Chapter 21

Sensory Experience and Perception

Good afternoon. Today we reach a pivotal moment in Klages' reconstruction of experience. Having demolished sensationalism and revealed the reality of the perceptual image, Chapter 22 now synthesizes these findings into a systematic account of sensory experience and perception.

The chapter's central insight is radical: what is "given" is not raw sensory data awaiting mental construction, but the completed entirety of temporally linked perceptual images. Experience is not construction but decomposition—a never-ending dismantling of the perfection of appearance.

This represents what Klages calls "the insight at the threshold of a prima philosophia"—a first philosophy grounded not in abstract principles but in the actual structure of lived experience.

Klages begins by looking around—taking stock of what has been achieved. The heterogeneity of sensory zones, seemingly suitable to support the sensualistic concept of sensation, brought us insight into the object-related heterogeneity of all perceptual qualities and finally revealed the impossibility that sensation scholasticism would face: the impossibility of composing even a single perceptual image from sensory contents.

The strongest reasons for this impossibility can now be summarized using the factors we've positively determined.

While we immediately associate day with night, warmth with cold, brightness with darkness—convinced each member of these pairs is only known in relation to its counter-member—sensation scholasticism has completely blinded us to the fact that we would know just as little about any arbitrary color without the variety of colors, about any arbitrary sound without the variety of sounds, about any arbitrary scent without the variety of scents. In short: we would know nothing about any qualities at all without the ever-varied perceptual image in which they appear together with other qualities.

If the whole world constantly showed the same red, we would have not the slightest consciousness of it and would never have formed the concept of redness, let alone color. In the absence of a second color, red would then be like the three dimensions—a property of space—but could not be experienced like these and therefore could not be understood, because it would not stand out against any of them.

The illusion that we compose the world's perceptual image from colors and sounds and scents added together fades away as soon as one realizes that only in the world's perceptual image—but not in themselves—can color, sound, and scent be realized.

This difficulty cannot be resolved by determining sensation's content as a difference in sensation, because in this way each becomes something poorly noticeable, and neither color from color nor color from sound would be further different, whether in kind or degree.

The same segregating performance that separated space from time, separated from both also the specific properties that are in reality permeated by them. This had to lead to the opinion that the juxtaposition of colors into individual colors, the succession of sounds into individual sounds—and conversely, that the colorful world-image could be restored by combining individual colors existing on their own, the sounding world-image through such individual sounds existing on their own.

However, the experiential content of color is what it is only in connection with accompanying colors appearing with it—another with the colors that have just passed. The experiential content of sound only in connection once with the sounds it follows, another with those that accompany it. Indeed, it proves dependent on the sound-image as well as the scent-image of the world, this one on their colorful image.

Isolation cannot be carried out substantively in colors and sounds any more than color and brightness of the color, sound and intensity of the sound can be separated objectively.

Klages now offers the main yield of all fundamental findings of the current section in condensed form—a general remark of extraordinary importance.

The word "given" is preferably used to denote what underlies all formation of experience as a kind of raw material. But by this cautious name choice, one has not escaped the fate of considering "given"—instead of the experienced that would actually be given—rather exclusively the parts and features that the decomposition process can distinguish in the found object.

Only insight into experience's nature shows us the way in exactly the opposite direction.

"Given" is the consciousness-independently real, from moment to moment completed entirety of temporally linked perceptual images, whereas the objective experiential world is created or gradually generated based on a never-completing decomposition.

What may appear as construction when we focus solely on experiencing is rather a never-ending dismantling, dividing and ordering, as soon as we revert to the content of experience that makes the experience process possible in the first place.

Not from the "raw material" of formless thing-elements is appearing reality patched together, but conversely: from the perfection of appearance, the original things are already cut out, which provide the basis for systematic further decomposition that sensory experience of science offers.

Conscious and deliberate recognition merely continues what involuntary experience has begun before it: the decomposition of images. And that manifold specificity which could not be emphasized enough in the arrangement of sensory organs is somewhat the vital prelude not so much of the vision of the world as of the analysis of the perceived.

