Chapter 22

On the Visual Ability of the Senses

Having established that experience is decomposition rather than composition, and that the senses possess dual functions—spiritual viewing and physical sensing—Klages now turns to what he calls "the visual ability of the senses."

This chapter demonstrates that the senses are not merely stimulus-receptive organs but independently capable messengers of the soul, through which it gains feeling and comes into essential contact with the remoteness of images. What sensationalism reduced to mechanical data-transmission, Klages reveals as participation in the soul's gift of vision.

The evidence marshaled here is extraordinary—ranging from linguistic analysis to animal instinct, from clairvoyance to the symbolism of scents. This is nothing less than a restoration of the forgotten wonders of sensibility.

Klages begins with tone. Even if language lacks tone designations, it distinguishes tone characters: high and low, light and dark, light and heavy, pointed and broad—from which the arrangement of objective tones on a "scale" originates.

While each higher tone is materially different from each lower tone, there is a character kinship of all comparatively high tones with the content of spatial above, all comparatively low with spatial below. Likewise with regard to light and dark, pointed and broad, light and heavy.

What language usage tells us from the world of tones applies generally: what we experience are never thing-properties for which we have sharply delimiting generic concepts, but rather—to say it more specifically—similarities and opposites. The former from essential kinship, the latter from essential conflict. The comparison of the inherently incomparable is based on the experience of its expressive content.

Before proceeding, Klages clears away apparent difficulties. One might deny any comparability between the world of things and the world of essence. Nevertheless, certain tone qualities and spatial above, or glaring red and the sound of a scream, become experienceable as expressions of the same essence. Yet the "high tone" or "screaming red" has not the slightest similarity with the conjunction of type-features in the property-concept of any thing.

The high tone does not belong to the category of things but perhaps to properties or effects of things—as likewise the screaming red. It is necessarily high, the glaring red necessarily loud, whereas the red ball before my eyes could also be green, or instead of smooth also rough, or instead of heavy also light.

This objection would raise a question needing examination—but would overlook which entirely different question of thing-conception it is, to which alone we may expect an answer by virtue of insight into the revelation of the essence phenomenon.

Language, strictly speaking, never names the contents of what is still today called sensation, and has no designation for the specific individual thing. If I say "before my eyes lies a smooth, red, solid ball with a diameter of ten centimeters," I have utilized general concepts—smoothness, redness, density, material filling, spherical shape, length—which I can only do because I already possess them.

The concept of substrate requires the concept of property. However, the concept of property is a relational concept. Therefore, the problem of finding the thing must be preceded by the question of the enabling ground of finding thing-properties.

To distinguish the concept of essence as clearly as possible from the concept of things, Klages has preferred expressions that differ entirely in terms of property—like height and tone. This does not exclude the possibility of character-kinship between the visible, audible, and tangible. On the contrary: if everything appearing did not connect with each other, and everything sounding with others, and everything resisting with others, there would be no perception of visible, audible, tangible thing-properties, and we would have no concept of disparate sensory zones.

Nevertheless, we must never substitute the unity of being of the thing with the unity of effect of the essence. The appearance, strictly speaking, cannot be divided into substrate and property—except perhaps metaphorically—nor can the essence appearing in it.

There are gods of water and even of specific bodies of water, gods of the plant kingdom and of specific trees, gods of the hearth and of specific houses. But also gods of night, day, dawn, light, darkness, storm, thunderstorm. Furthermore of love, joy, revenge, atonement, wrath. Furthermore of death, illness, fertility. Finally of praying, sacrificing, trading, healing, waging war, swearing, averting evil—and so on into infinity.

If the hallmark of objective thinking is the unmistakability of thing, property of thing, state and process, then neither thing-like beings nor property-like nor state-like correspond to things. "Essence" always stands on the same line of acting powers, and there is no possible predicate that could not figure as subject of statement in the world of essences.

The world of frozen "ideas" offers, so to speak, the shadow outline of a reality of once-living gods.

A difficulty may seem more problematic. When we hear the noise referred to as "rattling," we intend the image of clashing chains. With the sound of "prassing," perhaps the image of pouring rain and dripping leaves.

The sensation theorist would explain this with "associations." But Klages asserts: the rattling as well as the prassing is certainly something heard and thus just as good for the deaf as if it were not present. Everything introduced does not disturb the dependency of impressions on certain sensory processes—the indispensability of sensory stimulation.

