11. Thinking and Perception
Science permeates perceived reality with the concepts grasped and
worked through by our thinking. Through what our spirit, by its
activity, has raised out of the darkness of mere potentiality into the
light of reality, science complements and deepens what has been taken
up passively. This presupposes that perception needs to be
complemented by the spirit, that it is not at all something
definitive, ultimate, complete.
The fundamental error of modern science is that it regards sense
perceptions as something already complete and finished. It therefore
sets itself the task of simply photographing this existence complete
in itself. To be sure, only positivism, which simply rejects any
possibility of going beyond perception, is consistent in this regard.
Still, one sees in nearly all sciences today the striving to regard
this as the correct standpoint. In the true sense of the word this
requirement would be satisfied only by a science that simply
enumerates and describes things as they exist side by side in space,
and events as they succeed each other in time. The old style of
natural history still comes closest to meeting this requirement.
Modern natural science really demands the same thing, setting up a
complete theory of experience in order then to violate it right away
when taking the first step in real science.
We would have to renounce our thinking entirely if we wanted to keep
to pure experience. One disparages thinking if one takes away from it
the possibility of perceiving in itself entities inaccessible to the
senses. In addition to sense qualities there must be yet another
factor within reality that is grasped by thinking. Thinking is an
organ of the human being that is called upon to observe something
higher than what the senses offer. The side of reality accessible to
thinking is one about which a mere sense being would never experience
anything. Thinking is not there to rehash the sense-perceptible but
rather to penetrate what is hidden to the senses. Sense perception
provides only one side of reality. The other side is a thinking
apprehension of the world. Now thinking confronts us at first as
something altogether foreign to perception. The perception forces
itself in upon us from outside; thinking works itself up out of our
inner being. The content of this thinking appears to us as an organism
inwardly complete in itself; everything is in strictest
interconnection. The individual parts of the thought-system determine
each other; every single concept ultimately has its roots in the
wholeness of our edifice of thoughts.
At first glance it seems as though the inner consistency of thinking,
its self-sufficiency, would make any transition to perception
impossible. If the statements of thinking were such that one could
fulfill them in only one way, then thinking would really be isolated
in itself; we would not be able to escape from it. But this is not the
case. The statements of thinking are such that they can be fulfilled
in manifold ways. It is just that the element causing this
manifoldness cannot itself then be sought within thinking. If we take
one of the statements made by thought, namely that the earth attracts
all bodies, we notice at once that the thought leaves open the
possibility of being fulfilled in the most varied ways. But these are
variations that can no longer be reached by thinking. This is the
place for another element. This element is sense perception.
Perception affords a kind of specialization of the statements made by
thoughts, a possibility left open by these statements themselves.
It is in this specialization that the world confronts us when we
merely make use of experience. Psychologically that element comes
first which in point of fact is derivative.
In all cognitive treatment of reality the process is as follows. We
approach the concrete perception. It stands before us as a riddle.
Within us the urge makes itself felt to investigate the actual what,
the essential being, of the perception, which this perception itself
does not express. This urge is nothing else than a concept working its
way up out of the darkness of our consciousness. We then hold fast to
this concept while sense perception goes along parallel with this
thought-process. The mute perception suddenly speaks a language
comprehensible to us; we recognize that the concept we have grasped is
what we sought as the essential being of the perception.
What has taken place here is a judgment (Urteil). It is
different from the form of judgment that joins two concepts without
taking perception into account at all. When I say that inner freedom
is the self-determination of a being, from out of itself, I have also
made a judgment. The parts of this judgment are concepts, which have
not been given to me in perception. The inner unity of our thinking,
which we dealt with in the previous chapter, rests upon judgments such
as these.
The judgment under consideration here has a perception as its subject
and a concept as its predicate. The particular animal in front of me
is a dog. In this kind of judgment, a perception is inserted into my
thought-system at a particular place. Let us call such a judgment a
perception-judgment.
