Intellectual-Sensuous Contemplation

Sensations, perceptions, representations. The subject's direct links with objective reality are established through sensations —the initial sensuous images or elementary facts of consciousness. Sensation is the reflection of separate properties and qualities of objects which di­rectly affect the sense organs; it is an elementary and psychologically indivisible cognitive phenomenon

The sense organs are a kind of channels or windows open to the world, through which streams of external influences continually come in.

The difference between external influences determines the diver­sity of sensations. Sensations have a broad range of modalities, in­cluding tactile, visual, auditory, vibrational, temperature, olfactory, and gustatory. A type apart are sensations of processes occurring in the organism's inner environment —organic sensations, as well as sensations of the movements and positions of the body's organs (kinesthesia), the sense of balance, and static sensations.

In the process of life's evolution, special sense organs have de­veloped for only a small number of stimuli. The sense image of other properties of the objective world —as, e.g., of the form, size, and distance of objects from each other and from the observer — arises from the interaction of indications of different sense organs.

Whatever object we may take, it has a great many extremely diverse aspects and properties. Consider a lump of sugar: it is hard, white, sweet, it has a definite shape, mass and weight. All these properties are combined in something integral, and we per­ceive and comprehend them as a single whole rather than separ­ately. An integral image reflecting objects affecting the sense organs and their properties and relations directly is called perception. Per­ception is a higher stage of cognition, essentially different from sensations. Perception is thinking, living contemplation; we look at things with an outward eye but we see them with an inner one. The depth of this comprehension depends on a person's intellec­tual level, his experience.

Representation is the highest form of sensuous reflection, it is imaginal knowledge about objects that are not directly perceived. The physiological condition of the existence of representations is reten­tion of the traces of past influences and their actualization at the given moment. This function, which ensures the continuity and suc­cession in cognitive activity, is termed memory; without it, recogni­tion would be impossible. Representation is a generalizing synthesis of many sensuous perceptions.

Images with which man's consciousness operates are not re­stricted to the reproduction of the perceived. Men creatively com­bine and relatively freely create new images owing to their creative imagination or fantasy. Representations stand, as it were, between sensuous and rational cognition.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1085