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,[2 ] “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,[3] 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,[4] 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.”

* Translator’s note: the original text of Akròasis adds in parentheses “Eros.”

2 Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 13 (1855), p. 107.

3 Ästhetik, Vol II (1859), p. 319.

4 My italics.

Download the Hans Kayser Collection HERE