There were the touchstones, and there were the landmarks, often distant but just as important, which defined the realm of your experience. It was important to keep them separate, to hold on to their distinction, this was a basic parameter, even though every landmark is only someone else's touchstone. The boundary between the two and the treatment of this boundary was the life, was the striving to know, was the placement of this striving and of the hybrid subjects that arose from it, reborn, bewildered, regathered, ready to start all over again. For the one who strives to know there is always everything yet to know since his object is imaginary, a product of the striving, but with a fiendish twist so that it never comes to know itself in this way, never becomes simple knowing. It can't untie the knot but only draw it tighter. Well then, eventually it will snap, no need of a Hercules, and until then, or more accurately in the until that is its prior, time folds around and around as you and your younger selves - and your alternate futures - exchange looks, draw up the tally of hopes and expectations, fires, floods and winds, that delivered and destroyed, the promises, the infinities in a poem, the finally accepted, but never agreed-to boundary between the ideal and the real.

You might look at it from the outside, describe it or imagine describing it to someone else, consider it from another perspective. The moment there is anything, an emergence for you of you, this is necessarily possible, it is imposed on you because it can't be conjured away; a perspective is others looking and you are one of them. And whatever it is, it might look good, but more likely looks bad, looks like a destiny, is predictable, is fixed in a pattern so that it is equally certain that the limitation inherent in that pattern cannot be overcome. This awareness of obstacle has nothing to do with overcoming but everything to do with the subjectification in the felt need to overcome, to recreate or rehearse or merely repeat the image of freedom. The actual degree of freedom is far less than the imaginative capacity, and the point is to play these off against each other. The point? Well everything emerges out of this so there ought to be someone responsible. But that's just it, you've used up all the subjects there are, there aren't any more lying around. But that absence too is a subjectification, the last subject is no subject.

The confidence that you have evaded the burden of self-conceit is merely one of the forms of self-conceit. This should be rather obvious, but is less so in the absence of any symptoms of such a confidence which are usually concealed beneath a bearing. You ought to wish not for assurance but for its collapse, and this can only be brought about through coming in contact with the self-conceit of others, which takes myriad marvelous forms. Whatever treasure you happen to be harboring there is a key somewhere that will expose it. You move forward expecting to exercise your talent and find that it is not you on centre stage but the other and their talent is precisely in slapping the smile off your face. No amount of introspection can do this but only looking in that terrible mirror which is the face of the other. But no, this overstates the case drastically, the conceit of otherness is quite different from but just as insidious as the conceit of self. They are complementary errors, just consider the emotions they each nurture.

To try to look at what is going on, to merely look with a minimum of preconceptions, with no desire that this looking mean something, that it be now or in the future a part of a story, or constitute an event of a certain kind, or that it bring something about. This of course is impossible and betrays itself almost from the first word, being a trying, being somehow a desirable or praiseworthy way to set out. Desires are like something extra that is attached to what is here, a kind of 'head' that is screwed on, one that can read, write and execute, but only according to a certain pattern, according to a certain code. In the end you find yourself so obviously separate from your desire and you ask just what did it bring you? was it worth taking on, after all? (Yes or no, the answer is immaterial.) By this time the intensity of it has already dissipated; desires burn up, even the desire to desire. It is by the momentum left over after the desire has imploded that you might see something new, because as the desire dies so do its objects, and all the understandings that made it the most natural thing in the world to wish these things. To catch a glimpse of all of it breaking up - the entire process, the urgent positing of subject, object, obstacle, god and devil - even just for a moment before the next world arises, is a tremendous relief. What do you see? Just this, that the lure, the hidden thing that is sought for in and through desire is nothing but a portion of yourself that you have alienated. This is a discovery that cannot be made casually, or discursively and cannot be made deliberately, it is reversed in being described; it can only be betrayed, only be seen.  