Only the hearing-capable perceive sounds, whether awake or in dreams. Only the visually-capable see colors, only the smell-capable detect scents. Yet Klages has proven that with hearing's help, the working and effect of the same space-time powers can be perceived which appear to the soul in other ways through sight, again in other ways through touch—and therefore must also be known to the deaf-born, albeit not in the form of noises.

Far from diminishing the significance of the senses, this immensely enhances them. They transform from mere stimulus-receptive sensory organs to just as many independently capable messengers of the soul, through which it gains feeling and comes into essential contact with the remoteness of images.

The opposite attempt—to create an image from stimuli—must hopelessly fail and thus even negate itself, because it makes our knowledge of stimulus-exerting properties incomprehensible, indeed unthinkable.

From this viewpoint emerges a fundamentally new illumination of the performance capacity of the senses. What we have learned from previous sensory research concerns not sensibility itself but the physics of external and internal bodily processes.

The mechanics of sensory processes have been illuminated—sensibility minus its animateness. Millennia of cultivating the mind in service of purpose-driven belief in facts have accustomed us to regard sensory experience as sign-language of things and to immediately extract from it whatever it might tell us about them.

Now, however, we perceive in the sound of rattling also the character of rattling—and thus the character of iron. In the sound of prassing, the character of rain, hail, or rockfall. Thereby we are enabled to engage in spiritual exchange with the events themselves revealing powers.

This remarkably enriches our knowledge, as one may be surprised to recall it is based, among other things, on the universally possessed ability to quickly read moods, emotions, impulses, and even character traits from a person's face.

Consider the "instincts"—whether of humans themselves, especially of animals—which remain alien to sensualism. How does the animal recognize the means in water to quench its thirst? Where does the carnivore find its food in meat, the herbivore in plants?

Why is the hen incited by the egg's sight to brood it? The still completely inexperienced duckling by the water puddle's sight to plunge into it? Why the bee by the linden blossom's scent to extract nectar and store its prey in the artificially constructed honeycomb?

Why does the young cat chase the mouse before it has been demonstrated? Why does the silkworm greedily consume the mulberry leaf serving its future cocoon, and not a beech leaf, although it could? What prompts it to weave the web of thousands of meters of threads looser at one spot, without being informed that otherwise the butterfly could not tear the cocoon?

Why does the hermit crab cover itself with actinias, without having tested they would protect it? Why, as soon as its wings have grown, does the mosquito avoid the water in which it grew up, and why does the female—not the male—seek it again when necessary to lay eggs?

How did the leopard learn it must pounce on the giraffe's neck and tear open the artery if it is to have any chance of killing the much larger animal?

Isn't it crystal clear from such millions of reproducible examples that nothing has been discovered about the life of the senses by those who merely follow the mechanics of their fact-related data? Shouldn't the almost infallible certainty of such recognitions teach even the most entrenched rationalists that it is certainly not to be understood from the mind's performance capabilities?

Even today, quite a number of people—especially women—can practically "see through" another person at first glance, even guessing important aspects of their past and future fate. In exceptional cases, they can even sense from a device what it was used for—recognizing one axe from a large series that was used to commit murder.

Adding the myriad attested "telepathies," premonitions, true "clairvoyances," and the undeniable successes of water and metal-sensitive dowsers, we face a vast field of once widely spread but now rarer manifestations of primal seeing.

Common sense, imprisoned in factual consciousness, would either have to deny these or attribute them to utterly incomprehensible supernaturality. However such performances may be explained individually, it is certain they can never be understood from the activity of the image-alienated and image-piercing spirit within us, which has precisely torn apart the immediate connection between soul and world.

The magnificent systems of Romanticism, with their assumption of a "primal sense" or "central sense" or "all-sense"—a kind of trunk from which the individual senses branched off—were on the way to understanding this. They felt their way to access, on one hand, to the life-content of the sleep state and somnambulism, on the other hand to the today more than ever enigmatic "instincts."

Often the thirsty rider was led by his thirsty horse, which he let loose on the dry steppe, to a spring or oasis several hours away. Wild as well as some bred animals anticipate and indicate through protective behavior the impending unusually severe weather, especially earthquakes.

Think of the orientation ability of the homing pigeon, abducted a hundred kilometers in a dark box on detours, possibly returning home in a straight line. One can hardly avoid agreeing with the romantics when they tended to understand such things from the same perspective as clairvoyance, and will no longer find it ridiculous that all original peoples revered the animal for the operation of divine planetary powers.

