Chapter 2

On the Nature of Existence

In the previous section, Klages demonstrated that the act of perception is timeless, and that what it grasps—the object—must also be timeless. This created a significant difficulty: if perception grasps only timeless objects, how can we account for our experience of temporal reality?

We now approach this difficulty from another angle by examining the temporal being of things. As Klages noted earlier, neither thing nor process nor essence can be conceived without some duration of existence. Yet the demonstrable timelessness of the object calls into question both the concept of truly existing and the concept of time itself.

Klages proposes that we may clarify one concept by means of the other. To simplify the investigation, he takes the immovable thing as his starting point and examines to what extent perception carries the character of an act.

Consider the perception of a tree. Whether through a brief glance or prolonged observation, the perceiver receives not merely an impression of the tree's appearance, but also an awareness of the presence of an existing thing.

When this awareness is expressed in judgmental form, it becomes clear that the judgment does not concern the appearance of the tree. The appearance changes with every shift in the observer's position and differs for each new observer. Yet there is only one existing tree.

We distinguish the being of the tree from the "view" of the tree. We attribute, for example, the color produced by lighting to the view rather than to the tree itself. Similarly, the properties of the tree do not fully manifest in the appearance. The existing tree may have a height of fifteen meters, while the appearance shrinks to a point at a sufficient distance. The green of the leaves vanishes entirely in darkness, yet we count this green among the enduring properties of the persistent something that forms the object of our concept of existence.

Therefore, we must distinguish categorically between the impression-experience and the perception of the being of the thing, regardless of whether these usually or necessarily accompany one another.

The impression-experience can only be conceived as a temporal fact of boundless transience. How, then, could we preserve the comprehended existence from such volatilization unless we declare it to be a temporally non-extended act through which it becomes objective to us?

The assumption that perception constitutes a non-extended point is confirmed when we attempt to compare the content of the impression with the content of what we mean by the existing thing. The numerically indeterminate variability of impression-contents in view of a single thing prohibits us from placing any particular impression in the thing's place. What remains is to grasp the thing as an absolutely conceivable point—one that serves as a relational center for a manifold of images.

This point does not occupy a place within the thing, but it can represent the thing in a unique manner.

Two consequences follow for the relationship between the apprehending faculty and the temporal reality of appearances. First, this faculty removes its object from the world of appearances. Second, it connects with this object the peculiar capacity to find it identically across various views.

The objectification occurring through the act does not concern the reality of appearance, but rather an abstractum related to it for reasons that remain, at this stage, opaque.

Medieval scholasticism, in defending the doctrine of transubstantiation, argued that the persistence of the "accidents" of wine and bread does not contradict a change in their "substances." This argument, however disputable, confirms the correct assumption that the perceptual thing is an abstractum.

The apparent contradiction between logical usage—which rightly calls the perceptual thing "concrete"—and epistemological discovery of its abstractness requires clarification. Earlier, Klages distinguished the time-object from real time. He now distinguishes the existence of the thing from its underlying reality.

The actually existing tree is concrete in relation to its properties, yet abstract in relation to its appearance. "Concrete" literally means "grown together," revealing that it concerns not the idea of reality but the coherence of properties.

Nevertheless, one might object: when someone perceives a tree, the existential judgment refers not to a merely existent "it" but to an individual "it"—a specific tree at a specific place at a specific time.

This is true, but it presents a peculiar reverse side that must not be overlooked.

The appearance of the tree flows in time, and our observation likewise flows in time. However, when I perceive this tree and judge "there stands a tree," I have not only freed the tree from the encasement of its appearance but simultaneously liberated the here-and-now of the appearance from the entirety of space and the flow of time.

No conceivable change in the universe could alter this established fact in the slightest. One could cut down the tree, devastate the ground, even allow the earth to crumble into pieces—none of this would affect the objective reality of the thought-thing at the thought-place at the thought-time.

What has been cannot be undone. What has happened cannot be made unhappened.

Just as the tree-thing remains the same, so do the place of its existence and the span of its being in the flight of time. Not only is the tree an abstraction—the place and moment of its existence are also abstractions.

The present moment, at the moment of being grasped, immediately acquires the property of remaining "in place" forever, even as time and the whole world, including the perceiver, relentlessly move forward and have already left every "now" behind.

This situation is paradoxical when we consider that we speak of the now-point in plural, thus acknowledging a sameness in various now-points, despite the fact that our actual now is unique, singular, and unparalleled.

We may conclude that no concept of individuality could be devised that would escape the fate of meaning something abstract, given that even the individual thing, together with the moment of its presence for the perceiver, constitutes an abstraction.

This raises the question: what would the metaphysical concrete be like, which we must disregard in order to grasp the object of perception?

Before proceeding, we must address a gap in the previous analysis. Klages called the time-point the "generalized now" but left open the question of how such a generalization could be conceived.

Thus far, we have established only that the now, by virtue of its point-like nature, can divide time. We have not yet considered why, in dividing time, it marks an immutable point in time.

If we consider only the fact of its non-temporal extension, we cannot separate the time-point from the space-point, nor can we understand why no time-point coincides with another time-point, and no spatial point coincides with another spatial point.

It is only in the positional nature of the point that it becomes determined. The point appears uniquely bound to time and space, even though it is neither temporal nor spatial in itself.