It is no less mind because there is a voice reporting it as if it were merely undergone, no less a mind because of a pervasive, but ephemeral, discontent that drives the kind of reflection called spiritual, that produces figures of the thinker. Mind is not just the thinking part of appearance but all of appearance. It is the being known, the exposure, and an irrepressible supplement, a kind of excess of capability that looks for ways to be consumed. And better to let it be consumed than to pretend to a critique of life in the name of some god or other; better just to see, seeing without a seer, which is what it is anyway, has always been, could never not be, beneath all the fun and games.

The mind's field of vision is limited to a sector which we call the outward. As much as you seek to bend it around there remains a complement that can only be inferred. Oddly, this dark side seems infinitely closer in to you that the part you seem to know, or is that just a fact about how you conceive of your self? - with difficulty if at all, and why, indeed, should you have any conception of yourself, plenty seem to get along fine without one. The world, the sum total of events, is posed in the outward, it is the place of the question and the questioner, but it is insufficient for their veritable bulk. If some significance is there it is projected onto a film and that film floats in a layered series of such films, each an impoverished image or map of reality, variants with nothing to unify them, they already include all maps. We know we are experiencing a sort of debased fiction in place of an unbearable and inconceivable communication with the real. And thus life proves boring, the bubble intact in spite of all attempts to break out, or to stretch it to the span of full presence. This is not a failure of will but the very nature of outer worlds, of all outer worlds. And the only remedy you can think of is to leave your room and go in search of a new stimulus. If the reality is keen enough, if it crosses a threshold, then you are excited to find yourself there, and it almost seems that the great sleeping whale of the self has opened an eye and raised itself up for a moment. But then at other times such as this one it seems to have vanished completely and you don't know how to bring it back or if it ever will come back of its own accord. This is not the opposite of anything, is not the pole of a dialectic, because opposites coincide, the absence of the self would be its presence. You cannot fulfil your love for the world because you have no self equal to it, and such a self can only be found by losing yourself utterly in this love.

Human and octopus consciousness can meet in a rather profound way, experiencing a distinctive "I-Thou" moment, according to some humans, even though their evolutionary history is so different. They seem to be able to recognise each other and acknowledge a commonality which is not narrowly historical or ontogenetic - there is no parallel childhood or infant experience as there may be with other mammals - but drawn, if from a deeper history, from a shared inheritance at the cellular level and shared responses to solar and lunar cycles, and to similar ranges of energy levels, embodiment via the physics of matter at the intermediate scale. If intelligence were purely historical then human intelligence would be indelibly social and octopus intelligence as bluntly isolated and instrumental. There might be interaction, but it would not have that peculiarly empathic dimension, that sense of meeting an other across a divide, and the sudden abolition of that divide. Without any apparent need for it it seems that the unfolding of octopus intelligence includes a full emotional as well as cognitive life. It is as if once a certain threshold of intelligence is crossed the spirit in its entirety starts to break through, so that as mind develops it inevitably pulls spirit in with it, possibly, probably, in forms that are almost always latent.

All phenomena of mind that can be explained by way of evolutionary biology can also be explained by way of metaphysics. This probably says no more than that neither of these discourses explains anything at all, that they are merely versatile systems for continuing to make a sort of sense, ne that is roughly consistent with what has gone before. For example, the imperative for survival is the drive of life to realise itself and is nothing but the search for the Good- and where the Good seems at odds with simple survival we finds its need to distinguish itself. People's need to validate their identities is both a social drive and a back-handed acknowledgement that identity is entirely a fiction, and hence a step on the way to the infinitely deferred implosion of the mental world, the world of appearance, which exists only to pretend that there is something happening and someone for it to happen to. There is no contradiction between these two kinds of explanation. Evolution does not take place in an infinite world of pure possibility, but in one that is highly shaped by prior occupation and by the latent properties of whatever it is that is evolving. In other words it proceeds in a highly specialised space. The fact that we don't seem to see this, that evolution is implicitly treated as if it were the Hegelian Notion, freely determining itself in a sequence of significant forms, in only an artefact of where we happen to be viewing it from. This is especially relevant for consciousness. As an evolutionary emergent it makes its entrance through a certain door and onto a certain stage. It opens its eyes in wonder, it breathes the air of another planet, and what it sees, and what it breathes, is not reality but a reflection of how it got here and to what it owes its arrival.

