Knowledge
of Freedom
CHAPTER SIX
Human
Individuality
IN
explaining mental pictures, philosophers have found the
chief difficulty in the fact that we ourselves are not the outer
things, and yet our mental pictures must have a form
corresponding to the things. But on closer inspection it turns
out that this difficulty does not really exist. We certainly
are not the external things, but we belong together with them
to one and the same world. That section of the world which I
perceive to be myself as subject is permeated by the stream of
the universal cosmic process. To my perception I am, in the
first instance, confined within the limits bounded by my
skin. But all that is contained within this skin belongs to the
cosmos as a whole. Hence, for a relation to subsist between
my organism and an object external to me, it is by no means
necessary that something of the object should slip into me,
or make an impression on my mind, like a signet ring on
wax. The question: “How do I get information about that
tree ten feet away from me?” is utterly misleading. It springs
from the view that the boundaries of my body are absolute
barriers, through which information about things filters into
me. The forces which are at work inside my body are the
same as those which exist outside. Therefore I really am the
things; not, however, “I” in so far as I am a percept of
myself as subject, but “I” in so far as I am a part of the
universal world process. The percept of the tree belongs to
the same whole as my I. This universal world process
produces equally the percept of the tree out there and the
percept of my I in here. Were I not a world knower, but
world creator, object and subject (percept and I) would
originate in one act. For each implies the other. In so far as
these are entities that belong together, I can as world
knower discover the common element in both only through
thinking, which relates one to the other by means of concepts.
The most difficult to drive from the field are the so-called
physiological proofs of the subjectivity of our percepts. When
I exert pressure on my skin I perceive it as a pressure
sensation. This same pressure can be sensed as light by the
eye, as sound by the ear. An electric shock is perceived by the
eye as light, by the ear as noise, by the nerves of the skin as
impact, and by the nose as a phosphoric smell. What follows
from these facts? Only this: I perceive an electric shock (or a
pressure, as the case may be) followed by an impression of
light, or sound, or perhaps a certain smell, and so on. If there
were no eye present, then no perception of light would
accompany the perception of the mechanical disturbance in
my environment; without the presence of the ear, no
perception of sound, and so on. But what right have we to
say that in the absence of sense organs the whole process
would not exist at all? Those who, from the fact that an
electrical process calls forth light in the eye, conclude that
what we sense as light is only a mechanical process of
motion when outside our organism, forget that they are only
passing from one percept to another, and not at all to something
lying beyond percepts. Just as we can say that the eye
perceives a mechanical process of motion in its surroundings
as light, so we could equally well say that a regular and
systematic change in an object is perceived by us as a process
of motion. If I draw twelve pictures of a horse on the
circumference of a rotating disc, reproducing exactly the
attitudes which the horse's body successively assumes when
galloping, I can produce the illusion of movement by rotating
the disc. I need only look through an opening in such a way
that, in the proper intervals, I see the successive positions of
the horse. I do not see twelve separate pictures of a horse
but the picture of a single galloping horse.
The physiological fact mentioned above cannot therefore
throw any light on the relation of percept to mental picture.
We must go about it rather differently.
The moment a percept appears in my field of observation,
thinking also becomes active through me. An element of my
thought system, a definite intuition, a concept, connects
itself with the percept. Then, when the percept disappears
from my field of vision, what remains? My intuition, with the
reference to the particular percept which it acquired in the
moment of perceiving. The degree of vividness with which
I can subsequently recall this reference depends on the
manner in which my mental and bodily organism is working.
A mental picture is nothing but an intuition related to a
particular percept; it is a concept that was once connected
with a certain percept, and which retains the reference to
this percept. My concept of a lion is not formed out of my
percepts of lions; but my mental picture of a lion is very
definitely formed according to a percept. I can convey the
concept of a lion to someone who has never seen a lion.
I cannot convey to him a vivid mental picture without the
help of his own perception.
Thus the mental picture is an individualized concept.
