48
3 Gestalt
is a 24-h cycle of physical, mental and behavioral fluctuations. Because they
possess memory, creatures have a Gestalt representation of different stretches
of personal history of varying durations. These representations are necessary
to situate and orient them. No living creature exists in the pure present—only
machines do.
An animal’s perception signs, projected onto the objects around it, become
repositories of meaning. An animal’s umwelt is not filled with inert objects, but
is teeming with the most varied carriers of meaning. The animal’s world is “magical”, because things which don’t stand out objectively in an environment—and
are invisible to us—each has a meaningful existence in the world experienced
by the animal. In this way, we might say that an animal’s world is thronged
with magical objects and beings, seen by it alone.
Centrally Controlled Organisms
Up to this point we have been discussing the role of Gestalt in the way we
perceive the world: But Gestalt is just as important in the way we plan and
carry out actions. If a living organism is capable of voluntary movement, it
must have a sense of its body as a whole, and a comprehensive awareness of the
articulation of its body and the effect that its movements have on itself and its
surroundings. Just as vision would provide no useful information if it failed to
deliver a view of a whole object or background, similarly no action is possible
unless an organism has a comprehensive sense of how all its limbs are moving
in relation to its whole body and the environment.
Evidence is rapidly accumulating that at every level of animate life, the
behavior of organisms is controlled by a detailed mental map of their body
and especially its articulations. Such a map is, of course, a Gestalt, for the whole
musculature of the body is tightly interconnected, and has to be coordinated
and controlled as one unit. This Gestalt informs the organism of the state of its
limbs and provides the know-how for controlling every voluntary muscle with
its will. The function of this inner map is to tie the whole organism together
so it behaves as a single unit.
In traditional biology it is assumed that the behavior of the simplest forms of
life such as one-celled animals is rigid and invariant, and consist of autonomic
reflex mechanisms. It will be explained later that this belief is in the process
of changing. Be that as it may, with the advent of multi-cellular organisms,
evolution invented a new form of life: It consists of living creatures whose
behavior is controlled by a central decision-making module. This evolutionary
3 Gestalt
is a 24-h cycle of physical, mental and behavioral fluctuations. Because they
possess memory, creatures have a Gestalt representation of different stretches
of personal history of varying durations. These representations are necessary
to situate and orient them. No living creature exists in the pure present—only
machines do.
An animal’s perception signs, projected onto the objects around it, become
repositories of meaning. An animal’s umwelt is not filled with inert objects, but
is teeming with the most varied carriers of meaning. The animal’s world is “magical”, because things which don’t stand out objectively in an environment—and
are invisible to us—each has a meaningful existence in the world experienced
by the animal. In this way, we might say that an animal’s world is thronged
with magical objects and beings, seen by it alone.
Centrally Controlled Organisms
Up to this point we have been discussing the role of Gestalt in the way we
perceive the world: But Gestalt is just as important in the way we plan and
carry out actions. If a living organism is capable of voluntary movement, it
must have a sense of its body as a whole, and a comprehensive awareness of the
articulation of its body and the effect that its movements have on itself and its
surroundings. Just as vision would provide no useful information if it failed to
deliver a view of a whole object or background, similarly no action is possible
unless an organism has a comprehensive sense of how all its limbs are moving
in relation to its whole body and the environment.
Evidence is rapidly accumulating that at every level of animate life, the
behavior of organisms is controlled by a detailed mental map of their body
and especially its articulations. Such a map is, of course, a Gestalt, for the whole
musculature of the body is tightly interconnected, and has to be coordinated
and controlled as one unit. This Gestalt informs the organism of the state of its
limbs and provides the know-how for controlling every voluntary muscle with
its will. The function of this inner map is to tie the whole organism together
so it behaves as a single unit.
In traditional biology it is assumed that the behavior of the simplest forms of
life such as one-celled animals is rigid and invariant, and consist of autonomic
reflex mechanisms. It will be explained later that this belief is in the process
of changing. Be that as it may, with the advent of multi-cellular organisms,
evolution invented a new form of life: It consists of living creatures whose
behavior is controlled by a central decision-making module. This evolutionary