In all its various forms suffering, as distinct from pain, contains the frustrated desire to abolish itself. It grows analytic so that it seems always to have arisen as a result of some kind of error, which means a kind of choice, even if you are forced to admit that the choices made were inevitable. Eventually this boils itself down to a single cause, such as craving, ignorance, or pride as the source or universal form of all the other modes of faulty will. And sometimes a term like 'ego' is applied to the locus of this explanation, as if it is both agent and agency responsible for it. The ego is a blunderer stubbornly acting out the consequences of a primal mistake. It inveterately takes things personally, you say, when in fact things just happen, and its biggest mistake is believing in its own existence. But just as there is a positive ego from whom you derive great delight as well as this negative ego whom you mercilessly patronise, so there is an anti-ego, a summation of all the good advice you've ever been given as to unmaking this absurd figure. Every variety of response and attitude is included in the resulting dance but no insight is offered into what exactly the personal is, and how it arises out of the purely impersonal, unless it is suffering itself that is the key.

The scientific idea is that knowledge is validated by prediction and control, from which it follows that the subject of such knowledge is the human knower in general, or what you might call the context of prediction. In many ways this is a distillation of the mode in which your mind habitually operates, in the sense that it is the process of probing at matters because you have an interest in them, in which the sense of that phrase as 'have a investment and purpose in the outcome' predominates. The same double meaning inheres in the verb 'to speculate' on or about something. Have you ever inquired into yourself without a more or less overt intention to make things better? Can you? Is it possible? The extent of your openness is the breadth you can give to the possible meanings of better. You know what your best sense of better is, and it is the one you dignify as the most detached, most objective, most indifferent to outcome. This simply means that your goal, whether realistic or quite imaginary, is to identify as consciousness in general, as the abstract context of knowing. Acting thus is perhaps a way of sublating desire, of pushing interest so far that it is reconstituted beyond any particular interests. This might be a life's work, exploration is always worthwhile, it needs no external justification, but it seems to leave the figure of knowing itself unquestioned. This has something to do with focus, with the way a focused image passes through a vertex or pinhole. If there is a real disinterestedness it is not like this, it is not at the limit of interestedness, does not cure the pinhole of its embodied vices. It can't be reached by any path, but you can't shakes off the conviction that it is here, everywhere, hidden in plain sight.

The distinction between what you call the objective as against the presence you take to be subjective is a fundamental structure within experience but not itself a matter of experience. It is a kind of inference, but not one that begins with the self-evidently subjective, with the imaginary Cartesian point of origin. The world out there is the world of others, and only of yourself as one among those others. It is not that you come to know others in analogy with yourself, but that you come to know yourself as a be-ing (a process or struggle for identity) in analogy with others, who are always already established in your world, who are the reference that determines whatever meaning you can find in your own presence. Your sense of the material world is complementary to your sense of self, but your sense of self is secondary to your sense of the presence or identity of others. The existential dimension of emotions which arises from the respect in which they force awareness of your 'facticity' on you as an inevitable concomitant of their apparently only self-regarding intention (for example, 'I fear (harm)' entails that 'I am a kind of thing that can suffer (harm).') seems to prove, in what has now succeeded metaphysics, that matter prevails in the cosmos. But all that this really points to is an otherness, underlying and preceding your self, and it is more in line with the way of things known that this otherness is other selves, is in a sense social. For the existentialists the social is all too often the inauthentic, but they neglect to take account of the fact that the disquiet experienced in relation to others is identical to that experienced by way of their own putative 'facticity'. The other is the missing middle term in the syllogism of being.

