ABSTRACT
It will now be seen in what direction the following chapters will carry their inquiry. ‘Sense experience’* has become once more a question for us. Empiricism had emptied it of all mystery by bringing it down to the possession of a quality. This had been possible only at the price of moving far from the ordinary acceptation of the word. Between sense experience and knowing, common experience establishes a difference which is not that between the quality and the concept. This rich notion of sense experience is still to be found in Romantic usage, for example in Herder. It points to an experience in which we are given not ‘dead’ qualities, but active ones. A wooden wheel placed on the ground is not, for sight, the same thing as a wheel bearing a load. A body at rest because no force is being exerted upon it is again for sight not the same thing as a body in which opposing forces are in equilibrium.1 The light of a candle changes its appearance for a child when, after a burn, it stops attracting the child’s hand and becomes literally repulsive.2 Vision is already inhabited by a meaning (sens) which gives it a function in the spectacle of the world and in our existence. The pure quale would be
given to us only if the world were a spectacle and one’s own body a mechanism with which some impartial mind made itself acquainted.3
