The sense of being-there, our inside, presupposes a world, an outside, the object of experience. We accept that our perception is limited, illuminating only a fraction of the implied whole, which we never perceive as a totality but only in fragments, as impressions collected over time and internally composed into a scenery. Within that world, partly sensed and partly imagined, we identify other bodies as equivalent to my-body, whose sensory enunciation appears the same as ours, ostensibly limited by the great outside to the same degree that we are limited. We come to know that bodies emerge from one another, that we are each other’s imperfect copies, and by enacting that realisation we complement and consolidate our limited perspectives into a shared world. But then we remember that all we really have is our pitifully limited perspective within which everything we take for granted is only implied, only assumed, that our brothers and sisters are mere appearances that echo the hidden workings of the mind which is an incorporeal extension of our container, and we cannot know them for real, we cannot see through their eyes.

There can be no individuality without separation between Self and Other, without boundaries and distance, because individuality is coincidental with the locus of perspective that anchors the Self in space and time, and perspective presupposes a mutually exclusive polarity between that which is seen and the point of view. “Subjectively, first of all, we are inevitably the centre of perspective of our own observation” (Teilhard de Chardin 1970, 36), and yet the centre could not exist without the periphery, without the primordial kinship between Self and Other who now come face to face in the same world.

The genesis of being can be interpreted only retroactively, as a quasi-historical construction which relies on concepts developed only after the interpreting entity had already been formed, fully differentiated, and subsequently able to conceive of its own origin. “The only way to account for the emergence of the distinction between inside and outside constitutive of a living organism is to posit a kind of self-reflexive reversal (…) The One of an organism as a Whole retroactively posits as its result, as that which it dominates and regulates, the set of its own causes (that is, the very multiple process out of which it emerged).” (Žižek 2009, 205) It follows that anything pre-subjective is always already referred to in terms of intersubjectively constituted meanings, that is, we can posit the objective pre-conditions of subjectivity only from the position of a subject grounded in the dimension of We.

Gazing from within a world already accomplished we can nonetheless invent our own myth of creation, a myth that could plausibly begin with the formation of a droplet of water. By the cohesive force inherent to liquids it had formed a distinct boundary, a container-like surface separating the liquid from the non-liquid, the inside from the outside. The inside of the droplet capable of self-limiting by internal forces, by self-attraction, by virtue of separation from the outside, was already a proto-entity that projected its presence beyond the limiting surface, towards the outside, drawing more and more of the amorphous medium into the inside until the boundary between inside and outside had hardened to the point of relative impermeability, leaving only dedicated openings via which the outside could be drawn-in and the inside excreted. A flux of definite direction was thus established, becoming the primary axis of its cellular form, of energetic projection and introjection.

The outward projection of inward attraction was at first realised as hunger; later, as desire (Kojève 1980, 6); but both of these forces had oriented this newly inscribed entity towards the unknowable source of its being, towards the horizon over which it had risen out of the undivided noumenon. Its energetic environment, the world of objective difference, had evolved via progressive fragmentation of the outside, where each self-contained fragment of being provided spatial and functional reference to all other fragments, forming a relational background upon which all fragments became discernible and their interplay had engendered common space and duration. Such interplay, of simultaneously having an effect and being affected, was a crude form of sensory interaction, unseen but not inconsequential. The path of increasing fragmentation was thus progressively illuminated with mutual sensory awareness of the lowest order, the evolution of which had progressively refined and consolidated the outlines of interacting forms before one another, each developing a characteristic relation between its own inside and the common outside. This world of inter-related, mutually defining fragments had served as a flawed mirror in which the singularity that came to be known as the Self was outlined with ever growing clarity until self-awareness became the universal principle of reference and the locus of outward perspective: the reality-principle encompassing interfacial exchanges of energy between the Self and the Other. Self-individuation with respect to the Other inevitably gave rise to parallel individuation of otherness with the quality of selfhood, establishing thereby a reflexive symmetry of Self-in-Self and Self-in-Other, of I and You. Fragmentation of the inside had thus assumed the structure of thought, of subjective reasoning and imagination that could reach the inside of another, refining the network of internal fragments until its resolution, its elemental grittiness, had gained the appearance of external continuity, as if returning to the undivided source of being but on the wrong side of the mirror.

By virtue of conscious differentiation of the inside from the outside, of the Self from the Other, we came to regard the world that wholly contained us as something separate and independent of the Self. We came to know the world by projecting the principle of difference onto the world itself, so that the internal difference that separated us from the world became the very way of seeing of difference within the world. Difference thus became the common anchor of both the Self and its characteristic outside, but by internalising the principle of difference that had identified the Other as a multiplicity, we have inadvertently internalised the process of seeing itself, as the seeing mind, giving rise to the duality of thought and being. The seen was constituted in the mind, first as a thought of difference and then as perception of being, but simultaneously being thought of as independent of the mind and therefore existing objectively, beyond perception. This entanglement of thought and being as opposite aspects of the same fold became the kernel of meaning, whereby a thought projected across the fold could find a real counterpart, a double, within the differentiated Other.

“Man lives in the meanings he is able to discern. He extends himself into that which he finds coherent and is at home there. (…) Since we call ‘real’ any meaningful entity that we expect to manifest itself in unexpected ways in the future, we think of it as something that has a ‘life’ of its own.” (Polanyi and Prosch 1975, 66)

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Polanyi, Michael, and Harry Prosch. Meaning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. London: Collins Fountain Books, 1970.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.

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