The traffic paradigm for emergence puts paid to atomistic theories of consciousness, such as those which are quantum-based or panpsychist. Consciousness may emerge at a certain level or bounded set of levels in a hierarchy of mind which can be thought of as extending indefinitely far in both 'directions', above and below, but the explanation for the specific qualities, the phenomenology based on qualia say, that constitute what we recognise as consciousness, cannot be that they are made up out of the agglutination of kindred qualities of a finer grain existing at a lower level in the hierarchy - as if they were atoms of the consciousness that we, as subjects, identify in molecular form. What the traffic paradigm shows is that while there may be awareness of and some participation in the mind at the higher level by the consciousness at the lower level, there is no transfer of phenomenology between such levels. Thus you as the driver can experience your participation in the phenomenon of a flow of traffic, but your phenomenology gives you no access to the phenomenology that would be the natural expression of the behaviour at the higher level. Another example might be the relations of ants and an ant colony. The latter seems to be relatively more intelligent than the former in its response to its environment, but if either level of mind were presumed to possess phenomenology, there is no reason at all to infer that this could somehow be induced or transferred or sublated to the neighbouring level. Phenomenology might be thought of as embodying what is implicit and axiomatic for a mind relative to its possible actions in its environment. So if the environments are distinct, as they are in the two levels of an emergent mind, then the possible phenomenologies would be utterly disjunctive. This amounts to saying that while a hierarchy of emergents might be a correct explanation of the nature of what we know as mind, it offers no solution to the so-called hard problem, that is, why a certain level 'has' or does not 'have' phenomenology. 

Watching the traffic on an arterial road in a big city during a busy, but not peak, time offers a paradigm of emergence that is more illuminating than say, the typical example of the kinetic theory of gasses. The passing of cars is a discrete, irregular and frequent phenomenon. It has the same oddly pleasing Poisson-ish randomness as raindrops or the Geiger-like croak of frogs in a wetland. But to understand its relative smoothness and persistence you need to use a continuous measure of flow. When you do this you can derive a differential description which enables you to explain the endogenous behaviour of the flow, in particular the odd tendency that traffic has to become slowed down or temporarily jammed for no obvious reason, or more generally the mood of the traffic. To drive in such traffic is to enter this flow and to experience it, and to often be challenged or baffled by its dynamics. It is the flow of traffic that articulates with your purposes in having become a part of it; you are in your car to get somewhere and your will to get there, aggregated with the corresponding will of each other driver, is what creates the phenomena of the flow. At the same time as you are a discrete unit you are also a part of the emergent flow, you are simultaneously the individual with highly distinctive means, goals, methods and sense of self, and one of the substitutable corpuscles making up the flow. Every car is the expression of a brain that has been trained, and every trained brain is the imprint of a history - and all of this is submerged. There is more food for thought in this than in Searle's Chinese Room, since you can experience both modes of being in endless detail, can shift the emphasis between them to any degree. What is mysterious is not any antithesis between these modes but their effortless coexistence.

Is it really so easy to explain this desire to be someone? If you don't stand out from the litter in some way then you'll be denied attention, will die from neglect. There's a powerful drive at work here, surely, but that's why you learn to care for yourself. And then it is only after the need to survive has been practically assuaged that the real craving for identity seems to kick in. It was never just a matter of survival, you wanted to be, as well, and somehow this needs social proof. There is a difference between being loved and being respected, so that love, which provides not just care but the assurance that you are special and irreplaceable to some powerful, or at least independently significant, other, is insufficient without respect. Feeling loved provides the ground from which you can go out and win respect. Socially, love is not an end but a means. You might gain admiration, or the status of being enviable, independently of being respected. But surely the latter is the more preferable from the point of view of individuation since you can respect yourself but apparently not admire yourself. Those who choose to take admiration or envy directed to themselves as grounds for respect are seen as contemptible, as targets for satire. Is being respected being a personage, being uniquely definable in some way? Any ground of distinction can be twisted into one of respect, but for this to be effective the distinction needs to be socially recognised, to represent a rare status in an objective hierarchy of value. The craving for identity is pervasive but rather opaque. Naturalistic explanations for it are all very well, but they don't expose its strange logic, or rather, they don't sufficiently estrange the logic it persistently exposes.

