KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA63 (Leslie)

Commentary 21

REHEATED PORRIDGE
Part 3: Perception
by Maurice McCarthy
12th December 2003, posted 21 December 2003

<1>
Thinking and perception do not separate from the willingness to explain until the second hierarchy of being and the latter, i.e. perception, comes into its own in the beings of form.

<2>
Since divine harmony breaks down to reciprocating wisdom then the very first form of perception is that of being able to sense another being, where being at this level means a subjective consciousness or ego. Therefore there is an ego-sense. As regards humanity it is the weakest of our senses but it must exist nevertheless, simply because we are knowing beings. You know when you are being watched, sometimes. You know, for example on meeting someone with Down's Syndrome, that something is missing. These kinds of observation strike me as candidates for the ego-sense.

<3>
Secondly, since relations are beings in the highest levels then as truth begins to separate out into a form distinguished by the fact that it is no longer a subject then, therefore, there must be a sense of thoughts or ideas. This has to be the case even though, for us, thinking is that which seems to have no distinct quality of its own. (My personal experience is different. Ideas are beginning to acquire a 'tangible' feel. Correlative to this when I first began submitting to KJF my thinking seemed to occur in the forebrain but now it is in the head more generally. When I turn attention to the physical sensations in the head there is a sense of light pressure over both parietal lobes equally. Light reading seems still to be in the forebrain, however.)

<4>
Ideas are the actions or the "verbs" of egos and once ideas and egos (relations and beings) have separated then ideas remain relational forms but with the essential core of willingness absent. Every concept is a relation between existents by definition. The loss of quality in ideal forms I can only put down to increasing disharmony but this loss means that ideas lose their perceptibility to lower subjects such as human beings. Qualitative form is restored by stabilising or equilibrating the ideas into language. But since this is cosmos of egos and ideas degenerating therefore the truest language is an objective logos, such as described by the Greeks. Therefore there is a sense of language.

Ideas and language both speak of, or from, the inner being of subjective egos. In the physical world egos and ideas are non-entities or point objects of no consequence but language matters because it is linear. But we have just shown that thought does not arise from language but language from thought.

<5>
So we are poised to enter the world of spatial senses which I will skim over quickly because of their familiarity. The first sense akin to language is sound. Even in seismology sound speaks of the inner nature of the rock.

Next in line are the surface senses. The next is warmth, rather than touch, because of relation to the inner being again, whether physical or psychological. Aesthetically there must be a sense of warmth separate to the other senses because the gap from sound to colour is too great. Then colour, too, is a 2D sense entirely superficial.

Volume senses begin with the chemical ones. I would place them in the order of taste then smell. "Tasteful decor" should turn out not to be arbitrary phrase.

<6>
So we come to the bodily senses beginning with balance, the equilibration of a carnate subject. Since no body would require balance unless it moved then also it must perceive that it moves, by which I mean that the parts of the body relative to each other are obliged to be sensed. The term proprioception is used for this but often these days comingled with the sense of the body as a whole. This sense of life or health is usually only noticed in sickness and has its own peculiar quality or qualities. Lastly the sense of when the limits of the subjective body have been infringed is the sense of touch. Touch is spiritually last in the list of senses. I count twelve. Six 3D senses and six in diminishing dimensions.

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Maurice McCarthy