Thought as a Sense
In Akróasis, p. 105 ff., I wrote the following:
“Thought is a sense, like all our other senses. Thought has its
physiological basis in the brain, as sight does in the eye, hearing in
the ear. So there is a sense of thought, just as there is a sense of
sight, hearing, touch, etc.
“It has been a fundamental error of all philosophy since Socrates to believe that a philosophia (= love of wisdom) is possible only
by means of thought and its logical forms. This immediately appears to
be a paradox; for how else should philosophizing take place than with
reason? But has not philosophy, in the highest meaning of the word, the
highest thing as the goal of its knowledge: the spirit? Let us consider
the following. Every sense, along with its being-domain, has a
value-domain, e.g. thought has reason, sight has the visual arts, the
ear has music. It is sheer European arrogance to accord access to the
spiritual only to reason, the value-domain of thought. Beethoven
rightly said: 'Music is a higher wisdom than all philosophy'; and who
would deny that our other senses would likewise lead to the portals of
the spiritual, to 'wisdom,' if only their value-domains were truly
experienced?
“Our ear, our eye, our sense of touch,
'philosophize' just as much as our thought. To restrict the concept of
philosophizing to logical thought alone lands us with modern factual
philosophy precisely where it has landed itself: facing the
'nothingness' of existentialism, with its cerebral acrobatics performed
by its pompous minions.
“Philosophy, as the love of wisdom in its broadest sense, can thus be
obtained from the most varied human utterances and activities, and the
'spiritual' as a final stage can be reached in most manifold ways, but
certainly not only through our thought and its logical forms. This
spiritual object is no longer subject to space, time, and causality; it
matters not at all how and by what way it is reached, whether static or
dynamic, cosmological or biological, artistic or scientific, for it
exists outside of all these things; indeed, it exists outside
consciousness itself. This spiritual thing is a pure meditative
condition of our psyche, an immersion in the silence of the deity.
“By means of our sense organs-brain, eye, ear, sense of touch, etc.-we
receive impressions that all initially impress us materially. All these
impressions are objectively registered, ordered, and categorized
according to the structure of the individual sense organs. Here a
psychic capability has already entered in, because all impressions
would remain chaotic were it not for something in our psyche that
raises them to consciousness and forms them.
“But this 'something' lies in the prototypes of our psyche and not in
the logical forms of our consciousness! In harmonics, we call the
synthesis of these perceptions the human domain of being. If the
various domains of being-those of thinking, sight, hearing, touch,
etc.-are activated from inside, i.e. “kindled” from a point in our
psyche which we feel as the deepest, the best in ourselves and through
which we suddenly experience the relevant being-domain in its own
primal sound, primal light, primal tone, then we have reached the
value-domain; we move from logical laws into the norms of reason, from
thought into poetry, from hearing sounds into the world of music, from
everyday seeing into the world of the visual arts. And if we have the
strength and the inner disposition to extend this activity, this
psychic kindling, this elevated experience of the world into a
condition of repose, of meditation, of 'observing' in Goethe's sense,
then we have achieved what akróasis means by 'Ge-Hören' [gehören = “belong”], and what we may designate as spirit and the spiritual.”
I wrote this passage in 1946. The claim that thought is a sense, and
that there is a sense of thought just as there is a sense of hearing,
sight, and touch, mostly caused irritation and head shaking. I should
have added that this classification of thought is in no way unique to
harmonics, and has been postulated by others as well.
Baader
“The senses,” writes Franz Baader,
“are still a closed secret to today's philosophy. It is well known that
the spirit cannot be separated from the senses, but it disparages them
overmuch thereby.” On Feb. 17th,
1829, Eckermann noted the following words of Goethe: “In German
philosophy, two great things remain to be done. Kant has written the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft,
whereby a great deal has happened, but the circle is not yet completed.
Now, someone capable and significant must write a critique of the senses
and of human understanding, and when this has been equally admirably
done, German philosophy will have little more to wish for.”
Hellmuth Pleßner
The meaning of the senses as autonomous sources of perception has
recently been paid more attention, as the above-cited work of Hellmuth
Pleßner shows. A precise historical derivation and foundation of
harmonic sensory theory cannot be given here; nevertheless, we will
introduce a few supplementary ideas.