Perhaps the biggest difference in the use of purposive action as a general term in preference to intentionality is in the difference between an act and an intention. Intentionality is wholly absorbed in the broad concept of purpose, it is in relation to the field of possibilities but is reserved, reservatus. The action is irreversible and only in this way does directionality actually appear. The action is singular and defines an order that was not necessarily present in the intention. It is something like the so-called collapse of the wave function. The latter, which you could say expresses intention in a general manner, evolves purely deterministically, and the associated probabilities can be precisely calculated, but each individual event is always an ungrounded and indeterminable choice. It is little wonder that this has been seen as having some sort of deep connection to consciousness, although the details of this connection are never spelled out with adequate precision. The notion of consciousness is of course itself unclear, but it perhaps belongs in the same family as intention, or intentionality, or indeed attention. There is a certain detachment implicit in it, it is a "smoker's" way of being present at the event, of reserved participation. Will is closer in spirit to the fatality of choice, and, in so far as it is realised to be a senior concept to that of consciousness or intentionality, it is, if not blind, quite alien to the class of visual metaphors.

Purposive action is a general term, it's really meant to cover everything, certainly not just your purposes, or not in a simple way. What after all are your purposes? You seemed to know, until the moment that question arose and you intended to respond. As far as you can see they are endlessly nested one within another, and those you can claim are a small sub-band of those you can name and those a small sub-band of those you can in some way sense or enter into, and outside of those are all those that you can merely acknowledge, perhaps by your awe, or by your fear, or by a sense of the sublime, or just the need to look someone in the eye and say something. This picture, more or less, this extraordinarily interwoven network, with you, your whole heart, illuminating some small part of it that recedes into shadows on all sides without any loss of relationship, of tug, (Beziehung), is the only reason for talking in the key of purpose, or purposes, or indeed of will. Before there was the sense of your own self-directed purposes (and how grateful you were in the ordinary course of things for that crystallisation) there was a world of purposes already in operation, and that is what you'll yield up the well-worn levers of will to, in time. So not just everything you do, or every action done through you, but everything you encounter is this same purposive action, deeply known. What then is it to be an end and not a means, and so to treat others?

It's quite simple, what you seek is the principle (or the principal?) of experience, of your experience in general. Every particular experience is insufficient just as it is a going out, or an application of the principle. The possibility is exercised in this instance. You agree to accept certain assumptions, suspend disbelief in your existence, invest in a ticket and off you go. It gets plenty dramatic, you hold tight to the chosen conditions which can no longer be questioned, your life of a moment ago is still there on the ground, quaintly ant-like and eminently questionable, as you sail away in the ever more intense here and now, if you could only spare a moment, the one perfect moment inside of all this! You've surrendered to time, to the rushed quality, and no matter how good it seemed, no matter how you cried out, "This is it! Beauty itself!" it doesn't touch, or even come close to the principle. No matter how you focus on it, open your arms and let go of everything you were holding on to, free-fall into the tunnel, you never get any closer. It is fractal, just like this, and this again, or logarithmic, you are always exactly the same distance away.

What you think with words, what you get hold of by way of a grammar, what you write, this forum or hearth where you gather yourself, all of this is like a moon orbiting the planet-earth of your body, while both together, locked in their dance, orbit the sun of being. The sun illuminates both spheres independently, can't tell them apart, and you spin in your own orbit, but you can only go where you are carried by your great world, your mother. You can't look straight at the sun, you don't know its nature, the body, glowing opalescent or fiercely monochrome, is your proxy for it and you are touched to find that you are the same for it (how patiently the body, with all its staggering genius, attends upon your lunatic whims! can you ever repay its faith?), but from time to time you eclipse each other. And this solar system is a crowded one, there are other planets and circling moons everywhere, the orbits tug on each other, become perturbed and difficult to predict on any but the smallest scale. The proximity of another planetary system can disrupt the relations between earth and moon, to say nothing of all the kinds of eclipse you play a role in, wittingly and unwittingly. And even the father-sun, the author of your being orbits something else, a black hole say, and is perturbed by other suns, and the galaxies have their own relations, propelled away from each other, at least as you see it, from the measured time you keep by way of your interwoven processes, your wild and silvery music.