And now we can see how real objects can be represented to us by
mental pictures. The full reality of a thing is given to us in
the moment of observation through the fitting together of
concept and percept. By means of a percept, the concept
acquires an individualized form, a relation to this particular
percept. In this individualized form, which carries the
reference to the percept as a characteristic feature, the concept
lives on in us and constitutes the mental picture of the
thing in question. If we come across a second thing with which
the same concept connects itself, we recognize the second as
belonging to the same kind as the first; if we come across the
same thing a second time, we find in our conceptual system,
not merely a corresponding concept, but the individualized
concept with its characteristic relation to the same object,
and thus we recognize the object again.
Thus the mental picture stands between percept and concept.
It is the particularized concept which points to the
percept.
The sum of those things about which I can form mental
pictures may be called my total experience. The man who
has the greater number of individualized concepts will be the
man of richer experience. A man who lacks all power of
intuition is not capable of acquiring experience. He loses the
objects again when they disappear from his field of vision,
because he lacks the concepts which he should bring into
relation with them. A man whose faculty of thinking is well
developed, but whose perception functions badly owing to
his clumsy sense organs, will just as little be able to gather
experience. He can, it is true, acquire concepts by one means
or another; but his intuitions lack the vivid reference to
definite things. The unthinking traveler and the scholar
living in abstract conceptual systems are alike incapable of
acquiring a rich sum of experience.
Reality shows itself to us as percept and concept; the
subjective representative of this reality shows itself to us
as mental picture.
If our personality expressed itself only in cognition, the
totality of all that is objective would be given in percept,
concept and mental picture.
However, we are not satisfied merely to refer the percept,
by means of thinking, to the concept, but we relate them also
to our particular subjectivity, our individual Ego. The
expression of this individual relationship is feeling, which
manifests itself as pleasure or displeasure.
Thinking and feeling correspond to the two-fold nature of
our being to which reference has already been made. Thinking
is the element through which we take part in the universal
cosmic process; feeling is that through which we can
withdraw ourselves into the narrow confines of our own
being.
Our thinking links us to the world; our feeling leads us
back into ourselves and thus makes us individuals. Were we
merely thinking and perceiving beings, our whole life would
flow along in monotonous indifference. Were we able merely
to know ourselves as selves, we should be totally indifferent to
ourselves. It is only because we experience self-feeling with
self-knowledge, and pleasure and pain with the perception of
objects, that we live as individual beings whose existence is
not limited to the conceptual relations between us and the
rest of the world, but who have besides this a special value
for ourselves.
One might be tempted to see in the life of feeling an
element that is more richly saturated with reality than is the
contemplation of the world through thinking. But the reply
to this is that the life of feeling, after all, has this richer
meaning only for my individual self. For the universe as a
whole my life of feeling can have value only if, as a percept of
my self, the feeling enters into connection with a concept and
in this roundabout way links itself to the cosmos.
Our life is a continual oscillation between living with the
universal world process and being our own individual selves.
The farther we ascend into the universal nature of thinking
where in the end what is individual interests us only as an
example or specimen of the concept, the more the character
of the separate being, of the quite definite single personality,
becomes lost in us. The farther we descend into the depths
of our own life and allow our feelings to resound with our
experiences of the outer world, the more we cut ourselves off
from universal being. A true individuality will be the one who
reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into
the region of the ideal. There are men in whom even the
most general ideas that enter their heads still bear that
peculiar personal tinge which shows unmistakably the
connection with their author. There are others whose
concepts come before us without the least trace of individual
character as if they had not been produced by a man of
flesh and blood at all.
Making mental pictures gives our conceptual life at once
an individual stamp. Each one of us has his own particular
place from which he surveys the world. His concepts link
themselves to his percepts. He thinks the general concepts in
his own special way. This special determination results for
each of us from the place where we stand in the world, from
the range of percepts peculiar to our place in life.
Distinct from this determination is another which depends
on our particular organization. Our organization is indeed a
special, fully determined entity. Each of us combines
special feelings, and these in the most varying degrees of
intensity, with his percepts. This is just the individual
element in the personality of each one of us. It is what
remains over when we have allowed fully for all the determining
factors in our surroundings.
A life of feeling, wholly devoid of thinking, would gradually
lose all connection with the world. But man is meant to
be a whole, and for him knowledge of things will go hand in
hand with the development and education of the life of
feeling.
Feeling is the means whereby, in the first instance,
concepts gain concrete life.
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