The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul

Chapter 30

The Nature of Sensory Space

The chapter's central revelation can be stated precisely: "The real now and the perceptual space are one and the same."

This is not a metaphor but an identity claim. The ever-present now that consciousness grasps is identical with sensory space. Time and space are not two separate forms of intuition, as Kant claimed, but fundamentally related structures. More precisely, objective time is merely one aspect of objective space.

Klages will demonstrate that sensory space has the reality form of a mirror image. It is not given to us by original viewing but by reflection of what has already been viewed. This vital mirroring exchanges the flowing archetype—reality space—for the standing impression-content—sensory space.

This solves the deepest mystery we have been pursuing: How can the timeless act of consciousness attach itself to the temporal flow of life? The answer: Through sensory space, which is itself the changeless present—the standing platform that allows reflection to occur.

The implications are profound. If sensory space is the real now, then consciousness finds its foothold not in some abstract eternal realm but in the empirical structure of perceptual experience itself. The clash between spirit and life occurs not between two separate domains but within the structure of experience itself.

Klages begins by distinguishing three types of space that must not be confused.

First, reality space—what Klages has previously called "flowing space." This is the space of original experience, the archetype, the continuously transforming spatial quality of lived reality. It is never the same from one moment to the next. It flows, changes, transforms without pause.

Second, object space—the space of conceptual thought, the geometrical space of physics, the abstract container conceived as permanent and unchanging. This is the space we measure and map, the space that provides the framework for scientific description.

Third, and most important for this chapter, sensory space—also called impression space or observation space. This is the space we actually perceive, the experiential space of visual appearance.

"As a space to be experienced, it belongs to reality space." We actually encounter it; it is not merely a conceptual construction. Animals share it with us. A dog perceives sensory space; it navigates visually through an experiential spatial field.

But—and this is crucial—"we now wish to prove that it is not given to us by original viewing but by reflection of what has already been viewed."

This is the chapter's main claim. Sensory space does not present flowing reality directly. Rather, it presents a reflection of that reality—a standing image that has been extracted from the flow through a process of vital mirroring.

Klages introduces the analogy that will structure his analysis: "The sensory space would have the reality form of a mirror image."

What does this mean? Consider an actual mirror. When you look into a mirror, you see a space that appears real yet is fundamentally different from the space you occupy. The mirror space has depth, contains objects, seems tangible—yet it exists nowhere. It is an appearance without corporeal substance.

"We remind ourselves that the mirror image cannot fundamentally show its illusory nature. Who hasn't at some point been on the verge of running into an insufficiently lit mirror because they momentarily confused the mirrored space with the object space?"

The mirror image presents itself as real space. Only subsequent experience—walking toward it and encountering the physical mirror surface—reveals its character as reflection.

Now comes a key observation: "Within the world of appearances, the mirror image would stand on a level with the perception object itself. It can again be mirrored, its mirror image again, and so potentially into infinity."

You can mirror a mirror. The reflection of a reflection is still a perfectly valid reflection. This suggests that "the mirrorability of mirror images points back to the substantial illusory nature of the impression contents themselves."

If we can mirror what is already a mirror image, then perhaps what we take to be direct perception is itself already a mirror image—a reflection of something more original.

"The required initial link of the series—the primal original reality or simply the 'archetype'—lies on this side of the world of appearances."

The archetype is flowing reality space. Sensory space is its reflection. And object space is a further abstraction from sensory space.

But Klages emphasizes: "The mirroring process by which the archetype would be exchanged for the visual impression-content would differ significantly from the mirroring process of physical parlance. We must distinguish between the optical and the vital mirroring."

Physical mirroring involves light rays reflecting off surfaces. Vital mirroring is the process by which flowing experience becomes standing impression. We will explore this distinction further.

Klages now analyzes the fundamental difference between reality space and sensory space through their temporal characteristics.

Reality space, as we have established, is "flowing space"—constantly changing, never the same from moment to moment. "Due to its boundless transience, it is always already past and never the same image at any moment."

Reality space has no present. By the time you try to grasp it, it has already flowed into the past. Its essence is continuous transformation.

"Due to continuity of connection, the quality of the respective image phase would also be determined by all that have already passed."

Each moment of flowing space carries the traces of all previous moments. Nothing is isolated; everything interpenetrates in continuous process.

Now consider sensory space: "In contrast, the space of perception is never experienced as past, and every visual change is related to bodies and substances and not to itself."

When you look around a room, the space itself does not appear to flow or change. Objects within the space may move—a person walks, a curtain sways—but these movements are understood as changes in objects, not as changes in space itself.

"A space not present at the moment can indeed be 'imagined' but not perceived because, as soon as it happened, it would immediately appear as present."

You cannot perceive past or future space. Whatever space you perceive is always experienced as present. Memory provides images of past spaces, but these are imaginative reconstructions, not perceptions.

This leads to the key insight: "Both presentness and immutability are inextricably linked."

Sensory space is experienced as changeless because it is experienced as always present. The two characteristics are inseparable.

Klages continues: "If we carefully examine the counterpart of our sensibility, we find, according to the flowing nature of all experience, a never truly interrupted change of qualities also in our impressions—but not of the co-experienced space of appearance."

