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Theories according to which the phenomenal world originates in overt action by
the subject have two philosophical roots, one epistemological, one ideological.
As to the first, it is the notion that "the soul" or mind is nonspatial,
as was held by DESCARTES, and that attention can be but punctual, for in a nonspatial
mind no two things can be present simultaneously. Wholes can therefore be built
up only through the following three steps: (1) by scanning, that is, by apprehending
one element after another; (2) by keeping all those elements in mind simultaneously
(at present we would say in short-term-memory); and (3) by finally unifying or synthesizing
them into a whole, as KANT points out in the introduction of the first edition of
his
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"Kritik der reinen Vernunft" (Critique of Pure Reason). This notion
was handed down through LOTZE (1842, 1856) to WUNDT (1908) and finally to McDOUGALL,
PIAGET (cf. AEBLI, 1963), and to Soviet psychology.
WUNDT specified it into the assumption that perception of shape, not only tactile
perception but also visual, comes about by tracing contours with the sense organ
- with the fingertips or with the fovea. About fifty years later PIAGET renewed
this assumption, this time not for the percept but for the concept; which structutally
makes no difference. The concept of a thing, touched or seen, is, according to PIAGET,
the total of movements by which it was explored.
Still, in 1971, this assumption is repeated as an established truth (see KÜPPERS).
But as early as 1902, G.M. STRATTON had definitely disproved it by recording eye
movements and showing that eye movements by which a subject tries to follow a simple
outline, are anything but copies of that outline, and vary trial to trial in an
unpredictable way. STRATTON´s experiment was repeated in Münster a few
years ago with different configurations and instructions but the same result. This
could have been derived immediately from our knowledge of voluntary eye movements
- which obviously has not so far been integrated into our theory of visual organization.
Without exception, voluntary eye movements are jumps that cannot be controlled in
detail by the subject. During these jumps, as a consequence of the blurring effect
of quick displacements of contours over the retinae, nothing can be seen.
In other words, reception of visual structures is possible only for the eye at rest,
and that means simultaneously. This is why a whole landscape can be recognized during
a lightning flash in the night, though it lasts no longer than one-tenth of a second
; that is, much less than the reaction time of the oculomotor system, so that it
is dark again before the slightest movement of the eyes can be set going.
In haptics the situation is somewhat different. Because of the tiny area of the
touching fingertips and the greater velocity of local adaptation, there is practically
no recognition of structures without gross movements. But only by chance are these
tracing movements. Recognition of structure is possible without tracing, as BÜRKLEN
(1917) has shown and my own unpublished observations have confirmed.
The ideological root of creation-theories in perception can best be seen in a statement
of PETERMANN when he criticizes Gestalt psychologists, saying that for them the
perceiving subjects is "nothing but" a passive "battlefield of stimuli,"
to which one could reply, "Why should it be
[p. 64]
otherwise?" When WEIZSÄCKER (in 1940) propounds his "Gestaltkreis"
theory, general anthropological considerations play a much greater role than the
presentation of empirical data. There is a remarkable correspondence between WEIZSÄCKER´s
views and those of American transactionalists who also try to recenter perception
research on what is done by the perceiver, and in this connection more than once
emphasize that "each one of us ... creates for himself the world in
which he has his life´s experiences" (ITTELSON, 1960, p. 19). But this
is not meant as seriously as it sounds. it is preceded by the remark that "if
everyone perceived entirely differently from everyone else, it is difficult to imagine
how any agreement or social activity could be possible" (p. 16). The fact that
agreement is possible is accounted for not only by common interests and purposes
but also by neighboring and to that extent overlapping positions including a similar
orientation in space and time - which, in order for different perceivers to assimilate
their worlds to one another, must not be created but found (cf. E.J. GIBSON, 1966).
