The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
GA 4
3. The Human Individuality
[ 1 ] The main difficulty in the explanation of ideas is found by philosophers in the fact that we are not the external things themselves, and yet our ideas are supposed to have a form corresponding to the things. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that this difficulty does not exist at all. We are not the external things, but we belong with the external things to one and the same world. The section of the world that I perceive as my subject is permeated by the stream of general world events. For my perception, I am initially enclosed within the boundaries of my bodily skin. But what is inside this bodily skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole. So for a relationship to exist between my organism and the object outside me, it is not at all necessary for something of the object to slip into me or to make an impression on my spirit, like a signet ring in wax. The question: how do I get knowledge of the tree standing ten steps away from me, is completely wrong. It arises from the view that my bodily boundaries are absolute partitions through which the news of things passes into me. The forces at work within the skin of my body are the same as those outside. I am therefore really the things; not I, however, insofar as I am the subject of perception, but I, insofar as I am a part within the general world event. The perception of the tree lies with my I in the same whole. This general world event evokes the perception of the tree there to the same extent as it evokes the perception of my ego here. If I were not a world connoisseur but a world creator, then object and subject (perception and I) would arise in one act. For they are mutually dependent. As a knower of the world, I can only find what the two have in common as related sides of being through thinking, which relates the two to each other through concepts.
[ 2 ] The so-called physiological proofs for the subjectivity of our perceptions will be the most difficult to dismiss. When I exert pressure on the skin of my body, I perceive it as a sensation of pressure. I can perceive the same pressure through the eye as light, through the ear as sound. I perceive an electric shock through the eye as light, through the ear as sound, through the skin nerves as a shock, through the olfactory organ as the smell of phosphorus. What follows from this fact? Only this: I perceive an electric shock (or a pressure) and then a quality of light, or a sound or a certain smell and so on. If there were no eye, the perception of a mechanical shock in the environment would not be accompanied by the perception of a quality of light, without the presence of an organ of hearing there would be no perception of sound, and so on. By what right can one say that without organs of perception the whole process would not exist? Anyone who concludes from the fact that an electrical process in the eye produces light that what we perceive as light is therefore only a mechanical process of movement outside our organism forgets that it only passes from one perception to another and not at all to something outside perception. Just as well as one can say: the eye perceives a mechanical process of movement of its surroundings as light, one can just as well assert: a lawful change of an object is perceived by us as a process of movement. If I paint a horse twelve times on the circumference of a rotating disk, exactly in the shapes that its body assumes as it moves along, I can create the appearance of movement by rotating the disk. I need only look through an aperture in such a way that I see the successive positions of the horse in the corresponding intermediate times. I do not see twelve horse images, but the image of a horse rushing along.
[ 3 ] This physiological fact cannot shed any light on the relationship between perception and imagination. We have to find our way around in other ways.
[ 4 ] The moment a perception appears in my horizon of observation, thinking also operates through me. A link in my thought system, a certain intuition, a concept connects with the perception. When perception then disappears from my field of vision, what remains? My intuition with its relationship to the particular perception that has formed in the moment of perception. The vividness with which I can later visualize this relationship again depends on the way in which my mental and physical organism functions. The conception is nothing other than an intuition related to a certain perception, a concept that was once linked to a perception and which has retained its reference to this perception. My concept of a lion is not formed from my perceptions of lions. But my concept of a lion is formed by the perception. I can teach the concept of a lion to someone who has never seen a lion. I will not be able to teach him a vivid concept without his own perception.
[ 5 ] The conception is therefore an individualized concept, and now it is clear to us that the things of reality can be represented for us by concepts. The full reality of a thing arises for us at the moment of observation from the merging of concept and perception. The concept receives an individual form through a perception, a reference to this particular perception. In this individual form, which bears within itself the reference to the perception as a peculiarity, it lives on in us and forms the concept of the thing in question. If we encounter a second thing with which the same concept is connected, we recognize it with the first as belonging to the same species; if we encounter the same thing a second time, we find in our conceptual system not only a corresponding concept in general, but the individualized concept with its peculiar reference to the same object, and we recognize the object again.
[ 6 ] The concept therefore stands between perception and concept. It is the specific concept that points to perception.
[ 7 ] I may call the sum of what I can form ideas about my experience. The person who has a greater number of individualized concepts will have the richer experience. A person who lacks all intuition is not suitable for acquiring experience. He loses sight of the objects again because he lacks the concepts that he should relate to them. A person with a well-developed faculty of thought, but with poorly functioning perception as a result of coarse sensory instruments, will be equally unable to gain experience. He may acquire concepts in some way, but his intuitions lack a living reference to certain things. The thoughtless traveler and the scholar who lives in abstract conceptual systems are equally incapable of acquiring rich experience.
[ 8 ] Reality presents itself to us as perception and concept, and the subjective representation of this reality as imagination.
[ 9 ] If our personality merely expressed itself as cognizing, the sum of everything objective would be given in perception, concept and imagination.
[ 10 ] However, we are not content to relate perception to the concept with the help of thinking, but we also relate it to our particular subjectivity, to our individual ego. The expression of this individual reference is the feeling that lives itself out as pleasure or displeasure.
[ 11 ] Thinking and feeling correspond to the dual nature of our being, which we have already thought. Thinking is the element through which we participate in the general events of the cosmos; feeling is the element through which we can withdraw into the confines of our own being.
[ 12 ] Our thinking connects us with the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves and makes us an individual. If we were merely thinking and perceiving beings, our whole life would have to flow along in indifferent indifference. If we could only know ourselves as self, we would be completely indifferent to ourselves. It is only through self-knowledge that we feel a sense of self, through the perception of things that we feel pleasure and pain, that we live as individual beings whose existence is not exhausted by the conceptual relationship in which they stand to the rest of the world, but who still have a special value for themselves.
[ 13 ] One might be tempted to see in the emotional life an element that is more saturated with reality than the thinking observation of the world. To this it must be replied that the emotional life only has this richer meaning for my individual. For the world as a whole, my emotional life can only acquire a value if the feeling, as a perception of my self, enters into connection with a concept and in this roundabout way integrates itself into the cosmos.
[ 14 ] Our life is a continual oscillation back and forth between the co-living of general world events and our individual being. The further we ascend into the general nature of thought, where the individual ultimately interests us only as an example, as a specimen of the concept, the more we lose the character of the particular being, the very specific individual personality. The further we descend into the depths of our own life and allow our feelings to resonate with the experiences of the outside world, the more we separate ourselves from the universal being. A true individuality will be the one who reaches furthest up with his feelings into the region of the ideal. There are people in whom even the most general ideas that take root in their minds still carry that special coloring that unmistakably shows them to be related to their bearer. Others exist whose concepts come to us without any trace of peculiarity, as if they had not sprung from a person who has flesh and blood.
[ 15 ] Conception already gives our conceptual life an individual character. Everyone has their own position from which they view the world. His concepts are connected to his perceptions. He will think the general concepts in his own particular way. This particular determination is a result of our position in the world, of the sphere of perception adjoining our place in life.
[ 16 ] This determinacy is opposed by another determinacy that depends on our particular organization. Our organization is a special, fully determined individuality. We each associate particular feelings with our perceptions, in varying degrees of strength. This is the individuality of our own personality. It remains as a residue when we have taken into account all the determinants of the scene of life.
[ 17 ] A completely thoughtless emotional life would gradually lose all connection with the world. The knowledge of things will go hand in hand with the formation and development of the emotional life in a person who is oriented towards totality.
[ 18 ] The feeling is the means by which the concepts initially gain concrete life.