What you take as consciousness, as your consciousness, is only what it is by virtue of the background against which it shines-forth and into which it fades. This is clear enough for discursive, or intentional, consciousness which is never sufficient in relation to what it is about, and so much the less in relation to itself. It depends on something, something more conscious than itself, an other who listens to it; its attention is performed for another attention, without which, frankly, it would be nothing at all. And how can it be so sure of the ear of this other if it didn't hang onto the confidence of feeling consciousness, of unmediated body awareness? The outer and inner senses are diverse and their contents bear no intrinsic connection to each other but are brought together in something deeper again, an inner touch of which every sense is its own inflection, its own mood and tense. This inner touch, here, now, always, all ways, is nameless, pure particularity, more you than you could ever be, the event that gives you like the weather that gives sun or rain. Or beyond weather, the climate, the atmosphere, the space... it goes on and on, endless containments, endless openings. It is known because it happens, it happens because it is known.

It was of another order of truth quite beyond the possibility of skepticism; you knew it more surely than you knew your own existence, it was hyper-cogito. This superior form of certainty came with its own understanding, thus: In every realisation there is place of the free-play of alternatives against which anything positive must be posed, and this means that in ordinary understanding clarity of definition and the possibility of doubt are necessarily synonymous. Here free-play means relative absence, you withdraw so that the object can show itself as it is - this is your paradigm of truth - but that absence is a syncope, you simply can't know whether the ground was shifted while you were unaware, that the response truly fits the question. In this other kind of knowing the valences of inside and outside, or of presence and absence, are reversed. Where you were previously absent you are now more present, are absolutely present; if you identify it is with the creative intensity you previously consigned to the space of your absence, to the blank unknowing in the dialectical heart of experience. Hence every realisation is experienced from the inside, without any break in continuity. The gap in which the possibility of doubt could arise is fullness, and for the first time you encounter the truth unveiled. It changes things forever and yet it makes no sense, since what makes this truth so certain is precisely its contrast with 'ordinary' truth, it is dialectical in spite of itself. Isn't this just the necessary critique of enthusiasm? Does it apply to itself?

According to one theory there are three main divisions of mind of which the outer two are conscious and the middle one is unconscious. At the lowest and most embodied level there are the primary emotions, the 'animal soul', lust, fear, play, care, etc., and at the highest there are our thoughts and purposeful intentions: deliberation, reflection and imagination and such 'human' emergents. These are the conscious parts of ourselves, but they are quite different and almost incompatible in quality, the one being immediate and imperious in its demands, and the other being abstract, highly mediated and aware of its mediation, the dialectical soul, perhaps. Between these two, and unconscious are the acquired structuring process that parse the primary emotions so that they can appear before the reflective mind in the form of meanings and motivations. In this layer the primary emotions are represented and in the form of representations they can be bound into more or less stable but arational complexes. When the psychoanalysts talk of primary process in the unconscious it is roughly the activity of this middle layer that they are referring to. What seems to distinguish this view from the psychoanalytic one, however, is that the unconscious is seen as sandwiched between two heterogeneous forms of consciousness. The self could be taken as the whole of these parts, but perhaps it is more properly taken to be a virtual centre located in the unconscious, because only here is there the possibility of the entire structure being reflected within itself. The process of the unconscious is thought-like, but is not thought, neither is it primary emotion - in fact thought is unable to grasp it at all.

The widespread domestication of certain technologies has made a class of fiction plots, for example those that were premised on the divergent misunderstandings of characters who were physically separated, close to obsolete. In the same way access to social intelligence (that is, knowledge) previously thought to be inaccessible in principle could lead to a restructuring of emotions, by way of the stories that they are embedded in. Are we then in sight of the long-sought cure for love? Like our fiction plots, love seems to have an essential relation to stories, indeterminately generating and being generated by them. Any augmentation of perspectives, of the very principle generating perspectives, ought to have a significant effect on anything downstream of narrativity. The cure for love would doubtless take the form of a hunting down of blind spots, or better still of a ruthless everting, an illumination, of dark places so that the question of blind spots could no longer arise. Whatever is unknown in the other passes into you and your love for them melts into your love for yourself. Every new twist in the culture seems to be aimed at the burning heart of the previous formation. It is intent on rendering all received love stories caduc, unrepeatable, ineffectual, merely entertaining. But then by some unforeseen turn - the action of the blind-spot - the old stories are revealed as the truth of the new stories. But the melting away of blind-spots goes on, only much more slowly than you think. The drives are gradually unmasked, they succumb to objectification, to commodification. The subject precesses.