The sight of a figure immediately and directly fills us with deepest affection, even irresistible desire—sometimes even a voice's sound with intense aversion. The sensation theorist would confront us with "associations" and refer to the supposed insights of "accompanying tone of feeling" theory.

But if something fundamentally similar occurs in the animal kingdom—primarily through smell—when a dog follows the scent of a bitch or a horse flees upon sensing a panther, surely no one would explain it as "associations." And yet, animals are exceedingly rich in the most peculiar "idiosyncrasies": the bull hates red cloth, ants flee from blue light, the horse avoids the camel, badger and fox mutually avoid each other, as do shark and alligator.

Even if one called upon the entire poetry of the seasons to help explain the awe-inspiring power of flower scents, one would find no anchor point without the assumption that what lies within the sensory experience itself can only be somewhat depicted in the "mood pictures" it allows to arise: the scent of roses—gentle abundance; jasmine—hot intoxication; linden blossom—foretaste of bliss; violets—promising memories of youth; lilac—youthful exuberance; forest and resinous scent—fairy-tale mood; hay—contemplative absorption; damp leaves—primordial gathering.

It is not by chance that in colloquial language the name "stimulus" signifies the source of mental pleasure in sensually experienced images rather than the cause of sensory nerve processes. Compare "charm" and "enchanting."

One should not yet expect delineation of feelings, but we touch upon their close connection with vision. If no one denies the sensory datum the ability to relate to the external world, despite the process transmitting it occurring completely within the organism, then it is not apparent why data provided by sensory-mediated feeling should lack the same relatability.

At least three main cases can be distinguished: feeling speaks of the life-condition of the feeler, it speaks of the relationship of their life-condition to the impression's life-content, and it primarily speaks of the latter—though naturally always mediated by their own life-condition.

In this last case, we call the feeling datum the "felt character of the image," or more concisely, an essence feeling. It should be emphasized in the strongest terms: essence feelings are not causes but effects of mental visions in the feeler's personality.

Are thing-properties actually qualities or not? If they are, how can they be objectively compared with each other, which undoubtedly happens constantly? But if not, how can they be distinguished from real qualities?

Should we seriously believe that the warmth of the heat-giving stove is different warmth than that meant by the expression "warm red"? How would we come to state the same fact—being warm—in both cases? Nor does color cease to be color when we attribute warmth to it.

Everyone easily recognizes when and why a transmission occurs when we speak of a table leg. If I point to a person's leg and then to the figurative table leg, the visual similarity is hardly less apparent than that of the human leg with a horse's leg. We can add similarity of functions.

On the other hand, no one could visually demonstrate the similarity of the stove's warmth with the warmth of a peony's red or even with heart-warmth. Allegories and transmissions presuppose fully thought-out things, whereas the similarity of qualities belongs to the immediate content of experience that first enables the discovery of thing-properties and thus the thing itself.

Reality is experienced, and being is always only thought based on experienced reality. We have previously distinguished the reality of space from the being of space, the reality of time from the being of time. We now also distinguish the reality of the "how" from the being of the "how."

In the form of thing-property, the merely thinkable being of the "how" replaces the reality of the experienced "how." Color remains color even if we call it warm; warmth remains warmth even if we attribute it to a color. However, we use names of thing-properties for experienced aspects of appearance and explain a color's character with warmth's character.

Separated from its essential context, the image-quality becomes the timeless property of a thing, insofar as it falls within the area of influence of the position set by the mind.

This chapter begins the soul research of the senses—extraordinarily deviating from so-called sensualism. The senses are not merely stimulus-receptive organs but independently capable messengers of the soul, through which it gains feeling and comes into essential contact with the remoteness of images.

Polar to each other like space and time are the two most pronounced distance senses: sight and hearing. The former denotes the predominance of sensibility's spatial pole, the latter of the temporal pole. Color is an immediate feature of space; sound directly relates to time.

As time-enduring, the thing has greater elective affinity to space than to events, and accordingly greater affinity to color than to sound. Colors and their shapes most intensely captivate the perceptual object and bind it inextricably, whereas sound floats between thing and event and, although caught in the world of things, does not cease to speak the language of beings.

Here one of the laws of relation is announced, emerging from the necessities of experience to the analytical action of the mind.