Attention is the directedness of consciousness, but also needs to be distinguished from intention, and intentionality. Attention is directed at an object, intention may be directed at what is not yet an object and intentionality names this capability which is both passive and active, receptive to the (possible) object and also creating it, forming it out of a presence already in place. The object of attention is positive, it possesses the ability to draw attention to itself, it is a salient of interest. But can there be empty attention? Attention must let go of one object and move to another and so must retain both a peripheral awareness, an attention to what is not attended to, and the ability to detach itself. There is no phase of consciousness which is not reversible, where it is absorbed it can also be precipitated - sometimes this seems natural since there is felt effort in any conscious formation, energy is consumed, becomes exhausted, but at other times it is surprising, as when consciousness is pathologically overmastered by its object and can't detach via its own process, something like addiction. In detaching itself attention moves into a moment of emptiness, becomes free-floating or latent, but only for the briefest time, since it ceases to exist when it has no object. Perhaps it is like those brief intervals in a film when the camera pans from one scene to the next and there is a jerky blur which would destroy the illusion that we are looking into a world if we weren't sure that will be a destination, a new object, a new satisfaction in relation to the one renounced. Objects of attention are those that draw it in, satisfy and absorb it. In some passages in nouveaux romans an empty cinematic gaze travels over a neutral scene until it becomes hooked by a sexual image, a lure of desire. We are looking for what we want. Think of a bee in a flowering garden, attracted into flowers to drink their nectar; at some point the bee has filled its reservoir, it pulls out of the flower and turns towards the hive, attention switches to complementary activities, regurgitation, communication. Attention as labour, as transformation.

The mind is certainly not designed for turning inward. Everything rushes in to thwart the impulse. What fuels the mind is interest and interest abounds in the darnedest places, including everything to do with interest itself, its vicissitudes, the lack of, the poor quality of, the best kind of, the alternatives to, the appetite for appetite, etc. Put another way, there are so many places to see yourself reflected; the mind was creating selfies long before they became a craze - but always? maybe not - absorbed by narratives which allow it to identify in different ways, to take on various roles, a cast of characters, to find out what they think in order to find out what it might think. Might is the key word; the provisional or hypothetical self was a great discovery, a great multiplier of interest. So how is attention to be pulled back in, with no object, or interest, or hypothetical self, or role? 'All of that is objectivity, but how about the subject, the one it is all for?' - this thought, so easy to express, is almost impossible to think, to realise. It is like trying to align two like poles of two magnets - perfectly denominated in French as aimants - you try to hold one and come in with the other on a straight line, dead centre, but the slightest fluctuation, and there are always fluctuations, sends it flying off to the side, extraordinarily energised. Unlike with interest, there are no salient points of interest in the direction of attention, and why would there be, it all goes out from there? Interest is all selfies, attention is none.

You wonder what of your life is real given that it is located inside a larger field in which every momentary phase of subjective meaning is revalued and reinterpreted according more embracing and more stable meanings, deferred meanings, historical truths that are real but not yet revealed. You know it to be so placed because you live in a mental and critical epoch, proud of its dizzying self-criticism. What are we? Whatever it is we must say it, will say it sometime, declare what we stand for, what the beliefs are that we hold to and which we think are indispensable for making sense of the world. We align ourselves to larger currents, as we see them, which fix the value of things, or at least the general direction of what is good, what is on the side of the angels, and what is the opposite, and we are scandalised by the fact that not everyone agrees, at least in broad outline, and that there is apparently no procedure, no communicative reason by which a final consensus can be obtained. But we also know beforehand that we are wrong, at least about the most important parts, that everything will look different, be seen otherwise at another time, a time all too like our own, but not. We imagine we survived nihilism since everything seems to have kept on going, new generations replacing old ones, new hopes, new prospects, as before, and it has surely always seemed somewhat chaotic when you are still in the middle of it, but we don't know if any bells would have rung when the shadow-line was crossed. Come on, one more effort of mind, the harder it gets the better it is, we've outdone so much already, let's outdo ourselves.

