Cognition as a Synthesis of Percepts and Concepts
The common definition of cognition is: "the mental action or process of
acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the
senses." [1] There is probably no dispute about this. But there are many
explanations of how we acquire the correct understanding of the world – in
fact, the whole history of philosophy is the history of the search for the
adequate answer on this fundamental question in relation to the nature of
the human knowledge.
This is little surprise when we realize that "pure experience is merely
juxtaposition in space and succession in time; an aggregate of nothing but
unrelated single entities. No any of the objects which there come and go has
anything to do with any other in the causative sense. At this stage
the
world is a multiplicity of uniform importance. For our experience the
snail, which belongs to a lower stage in organization, is of equal value
with the most highly evolved animal. The distinction between degrees of
perfection in organization become evident to us only when we lay hold
conceptually upon the multiplicity given to us in experience, and work it
through. That what is presented to us by experience is an endless mass of
single entities. These single entities must naturally be different one from
another; otherwise they would not appear to us as endless unrelated
multiplicity"
[2] of sense perceptions.
This condition of pure experience is for many people hard to imagine due to the fact that
"in practice, man never experiences a division between a purely passive
awareness of the ‘directly-given’ and a thinking recognition of it. The
boundary between the ‘given’ and the ‘known’ must be drawn artificially"
[3] with the aim to understand the nature of cognition. The condition of
pure perception we would experience only if we could observe the world while
simultaneously removing all thoughts from our consciousness.
Therefore we need to recognise "the unquestionable fact that in the
world, merely as we perceive it spread around us, truth cannot directly
be found. A consideration of the actual world of sense-experience, if it
is made objectively and thoroughly, leads to the knowledge that this
world, as we perceive it with our senses, is not complete in itself, and
that it is brought to a state of full reality only through ourselves."
[4]
Due to this fact some philosophers have arrived at the following
conclusion: "Man observes the sense-world and then, through the working
of his soul-life, he attaches to it the world of ideas. As a result of
this it appears to him that this idea-world must be a picture of the
outer world. On the other hand, he perceives that the idea-world exists
within himself. What relation can there be between this idea-world man
finds in himself and the world outside him? This was the question, and
the only answer they could find to it was this: In attaching our
idea-world to the outer world which we perceive, we create truth."
[5]
But these philosophers were mistaken. For if they were correct then
"all possibility of penetrating to the reality of objects would be
destroyed, all possibility of searching for the truth, for truth cannot
exist if it can only be created subjectively," [6] by man himself.
The path out of this blind alley is this: "If we consider the act of
sense-perception with an unprejudiced mind, we find that in itself it is
incomplete, that in every way it is not self-sufficient. By the fact
that we have been placed in the world, born into the world, we split the
actual world of reality in two. It is true that, in one sense, we have
the whole world-content here with us. But owing to the way in which we
are placed as human beings in the world, we split the world-content into
the ‘percept-world’ which appears to us from the outside, and the
‘idea-world’ which appears to us from within our own soul.
Owing to the
manner of our existence in the world, the world is for us divided into a
percept-world and an idea-world. [7]
Whoever regards this division as absolute and says to himself ‘The
world is over there, and I am here,’ will never be able to unite his
idea-world with the percept-world. The true solution of the problem is
this: I look at the percept-world. It is everywhere incomplete:
everywhere something is lacking. I receive an endless number of
unrelated impressions. Now I myself with my whole being have come into
existence out of the same universe to which this percept-world also
belongs. So I look into myself: and I see in myself just that which the
percept-world lacks, namely ideas, relationships, arrived at by
thinking. I must, therefore, through my own being reunite that which for
me – as a result of my coming into the world – has divided itself into
two parts. I gain reality by my own effort.
Owing to the fact of my being born as I am into the world, that
which is really one, appears to have branched into two parts – that
given by outward perception, and the world of ideas.
By living and growing and developing my being, I unite the two streams
of reality. In the process of acquiring knowledge, I myself achieve
reality. As a matter of fact I should never have attained
self-consciousness had I not, by the way in which I entered the world,
divided the world of ideas from the outer world of perception. But I
should never find the bridge to the real world if I did not bring the
idea-world, which I have separated off in myself, once more into unity
with that which, without the idea-world, is no reality at all." [8]
It is of decisive importance that it is clear to us that "thinking
is an organ of apprehension which perceives the thought-content of the
world. Our consciousness is not the capacity to produce thoughts and
store them up, as is generally supposed, but the capacity to perceive
thoughts and ideas. Our mind is not to be conceived of as a
receptacle for the world of ideas, containing the thoughts within
itself, but as an organ which perceives the thoughts" [9]
as precisely and consistently as we are capable of using it for this
purpose.
All disagreements about the nature of the world are the result of
incomplete observations and incapacity for a thorough investigation of
the world of ideas and the manner in which ideas can harmonise with the
facts of existence. For "our thinking is a multiplicity of thoughts
which are woven and bound organically together in the most complicated
fashion. But, when we have once penetrated this multiplicity from all
directions, it becomes again a unity, a harmony. All the elements are
related one to another; they exist for one another; one modifies
another, restricts it, etc. The moment our mind conceives two
corresponding thoughts, it observes at once that these really flow
together to form a unit. It finds everywhere in its whole realm the
interrelated; this concept unites with that, a third illuminates or
supports a fourth, and so on. If, for example, we find in our
consciousness the concept ‘organism’, and we then scan our conceptual
world, we meet with another concept, ‘systematic evolution, growth’. It
becomes clear that these two concepts belong together; that they
represent merely two aspects of one and the same thing.
But this is true of our entire thought-system. All individual
thoughts are parts of a great whole which we call our conceptual world.
When any single thought emerges in consciousness, we cannot rest until
this is brought into harmony with the rest of our thinking.
Any
isolated concept is an abnormality, an untruth. When we have
arrived at that state of mind in which our whole thought-world bears the
character of a complete inner harmony, we gain thereby the satisfaction
for which our mind is striving. We feel that we are in possession of
truth. Thus we perceive truth in the thorough-going agreement of all
concepts in our possession" [10] and their agreement with all experiences we encounter
in our life.
In this manner "our theory of knowledge establishes the conviction
that in thinking the essence of the world is mediated. Through thinking
alone the relationship between the details of the world-content become
manifest, be it the relation of the sun to the stone it warms, or the
relation of the man to the external world. In thinking alone the element
is given which determines all things in their relations to one another."
[11] For that reason spiritual science lays great stress on the need for
the development of the capacity of thinking for all those who want to
arrive at a real understanding of the nature of the things, beings, and
phenomena which exist in the world.
However, this doesn’t mean that there is no need for the development
of our capacities of perception and observation, and for ever new
experiences that life circumstances are enabling. For example, if a
person would study a lot about apples – about their origin, cultivation,
use in nutrition, etc. – and he would not at the same time eat any of
them, he could not arrive at the real cognition of the nature of apple.
In the same manner as we arrive with the help of singular concepts to
more complete mental picture of what we investigate, so the isolated
perceptions of colours, shapes, tastes, smells, sounds, etc. enable us a more
complete experience of what we perceive.
Thus we can arrive at the conclusion that "our whole being functions
in such a way that the elements which constitute the reality of every
object or event come to us from two sides, from perception and from
thinking. Cognition is the synthesis of percept and concept.
Only the two together constitute the complete thing"
[12] – or expressing it more precisely, cognition is the synthesis
of all precepts and ideas that offer suitable explanations of things,
beings and phenomena we investigate.