Those components of experience that depend upon a capacity for a certain kind of purposive action are just those from which you can consider yourself as detached. Whether such a capacity has independent existence, so you can imagine, say, augmenting it via certain training, or via a drug, is not important, it is rather about how you think of that kind of experience and of your relation to it. The question belongs to the grammar of experience. The ability to think of some part of experience as depending on a capacity is surely itself a capacity, but what is not capacity is the possibility of having a given capacity. This is to say that the mental operation of detachment is not purely a matter of imagination but of an approach to the existential. Detachment only emerges with the weight of the question, 'who is detaching?' The distinction emerges in the case of love where to say that the other is an end in themselves means that it is not a matter of a certain way of treating them but of the absolute event of an encounter, of whether the other remains present (as or in the question) after you have detached from the circumstances, from the capacities you have brought to bear. In the question 'who?' the particularity of the situation stands over against the thought, the implicit description of the situation - it belongs to the happening of the situation and not its meaning, its assimilation to a world. If this is taken to be an antithesis then its significance is lost, the two are a difference which does not constitue a duality.

For the most part they are soulless, but soul is the quality they most seek, most claim, most overlook, most persecute. They might claim to be edified by the art that pleases them, when you catch them being so pleased by it, but it is soul that they suck from it, that they feed on as if in need. What would it imply to say of one that he or she is ashamed of having a soul? As distinct from not having one, of being ashamed of not having a soul? You could map out the four alternatives, having or not having a soul versus being proud or ashamed. But do those say, who are proud of having no soul really have no soul, or is that just the way their soul expresses itself? It is to do with hidden depths of experience, but also with illusions produced by mirrorings, veilings, fleeting appearances, by the ambiguity of motives. If it is anything at all, it is of the nature of the soul to conceal itself behind appearances, but unless there is some experience which makes it present, for someone, to someone, at some time, it might be nothing more than a 'way of speaking about' the hiding process itself.

Where there are two of you the overlap of highly divergent contexts means that neither can be fully individual to the other. You are merely types in the other's field, but each knowingly delivers to the mutual scene a fiercely individuating consciousness, a single world that is all the world and that is centred on an originating and radically unsubstitutable absence. It is your experience and nothing else, and the intercourse between you is motivated by this metaphysics, first and last. Strange encounters ensue on ritualised acts of selection, and part of you thinks also of 'Selektion'. The ritual is the indispensable supplement. After how many such encounters do we become individualised to or for each other? What is revealed that was not there from the start, or long before it? There is no limit to what is sought.

Schubert's Die Schöne Mullerin was performed in a church. The fine young tenor and his older and grizzled accompanist took their places in front of the altar in a cleared space below a large crucifixion. This, in pale yellow wood, dominated the scene. You could almost feel the still-fresh incisions made by the carver's blades. Elderly couples predominated in the audience. They seemed to approve, to socially seal, Wilhelm Müller's tale, which took on a sacrificial quality as it unfolded in the words and gestures of the singer, in the piano's ironic commentary. The journeyman miller falls in love with the miller's daughter, he dares to speak his love, she seems to accept him, but then transfers her affections to the huntsman. He descends into grief and embraces the running brook in which he drowns. It seemed to echo and oddly reverse the story of Cain and Abel (the type of Christ). Whose offering succeeds in winning favour? The hunter, man of meat and blood is again preferred to the agrarian, the man of grain and of imagination. But the latter does not rise up in jealousy and kill his brother, his rival (son semblable, son frère), but grows depressed and kills himself. And young Schubert, in the same year that he was first treated for the syphilis that would soon kill him, composes the unsurpassably beautiful songs. What is worst? The pain of being unchosen or the sacrifice in being chosen, singled out to be raised high, or the terrifying power of music to make it all seem fitting. Tea and snacks were served after the show.