There is so much repetition as the days follow each other and you find yourself thinking the same thoughts on the same occasions, going through the motions like a puppet, or rather you don't find yourself at all but are lost in these unpinnable moments, these cascading deficient instances of some remote specialisation of being. It is not a repetition in the events but only an expression of the mind's inability to register these moments as unique and irreplaceable, to disinter and identify them, to mark them on the map of time. This appears to be a weakness of the mind, but it stems from the nature of subjective time of which what we call the mind is only one expression. As the past-continuous tense suggests in referring to them in retrospect the essence of these events is only revealed in the clustering of instances of near-indiscernibles, only aggregated do they acquire the density of lived experience. The distance between events is not to be measured by the imaginary duration that separates them but by the divergence of meaning between the families to which they belong. These families being an inherence of past and future instances, are outside of the flow of time. They belong to what we call identity or soul, which is in a dimension oblique to time. The truth is not experienced as such, but it haunts experience. There is an extraordinary poignancy to the awakened memory of moments of life which were not experienced as they were lived. What was there instead was an adumbration of this deferred awakening, and this is how even when we are entirely submerged in habit, lost in the dream, there is always an otherness, a sort of remainder. This is what would be left if we really could subtract away everything already known and taken for granted, the remainder being the zero-degree of livingness, ennui as the apparently etiolated and empty but in reality utterly dense and full, pure thick undifferentiated being - and only mistakenly dismissed as facticity.

The jiva, the individual soul, or what you experience with, is the entire life, that peculiar four-dimensional sausage that popular science sometimes speaks of. As we experience it, life is always a limited portion of flowing time, we are aware that the proximal region of relevance - grounded on sensory experience of the present subject and its location in a world -  recedes away into twilight, dream, unconsciousness at either end. Our 'delta T' is not a step function but something like a bell-curve, asymmetric, of varying width and with long tails (Could there be some sort of Fourier-like transform involved? Certainly somewhere...) It may have a peculiarly multi-dimensional character with regard to the past which often seems more active than a mere fading impression or echo - but surely these other dimensions are in the frequency domain rather than the time domain. At any rate the two canonical points where this thickly stranded flow comes into contact with timelessness are birth and death. Assume that both of these are respectively explosive and implosive events, singularities which transmit a sort of background radiation forwards and backwards over the entire extent of life. They must do this by virtue of their timelessness, as they connect equally with every point in time - or as a singularity in the time domain transforms to a smooth distribution in the frequency domain, the signature of a soul, its true, but not original, face.

Aloneness is a relative concept: if there were no outside, or community, in relation to which you were alone you would simply be everything. Metaphysically aloneness marks an essential point in a movement that subsumes it, and whether this movement leads to a fundamental, but reconciled, dualism, or to an implosion of all dualisms is immaterial. It is a singularity in consciousness, but not of any imaginable consciousness only of our consciousness, paradoxically, of collective human consciousness, a singularity out of which the individual soul is born. And does not the moment of death recapitulate the moment of birth? Can we not hear an echo of Christ's "Eli Eli, lama sabachtani" in Descartes'"Cogito ergo sum"? Only an echo, each gives rise to an errancy, patterns reconciled or dissolved only in a much larger mandala.

Separation is not death, but as an impending element in psychic life it can and does mobilise passions of the greatest intensity. Death on the other hand is most certainly separation - even if many of those who die do not do so in full consciousness, and despite a certain set of beliefs that imagines life after death to be quite continuous with life before death - Christ's last words are evidence enough for this. That there is a tearing up by the roots may be known from an examination of all the little deaths, otherwise thought of as big changes, that we experience in the course of a life. Self-consciousness on the brink of death must relinquish its absorption in its worldly context and return to the barest own-being. It may then see that it was only ever for itself and that the engrossment in the world masked the fact that the world had never been and could never be its foundation, its final metaphysical ground, but that it persistently seemed as though it did. To be born, with all that that short word entails, into a place is naturally to be rooted in the beliefs of that place; to begin to awaken, to begin to know, is to know nothing else than this, and to revel in its massive richness and its contradictions. Such beliefs are never simple or explicit, but reach down into metaphysical depths where the nature of being and the origin and purpose of life are secured. The active soul in its worldly engagement draws on this reserve for the implicit knowledge of itself, for the cardinal values that orient its being, for identity, in short. It is the heir to all the levels and can make what it can with them, art or crime. To reverse the process of putting out roots, however, is to discover that what seemed to be deepest nativity and seamless communion was a dream-like illusion which did not touch the innermost subject. To realise as a subject entirely lacking in identity is to be utterly forsaken. This insight may last only for the duration of the final conflagration or mark the passage to something unspeakable.

