Chapter 29

The Conceptual Relationship of Appearance

Klages addresses a question that follows naturally from this analysis: Why can only visual appearance serve as the basis for conceptual thought? Why is vision the privileged sense for the development of consciousness and conceptuality?

The chapter's title—"The Conceptual Relationship of Appearance"—indicates that we are investigating a fundamental affinity between the visible and the thinkable. Klages will demonstrate that this affinity is not accidental but stems from a specific structural feature of visual form: its empirical timelessness.

The central thesis can be stated precisely: "The conceptual kinship of appearance is based on the empirical timelessness of form. Form relates to other features of sensory appearance as the permanent to the changing, the solid to the liquid, the stationary to the moving, the lasting to the fleeting, the eternal to the temporal."

This explains why spirit could only develop in beings capable of perceiving visual form. Only vision provides access to forms that possess relative timelessness within the temporal flow of experience. These forms serve as the foundation for conceptual thought, which requires stability and permanence.

Klages will support this thesis through multiple lines of evidence: the primacy of visual representations in imagination and memory, the dominance of spatial-visual metaphors in language, the location-freedom of visual forms, and the relationship between form and conceptual meaning.

The implications are profound. If consciousness depends on visual form's empirical timelessness, then only eye-beings could become thinking beings. And if spirit requires the perception of timeless forms within temporal flow, then the clash between spirit and life becomes comprehensible as a structural necessity rather than an accident.

Klages begins with a series of observations about how we understand representations and images.

First example: "Although we only call the fragrant component of the rose in rose oil its aroma, even the child believes to see the rose itself in the image of the rose, thus indicating that its understanding of the matter clings to the optical impression."

When we extract rose oil, we acknowledge it contains only the scent, not the rose. But when we see a picture of a rose, we say "that is a rose"—not "that is an image of a rose." Our conceptual understanding gravitates toward the visual.

Second example: "The reflection of the cloud in the pond is not so much an effect of the cloud to us, but rather in a peculiar way the cloud once more, whereas the rain that pours down on us is regarded as something different from itself."

The visual reflection of the cloud is somehow still the cloud. But rain—a tangible, tactile effect—is considered different from the cloud that produces it. Visual representation preserves identity in a way physical causation does not.

Third example: "The lion cast from bronze is far more a bronze lion to us than just a piece of metal, while we unhesitatingly count the real hide of the slain lion, when spread on the ground, among the category of carpets."

The bronze statue, which merely resembles a lion in visual form, is called a lion. But the actual hide of a lion, which was part of the lion's body, becomes categorized as a carpet based on its current use and appearance. Visual form trumps material substance in determining identity.

Fourth example: "If a phonograph deceptively allows us to hear a lion's roar and we are no longer tempted like a child to look for the real lion, we call what we heard an imitated lion's roar, but certainly not a depicted lion."

Audio reproduction does not create a representation in the same sense that visual reproduction does. We distinguish carefully between the real sound and the imitation. But visual images are treated differently—they somehow contain or present what they depict.

Klages draws the conclusion: "Only appearance forms the basis of all inherent universals."

What makes something capable of representing general concepts—of standing for a category rather than just a particular instance? Only visible appearance possesses this capacity. But why?

The answer Klages will develop is that visual forms possess a special relationship to time that other sensory qualities lack. This temporal structure makes them suitable foundations for conceptual meaning.

Klages now examines what happens when we remember, imagine, or think about things. His claim: visual images dominate mental life even when the original experience involved other senses.

First observation: "The sight of a well-painted winter landscape might evoke the phantasm of cold, which may complete itself in an 'imagined' shivering. The sight of a vividly depicted torture can lead to the empathy of actual pain."

Visual images can evoke sensations from other modalities. We see a picture of winter and feel imaginative cold. We see depicted torture and experience sympathetic pain. The visual serves as the gateway to other sensory domains.

But the reverse does not work as well: "One does not hear the voice of an acquaintance without immediately having a silhouette of their appearance before the mind's eye—but even to an extremely musical mind, it is at most exceptionally that the sight excites with approximately the same clarity an image of the voice of the observed."