It is not the emergence of the phenomenon that forms a possible subject of science, but the emergence of rational knowledge about it. This however demands as "given" the eternally "finished" connection of phenomena, which it divides and introduces into the never-to-be-closed system of relationships of the noumena.

Only such a psychology—indeed science in general—can arrive at contradiction-free findings which have recognized that all experience never achieves anything other than the transfer of inherently indivisible, constantly flowing images into the language of the analyzing intellect.

This is the insight at the threshold of a "prima philosophia."

Moving on to the factual yield: the act of perception requires the state of wakefulness and consequently the possibility of sensation. Therefore we suspect in the still unclear process of sensation the reason for the most decisive probing of perceived images from the state of the perceiver.

Accordingly, the life of the senses would split into two functions: the viewing of images and the sensation, whose counterpart would be the self-being of the images or, as presciently determined, their corporeality.

If we call viewing the spiritual aspect and sensing the physical aspect of the life process, then we have provisionally established the following regarding the problem of experience:

The spiritual viewing occurs equally in sleep and wakefulness, whereas the physical sensation establishes the distinguishing characteristic of wakefulness. Without observed phenomena, there is no sensible corporeality of the phenomenon, and without the foundation of sleeping—that is, observing life—there is no wakefulness, that is, sensing life.

The act of perception relies on sensitive wakefulness, and perceptible tangibility is based on sensible corporeality.

Experience is the unlimited progressive analysis that the mind performs on the reality of the phenomenon, guided by the differentiating life process of sensation.

As Sensualism confused sensory experience with the process of perception and neglected the intellectual act that inevitably accompanies sensory experience in humans, it faced the hopeless task of deriving the limit and the matter to be limited from the performance of the perceptual act—that is, the thing and its properties—from one and the same event.

Not only that: Sensualism overlooked that the senses are organs of both body and soul, or that in every experience, the process of viewing images and the process of sensing their corporeality work together. It believed it could bundle the world phenomenon from disparate "sensory contents."

We will not repeat how Sensualism thus very involuntarily strangled itself.

Now, after gaining insight into the dual function of the senses, whole chains of questions fall away as chimerical—questions on whose unanswerability Sensualism shattered. The task becomes all the more pressing for us to not only identify the means to separate viewing from sensation but also to delve deeply into the structure of their interrelation.

As the path from the thing to the image led us via the intuitive image—the phenomenon—we have found it necessary to insert a third process between viewing and sensation: the process of intuition.

While its distinction from the sensation process has so far been at the forefront of consideration, while its distinction from the process of viewing became more a matter of speculation, the following chapters will continue to be dedicated to clarifying this.

Just as a body without a soul would no longer be a living body, so the spiritual sensory process of seeing must be involved in the physical sensory process of sensation if it is still to deserve the name of a life process.

The third process to be incorporated—where both merge—now presents itself differently thanks to its participation in sensation, differently thanks to its participation in seeing.

According to the former, we would have to explore the conditions under which corporeality is experienced in images. According to the latter, the conditions under which the intangible event appears—or the conditions for the transformation of seeing into a viewing that is always physically underpinned.

This investigation, to be undertaken later, we have introduced with the characterization of the difference between improper image properties and actual thing properties and continue it for the time being by gradually reclaiming sensibility's ability to see, which was falsified by the scholasticism of sensation.

Klages has reversed the entire sensationalist paradigm. What is given is not raw data but completed perceptual images. Experience is not construction but decomposition—the mind's analytical dismantling of appearance's perfection, guided by sensation.

The senses possess dual functions: spiritual viewing and physical sensing. Perception requires their cooperation through a third process—intuition—which mediates between the intangible event and its corporeal appearance.

This is the threshold of first philosophy: recognition that all experience transfers indivisible, flowing images into the language of analyzing intellect.

Thank you.