Mental consciousness comes about against a background of implicit understandings by which it acquires whatever sense it has, or it is the salience of one phase of this knowing mass, its separation out of an already existent ocean of thought - but how is such separation possible? What is it that distinguishes, that presumes to have already chosen, to have known how to choose, any thought at all, including this one? It is nearly impossible to describe how strange this apparently banal and habitual experience is. To go back upstream of any thought only to find other thoughts, very quick and spreading out in every direction, like a voice suddenly picked out in a murmuring hubbub, sounds that speak and prove to have been whole sentences. It is just as hard to say what a thought is, but for its incorrigible illusion of self-transparency. We ought to know, it is us at the heart of certainty, of the identity of thinking and being, but it proves dark and elusive. Feeling, closer to being, precedes thinking, but we cannot discern the point at which thinking emerges out of feeling like a rim or fringe in a field of changing light. Feeling too, the very field without a centre, embodiment, is itself a differentiation out of an ocean of feeling, as is will the natural prior of feeling, closer yet to being, like breathing, the resting body of the world; it was you doing it before you ever acted. You are there, you have always been there, you wake out of a dawn that that was already in full swing, that was already awake before being noticed, even in deep sleep knowing the way. You am.

There is an inner world of thoughts, feelings, intentions, and perceptions and an outer world of events and signs but since the outer world only affects us through our experience of it the outer world must be inside the inner world, and the true inner world must be quite unlike, must have an entirely different form to, the inner world as defined in subjectivity, that is, defined through its own folkways. The inner world is fleeting and unreliable, it contains no clearly defined objects and such objects as there are are patently affected by the condition of the body and so require continual correction in order to be of any utility. The stable objects of the outer world form a better basis for understanding the conditioning of inner experience than any of the inner contents themselves which always have a secondary character as meanings even if they are unmediated as events. In fact the only effectiveness of the inner world is in its meanings and meanings are always founded on systems drawn from the outer world. Event and meaning are so far apart in the inner world that they can only be brought into some rough alignment by way of the outer world. The inevitable conclusion being that the inner world is contained in the outer world. But again, the outer world as meaningful is nothing but the human world, and the human world is a precipitate, a sort of coral, built up by myriads of historical achievements of the inner world. The history does not belong to our individual inner world but to the collective inner worlds of us and our ancestors. So, as long as we grant that both individuality and time are dissolved in the true inner world, we again find the outer world to be inside the inner world. However, the world-building achievements of the inner world are creative acts and these have no inner strength or lasting efficacy unless directed at an obdurate outer world, unless they are in some sense the (self-)sacrifice of the inner world.

A theory of mind is also a theory of theories of mind and in this it can easily fall into an distorting spiral, like the endless layers of strategy in Prisoner's Dilemma. If the are no limits to what we imagine other people might do, in spite of what they say about themselves, in spite of the benign or downright compassionate image they wish to transmit, it is because we find no limits to what we might do - and why should they not have at least as much freedom to act as we do, in fact generally more so, our inhibitions being known to us and theirs not. And if we know there are no limits to what we might do it is because we can imagine our own responses to some outrageous liberty they have taken, moments when we feel justified in abandoning all limits. There are peculiar and systematic distortions in the frames we impose in considering others in order to evaluate their dispositions. We may seek to avoid the use of stereotypes but we must use them in creating these frames since in attempting to reveal the dispositions of others we use hypothetical instances where the other responds to stereotypes, stereotyped instances in other words. We judge others by the way in which they judge which we don't know but can only imagine by pitting one stereotype against another. This is the subject of much the drama both real and imaginary, both including us as actors or not, which consumes our attention. There are inherent flaws in any theory of mind which lead to the ethical turn but rather than resolving anything this only draws us in more blindly.

