by Dr. Hans-Joachim Rudolph
There is a kind of truth that does not speak but shows. It does not reveal itself in discourse but in form. What it brings forth is visible, tangible, sensually perceivable order.
We encounter such forms in art, in architecture, but also in a movement or a well-placed line. They appear coherent, even when we cannot quite explain why. Their “truth” lies not in verbal reasoning but in their visual presence. What is ex-pressed here is a mode of insight beyond concepts—yet still intelligent.
In his work Visual Identity* (Insel Verlag, Frankfurt 1975), Reimer Jochims describes this kind of recognition as a psycho-physical process between matter and mind. Building on Konrad Fiedler, he understands form not as something external but as the visible emergence of an inner order—an order that does not argue but reveals itself.
This “visual truth” fundamentally differs from propositional truth as it is conceived in science. It is not “true” in the sense of a true statement, but in that it is coherent within its own conditions.
His book begins by examining the nature of non-conceptual insight: How can visual truth be conceived? What role does logical thinking play—and where does it have no role? He then shows that even small children, before they acquire language, possess remarkable abilities of form perception and spatial orientation. From this emerges a guiding question: Is there a structural parallel between a child’s way of engaging with the world and the creative thinking of artists? And what does that say about the nature of thought itself?
Visual Access to the World
“The eye thinks too”—Rudolf Arnheim’s famous phrase captures the essence of visual insight: thinking begins with seeing, feeling, and shaping—not with concepts.
Reimer Jochims developed this perspective systematically. Following Fiedler, he conceives of form as the result of a cognitive struggle for coherence. “Reality,” says Jochims, is the outcome of a psycho-physical process—a dynamic inter-play between mind and matter. The resulting form shows what has been thought—without having to name it.
The intellect is involved, but in a specific way: it does not operate conceptually but supportively. Jochims speaks of “simple and unspecialized logical operations” that serve the development of perception. Thought guides the process without translating it into language.
Strikingly, explicit negation is absent. In logic, negation is a central tool—in visual insight, it is largely irrelevant. What doesn’t “fit” is not logically excluded but revised. Forms are altered, discarded, and begun anew.
This mode of thinking is autonomous—not a precursor to conceptual cognition, but a full-fledged cognitive achievement in its own right. It produces its own kind of truth: not as correspondence with statements, but as experiential coherence within concrete materials and situations. The form-creating judgment is often a quiet “This fits” or “This feels right.”
Jochims’ theory thus points to a non-propositional yet rational dimension of thinking: thinking in forms rather than in concepts, a kind of truth rooted in the sensible. This way of thinking is largely neglected in education, since it resists standard testing. Yet it seems to be a fundamental mode of human world-interpretation—more primordial than discursive thought.
Visual Insight in the Child
Long before a child can speak, it thinks—not in words, but in movements, gazes, gestures, and forms. It points to things, arranges them, imitates, laughs at repetition, marvels at variation. Meaning is not named but shaped.
This is not a simple stimulus-response reaction, but a structured process of active engagement with the world. The child’s world is a world of forms: meaning arises through appearances, spatial relations, repetition and variation.
Developmental psychology has shown that complex cognitive processes unfold within the first year of life. Research by Piaget, Bruner, Trevarthen, and Gopnik revealed that children operate with implicit hypotheses. They expect reactions, test outcomes, construct order—all without language. Insight occurs through perception and action: visually, spatially, kinesthetically.
A vivid example is block play. It’s not just about motor skills—it’s about recognizing patterns, symmetry, and stability. “Right” or “wrong” is perceived sensually: if the tower falls, the form was incoherent. Negation appears as failure—not as an abstract “no”.
Sorting, repeating, sequencing all point to a prelogical thinking in forms. It makes judgments without abstraction—a formative mode of thought, rational in structure, sensual in appearance. In this sense, children’s cognition structurally resembles the kind of visual truth Jochims describes: a mode of coherence that is shaped, not spoken.
Naturally, there are differences between a child’s play and artistic creation. But the fact that both operate without verbal negation and judge through form is noteworthy. Both children and artists come to understand by shaping—and judge by re-vising.
Childlike and Artistic Thinking in Comparison
The child thinks by shaping—the artist shapes by thinking. Both operate beyond conceptual logic, without explicit negation, with a sense for what fits.
The artist engages with material—surface, line, color—just as the child engages with the unnamed world: as an open field of possibilities. Form does not arise from a concept but emerges in the process. Perception, judgment, and action are inter-twined.
The child acts the same way: it does not reach for the block because it grasps the concept of stability, but because it experiences what holds. Just as the artist varies lines, the child experiments with shapes. In both cases, judgment lies in action.
The difference lies in their conditions. The child is learning how the world works. The artist seeks to transcend what is already known. Yet both do so through form—not through concepts. The child seeks order; the artist seeks openness—but both do so through shaping.
Negation, too, in both cases is not logical but performative. An unstable structure, a failed drawing, a jarring sound—these are sensuous signals of failure. Critique occurs within the medium, not symbolically.
One final shared feature is temporality. Insight is not a fixed result but an unfolding process. The child repeats, destroys, begins again. The artist revises, erases, adds. Truth appears in the act—not in the conclusion.
All this points to a structural parallel between childlike and artistic thinking. Both show that insight does not depend on language—and that thinking in forms is not inferior to conceptual thinking, but in fact precedes it. It is non-logical yet intelligent thinking: a way of arriving at truth through coherence and form.
Visual Insight as a Fundamental Mode of Human Thinking
In language, we know truth as the correspondence between statement and fact—adaequatio intellectus et rei. In the visual realm, truth appears as the inner coherence of a form—as validity in the appearance itself. This formal truth has its own logic: not formal logic, but the logic of form.
Visual insight is not a marginal phenomenon, not a special case of childhood or artistic activity. It is a fundamental mode of human thought—older than language, more independent than concepts, more immediate than any discursive explanation. Even before a person forms an image, they have seen one. And before naming it, they have perceived order, sensed tension, distinguished shapes.
Artistic practice and childhood play are privileged arenas in which this kind of thinking becomes visible. Here, things are shaped without a predefined concept steering the result. Here, meaning emerges not through assertion but through form.
Yet this way of understanding is ambivalent. Its power to persuade is strong—often stronger than argument. It operates below the threshold of language, reaches the unconscious, shapes affects, directs attention. And precisely because it does not rely on concepts, it is susceptible to manipulation. In advertising, propaganda, and political imagery, visual thinking is deliberately used to produce opinion, generate desire, cement enemy images. What began as a medium of freedom becomes a tool of suggestion. It does not promote under-standing, but rather imposes agreement; instead of opening up the world, its interpretation is fixed.
This perversion of the visual is a systematic reversal of its original potential. It exploits the power of images to create bonds where openness would be possible. Where language compels us to think, the image allows immediate feeling. Where concepts permit counterarguments, the visual suggests evidence—even where it deceives.
For this reason, it is essential to understand the structures of visual thinking—not only to appreciate it in art, but to confront its effects in society. Those who recognize the rules of form are less susceptible to the seductions of imagery. Those who know what coherence means can also detect incoherence. And those who learn to cultivate visual judgment gain a degree of cognitive freedom—beyond language, but not beyond thought.
* Reimer Jochims: Visuelle Identität, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt 1975