Colors shift, sounds rise and fall, temperatures vary, smells come and go. "The qualities are in sometimes rapid, sometimes extremely slow change—qualities of something touched, tasted, smelled, heard, seen. However, the space of their appearance does not flow with it."

This is the critical distinction. The sensory contents change constantly. But the spatial framework within which they appear remains unchanging.

Consider a specific example: "The property of smoothness is something spatial, such that its externality can be distinguished from its quality but not separated without also negating it."

Smoothness has both a qualitative aspect (how it feels or looks) and a spatial aspect (its extension, its location). You can feel smoothness through touch or see it through vision. "The specific content of felt smoothness is entirely incomparable to that of seen smoothness."

The tactile quality differs completely from the visual quality. Yet both are experienced as spatial. What allows us to recognize that felt smoothness and seen smoothness involve the same spatial structure?

Only if "the sensory space must have been experienced for it to be understandable that it is perceived."

The spatial framework is not constructed from sensory qualities but is the standing platform within which those qualities appear. Different sensory modalities access the same spatial structure because that structure exists independently of any particular sensory content.

Klages now makes his most important claim: sensory space is the real now we have been seeking throughout this investigation.

He begins by noting that sensory space can appear to vary in size: "The sensory space may indeed appear to us sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, and this happens not only due to differences in visibility, weather influences, and lighting colors, but also due to peculiarities of our mental constitution."

In fog, space seems compressed. In clear mountain air, space seems vast. Different psychological states can make the same room feel spacious or cramped.

But these variations do not affect the fundamental structure: "Yet that which remains after separating all peculiarities from the current impression of the world, through urgent spatiality, never participates in any of those transformations that can be vividly played out in lines, colors, shapes, temperatures, tangibilities, tastes, smells."

The spatial framework itself remains constant even when particular spatial impressions vary.

Klages formulates this as a principle: "Every quality can be steadily increased or decreased: bright—brighter, dark—darker, loud—louder, quiet—quieter, smooth—smoother, rough—rougher. Whereas to the concept of separation, without whose involvement the qualities would not appear, the concept of strength does not apply."

Qualities admit of degrees. You can have more or less brightness, loudness, smoothness. But separation—the fundamental spatial property of being-outside-one-another—does not admit of degrees. Things are either separated or not. Space does not become "more spatial."

A thought experiment: "If someone stands at the window and sees a car driving past on a road leading away from the house, moving further and further away, they feel an internal compulsion to understand the increase in the intervening space from the movement of the car and not from a spatial event."

We say the car moves away through space. We do not say space itself expands, pushing the car farther from us.

"It would be conceivable that we might judge: not 'the distance increases because the car is moving away,' but 'the car is moving away because the depth extension of the space is increasing.' If that never happened and does not happen, then the experience of spatial appearance must have a characteristic that allows only one of the two equally possible judgments."

Logically, both interpretations are possible. But we always choose the first. This reveals that space itself is experienced as unchanging while objects move through it.

Klages cites Goethe's verse: "Already all nearness is distant." He asks what we understand by this. "If we reflect on the discursive content, we would have to ascertain that it expresses that the nearby seems to have become something distant, and not that a spatial dimension has expanded."

Objects become distant. Space itself does not change.

The conclusion: "Thus, the sensory space is something never past and passing, but changelessly present. It coincides with the real now that we have repeatedly asked for in vain: the real now and the perceptual space are one and the same, although judged from two essentially different perspectives."

This is the breakthrough. The real now—the present moment that consciousness grasps—is not a temporal point but sensory space itself.

"The real now is not seen but observed, and indeed in the only possible form of the ever-present sensory space—thus revealing to us the meaning of the linguistic equation between present and presence."

The German language reveals this identity through its words. "Present" (Gegenwart) literally means "against-wait" or "counter-waiting," but it shares a root with "presence" (Anwesenheit)—being present in space.

Having established that sensory space is the real now, Klages now makes an even more startling claim: objective time is merely one aspect of objective space.

"Just as from the constancy of space the phenomenon of process emerges, so from the ever-present the past separates, and thus from space itself the sequence of points in time."

Movement and change become recognizable only against the background of unchanging space. Similarly, the past becomes distinguishable only in relation to the ever-present now.

This generates "the schema of a line as the extension of the ever-present space through all moments that have ever been."

The timeline—the conception of time as a linear sequence—arises from spatializing the succession of presents. Each present is a "now," and the series of nows creates the illusion of a temporal dimension running alongside space.

"With that, we have made the leap from the space of perception to the space of things and determine—probably to the reader's amazement—that objective time is merely one side of objective space."

Objective time—the abstract, measurable, homogeneous time of physics and mathematics—is not a separate dimension. It is a property of objective space.

"Dominated by the thought of space's constancy, time becomes spatialized time, more precisely into the imperishability of the spatial object."

Objects are conceived as enduring through time precisely because we extend the constancy of space into temporal permanence. The object at time t1 is "the same" as the object at time t2 because we project spatial identity across temporal succession.