The subject and object are not autonomous existents so how is it that the polarity between them varies and can be intensified beyond measure? And how is it that perception arises only in their duality? There is a process or continuous event that while itself invisible precipitates subject with object with subject with... It is a disequilibrium and perhaps we can lean on it, push it this way and that, make it hang further out of balance. All manifestation is a kind of fucking, not least in that you can't say anything about it, can't produce a commentary, running, crawling or stationary without missing the point - and it is so human to miss the point. When it is on it is on and it produces its own kind of music, it knows how to sing and we are a voice in the chorus without saying a word. And is it really us? We seemed more knowing, we did whatever needed to be done next without having thought about it, inescapably right and therefore sublime after a fashion, mere presences, the miracle entire, the shouting angels in every hair, in every drop, in every fibre. And us, unable to carry the least part of it with us, over into the next moment.

Your understanding of division is shaped around reflections on the experience of time, but this family of experiences is weighted towards self-differing. It is the nature of being in time that you cannot coincide with yourself, and that you are propelled in a distinct direction by this fissure in identity, this is how we each of us must discover time, already surrendered to it. And yet our ideas and feelings about the end of time, or freedom from time, are built around the notion of an end to separation - and separation, being always directed to the other or the outer, has a different history to that of self-differing. That I am a stranger to myself serves as no mediation for the other's strangeness to me. What preceded separation was not the union with the mother, although this is a common and far-reaching mistake, but an extraordinary innocence and openness, which we can sometimes recall in our relations with animals, this was not temporally prior to separation but it was separation entirely without reluctance, resentment or remorse, without re-doubling. The lines that set off the syntonic from the dystonic emerged from this but were unforeseen. They were inevitable results of a certain over-enthusiasm, of too much mind. Only then did separation assume its melancholy tone, the emptying of intimacy and the invention of solitude. A grief arose and was almost instantly suppressed so that it returns as both lachrimae rerum and the bracing obduracy of things.

This is the strange thing, that there is this promise of happiness even when the only thing surely ahead is death. Happiness does not then belong in time? But that is just what happiness is, freedom from time. And where better to uncover this than where time is at its most inexorable, where it dominates completely? But it is a different happiness to the one you have imagined, it is not the great de-alienation, the awakening from the dream of enmity and opposition and its immemorial rule, the recovery of innocence, a universal friending, recovery, insouciance, the reign of music. That is one of the spectres haunting history, not the one you usually think of, perhaps, but since history cannot end until it has coincided with this oblique and reversed image of itself it is one of the engines of time. No, this happiness is behind the process of process, indifferent, satisfied, taking no side, to such a degree that time unhindered by any trace of hope, regret, longing, or the desire for arrest, ceases to be time.

A slight defamiliarisation and you can begin to gauge your absorption, O this world is quite a fascinating place, but who exactly is fascinated? Traces of happiness are everywhere because everything promises a still greater intimacy than that of the senses and you don't even need to be in love. The sweetest experiences under the rule of passing time, of the rushed quality, yield only a hint of the fullness you still crave because you know its is owed. Yours is the wealth that needs no counting. It is every kind of happiness and there are as many distinctive colours and flavours of it as there are things you can conceive, and what you love is the explosive variety if not any one phenotype, because at core all forms of happiness are instances of one quality, of a tremendous recollectedness, something of the self, self-luminous, essential bliss. Only in this is there freedom from time. The self's nature is out of time and free of all quality - which you know but won't admit because it initiates qualitative experience in time. Bliss, being, knowledge are projections in this time which is no other than your self in its parting and re-embracing, its les adieux, fission and reunion, dualities that undo themselves in their very making. Every particular arrives here at this endless festival, this compliant orgy of phenomenality.