But the last part of the sentence is not the author´s but the reader´s
remark. The convergence toward familiar ways of perception research goes on when
the concept of equivalent configurations of "externality-impingement"
is introduced and experimental work on visual "depth cues" is reported
in detail. These cues play a role exactly analogous to the unity cues in MÜLLER´s
and PETERMANN´s theories of collective attention here controlling visual depth
to such a degree that there is not much freedom for creativity left, except in the
case where cues have contradictory effects. The role attributed to past experience
in the origin of cues is about the same as in other American perception research.
Finally the creativity of the perceiver comes down to the fact that "the experienced
consequences of every action provide a check on the perceptual prediction on which
the action was based," just as in the process of scientific inquiry (p. 35),
which would not make any sense if the perceiver´s world were his free creation.
By these arguments "transaction" is reduced to the concept of an interplay
between acting and observing objective consequences of action in which it makes
no more sense to ask: which came first, the chicken or the egg. That there are stimulating
new perspectives, as well as the remnants of nineteenth-century introspectionism,
in transactionalist psychology is shown by the role that is attributed to the mystical
activity of "externalization," which was shown to be an unnecessary construct
by KÖHLER as early as 1929.
The last and most important ideologically determined branch of percep-
[p. 65:]
tion research to be mentioned here is of the Soviets. The emphasis laid by them
on the role of overt activity of the perceiver is unmistakably derived from the
central position that "labor" plays in their whole philosophy of life
(cf. SOKOLOV, 1966; ZINCHENKO, 1966). Hence their preference for intentional operations
such as searching, analyzing, matching, arranging, counting, copying, building up
out of given material, operations that furnish more thorough, more detailed or more
exact information on objects that have been perceived already or are being perceived
during this additional scrutiny.
If instead of philosophizing we try to make a list of bodily activities, concious
and unconscious, that occur during perception, we get the following collection (which
is perhaps not quite complete): Receptors are exposed to stimulation by certain
objects (as by looking about, grasping, bending to a keyhole or climbing an a fence
in order to peep, also by turning over the leaves of a book); the area accessible
to receptors is enlarged (as by wandering about in a large building or in the streets
of a city, or by groping in the dark, also by traveling); sense organs or objects
are moved so that stimulus configurations shift to the most sensitive part of the
receptor (as in fixation reaction of the eye or by bringing objects to the fingertips
or to the tip of the tongue); receptivity of the sense organ is optimized (as for
example in the eye by accommodation, convergence, retinal adaption, modifying width
of pupil, and so on); the head is moved unintentionally so that by motion parallax
the near and the distant can be distinguished (TSCHERMAK, 1939; KLIX, 1962); the
same effect can be reached by passive transportation (GIBSON, 1950); the head turns
and tilts unintentionally so that the source of a sound can be localized not only
to the left or right side but also above or below and to the front - or back - of
the perceiver (WALLACH, 1939); local adaption slows down and perceived structures
are prevented from fading (for example, by the minute unconscious oscillatory movements
of the eyes [DITCHBURN, et al., 1952] or the intentional gross rubbing of the fingers
in haptics, as in Braille reading [BÜRKLEN, 1917]; qualities of the material
are abstracted (as roughness by rubbing, hardness by pressing or biting, elasticity
by bending and so on); details of a perceived structure are intentionally explored
by wandering eyes or systematic scanning, verbal, tactual, and visual, sometimes,
but not necessarily including tracing; outer conditions of perception
[p. 66]
are improved (as in moving a watch toward the ear, stopping one´s breath,
shutting the windows that open on a noisy street, taking eye glasses on or off (or
wiping them), turning on a light, going toward windows, blinking, sniffing, leaving
and re-entering a room in order to recognize a smell, licking a finger and lifting
it up in order to feel a faint air draft, shaking a hollow object or lifting it
in order to find out whether it contains something, and so on, rolling an egg in
order to find out whether it is raw or boiled, lighting a match and holding it to
a piece of fabric in order to know whether it is wool, and so on); objects are subjected
to planned operations in order to know them more exactly (as matching, arranging,
counting, copying, building them up out of given material and so forth); one´s
own limbs are moved in order to observe them (as in the child preparing for voluntary
movement by building up visual-kinesthetic coordination, or in an adult restoring
it after experimental disturbance [HELD, 1966; SMITH and SMITH, 1966]; music is
accompanied with rhythmic movements; music or words are recited, written characters
are reproduced in order to know them better.