No matter how carefully you think about it, you can't get any closer to it. You can't get any closer to it because you are already too close, so close that you completely coincide with it. But you have no idea of what it is, or of how it is. If you try getting further away from it you fly so far and so fast that can't even sense it any more, you lose it in a fraction of an instant, and yet you haven't moved an inch. You are lost in a maze of whats that promise to lead you to in to it but only circle endlessly around. You're so tired of the chase and you'd gladly give up looking but it won't let you go. It was there at the first and it promises to be there at the last, wearing the same enigmatic smile. It is unfailingly persistent, it might be the only real thing. You wonder if it cares, if it can care. Why does it all depend on you, who have so little to bring to the party? You burned up all your fuel and now you're burning up the ashes, and you're still not warm, not even close.

Any animal that needs to sleep seems likely to possess consciousness. This would imply that consciousness has been around for a long time in evolutionary terms, and so must serve some important purpose. A lot of effort seems to have gone into optimising the milieu for consciousness; we can hardly guess how many unconscious subsystems silently serve it. Taking this further, say the sense of self descends from own-ness, from the distinction inherent in belonging somewhere, in a territory, or with a group of fellows. You recognise your own, like the dog who knows it own smell when it revisits a tree, something inherent in the olfactory joy. That self is mediated by smell would seem appropriate, it being primarily expressive of an immediate and powerful orientation below the level of consciousness. This means that the sense of self which has also been around for a long time is not original with consciousness, but is inherited by it. (You could argue that insect behaviour expresses self prior to consciousness - pure olfaction, information without joy.) There are perhaps reasons to sever the sense of self from its primeval root and place most of it in consciousness, and these would seem to mostly on the side of consciousness, of aiding in the fuller development of its subsystems. As something like territoriality, the self is always in the context of the boundary between what is your own and what is other, where the other is immediately understood as an alternate self. Beyond the boundary of your world lies the world of someone just like you, only possessing motivations which clash with yours, are incompatible with yours. If there is a howling beast on the borderline it is your self - but such an understanding of self can only exist once self has been almost entirely ingested by consciousness. As for the digestion of self, well, that process has hardly begun.

There is experience and there is the experiencing, these are one and also two. They are distinguished, but only imperfectly. As two they are inseparable complements. Neither is sufficient. This is already a distinction which challenges any reduction of experience to phenomenality. Experience cannot be simply a dream which has descended upon a transcendent dreamer. The experiencing is not experience but there is an aspect within experience that points to it, as something like the being or event of the experience. But it doesn't stop, or even start, there, because the experiencing is originarily an experience for another subject, who is not present but not altogether absent either. The other can experience your experiencing, just as you can know the other's experiencing, without knowing the experience as such. You can know your experience as able to be experienced by the other; what they experience is not your experience but your experiencing. This is to say that the other's attention, the fact of their so experiencing, is experienced by you - as it is directed to the happening of your experience, your experiencing - without your having any access to the content of their experience, without possibility of verification. And this attention of theirs is not general, is not substitutable - everything depends on who that other is. The other's attention is not equivalent to any simulation of the other's attention. However it can be transmitted to you in a mediated way, as words in a letter, or sounds on a phone, because it is native to the symbolic. Actually, your experience as such is general; it is not particular because there is nothing to distinguish it from. It is the unique other's experience of your experiencing that makes you individual, in so far as you can be individual. When you ask yourself 'who am I', you are calling for the uniqueness you bear for others, your witness to their experiencing to be directed to your own.

An ethical directive is addressed to you as a member of a class of subject comprised in a certain class of situation. It can be analysed as depending on a maxim, a universal form of the imperative: anyone in situation A should do B. Now, your situation A' is rightly understood as an instance of A, therefore you should do B'. Where B' is the appropriately relativised version of B. Even in cases where the ethic is implicit and not formulated as a maxim, it seems to proceed via such an abstraction, which might, for example, be understood from the outside as following a game-theoretic logic. The recommended behaviour would therefore be the one which maximises an intuitively evident utility. So, to grasp yourself as subject to an ethical injunction is to grasp yourself as kind of being, and not as pure individuality. But the contrary to this is that discovering yourself to be subject to an ethical imperative is precisely what individuates you. If your situation is understood as consisting only of indifferent possibilities of alternative actions, then it is not yet ethical, but you are also merely a possible being for whom it does not matter which course is chosen. Thus, to fully grasp your situation is to completely individuate it, and hence is to go to the limit of your own individuation, and in doing so to assume full responsibility. The only way to reconcile this antithesis is to see that realisation of your individuality, the suchness of your self, is the transcending of its particularity into universality of being. So, to fully assume your situation is to be that situation, and to be one with every other being embraced by that situation, to assume the faith in a commonality of ends in process of realisation.

