Chapter 20

Impression Qualities in the Service of Essence Representation

Klages now demonstrates through an overwhelming accumulation of evidence that what we originally experience are not things and properties at all, but essences and their characteristics. This is not poetic metaphor but phenomenological fact.

The chapter's title—"Impression Qualities in the Service of Essence Representation"—reveals its thesis: the qualities we perceive serve to represent living essences, not to construct knowledge of material objects. What sensationalism mistakes for building blocks of objective knowledge are actually expressions of demonic powers—the mythical world that language has preserved for us.

Klages begins by returning to twilight, that phenomenon whose resistance to thing-description we encountered previously. We found it difficult to express in factual data what twilight is. Now we know why: the meaning of the name "twilight" does not lie in optics but in the twilight essence, which merely appears in optics. Therefore twilight cannot be described but only characterized using names with related meanings.

Just as the mental process expressed by a smile could be expressed in other ways, so too—if twilight is an essence and the essence-shaping soul of the twilight image—must its optics be replaceable, whether by other optics or by something acoustic or tactile. And just as what we factually call a smile fits very different appearances expressing different moods, so too must optical twilight signify different essence-traits.

Consider the evidence. We call the mountain ridge disappearing behind flickering atmosphere at radiant midsummer noon a "twilight outline." We speak of the "fading" of the coast on the high seas in clearest weather—using the same word that corresponds property-wise to a certain degree of darkness also for characterizing optically differently-shaped distance.

Conversely, Goethe makes distance appear in twilight through the simple yet compelling verse: "All nearness is already distant."

If twilight suggests darkening at one time, it means distancing at another. If approaching night appears in twilight, then at another time, deepening distance appears. This proves that in twilight's perceptual reality, different characteristics of the world can become apparent.

Even more convincingly—and Klages inserts this crucial point—the essentially incomparable nature of image-characters covered by one name emerges when we choose examples from areas primarily serving to denote thing-properties.

The human body has the property of warmth, ice the property of cold—but also the colors of one painting are warm, another's cold. Rough is tree bark, but also the sound of a roaring bull and the climate of the Pamir highlands. Sharp is the knife, but also the locomotive's whistle and vinegar's smell. Sound-property and color-property have absolutely nothing in common—yet we speak unhesitatingly of tone-colors and color-tones. Height characterizes mountains, depth the well shaft—yet according to the same characteristic, sound-qualities differ from each other.

Klages now ventures the decisive counter-test. The essence of color to which we attribute warmth, although experienced by us according to linguistic testimony, does not tend to become conscious the way it happens with human essence when we speak of character, personality, disposition, soul and its states.

Assuming all essence is obliged to appear, we should have to describe human characters with property-related names and especially favor those familiar to us for characterizing images.

The conclusion is confirmed immediately. We speak of "Twilight of the Gods," "twilight state of consciousness," "twilight dream" or "dreaming twilight." We say "it dawns on him" when something begins to "become clear" to someone. We judge someone sinking into sleep as "dozing off" and let the lazy person "languish" his days.

We can confirm this immediately using "flutter" from our previous chapter. It is certainly not exactly the pennant's fluttering, but the similarly named and equally inaccessible movement of moth or butterfly from which the term was borrowed for the human trait of fickleness.

We immediately convince ourselves that fundamentally all names for perceptual features of world phenomena are used for characterization, and we would have to do without them if we wanted to dispense with such names.

Consider the following series of improper directions and locations in sensory space—and I will read these rapidly to convey their overwhelming abundance:

Esteem, raise, university, higher mathematics, high nobility, high rank, high priest, at the highest place, God the Most High, majesty, high spirit, high flight of thoughts, high goals, magnanimous, very holy, to rise, to hold someone high, gain the upper hand, prevail, supreme command, superior, colonel, strive upwards, rise, superiority, surpass, overwhelm, convince, outwit, trick, take advantage of, overpower, exalt oneself, pinnacle of happiness, top of society—

On a low level, deeply sunk, beneath all dignity, under criticism, underestimate, suppress, subjugate, succumb, perish, subject, subordinate, submissive, dejected, depressed, demoralized, perish, fallen angel, fallen woman, the fall of prices, someone's reputation falls, fall into temptation—

It will hardly be mistaken that in such transfers to value opposites, a primal relationship of humans to perceptual space forms, for which height and depth, above and below, upward and downward direct the poles of the souls of the universe.

