Chapter 4 THE WORLD AS PERCEPTION
Why do people hold a certain view? What is it that convinces someone of something? It depends on their thinking personality. Each Philosophy Of Freedom chapter describes 12 thinking personality types.
Chapter 4 of The Philosophy Of freedom describes the perception process. The aspect of the perception process that most interests someone depends on their thinking personality type. Here are some notes on the 12 views of the perception process. A free person will be aware of all the 12 world-outlooks and apply them according to need.
4.0 The chapter mood is Empiricism (immediate external experience) Introduction: When someone sees a tree, his thinking reacts to his observation; an ideal element is added to the perceived object, and the perceiver regards the object and its ideal complement as belonging together.
4.1 Materialist perceiving (physical world) Walking through the fields a partridge is discovered to be the source of a rustling noise. The mental process used was to generalize experience.
4.2 Spiritist perceiving (what underlies world, gained by inner activity) When, I, as thinking subject, refer a concept to an object, we must not regard this reference as something purely subjective. It is not the subject, but thinking, that makes the reference.
4.3 Realist perceiving (external world) All that is perceived before thinking begins is the pure content of perception. The world would appear as a mere chaotic aggregate of sense-data, colors, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth, of taste, of smell, and, lastly, feelings of pleasure and pain. This mass constitutes the world of pure unthinking perception.
4.4 Idealist perceiving (looks for progressive tendency) Every extension of the circle of my percepts compels me to correct my picture of the world.
4.5 Mathematist perceiving (calculating, order) I should like to call the dependence of my perceptual world on my point of observation "mathematical," and its dependence on my organization "qualitative." The former determines proportions of size and mutual distances of my percepts, the latter their quality.
4.6 Rationalist perceiving So long as things are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, they must have no existence.
4.7 Psychist perceiving (psychology, ideas are bound up with a being) When the tree disappears from my field of vision, an after-effect of this process remains within myself, a picture of the tree. My self has become enriched; to its content a new element has been added.
4.8 Pneumatist perceiving (spirit) For Berkeley nothing is real except God and human spirits. What we call the "world" exists only in spirits. This theory is confronted by the now predominant Kantian which instead of spirits speaks of unknowable things-in-themselves.
4.9 Monadist perceiving (build up existence in itself) Nothing can any longer be found of what exists outside of me and originally stimulated my sense-organs. The external object, on its way to the brain, and through the brain to the soul, has been entirely lost. What we perceive is something we produce.
4.10 Dynamist perceiving (force is present) What the naive man regards as existing outside of him, is really a product of my “soul”.
4.11 Phenomenalist perceiving (appearance of phenomena and interpretation) For as soon as I see clearly that my sense-organs and their activity, my nerve- and soul-processes, can also be known to me only through perception (appearance), the argument which I have outlined reveals itself in its full absurdity.
4.12 Sensationalist perceiving (accept sense impression without mixed in thought) Only my real eye and my real hand, but not my ideas "eye" and "hand," could have, connected to them, the representations "sun" and "earth" as modifications.
Comments