ABSTRACT
THE PHYLOGENESIS OF PERCEPTION IS CHARACTERIZED BY THE INcreasing amount, variety, and enrichment of sensory experience. It culminat.es in man's allocentric mode of perception, in which independently existing objects are perceived (objectification). Because of man's openness toward the world the number of possible objects of human perception and the variety of their aspects are infinite and inexhaustible. To what extent man realizes his potentiality of allocentric perception depends on the stage he reaches in his ontogenetic development. During this development he explores, in the playful encounters of childhood, an expanding environment and an increasing variety of object aspects in exercising his growing sensory-motor capacities. While part of this exploration takes place in the spontaneous and immediate encounter with the objects, an important part consists in the increasing acquaintance with their meaning in the culture. Such learning on the one hand enriches the object world of the growing child to a degree which could never be reached by an isolated individual. On the other hand, it also increasingly supplants the child's original approach to the objects and, especially in our time, entails the danger of closing his openness toward the world and of reducing all experience to
238 Two Basic Perceptual Modes
the perception of such preformed cliches and "angles" as make up the world of "reality" seen by the family, peer group, and society in which he grows up. The perspective from which objects are perceived may narrow to "what they are there for" and "how one deals with them." Nature may no longer be seen as the mother of all living creatures including man, but may become an enemy to be conquered or a mere object to be exploited and used. Other people, too, may be seen from a similar viewpoint, the viewpoint of secondary autocentricity.