There is no sharp borderline between "natural" and more or less impulsive
testing activities, on the one hand, and planned and systematic testing methods
as developed in natural sciences, on the other.
All these activities have one trait in common: none of them "produce"
or "create" anything. their very purpose is to make things react in various
ways and thus lay open their nature and, at the same time, to optimize the receptivity
of sense organs in order to draw from them as much information as possible.
The above statements about the nature of the subjects´s activities in perception
are not invalidated by pointing to the modifications of the perceptive field by
"subjective" factors such as emotion and motivation. It is true, the conception
of a causal chain leading from the object through the sense organs and the afferent
nerves to the psychophysical niveau and thus calling forth the world of percepts
is a simplification. Percepts are not mere effects of stimulation in an empty field.
Rather they are reactions of the organism to the impingements coming through the
senses and, to that extent, depend on the nature and momentary state of the organism,
as well as on the nature of stimulation. Considering this, we must not be surprised
about the modifications of our phenomenal perceptual world in
[p. 67]
consequence of changing motivational states: the recentering, the standing
out of objects relevant to these states, the acquisition of varying valences by
these objects, and so on. But all this has nothing to do with our problem, for the
following reasons.
(1) These changes are not due to an activity of the subject, be it impulsive or
intentional. They follow immediately from a modification of the nervous system itself.
(2) These changes are not instances of creativity. They come about by an increased
(or diminished) sensitivity to specific objective facts by which the efficacy
of their influence on the subject is enhanced (or lessened). In the moment when,
instead of this increase of sensitivity, creative processes in the strict sense
of the word take place, perception becomes prejudiced, distorted, illusionary, and
in higher degrees hallucinatory and paranoid, that is, it is no longer cognition
in the sense of reproduction of reality but a kind of daydream occasioned by the
present stimulation and therefore no longer fit for information and mutual understanding.
Perception is not a way of adding new facts to the world - this is the task of
art and invention - but to find what there is before perceiving begins, but which
has not yet been found by the present perceiver. In everyday perception the possibility
of changing the observed object by the very act of observation need not bother us,
though it plays a role in psychotherapeutic situations. There the endeavor to find
out what is the matter with the patient may initiate real changes in him, so that
after "observation," in some cases, he is no longer the same person as
before. Apart from this particular case, in a perceiver creativity can only consist
in inventing better and better methods of putting questions to phenomena and of
making them answer these questions. But finally everything depends on listening
to the answers. a judge who is talking all the time instead of having the witness
speak does not get the information he needs.
To state the decisive point explicitly once more: the phenomenal or perceived world
is one of the most ingenious inventions of organisms. These cannot directly orient
themselves in their wider physical surroundings. But they acquire this possibility
by a detour. They develop a kind of enclave within themselves, in which through
the sensory apparatus a copy of the surroundings as well as a copy of the organism
itself is built up. Between these copies - the phenomenal world and the phenomenal
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ego - the interaction exists that is lacking between the organism and its
physical surroundings. By connecting the subject with the executive by cybernetic
means, the organism becomes able to act and react adequately also in and to its
wider physical surroundings. But if this is the case, the appliance will function
mostre satisfactorily only if the processes representing the surroundings are controlled
from outside as exclusively as possible, that meand, if interference from the side
of the subject is minimized. From this it can be understood what it means to be
passive when perceiving, and even to be a "battle-field of stimuli." This
kind of passivity, which to some of us, as it seems, is beneath human dignity, is
the presupposition of prosperous action, particularly of group interaction and of
successfully improving the world when we find that is should be better.
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