From the emphasis on the value of "above," the essential symbolism of the head is explained once again: leader, captain, chief, main thing, main share, ledger, capital, assertion.

The same applies to other dimensions of space, further with size and smallness, length and shortness, depth and shallowness: magnanimous, big-hearted, megalomania, boaster, braggart, small-minded, faint-hearted, petty; far-sighted, open-hearted, long-winded, broader and narrower field of view, narrow-minded; lengthy, tedious, entertaining, shortsighted; shallow, flat, superficial, profound, thorough.

For readers to whom the fact of symbolic usability of perceptual circumstances is still somewhat new, Klages offers a sample map of characterizing expressions whose perceptual original meaning becomes clear from mere word-consideration:

Limited, comprehensive, enlightened, sophisticated—obstinate, ossified, petrified, nailed, twisted, crazy, blinded—tense, steadfast, exuberant, extravagant—moved, shaken, touched, captivated—to pull oneself together, let oneself go, expose oneself—to go within, reflect, introspective, to go out of oneself, be cheerful—fluctuating moods, fickleness, distractibility, changeable, summary—turn one's mind, curly mind—inclined, obliging, accommodating, devoted, reluctant, reserved, measured, rejecting, condescending, dismissive, repulsive; to feel cold, make a sour face, turn one's back on someone—puff oneself up, mouth full, pretentious, broad-tracked, swollen, puffed-up—irascible, quick-tempered, indignant—dissimulation—unpolished, crude—cling to something—urge someone—carry a thorn in one's heart, pour one's heart out to someone, take something to heart, have no heart, heartless; push one's head through, get something into one's head, rack one's brains, lose one's head, headless, hollow-headed, stubborn—ingrained prejudices.

This is not mere metaphor. These expressions reveal that character-representation necessarily employs perceptual language because what we encounter in perception are living powers, not mechanical properties.

Klages previously called beings "spiritual powers" and now explains why he has avoided the physically usual name "forces."

With properties, the timeless substrate of the being-so of things is thought into images. With forces, the equally timeless substrate of constant effectiveness is posited. Timelessness includes spacelessness, and forces especially reveal they lack directional determination—which alone would forbid transferring the concept of force to powers that weave images of space at the "loom of time."

The distinction becomes clearer: Mechanical movements and electrodynamic processes are always something effected. In the world of things, every moving thing is moved from outside, never moving itself. Thus physics lacks and must lack the distinction between activity and passivity, just as geometry lacks the distinction between right and left.

Powers, however, are always self-moved and either acting or suffering. The line of the perceptual image achieves something when it rises, and something happens to it when it falls. Twilight comes, sets in, clears, recedes. Day breaks in and vanishes. Distance opens. Clouds drift, wander, hurry, chase, sail, flee, gather. The moon hides.

It takes no shrewdness to recognize that this is the mythical world of demons that language has preserved for us. And today no one would claim that physical forces are demons and that demons are perceived and perceivable.

With considerable evidence, Klages has shown that for the most meaning-defining features of perceptual images, the dividing lines separating seeing from hearing and both from touching—according to the presumed immiscibility of visible, audible, tangible thing-properties—do not exist.

There are quite a few perceptual contents with unexchangeable names for which it would be impossible to assign them exclusively to one sensory zone.

"Weinen" means not only "to shed tears" but also that peculiar noise whose intensified form imitates the interjectional cry "Wehe." These are physically extremely complex, pictorially extremely simple movements and sounds simultaneously, perceptible in words like: flow, blow, surge, whirr, breathe, rustle, blare, sob, bubble.

The pictorially unique process of melting—and likewise solidifying—can be seen as well as felt. Scratching, scraping, scribbling, sneaking, threshing, trampling undoubtedly mean activities usually determined by sight but are also immediately understandable sound-words.

"Dumpf"—cognate with "Dampf"—denotes in "stuffy air" something noticeable with the sense of smell as musty dampness, in "muffled sound" an indescribable timbre. It cannot be denied that the word's current full meaning contains the materially unspeakable essence of both.

One would get lost in the boundless if even a little linguistic history were brought in. "Bright" is substantively today almost identical to "shiny," whereas earlier it was "sounding, loud"—of which we still have "Hall" and "hallen." The ever-recurring phrase "bright sounds" reveals that the substantively insurmountable difference between ringing and shining does not exist for the images of ringing and shining. Goethe practically reveals the reason for this semantic development when he talks about "What noise brings the light" from the echo of brightness.