We do not yet know what binds the point to a specific location. However, we can already see that the reason cannot lie in the point itself, but solely in the nature of the medium through which the location is determined with its help.

The point must always occupy some position because, wherever it is, it immediately marks a location. Yet it occupies any position without altering its properties. The present shares with any possible time-point that it derives the uniqueness of its character only from a factual sequence of points—that is, from a mere relation to other locations.

The time-point is the generalized present insofar as the higher abstraction "time-location" is already contained within the present.

This result may now be examined for its suitability in resolving the apparent contradiction that a punctual act could grasp the flow of time.

No mortal can specify what time itself or space itself is, because it would be inconceivable to find real time or real space through timeless acts. Rather, what we grasp and find is never anything other than the point in time to which time merely belongs, and the point in space to which space merely belongs.

The time-point cannot be conceived without reference to the totality of time. The space-point cannot be conceived without reference to the totality of space.

The solution to the difficult question of what such "belonging" entails—from which we receive the impulse to distinguish real time from the time-object—can only be undertaken after we have shown more precisely what it does not consist of.

Let us return to the question of abstraction. Even the conceived now, as has been shown, is already an object and an abstraction, and therefore only a link in a chain of completely similar time-points.

We can mentally place ourselves at any point in time to judge events from it as an imagined present, which historians and storytellers do when they report past events in the present tense. Nevertheless, it remains true that only the now enables the formation of the concept of the time-point.

When we say that something has taken place, we mean that there is a point in the past where the happening was present. When we assert that something will take place, we assert the presentness of the happening for a point in the future. It is always the now that, stripped of its uniqueness, recurs in every time-point.

But wherein lies this uniqueness of the now?

No reflection on the act of comprehension would be able to reveal what always accompanies the grasping of time to lend the consciousness of the now its exemplary meaning. Here, where we discuss only comprehension, we must be content with the negative decision that something determines the act whose origin does not lie in the ability to comprehend.

The primal concrete X that we seek is undoubtedly present. But it is in its nature not to become an object to us in the same manner as things. Hence, the act of comprehension, as it comes into being, simultaneously detaches itself from its immediate enabling reason.

This conclusion is significant. What makes the now uniquely present—what gives it its character as this now rather than merely another time-point—cannot be grasped by comprehension. It belongs to that dimension of reality that remains inaccessible to the timeless act of perception.

The deepening of insight into the essence of the time-point leads us further in solving the question of the essence of the thing-point.

In the thing, we have recognized the non-extended relational point for a temporally flowing multiplicity of images. We can now understand it to be anchored in time in a particular way.

However, while the mere time-point remains where it is, the thing must be thought of as participating in a time-span. This span may be extremely large, like the duration of the universe, or extremely small, like the duration of a lightning bolt, but it can never shrink to the mathematical point in time. There is no "existence" at the mathematical moment.

We recollect that at the time-point, because it forms a place in the time-object, the sequence of all other points also belongs, and that two points suffice to delimit any arbitrary time-span in the same way as a single point marks a place.

Therefore, the point of the thing is determinable from its uniformity at at least two, otherwise arbitrarily close, time-points. The temporal sequence of appearance has an identical point of relation only with regard to distinct points in time.

If we imagine the perceptive gaze gliding along the timeline, it would find in the objectified sequence of appearances the same point of the thing at each point. Thus, the thing, even if it does not exist at the mathematical moment, continues through this moment as the same point persisting place by place.

We previously noted that no extension, however short, can be conceived that cannot be divided into any number of parts. No matter how close together we choose the time-points where the act of grasping would find the object-point, nothing prevents us from inserting an unlimited number of additional time-points between them, where it would also be found.

There is absolutely no point in the timeline where the object would not be identically present for the discerning perception. It therefore stands to reason to replace the series of points with the line itself and to understand the inseparable existence of the perceptual object as the persistence of the appearance-related point along a definable span of time.

We thus reach one of the most instructive and consequential concepts created by the human mind: the concept of "always" or "duration."

Duration is not a property of real time or of temporal reality. Rather, it is a construction of the timeless perceiving faculty—an abstraction derived from the persistence of the identical object-point across a series of time-points.

What endures is not the flowing, changing reality of appearance, but rather the timeless point of relation that perception has extracted from that flow.

This analysis confirms and extends Klages' fundamental thesis. The act of perception, being timeless, can grasp only timeless objects. When it encounters temporal reality—the flowing appearances, the changing world—it must abstract from that reality to create its object. It must freeze the flow into static identity, transform the transient into the enduring, replace the concrete with the abstract.

The perceiving faculty operates by removing things from temporal reality, anchoring them at abstract points in abstract time, and constructing the concept of duration from the persistence of identity across multiple such points.

In this operation, we see spirit's characteristic mode of relating to reality: not by participating in its flow, but by extracting from it, abstracting from it, creating timeless constructs that can be grasped by timeless acts.

The question that remains—and which Klages will pursue—is whether there exists another mode of relation to reality, one that does not require this extraction and abstraction, one that can somehow access the temporal as temporal rather than transforming it into the timeless.

That question points toward the soul and its distinctive way of experiencing reality—a way fundamentally different from spirit's objectifying comprehension.