When you hear someone's voice, you immediately visualize their appearance. But when you see someone, you rarely conjure an equally vivid auditory image of their voice. Vision dominates the associative connections.

Next, a more subtle point: "Sounds, noises, and above all smells sometimes overcome us with intoxicating power and give us a stream of inner images that temporarily 'disengage' us from the shackles of sensory presence."

Proust famously explored this phenomenon—how a scent can unleash a flood of memories. But notice what Klages observes: "If we then reflect on the experience, it always shows that the sound impression did not conjure a sound phantasm, nor did the scent impression conjure a scent phantasm, but each of them images of appearance."

The scent of madeleine cookies does not evoke olfactory memories primarily but visual memories—images of places, people, objects. Even when non-visual senses trigger memory, what emerges is predominantly visual.

Further evidence: "We are able to retain some significant sentences we heard in memory for years and to renew all the incidental circumstances of the conversation in detail, once the last memory of the speaker's voice has long faded."

You remember what was said and the visual scene of the conversation long after the actual sound of the voice has become irrecoverable.

Now comes the crucial test: "It is more difficult and crucial for our guiding principle that the attempt to 'imagine' the meaning of a word never succeeds without the help of appearance."

Try to think about the meaning of "sweet" without visualizing anything—no image of sugar, candy, tongue, or any visible object. "One will try completely in vain to recall the meaning of sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness if one denies every glance at the visual representation of both a tastable body and the palate and the moving tongue."

The same applies to sounds: "One no longer conjures up the shadow of a substitute phantasm for the actual sense of thunder, roaring, crashing, howling, noise with the reckless banishment of all images of spatial positions."

You cannot imagine thunder without visualizing lightning, storm clouds, or spatial scenes. The sound itself becomes thinkable only through visual mediation.

Finally, abstract concepts: "One chooses any general concept—virtue, diversity, mathematics, lie, sensual pleasure—and it will be confirmed that the attempt to sensualize invariably requires the conception of shapes."

Even the most abstract ideas require visual imagery for concrete thought. This is why earlier peoples "anthropomorphized" virtues and vices as gods, and why allegorical paintings and sculptures persist—we need visible shapes to grasp abstract meanings.

Klages now turns to language as evidence for vision's conceptual primacy.

"Our understanding of language is evidenced, which borrows names primarily from the world of appearance to denote both the most general objects of thought and the mental activities directed at them."

Consider the word "presentation" (German: Vorstellung). Originally it meant theater performance—bringing something before the eyes. Only later did it acquire the philosophical meaning of mental representation.

But notice the "peculiar fluctuation between 'bringing something to view' and 'meaning something.'" The same word refers both to making visible and to signifying conceptually. This conflation is not accidental—it reveals that conceptual meaning is inherently tied to visual presentation.

Klages notes the confusion this creates: "If it is sometimes the phenomenon of meaning, sometimes precisely the meaning of the phenomenon that is designated with one and the same name, then we understand why the 'representation,' once picked up by science, immediately also became a source of endless disputes."

The word slides between the sensory image and the conceptual content, making it "the worst problem child of psychology."

Next, consider "perception" (German: Wahrnehmung). "We do not hesitate and are undoubtedly right to call sounds, smells, taste impressions 'perceptual' contents—but there is no doubt that we would not speak of 'perception' if we were not seeing beings."

The term originally referred to visual taking-in. We extend it to other senses, but the visual root remains determinative. And just as with "presentation," the term "soon acquired the connotation of 'conviction'"—perceiving slides into believing.

Even stronger evidence: "Words like 'appearance,' 'sensory illusion,' 'phantasm,' language provides even stronger evidence of its overriding tendency to derive the broader concept of impression-giving simply from the narrower visible impressions."

The general category of sensory impression is named after the visual case.

Temporal language relies on spatial metaphors: "With the very common compound words 'period,' 'time stretch,' 'time span,' we perceive time as a perceivable line."

We cannot think time without spatializing it—and spatial thinking is inherently visual.