Through a perception-judgment, one recognizes that a particular
sense-perceptible object, in accordance with its being, coincides with
a particular concept.
If we therefore wish to grasp what we perceive, the perception must be
prefigured in us as a definite concept. We would go right by an object
for which this is not the case without its being comprehensible to us.
The best proof that this is so is provided by the fact that people who
lead a richer spiritual life also penetrate more deeply into the world
of experience than do others for whom this is not the case. Much that
passes over the latter kind of person without leaving a trace makes a
deep impression upon the former. (“Were not the eye of sun-like
nature, the sun it never could behold.” Goethe) Yes, someone will
say, but don't we meet infinitely many things in life about which
previously we had not had the slightest concept, and do we not then,
right on the spot, at once form concepts of them? Certainly. But is
the sum total of all possible concepts identical with the sum total of
those I have formed in my life up to now? Is my system of concepts not
capable of development? Can I not, in the face of a reality that is
incomprehensible to me, at once bring my thinking into action so that
in fact it also develops, right on the spot, the concept I need to
hold up to an object? The only ability useful to me is one that allows
a definite concept to emerge from the thought-world's supply. The
point is not that a particular thought has already become conscious
for me in the course of my life, but rather that this thought allows
itself to be drawn from the world of thoughts accessible to me. It is
indeed of no consequence to its content where and when I grasp it. In
fact, I draw all the characterizations of thoughts out of the world of
thoughts. Nothing whatsoever in fact, flows into this content from the
sense object. I only recognize again, within the sense object, the
thought I drew up from within my inner being. This object does in fact
move me at a particular moment to bring forth precisely this
thought-content out of the unity of all possible thoughts, but it does
not in any way provide me with the building stones for these thoughts.
These I must draw out of myself.
Only when we allow our thinking to work does reality first acquire
true characterization. Reality, which before was mute, now speaks a
clear language.
Our thinking is the translator that interprets for us the gestures of
experience.
We are so used to seeing the world of concepts as empty and without
content, and so used to contrasting perception with it as something
full of content and altogether definite, that it will be difficult to
establish for the world of concepts the position it deserves in the
true scheme of things. We miss the fact entirely that mere looking is
the emptiest thing imaginable, and that only from thinking does it
first receive any content at all. The only thing true about the above
view is that looking does hold the ever-fluid thought in one
particular form, without our having to work along actively with this
holding. The fact that a person with a rich soul life sees a thousand
things that are a blank to someone spiritually poor proves, clear as
day, that the content of reality is only the mirror-image of the
content of our spirit and that we receive only the empty form from
outside. We must, to be sure, have the strength in us to recognize
ourselves as the begetters (Erzeuger) of this content;
otherwise we see only the mirror image and never our spirit, that is
mirrored. Even a person who sees himself in a real mirror must in fact
know himself as a personality in order to know himself again in this
image.
All sense perception dissolves ultimately, as far as its essential
being is concerned, into ideal content. Only then does it appear to us
as transparent and clear. The sciences for the most part have not even
been touched by any awareness of this truth. One considers the
characterizations given by thought to be attributes of objects, like
color, odor, etc. One therefore believes the following
characterization to be a feature of all bodies: that they remain in
the state of motion or rest in which they find themselves until an
external influence alters this state. It is in this form that the law
of inertia figures in physics. But the true state of affairs is
completely different. The thought, “body,” exists in my
system of concepts in many modifications. One of these is the thought
of a thing which, out of itself, can bring itself to rest or into
motion; another is the concept of a body that alters its state only as
a result of an external influence. I designate the latter kind as
inorganic. If, then, a particular body confronts me that reflects back
to me in the perception this second conceptual characterization, then
I designate it as inorganic and connect with it all the
characterizations that follow from the concept of an inorganic body.
The conviction should permeate all the sciences that their content is
purely thought-content and that they stand in no other connection to
perception than that they see, in the object of perception, a
particular form of the concept.
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