but would capture no more of the word's meaning than any attempt to define reality itself. Just as perceptual content "redness" becomes present only through indication, so does the essence revealed in the redness.

Now, if redness appears only in a perceptual image, and the perceptual image is experienced only insofar as it is itself a manifestation of life—or more broadly, an appearance of an event—then we have, in the process of viewing which first makes perception possible, the internalization of an expression or process to observe.

Through this process, a receptive and receiving center of life comes into contact with a giving and acting center of life.

If we call this—regarding its inherent characteristic of needing to appear—an image or archetype, then archetypes are non-perceptual. Viewing is sharply distinct from perception, and completely from the conception based on it.

Not according to the sometimes "aesthetic" mode of perception, which strives to graze surface properties of things, does perception participate in viewing. Rather, according to its penetration into the depths of the appearing essence.

The same opposition appears in modes of expression. We must "describe" things materially and formally using material and formal "properties." The reality-less image cannot be described at all but can only be "called into appearance" through indication and interpretation of its character.

The perceptual image is not composed of sensory elements. It is an indivisible whole in which substrate and property exchange places, where space and time appear immediately as polar unities, where what appears is not thing-properties but living powers—animated beings whose expressions constitute the world's image.

This Copernican reversal restores to experience what intellectualist reduction destroys: the reality of the image-world, the immediate presence of beings, the living character of all actual perception.