Even distance becomes spatial: "With the statement that we are 'still far away' from the goal, we once again replace all conceivable obstacles separating decision and accomplishment with spatially visible extension."

Finally, intellectual activity is described through visual metaphors: "'Clarity of mind,' 'clear head,' 'view,' 'insight,' 'intention,' 'point of view' borrow the state and process images of the world of appearances to denote the properties, successes, and activities of intelligence."

Language consistently privileges visual appearance as the model for conceptual thought. This is not arbitrary but reveals something about the structure of conceptuality itself.

Klages now discusses the work of Lazarus Geiger, a 19th-century linguist who recognized appearance's conceptual kinship but failed to explain it adequately.

Geiger observed: "An invisible gas is initially thought of under the image of a visible vapor, with the negation of its density only added in imagination."

We cannot think the invisible directly—we must first imagine it as visible, then mentally negate the visibility.

"We do not begin to think of warmth, sound, light as independent things until they also appear to us shaped, radiant, wave-forming."

Abstract entities become thinkable when given visible form.

"Even a spiritual being is only a refined corporeal form demanded by the intellect as invisible, but still hovering visibly before the imagination."

Angels and spirits are "invisible" yet imagined with visible shapes—wings, halos, luminous forms.

Klages credits Geiger for this insight: "An insight is never devalued by the fact that the development of thought based on it grew beyond it."

But Geiger made two errors. First, he "confused appearance and concept"—treating visual images as if they were identical with conceptual meanings rather than their necessary foundation.

Second, he "sought the concept-supporting faculty of appearance to be mainly caused by the particularly highly developed power of differentiation and essentially in the 'delicacy' of the eye."

In other words, Geiger thought vision supports conceptuality because the eye is more refined, more discriminating than other senses. It can distinguish more features, detect finer differences.

But Klages rejects this explanation: "One would literally remain stuck in a superficial understanding if one considered the undeniable dependence of word meaning development on appearance to be sufficiently explainable by any conceivable superiority of sight over the other senses."

The reason vision supports conceptuality is not its superior discriminative power. The reason lies deeper—in vision's unique relationship to time.

Klages now presents his positive explanation through analysis of the concept of "form."

"'Forma' means 'shape' and originally also refers to the device used to shape something, such as a vessel that can be filled with this or that 'contents.'"

A vessel has a fixed shape but variable contents. The same jug can hold water, wine, or milk. The form persists while contents change.

But why does form serve as the foundation for ideal meaning? "There is no doubt that the property of its color immediately falls away and that the conceptual kinship must rather be sought in its relative rigidity."

Not the vessel's color but its stability matters. And here is the key insight:

"The form—here initially of the vessel, but thus every form—relates to other features of sensory appearance like the permanent to the changing, the solid to the liquid, the stationary to the moving, the lasting to the fleeting, the eternal to the temporal."

Form possesses relative timelessness. While other features of sensory appearance change constantly—colors shift in different lights, sounds fade, smells dissipate—form remains relatively stable.

This is not absolute timelessness. Forms do change, decay, transform. But compared to color, sound, or smell, visual form endures. It persists through temporal flux.

Now the crucial reversal: "Not from the predominance of visual impressions served as basis for the logical sense of perception, but rather the opposite: perceptions gained predominance in human sensuality in tandem with the development of a thinking that could only utilize those features of appearances as a foundation for the timelessness of objects which possessed the character of being withdrawn from time."

Vision did not become dominant and then provide the foundation for thought. Rather, thought required timeless features, and therefore vision—which provides access to relatively timeless forms—became dominant.

"From the experienced archetype of reality, the spatial form became a symbol of significance, because and insofar as it was the counterpoint to its temporal flow."

Form serves conceptual meaning precisely because it stands opposed to flow. It provides stability within flux, permanence within change, timelessness within time.

Klages extends this to tangible resistance: "If ideological thinking indulges in a cult of 'eternal forms' due to confusion of the visibly static with the concept, then it is quite obviously the confusion of the conceptual with the tangibly static that has helped empirical thinking to its no less blind cult of 'eternal substance' since ancient times."

