Wednesday, 17 July 2019


The object in attention is never simple but always a figure-ground relation, in which figure is relatively clear and simple and ground vague and complex. In any distinction between two simultaneous objects one is always more on the side of figure and the other more on the side of ground. Ground stretches away to the horizon and no further, but like a hyperbolic plane more and more content is packed into it the closer it is to the horizon, so that infinite 'stuff' is compressed into the horizon's inner rim. Matters in the ground are differentiated but not in an accessible way. They are differentiated because at any moment with your purposeful interactions with your world the presentation pivots so that some element of the ground becomes figure and what was figure recedes back into ground. What you take to be yourself as subject at any moment is an element of the ground, and is thus always an object or a pre-object, a prefigure. The veritable subject is beyond the horizon but since there is infinite content on the near boundary of the horizon it would take infinite energy to cross it. It is just because the veritable subject is beyond the horizon that the field of awareness is known as consciousness with all its paradoxical properties. There is no way to intentionally cross the horizon, but perhaps in an event akin to quantum tunnelling you might discover yourself to have always been 'there', outside of any possible 'there'. This gives a whole new meaning to Gertrude Stein's famous "There's no there there."

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