ABSTRACT
The explication of both historic causes and action-guiding consequences seems to be the most important task of a historicogenetic analysis, following the prior task of compiling the actually existing patterns of perception in the East and in the West. This chapter deals with the problem of how it is possible to design a classification system of formal perceptive categories. Not every perception expresses a pattern and not every pattern specified falls into the same category. The stability of a perceptive pattern is frequently independent of the adequacy of its imagined causes or their conscious acknowledgement, just as action-guiding consequences may be maintained, though their formerly realistic causes vanished a long time ago. The system is a kind of matrix within which any perception pattern regarded as empirically significant can be located and assigned a particular matrix position such as imagined self-perception of the strategic or normative variety.
