During the last couple of posts, we have seen Fichte describe the development of perception. He began from the immediate state of consciousness, where a stream of sensations overwhelmed us. Then, the consciousness started little by little to distinguish this stream into individual sensations and collect these individual sensations into perceptions of things. Finally, it also distinguished itself from all these perceived things.
What is still lacking from perception, Fichte says, is perceiving things as something (say, as a tree or a rose). What such “perceiving as” still requires is that we recognise an individual perceived thing as resembling a familiar pattern that we have already perceived (like that of a rose). Of course, such recognition is possible only if we have already perceived several similar things (other things) and formed a general notion of what it is to be such a thing.
This pattern recognition perfects the phase of perception, Fichte says. By perfecting Fichte does not mean just that it is the most intricate mode of perception we have met thus far. Indeed, Fichte wants to say that pattern recognition already points toward mental activities beyond the level of mere perception, if only in an unconscious manner. Thus, pattern recognition already involves something like memory, since it requires preservation of mental images of perceived things. Furthermore, it also presages language, where we can explicitly indicate e.g. that what we have perceived is a tree. Finally, pattern recognition is a precursor of concept formation (one type of thinking), which involves consciousness creating a general representation, under which individual representations can be subsumed.
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