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Tuesday, 5 September 2017



Experience in present time, the Dasein, can be likened to a vector field. This is to say that it has a field-like spatial aspect constituted out of a focal centre of awareness and all of the implicitly understood co-present alternative and contiguous centres of awareness. In short there is always a sense of choice, of the selection of one out of a range of possibilities, so that the meaning of the one that is actual depends on the others that are inactual. This roughly describes the field quality, the vectorial quality is that the component awarenesses, actual and inactual, are each arrow-like. They have a source, a direction, and an aim. You cannot speak of intention, or intentionality, without this trinity, although the parts that make it up, the components of intention, don't look like anything, and certainly not each other, since they are by definition not themselves intended. (To assert that the most basic units of awareness are themselves made out of distinct parts explains why our phenomenological insight is so poor and limited, why we are so easily blindsided by our own minds. Inner experience is not a fractal, expect perhaps under the effect of certain drugs, its fine structure terminates immediately below its own resolution - precisely where the action is.) Both of the elements, field and vectoriality are described by spatial metaphors and these descriptions are in some sense natural. What is less obvious is that these two spatialities have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The direction in which the vectoriality of intention points does not exist in the space in which the variants of possible meaning, of alternate intentions, exists. The former has a one-dimensional quality, the latter has no clear sense of dimension at all, that is, it may be five-dimensional or non-Euclidean, or some sort of network impossible to realise in intuitive space. It is a notion of space, space in the way the term is typically used imprecisely. What we might venture is that at each point of this possibility space there is an associated bundle of vectors representing the realisable actualities. This kind of double-layered structure is what is required to begin to describe any concrete moment.

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