Regarding darkness—the opposite of brightness—it is beyond doubt that it is not only perceptible through the eye. Word combinations like "oppressive darkness," "dense dark," "thick darkness," along with "heavy fog," announce not only the perceived character of darkness's image but also its effect on the experiencer's sensitive corporeality.

Those whose experiential memory is strong enough will remember from early childhood how in the evenings, after being put to bed, darkness "laid on the chest," how even shortness of breath arose, how the pressure instantly disappeared with the candle's glimmer. The nightmare and incubus of countless legends confirm this experience from the imagery of original peoples.

Starting from what has been called perception, it becomes an insurmountable mystery why we possess knowledge of countless perceptions we would futilely try to analyze into sensory contents; furthermore, the possibly even greater mystery of why this knowledge consists of perceptual impressions having spatial and temporal position in relation to an external world; finally, the probably greatest mystery that we use the same perceptual impressions to name character-traits of living beings.

The situation presents itself quite differently if we consider the process giving us images as a process of the soul, to which physically varied senses only render indispensable services.

Initially, it is one and the same soul that connects with its image-space of the world, regardless of whether the sense of sight, hearing, or touch reports to it. The process no longer appears as textbook physiology of the senses schematically describes it: at the peripheral receiving organ like the retina, a chemical change occurs from ether vibrations; the conducting nerve telegraphs, and there "springs forth" or somehow joins the "sensation" of a color.

Instead: the change in the body mediated by the optic nerve process awakens the soul's visual capacity, according to which a color-appearance occurs in image-space—the counterpoint of the soul.

Just as the visual process truly shakes the entire cell association we call the living organism, there is no change in this association by a sensory process that, as received and absorbed by the corporeal soul's capacity for perception, does not also result in a transformation of the perceptual world.

Measured against sensory nerve processes, what today is falsely called "sensations" are all interpretation processes, for the purpose of revealing what for the soul alone holds the character of reality: the sometimes meager, sometimes rich, but always potentially capable of visualization—image.

And since image-space is immersed in the stream of time, the interpretation now due depends on every past one, just as deciphering every line of a difficult text depends on previously deciphered lines, or as understanding a treatise's conclusion depends on understanding preceding pages.

Then, however—since according to a truth whose manifold applications will engage us in detail, only similar comes to agreement with similar—what the soul encounters through the means of the senses, even in sleep's occurrences, is originally not the endowed thing including its movements and changes, but rather each time a living power.

Therefore what the ensouled organism—from unicellular to human—encounters becomes, according to the alertness of its viewing, the stage of appearing beings: enticing or threatening beings within the animal kingdom including humans, further revealing their own characters more and more only within humanity equipped with higher visual power.

Thus, not vitality, but the understanding of a spirit-bearing vitality kills stretch by stretch the images of the world, until finally only things remain—and in the future, even only numbers.

But what applies to the most non-thing-like features of images—where regarding their transience even the sounds we favored were not chosen by chance—applies no less to those that many-thousand-year appropriation-work of the spirit has so closely interlocked with things that some are initially inclined to consider it impracticable to understand them apart from their image-content: think of form-determination, hardness, weight, state of aggregation, adhering color.

To clarify this as well, Klages recalls the factual incomparability of any given quality with any other, leaving open here how it is understandable that we nevertheless enhance each one with full justification: bright and brighter, red and redder, loud and louder, warm and warmer, sweet and sweeter.

If sweeter sweetness is nothing but increased or modified sweetness, we hold it unquestionably certain that the brightness, redness, loudness, sweetness, warmth capable of being increased is always a special kind.

In contrast, something like pure intensity seems to meet us in the pressure-resistance of a tangible body. We tentatively assume it is really perceived with the help of touch, and immediately consider that mechanics bases its size measurements—which are solely its concern—exclusively on pressure, since impact and tension already presuppose the pressure phenomenon. In view of its tendency, the entire physics could be defined as the science of the laws of effect of measurable pressure differences.

If the pressure-exerting side is the perceived and perceptible side of reality, then on the artistic and in our sense merely visible side falls everything that would resist the attempt to dissolve it into pressure differences.

Only the negative determination of the artistic brings us that insight into the essence of viewing which convincingly highlights its involvement in every sensory process and especially in the most sensitive of all senses—the sense of touch—and teaches us in terms of essence-appearance that it is no less felt than seen or heard.

