Karl Bühler

Karl Bühler is presented as a theorist of knowledge that can operate without an image. His claim that an object may be thought fully and exactly without representation supplies a key contrast for the book’s account of image-consciousness, while the example of a blue in the Sistine Madonna exposes a limit in treating conceptual knowledge as direct access to a particular sensible quality.

Position in the argument

Bühler enters the discussion through the question of whether knowledge must be accompanied by an image. His position is that thought can be fully determinate without representation, provided the object can be given by some means other than sensation. The claim makes knowledge in a free state an important counterexample to any account that treats images as necessary components of thought.

The book distinguishes the description of an image as it is given in reflection from explanatory hypotheses about what images are. Within that inquiry, Bühler’s account is not simply dismissed: it helps establish that knowledge and imagery can come apart. The issue is what kind of object such knowledge reaches, and whether knowledge changes when it enters into an image-consciousness.

Knowledge without an image

Bühler’s example is an individual shade of blue in a painting: a person, he argues, can think it fully and exactly without representing it. The book’s analysis treats such free knowledge as relational and empty. The blue may be thought of as the fourth primary colour of the Sistine Madonna, but in that formulation the colour is reached through its place in an order, not through the concrete sensible quality that makes it this particular blue.

Bühler’s classification of states of awareness further clarifies the account. It divides them into consciousness of rules, relations, and intentions; the final term is judged unsuitable because it refers instead to order, arrangement, or system. In this framework, pure knowledge is principally consciousness of relations. It can encompass complex connections between individual objects, but sensible matter is present only as what the relations designate or support. Even a detailed conceptual identification therefore remains empty of intuitive, sensible content.

The challenge of the particular blue

The discussion challenges Bühler’s example on both psychological and ontological grounds. A specific shade, as a sensible individual, and knowledge of it belong to different orders of existence. Thought can identify the shade by its relations—for example, by locating it among the painting’s primary colours—but it cannot thereby apprehend the unique blue itself as a sensation. To aim at that blue directly would be to try to see it, not merely to think it through a relation.

This distinction also clarifies what happens when knowledge becomes part of an image. Imaging knowledge does not simply retain a relation such as the shade’s place in a colour order; it aims at something that is that shade. The relation recedes behind the thing, although the thing is not yet given with the opacity and externality of a perceived object. The book therefore treats the transition from free knowledge to imaging consciousness as a possible radical modification, not merely as the addition of an intuitive image to unchanged knowledge.

Relation to image theories and experimental reports

Bühler’s account stands alongside a theory associated with Husserl, in which an image provides intuitive fulfilment for an initially empty signification. The book questions that formulation: an image cannot simply arrive to complete an already constituted consciousness, because the image is itself a consciousness. The debate makes Bühler’s distinction consequential. Knowledge may be possible without imagery, but its role within an imaging act cannot be explained as though imagery were only a supplement to an otherwise unchanged thought.

Experimental reports discussed in the same inquiry complicate a clean boundary between pure knowledge and image. In Schwiete’s examples, one subject reported an indeterminate image of an opening, while another reported two indeterminate, dissimilar objects without spatial characteristics. Such cases were still affirmed as images despite lacking determinate intuitive qualities. Other reports describe a thought of something long and pointed, or a direction beyond the Mediterranean Sea, as a germ or tendency toward visual representation. These observations are not presented as Bühler’s findings; they show why the book asks whether knowledge changes before an image is fully constituted, and why the difference between empty knowledge and image-consciousness requires more than a simple opposition between thought and representation.

Significance

Bühler’s role is chiefly argumentative: his account gives the inquiry a strong case for thought without images, while its treatment of the blue shade reveals how relational knowledge differs from direct sensible intuition. The resulting distinction helps organize the book’s examination of pure knowledge, image-consciousness, and the intermediate states in which thought is already oriented toward the sensible without yet presenting a determinate image.