Wednesday, 26 December 2018
The hegemony of visual metaphors dictates that subject and object are separated in space of some kind. The empty space thought to be between them maintains them as they are in the act of contemplation. Perhaps the most that can be said is that subject and object are not the same, or better that the experienced is not the experiencing. What kind of negation is this? Because the experience is the experiencing, there is no separation between them in the present, but a moment later they peel away from each other; the experiencer remains presence but the experience falls away, it recedes into the past or is transformed into something irretrievable. Into the past? But isn't time just another metaphor like space, in this case based on hearing or perception of movement or change? Audible form is developed in time as time is observed in motion and the two kinds of time are coordinated. Time and space are forms of experience but not of the experiencing. To think that they are is to imagine that the experiencing can be experienced apart from experience. There is no evidence for experiencing; if it wasn't the only thing that was happening then you would never invent it. It is not illogical to deny it. Only by denying it can you realise the incompleteness of experience. An existence that was wholly experience, such as the panpsychists propose would be experience without question and hence no experience at all. Or in other terms, there is no 'there is' to experiencing, it is upstream of every 'there is' no matter how.
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