Consider some of the countless activities impossible without a tactile organ: tearing, ripping, swinging, throwing, stirring, rubbing, stroking, smoothing, shaping, hitting, kneading, stretching, bending, breaking, turning, twisting, plucking, squeezing, prodding—not to mention the endless series opening up with the reinforcement of tactile organs with various tools: writing, painting, drawing, knitting, crocheting, embroidering, braiding, weaving, hammering, chopping, drilling, screwing, rowing, churning, tying, cutting.

Performed with the hands, most of these activities can again be perceived through both eye and ear, because the accompanying sound of almost every kind can be distinguished from any other's accompanying sound.

But move directly to mere touching and ask whether you could divide into differences of pressures what you experience when counter-pressing the hand, when you touch in succession: stone, metal, wood, bread, velvet, sheepskin, powdered sugar, sand, flour, feathers, cake dough, butter.

And further ask whether you could communicate the felt experience in any way other than specifying characteristics, for which language once again provides a multitude of names whose meaning, quite familiar to us, could not be replaced in a single case by pressure sizes: smooth, rough, blunt, sharp, sticky, slippery, soft, brittle, fragile, crumbly, swelling, pliable, edgy, rotten, plump—or using material characteristics: stony, metallic, woody, grainy, silky, fibrous, springy, woolly, fleshy, bony, greasy, doughy, mushy, sandy, floury, chalky, oily, soapy.

All of this and unimaginably much more is perceived through touch. What is felt is always a character, sometimes meager, sometimes richly developable, but always in images, none of which—viewed in terms of object-properties—remains restricted to the tactile area and cannot be completely divided into additionally perceived pressure differences.

Thus our tasting, smelling, and touching also have "eyes," just as conversely, the eye is capable of touching.

Moreover, if touch were only the organ for perceiving resistance and not also an organ of seeing, we could not distinguish countless things and thing-properties without the eye's help, which can actually be determined through touch alone.

It is said that the Persian tastes rice with the fingertips. The expert in fabrics can feel the cloth's quality in complete darkness with hands, and the master shoemaker no less the leather's quality. Experts assure us that one can distinguish just by touch the following fabrics, even some subtypes, sometimes even the factory: wool, cotton, linen, silk, satin, plush, jute, drill, tulle, muslin, molton, brocade.

The same applies to other senses. If I shake one of two identical-looking boxes, knowing one contains buttons and the other needles, I can hear which is which—and would even, without knowing anything about it, at least guess the contents. We hear without looking whether a glass has fallen and shattered or a clay jug, whether an apple is torn or an onion broken, whether wood hits wood or stone hits stone or metal hits metal.

There are therefore unquestionably acoustic images with which we relate to such and countless other thing-properties.

Color names originally did not partake of the definiteness of meaning they have today. In Indo-European languages, they had more indefinite sense with flexible variability and were used in colloquial language to receive characteristics.

White meant something light, shiny, bright, like silver—from which "white wine" derives, as well as "to whitewash oneself" for someone wanting to talk away a mistake. Black something indeterminately dark—from which "black forest," "black cloud," "black bread," and symbolically "black suspicion," "black hour," "black ingratitude," "black artist," "to blacken oneself." Red an ill-defined range of fiery tones—from which "red gold," "red copper," "redskin." Green refers to plant growth coloring and, according to ancient interpretations of vegetation, meant the colorful appearance of the growing, "greening," occasionally with connotation of incompleteness and immaturity—from which: to get on a green branch, green side, green boy, greenhorn, not to be green with someone.

Thus the characters of the colorful world-appearance were originally captured, only to experience over time that object-specific delineation and solidification permitting physical application of current color names—to an extent going far beyond linguistic objectification of tactile qualities.

Through overwhelming accumulation of linguistic and phenomenological evidence, he has demonstrated that impression-qualities serve essence-representation. What we perceive are not building blocks for constructing knowledge of material objects but expressions of living powers—the mythical world of demons that language preserves.

The entire apparatus of sensory zones, thing-properties, and objective qualities dissolves. In its place appears the soul's interpretive process, awakened by bodily changes to encounter the stage of appearing beings.

Not vitality but the understanding of spirit-bearing vitality kills stretch by stretch the images of the world, until finally only things remain—and in the future, even only numbers.

Against this nihilistic trajectory, Klages defends the original reality: the world as manifestation of living essences, whose characters we encounter in every act of genuine perception.