It seems, for example, to be taken for granted that thought is the
active “spiritual” part of our psychic capability, while the
apperceptions of the senses are the passive “sensory” part, the
“material” so to speak, by means of which the mind, or thought, creates
knowledge. Thus spirit is mostly identified with logical thought,
although Kant and others distinguish between consciousness (spirit) and
reason (logic). But is it logical thought alone that is “active,” does
it alone have a priori
forms? Certainly not! Every process of hearing, seeing, and touching is
not only receptive, but selects according to the inner forms of our
sense organs only that which is in accordance with it. When I tune my
stringed instrument and the fifths are pure, then that is an active
function, not a passive one, of my ear and my psyche: because when
doing this, I do not need to “think” at all! Every sense has exactly
this kind of system of a priori
things as does our thought. If thought dwarfed our other senses by as
much as is almost always assumed today, if it alone expressed the
spontaneity of our psychic capability, then it would have to manifest
somehow, even without the other senses. But imagine someone born blind,
deaf, and without a sense of touch, but with consciousness intact. What
could this unhappy person do with his consciousness?! If one answers
this platitudinous question with the “unity of our psychic capability,”
then in this unity there lies the impossibility of requiring thought
for spiritual things alone. The preponderance of thought over the other
“senses” cannot be supported through the predicates “active” and
“passive.” Even if thought “takes up” and “works with” sensory
impressions, like a central intelligence, that is a purely regulative
work and has nothing to do with the “spiritual.” The a priori
forms of the structure of our senses allow only certain impressions
into the information center of the brain, as if through a filter. The
brain reprocesses sensory impressions with the a priori
forms of logical thought. All senses, including thought-and for this
reason I classify it as a sense-have their physiological, material
basis: eye, ear, touch sensors, and brain substance. Thought as
something completely exempt from materiality is a pipe dream, if not a
fraud.
It is entirely different when all senses, including thought, are
fertilized, or ignited, by the spiritual. Then the senses become
enormously important carriers of the best things we humans have to say
and impart: partaking in and realizing the realm of ideas in science,
politics, art, and religion.
If we categorize thought among the senses, this is no belittling of its
value, but quite the opposite: the senses previously denigrated as the
spontaneous means of perception are raised to the level of thought!
There will always be argument and discussion about the hierarchy of all
the senses, including that of thought. To Beethoven, tone and its
spiritual “ignition,” music, meant more than all wisdom and philosophy,
i.e. more than the perceptions obtained through thought; a painter
would place the world of light and colors above all else; for Hegel the
“concept” was the non plus ultra;
and so forth. But I believe we will only come to any sort of correct
judgment and evaluation of our various psychic capabilities if we can
reduce the hypertrophy of thought to its due measure, and according to
the same measure raise the “senses” up from their undervaluation. Our
harmonic theory of the senses intends and wishes for nothing else.
For in the final analysis, the important thing is not thinking,
hearing, seeing or touching, but the spirit, the idea. One of the last
great aesthetes of the German-speaking world, Moriz Carriere,
wrote: “The moods and conditions of a spiritual being are not
unconscious or thoughtless, but self-consciously spiritual; thus music
also becomes an expression of the spirit. How the spirit sees the
world, how it has formed its thoughts and will into character, what its
goals are, all this is not something external to it, all this makes up
its being, determines its condition, determines its state of soul. All
this sounds together when the spirit expresses it musically.
Admittedly, it lacks the sound articulated to the word, the bearer of
thought; the tone is only a tone, defined by its ringing, its strength,
its duration, its pitch, not as the sign or symbol of a concept, but
only as the expression of an emotion. But if we make our thoughts clear
in words, if they only achieve distinct certitude by speaking them,
then all of spiritual life is still far from being completed in speech;
and the visual arts and music exist precisely for this reason, because
many unsayable things can be painted and sung. The idea is not only thought,
it is also formative life force, and the way it realizes itself in
spatial form can only be insufficiently described; it can only be made
perfectly apparent through presentation to the eye. Likewise, the idea
is the principle and measure of becoming life, never taking fixed form,
never remaining idle, but passing through the present in constant
change, and bringing forth from it the future.”