Both Platonism (eternal forms) and materialism (eternal substance) make the same error—confusing relative empirical timelessness with absolute conceptual timelessness.

"The tertium comparationis of form and firmness of substance is the relative timelessness of both: one is viewed in colorful, the other in tangible appearance."

Both visual form and tangible substance resist temporal dissolution more than other sensory features. Both provide foundations for conceptual thought. But neither is truly eternal—both possess only empirical, not absolute, timelessness.

Klages now identifies a second crucial feature of visual form: its freedom from specific location.

The contrast with touch is instructive: "Had a blind person determined the person of the bearer by touching a human form, and if the bearer had now changed location, the blind person would have to perform the tactile exploration again at another spot: tactile process and tactile form are location-bound."

To touch something, you must be at its location. If the object moves, you must move to touch it again. Touch is spatially specific.

"In contrast, someone who sees their own body reflected five times in a double mirror perceives the reflections and in them the unity of the object without changing locations: visual process and visual form are location-free."

You can see the same form in multiple places simultaneously—in mirrors, photographs, paintings. You do not need to be at the object's location to see its form.

"The physical form is truly where it is touched, whereas the image form without the body is found nowhere or everywhere."

Tactile form exists only at one specific location. Visual form can appear anywhere—or everywhere simultaneously.

"The location-specific optic nerve is sensitive to location-specific effects of object light—but no chemical substance in the world is shape-sensitive."

The eye responds to light patterns that carry information about distant forms. No chemical receptor responds to shape as such—only to molecular structures requiring direct contact.

The key point: "It is only in the visual impression that the omnipresence of the form is realized, and this now forms the living counterbalance of the bridge arch which spans over to the placelessness of objects."

Visual forms can appear anywhere, just as conceptual objects are nowhere specifically. The location-freedom of visual form mirrors the placelessness of thought.

"Just as the visual image of the thing and this alone in the empirical moment can be experienced and yet can even signify the never momentarily occurring movement of the thing, so is the thought object captured at the mathematical point of time and nonetheless able to hold countless features from the world of events."

Visual form, experienced in a moment, can represent motion and change. Similarly, conceptual thought, occurring in timeless acts, can encompass temporal processes. The structure is parallel.

Klages has demonstrated why only visual appearance can serve as the foundation for conceptual thought. The answer lies in two structural features of visual form: empirical timelessness and location-freedom.

Visual forms possess relative permanence within temporal flux. They endure while colors shift, sounds fade, and smells dissipate. This empirical timelessness makes them suitable foundations for concepts, which require stability and universality.

Visual forms also possess location-freedom. Unlike tactile forms bound to specific places, visual forms can appear anywhere simultaneously. This omnipresence mirrors the placelessness of conceptual objects.

Together, these features explain why "only an eye-being could become detached and therefore a thinking being."

Thinking requires access to timeless forms within temporal flow. Only vision provides this access. Therefore, consciousness and conceptuality could only develop in beings capable of visual perception.

The evidence converges from multiple directions: the dominance of visual imagery in memory and imagination, the prevalence of visual metaphors in language for conceptual activities, the necessary role of visible shapes in grasping abstract meanings.

"The visible form, prototype and model of form in general, means, represents, 'presents' in the form of an immediate presence the reality of events. It provides from the ephemeral its experiential presence and thus in the sensibly present the sensibly already elapsed."

This is the key formula. Visual form makes the temporal available to the timeless act of reflection. It provides "in the sensibly present the sensibly already elapsed"—it gives consciousness something stable to grasp from the flowing stream.

But this solution creates the problem it addresses. By providing timeless forms as foundations for thought, vision enables the development of spirit. And spirit, operating with timeless concepts, necessarily falsifies the temporal flow of life.

"Spirit and life could only clash in beings capable of perceiving the timeless form within temporal flow."

The capacity for vision makes thinking possible. But thinking, once established, turns against the flowing life that made it possible. This is the tragedy Klages has been documenting throughout his work.