ABSTRACT
BY "OBJECTIFICATION" I DO NOT MEAN OBJECTIVITY, BUT THE PHEnomenon of man's encounter with more or less definite objects as a certain type of relatedness emerges between him and his environment. The degree of objectification is characterized by the degree to which the object is perceived as existing independently of the perceiver and the degree to which the richness of its qualities is perceived. Man takes it for granted that his environment is structured into definite objects. This is what he experiences both in his wakeful awareness and even in the hallucinatory world of his dream life, although in the latter the objects become more elusive and cannot be sought out and recaptured at will, as the objects of reality can. Yet, objectification is a quite late phenomenon, genetically. It appears fully only in man, and in him it develops only gradually in the course of infancy and childhood. Neither man, ontogenetically, nor the living organism, phylogenetically, begins life with the objectifying type of related-
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86 Two Basic Perceptual Modes
ness. The human embryo and the neonate do not distinguish between themselves and the outside world. In most of the protozoa, proper sense organs are as yet hardly to be found. If nevertheless they are sensitive to light, mechanical, chemical, and electrical stimulation, and to changes of temperature (although not all of them are sensitive to all of these stimuli), this seems to be due to an undifferentiated irritability of the whole protoplasma of the animal body. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, when life begins it does not have an object world but proceeds only in degrees of well-being or ill-being, in degrees of nervous excitation, which, although often caused by agents of the environment, is not referred to the environment by the organism or probably does not even show, in the earliest stages, bodily localization. These excitations evoke reactive movements, but they do not lead to the perception of objects or even of an undifferentiated environment. The Swiss biologist Portmann has given a vivid account of the gradual emergence of an environment as we move up the evolutionary scale. He describes the world of the earthworm, in which there is only the change of light and dark, the experience of more or less hard obstructions (Widerstand), of humid and dry, of warm and cold, and of some scents. But no objects exist in this world and the worm never encounters the unending variety of plant and animal forms. In some, more highly organized worms of the ocean, in some snails, in many insects and crabs, the presence of simple eyes leads to the emergence of foreground and background, of distance, and of vaguely perceived shapes moving before this background.1 With the increasingly higher development of the sense organs and increasing cerebralization, the distinctness and variety of sensory experience of the environment increase. The development of the so-called higher senses, sight and hearing, with the advent of a more highly developed eye and ear in the higher vertebrates (birds and mammals), constitutes an especially important step in evolution and brings about a considerable enrichment of the perceived environment. But even though man is surpassed by some animals in the acuity and range of some senses, only he has a full-fledged perception of objects as things and creatures existing independently of him and his needs.2
