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Sunday, 14 August 2016



Even if what we call consciousness takes its rise from feelings that accompany bodily tropisms this explains no more about it than the way that the feeling of the body provides an anchor for what must be by its nature far more fluid. This other thing remains nameless because it has no world, and indeed it is only through the intervention of bodily consciousness that a world first comes about, so that this latter forms the screen or the frame in which everything is projected. World here has to be understood as the necessary correlative of home, which is perhaps the more fundamental term. We can observe this in simple forms of life with little or no nervous organisation such as worms, ants and snails, and indeed what is a single celled organism but a kind of intentional microcosm? More complex worlds are built up in concentric layers but very strongly mapped one into the other so that although the layers may be distinguished it is impossible to locate any experience wholly within a single layer, or indeed in anything but all the layers at once, including those we do not yet have an inkling of. In this way we have the notion of different interpenetrating worlds, where each world represents, with its own drastic foreshortenings, the possibility of a projection of the unbounded totality. If the external world of objective but relative space and time is a particularly successful refraction of the world of bodily consciousness, achieved not without considerable if largely forgotten effort, like language, it is not the only possibility. The worlds that we inhabit in dreams seem to be located in precisely the opposite direction, relative to bodily feeling, as the outer world which they mirror and parody.

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