How do you get the notion of the particularity of the particular? In most of your dealings in the world it is not needed. The objects of interest are indexed by their meanings, and meanings are always generalities, or the refined cross-referencing of generalities which are still generalities. If such cross-referencing was drawn out to its ultimate point then presumably it would achieve the unique meaning of individuals. The possibility of reaching such a limit might be part of your idea of the reality of 'real' things but it cannot constitute their uniqueness. For you, objects are individualised by a choice, which may be your own active selection of the object or else passively, the selection of you by the object. Is this then like checking into a large hotel? You chose the city and selected this one hotel out of several possibilities. You arrive and present your credentials. The impenetrably polite and perfectly groomed clerk stares attentively at a screen in which you are to be identified, a tiny ripple of concordance flickers across their face to show that you are in the system, they press a few buttons, clickety-click, and smile and hand you an invisibly coded card. And then after riding an elevator, and reading off room numbers in a corridor lined with identical doors, you find yourself in a particular room in which everything is satisfactory (for the sake of argument). It is familiar and functional and fit for purpose but utterly generic. You can rest but not really relax, or maybe it's the other way around, you can relax but not really rest. If you stay in the same room for more than a week then all its contents will perhaps acquire an individual character, some of the quality of home, but this too is generic, is merely homeness. You can stare for a long time at an object, say a glass you have filled from a little bottle selected from the mini-bar, you can taste the familiar brand of whisky. Is this particular? Does it have haecceitas, quiddity? Are you enough to make the moment, is the moment enough to make you?

Say that there is a phenomenal field in which all perceptions and conceptions operate, or rather that is consitituted by these and their interactions, and assume of course that 'you' are an emergent of this too. This would be a brief summary of the naturalist position. Is there some sense in which something other than phenomenal is demanded by this picture, say 'being', or the 'observer', or the 'thou'? Well, obviously there is such a demand, you can call it humanism in a broad sense. The more pertinent question is whether it is a 'real' demand, whether it irreducibly points to something beyond the phenomenal, or whether that very 'beyond' is itself just phenomenal, the higher level implicit in it being a sort of perspectival, or even parallax effect. You can think of the proponent of the first alternative as the 'gnostic' and of the second as the 'deconstructionist'. It seems then as if the gnostic can always find its truth concealed within the deconstruction and the deconstructiionist can always find the hidden flaw in the gnostic. How many cycles of this dance can you hold in mind at once? And on which foot do you start?

Your phenomenal field is centred, which means no more than that the distinction of focus from periphery, or foreground from background, is a functional one. And the centre of that field is directed, that is just what your experience tells you at each moment; to be distracted is to be intent upon a distraction, you are inescapably intent. And the periphery is also directed but in quite a different way to the focus, the periphery being indefinitely plural, and also as periphery it is not subject to the same need to select and define its objects. The space of objects 'intended' by peripheral consciousness is larger, is of intrinsically higher dimension, than the object space of focal consciousness, which is already large enough! You are submerged in an ocean of intentionality. The focal space is incomplete, since it cannot anchor itself, its fundamental or metaphysical orientation is drawn from the larger space in which it is embedded. The question of anchoring or grounding does not arise for that larger space. In terms of your understanding, it anchors itself, but these terms are meaningless for it. If you were to trace the line of intent from your focus out towards the periphery you would see it bend until is seems entirely turned around and facing 'you'. The is what you experience as a sort of super-ego or Other, that which anticipates you and limits you at every moment, in every conscious resolve. You sense that this is a trick, but you don't know how to attain the escape velocity that would propel you past it. Indeed, if it seems to aim at your death this is only its playfulness, its childlike innocence.