The mind is firmly rooted in the body so that there is no flicker of thought that is not also a flutter of the body, and no ripple in the body that is not also echoed in the mind in a purely ideal context where the body-image serves as a loose proxy for the self. This leads to a false sense that the body shares the mind's preoccupations, that a success for the mind is a strengthening of the body and that the anxiety felt on becoming aware of a change in the body is the body's own shrinking from its destiny. This illusion is fed by the fact that the words that denote mental states and modes are usually descriptions of bodily states, vaguely meant to be understood metaphorically. If the body does in fact have any feelings in regard to itself, and if the vegetative soul could speak them, these would express its purely material solidarity, its belonging, its fundamental loyalty to the great democracy of the material. No molecule or chemical or thermodynamic or electric or informational system would be or could be in any way privileged over any other; they have no strict boundaries and no limitations on freedom of association. The body, indeed all of life, is perfectly fine with death; it does not distinguish itself from death and every system of life, viewed from the perspective of matter, is also a system of death - as ought to evident whenever we eat or even breathe. So what we experience in suffering, in the craving for life, for the sovereignty of life over death, is nothing but a form of hegemony. As psychological beings, that is as psycho-physical selves, we are the privileged beneficiaries of this hegemony and contemplation of its inevitable downfall should inspire a ruthless recension of our ontological presuppositions.

Take it like this: there is the invisible and unmanifest seer and there is the seen which is its counterpart. You can't have one without the other. Compare this to audience and show. The audience is unseen in the dark, its gaze directed away from itself and towards the illuminated stage on which there are various performers moving in and out of relationships. And it is not just the spectacle of the performers they take in but the set and setting as well. Within the staged relations, as read by the seer, there is always a basic polarity of subject and object, but the holding of these positions shifts around freely. This is where the entire rhetoric and ethics - these are inseparable and perhaps identical - of the terms subject and object plays out. We say the seer identifies with some distinguished element in the scene when that element is endowed with the subjective role relative to one or more other elements in their manifest relations. There can be a plurality of such relative subjects in which case there is always one true subject among them. This may be because the polarity is forced between any two and is forced to be consistent according to a certain logic, asymmetry, transitivity and so on, or else because the only rule is that of the one true subject and the logic is its side-effect.
This is how it seems to work but it is not entirely convincing. It tames the idea of subject so that we forget it is an abyss. This theory of what is is the point of view of the objective true subject, an oxymoron. This is the other as if God's all-seeing eye. It is like the reflection of the sun which we mistake for the sole source of illumination only because we are unable to look at it.

Being able to perceive others as fellow subjects has been referred to as having a theory of mind or being able to assume the intentional stance, and these terms emphasise the secondary nature of this capability. It is not built-in in a generally unproblematic way like stereoscopic depth perception but in common with other kinds of theory it is built up in stages and passes through a number of cognitive turning points which are not universally assured. The questions of the degree to which it is more a theory than a practical skill - riding a bicycle is not the same as having a theory of velocipedality - and of what is its relation to empathy - overlapping or orthogonal? - aside, it is a matter of certain functional beliefs which are acquired through experience and which only alter, apart from the effects of disease or trauma, in the direction of becoming more comprehensive and inclusive. The perception of others grows like a theory, and is even sometimes seen as a late acquisition connected to the ability to appreciate realist art. In the novels of George Eliot, for example, we are shown the growth of this capacity as a creative leap prompted by suffering and other checks to the ego. Some of the stages here include going from perceiving others' intentions toward us - or those which directly affect us - to others' intentions toward third-persons and toward themselves; and expanding the view from the intentions of others to their thoughts and feelings; and from seeing their actions as expressions of their selves to seeing them as expressions of their understanding, indeed of the current state of their own theories. These theories must be in good part a cultural product and so anxiety about failures in theory building must always be present, expressed perhaps in fantasies of zombies, AIs and serial killers, but generally projected safely away from the self. There are other functional theories that we build in the process of humanisation which would appear to be built on top of a theory of mind and to therefore be posterior and more abstract, but since these include the self more fully their fractures and anxieties are prone to raise far more intense passions. In particular these posterior syntheses include the theory of good life, that of intimate relations and that of the social network.