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3 Gestalt
the disembodied pattern without the points. He called a mental unity synthetic
when it consists of being aware of a number of different things as one.
There is one more element in Kant’s conception of Gestalts: In order to tie
things together there must be a single common subject, or self, and her or his
awareness must be unified. Kant had the insight to recognize that the self, or
center, to which we attribute the experience of seeing and knowing, is itself a
mental construction—something like distal attribution. (In the present case,
proximal attribution.)
Kant believed that sensory experiences form hierarchies, so that out of a
multiplicity of distinct experiences we can form a single global experience in
which each constituent retains its individual existence. The fundamental nature
of a Gestalt, for him, was that it is a hierarchy of perceived things all experienced
simultaneously as parts of one act of awareness. It is a most remarkable fact, as
Kant observed, that it is possible to be fully aware of a number of items at the
same time. It is this capacity which singles out the minds of living creatures as
something truly distinctive in the world, almost outside the ordinary range of
nature as we know it.
Kant’s most radical and genuinely modern idea is expressed in what he
himself called his Copernican Revolution. The empiricists, who preceded Kant
historically, asserted that it is not possible to have any knowledge unless it is
received through the senses—because the alternative would be that we are born
with pre-existing knowledge of the world. Kant’s insight was that raw sense
data supplied by our sense organs is unorganized and chaotic, and would be
meaningless to us if we didn’t already possess a synthesizing and organizing
faculty in our brains.
We are born with what he calls categories of the understanding. For example,
the categories of space and time frame all our physical experience and make
it intelligible. Out of our sensory experience, interpreted and organized by
the categories, we come to understand the world in a certain way. Behind
our sensory experience—and causing it—are physical phenomena of the real
world. But this world, the world as it is, is inaccessible to us and cannot be
known directly.
Language too requires the synthetic faculty of the mind to assemble words
into coherent sentences and thoughts. Here Kant appears to be making the
assertion that—as stated previously—the mind has a way of building Gestalt
concepts from sentences. Reading the work of Kant, one is surprised again and
again at the number of sophisticated modern ideas he anticipated. The work of
great thinkers, such as Kant, Darwin, even Aristotle, are gold mines in which
one can profitably dig again and again.
3 Gestalt
the disembodied pattern without the points. He called a mental unity synthetic
when it consists of being aware of a number of different things as one.
There is one more element in Kant’s conception of Gestalts: In order to tie
things together there must be a single common subject, or self, and her or his
awareness must be unified. Kant had the insight to recognize that the self, or
center, to which we attribute the experience of seeing and knowing, is itself a
mental construction—something like distal attribution. (In the present case,
proximal attribution.)
Kant believed that sensory experiences form hierarchies, so that out of a
multiplicity of distinct experiences we can form a single global experience in
which each constituent retains its individual existence. The fundamental nature
of a Gestalt, for him, was that it is a hierarchy of perceived things all experienced
simultaneously as parts of one act of awareness. It is a most remarkable fact, as
Kant observed, that it is possible to be fully aware of a number of items at the
same time. It is this capacity which singles out the minds of living creatures as
something truly distinctive in the world, almost outside the ordinary range of
nature as we know it.
Kant’s most radical and genuinely modern idea is expressed in what he
himself called his Copernican Revolution. The empiricists, who preceded Kant
historically, asserted that it is not possible to have any knowledge unless it is
received through the senses—because the alternative would be that we are born
with pre-existing knowledge of the world. Kant’s insight was that raw sense
data supplied by our sense organs is unorganized and chaotic, and would be
meaningless to us if we didn’t already possess a synthesizing and organizing
faculty in our brains.
We are born with what he calls categories of the understanding. For example,
the categories of space and time frame all our physical experience and make
it intelligible. Out of our sensory experience, interpreted and organized by
the categories, we come to understand the world in a certain way. Behind
our sensory experience—and causing it—are physical phenomena of the real
world. But this world, the world as it is, is inaccessible to us and cannot be
known directly.
Language too requires the synthetic faculty of the mind to assemble words
into coherent sentences and thoughts. Here Kant appears to be making the
assertion that—as stated previously—the mind has a way of building Gestalt
concepts from sentences. Reading the work of Kant, one is surprised again and
again at the number of sophisticated modern ideas he anticipated. The work of
great thinkers, such as Kant, Darwin, even Aristotle, are gold mines in which
one can profitably dig again and again.