Klages asks why this obvious fact "was overlooked for millennia which we daily express in words, whenever we speak of time spans, time intervals, length or brevity of time, of time periods and durations."

Our language spatializes time constantly. We measure time by spatial metaphors—spans, intervals, lengths, periods. This is not accidental but reveals time's derivative nature.

"With regard to two arbitrary moments in the past, we can always only determine which seems further from us, which closer, both thus seen as separated by nothing but a distance."

Past moments are conceived spatially—as near or far, separated by measurable intervals. "Then the series of all their extensions as such—and thus just extension."

Klages provides a schema:

Each step represents a further abstraction. The timeline is ultimately "nothing more than the non-visualizable depth extension of space or its ever-enduring always—essentially an expanded present."

Time is spatialized presence extended into an imaginary fourth dimension.

Klages now situates his analysis within the history of philosophy, arguing that the ancient Greeks understood space better than modern thinkers.

"It is the sensory space that helped visually underpin all ordering thoughts, and to the fixed positions and forms it first made possible, those primitive judgments are tied according to which humans first recognize the specific tree, the specific house, the mountain, the river, the landscape."

Spatial constancy provides the foundation for conceptual thought. We can think "the same tree" across different moments only because spatial position remains stable.

An observation about early cosmological thinking: "It may be difficult to decide whether Heraclitus meant it literally when he said the sun is new every day, but it is certainly no coincidence that he did not say the earth is new every day."

The earth, as the foundation of sensory space, is experienced as constant. The sun, moving across the sky, is experienced as changing.

Klages notes that "those who deal with symbolic thinking of early times will find the double equation established in the primal layer of many peoples: immobility = space = earth (= woman); mobility = time = sky (= man)."

These symbolic equations reveal intuitive understanding of the relationship between space and constancy, time and change.

Now comes the comparison: "Parmenides, who first forged the concept of being from the omnipresence of space, has the scarcely overestimable advantage over Kant that he, in conscious opposition to Heraclitus's Panta Rhei, resolutely displaces time into the ever-present Now."

Parmenides understood that being is essentially spatial and present. His description of being can be read as a description of space:

"Being stands before me without gaps. Never has it become, so can it never perish; It is whole, unique in form and without movement and end. It never was nor will it ever be, only presence is it."

Klages suggests: "One could replace 'Being' or 'Entity' with 'Space' without semantic shift."

Kant, by contrast, treated space and time as two equally fundamental forms of intuition. "Hold beside these pronouncements Kant's cited sentences, we must confess to our shame that in the course of about 2300 years, European philosophy was unable to advance the problem of space by a single step."

Parmenides grasped the primacy of space over time. Kant obscured this insight by treating them as parallel structures.

Klages now acknowledges the modern thinker who recovered the Parmenidean insight: Menyhért Palågyi.

In his "New Theory of Space and Time," PalĂĄgyi formulated two decisive sentences:

"The moment is the space. The space point is the time stream."

The first sentence expresses "what fits into the language of highest generalization of that perceptual fact whose most immediate expression would be: the experiential present is the sensory space."

This is exactly Klages' own position. The present moment and sensory space are identical.

PalĂĄgyi drew the necessary conclusion: "If the moment is the space, then the space must become different if the moment becomes different."

This led him to develop the concept of "flowing space"—the idea that space itself is in constant flux, renewing itself from moment to moment.

"With regard to the apparently 'standing space' presented to us solely perceptually, the 'axiom of space conservation' applies, according to which the real space renews itself incessantly and congruently with itself."

Reality space flows continuously, but each moment presents a congruent sensory space. The flow is hidden by the constancy of the perceptual form.

"Seen from the time stream, the continually successive present spaces become 'momentary cross-sections' of events."

Each moment of sensory space is a cross-section through the flowing reality space—a snapshot that appears unchanging but represents a single phase in continuous transformation.

This is precisely Klages' position: sensory space is the vital reflection of flowing reality space, presenting as changeless what is actually in constant flux.

Klages has revealed that sensory space is the real now—the changeless present that provides consciousness its foothold in temporal experience. This solves the fundamental problem of how timeless acts of reflection can attach themselves to flowing life.

Sensory space has the reality form of a mirror image. It is not given by original viewing but by reflection of what has already been viewed. This vital mirroring exchanges the flowing archetype (reality space) for the standing impression-content (sensory space).

The key discoveries can be stated as identities:

Time is not a separate dimension but derives from the spatialization of successive present moments. The timeline is essentially an expanded present—the depth extension of sensory space projected into an imaginary dimension.

This explains why only eye-beings could become thinking beings. Vision provides access to sensory space, and sensory space is the standing platform that makes conceptual thought possible. Without the changeless present of sensory space, consciousness would have no point of entry into the temporal flow.

But this also reveals the tragic structure at the heart of existence. Sensory space makes consciousness possible by providing timeless form within temporal flow. But consciousness, once established, treats this standing platform as ultimate reality and denies the flowing archetype from which it derives.

The mirror image presents itself as the thing itself. Sensory space, which is a reflection of flowing reality, appears to consciousness as primary and self-sufficient. This is the fundamental illusion that allows spirit to set itself against life.