The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 2

A tree stands and a cat sits beneath it. Both are present before me. What does

"are" mean in this sentence? It implies that they appear to someone who registers their existence. Without that "being" has no meaning. There is no being per se, no existence suspended in a void with no one to witness it. It is always for someone. The most elementary ontological situation is dual: there is that which appears, and to whom it appears.

This duality is the minimal condition under which anything can be said to exist.

Yet distinction cannot remain a momentary cut that appears and vanishes. If it is not held, it has not occurred. The difference between the tree and the cat must persist long enough to be a difference. Something must retain both sides of the boundary simultaneously, holding them apart and together at once. This is the node: the minimal entity in which a distinction is established. The node is a process of holding, a sustained act of keeping the boundary in place.

Distinction does require unity. The judgment "A is not B" presupposes a position from which both A and B are visible. That point is the synthesis, the link that holds the distinguished terms together. Kant called it the transcendental unity of apperception, the "I think" that must be able to accompany all my representations, the condition under which any manifold of experience is held together as one.

The most elementary distinction a node can draw is between itself and what is not itself. Before it can distinguish tree from cat, or here from there, it must already have separated itself from the field in which those distinctions will be made. For this reason we will call it a subject, though at this stage no subjectivity in the full sense is yet required. All that is needed is a sustained act of self-demarcation.

Once the boundary between self and not-self is in place, a second operation becomes possible: distinction within the not-self. This thing is not that thing.

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This act produces objects: distinct regions of the not-self, each one defined by its boundary with what it is not.

Two modes of distinction within the not-self are treated as fundamental categories by the tradition. Space is the distinction of relation: this object is bounded off from that one. Time is the distinction of sequence: what was distinguished before is now past and what comes next is the future. Neither is a container within which distinctions are made; each is a way of making them.

A third operation is the distinction of another as oneself, the recognition that a given object is in some sense me and not me. This gives rise to structure in the full sense, to groups of nodes related within a single field as co-operating centers of distinction. In Ontology of Differentiation it was shown that from here one can derive both non-living objects and life; we skip this to shorten the discussion.

When a subject distinguishes the results of its distinctions, something new emerges. I see a tree and I see grass. The tree is tall, brown and green; the grass is low and green. These are raw perceptions, immediate and concrete. Now I distinguish my distinctions. I lay the two results side by side and notice that something recurs in both: they are green. The green is not a third object alongside the tree and the grass. It is what emerges when two distinctions are compared and what they share is separated from them. Green is a distinction of distinctions.

Having extracted "green," I am able to use it: to compare it with other extracted patterns, to hold it apart from "red" and "yellow." For this I need a code that can operate independently of the original encounter. The first such code is a mental representation. I can close my eyes and summon green, hold it before the mind, place it next to blue, and compare them without seeing grass or sky. The representation detaches the pattern from its source and makes it available for manipulation.

A word is the code separated from the perception. When you hear "the stock markets crashed," you are unlikely to picture a specific trading floor or a downward curve. The words move through chains of distinction without anchoring

THE VANISHING POINT: A LEFT-HAND PATH READING OF

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themselves in any concrete representation. "Tree" is an instruction for performing a certain kind of distinction, a recipe for drawing a boundary that another subject can execute in his own mind. Names accumulate and form systems of interrelated codes — language.

Language becomes material for the same recursive operation. We distinguish language itself. We notice that certain codes behave alike, that some patterns recur across different domains of distinction. Six trees, six cats: the "six" is found when I notice a similarity in how the objects were grouped. Mathematics is the systematic extraction of patterns from patterns of distinction.

Recursive distinction allows us to find highly stable, invariant regularities that govern how distinctions reliably hold or relate to one another. We call them laws. A stone falls, a leaf falls, and I fall from the tree. These are different situations involving different objects, yet when I analyze each case, a generality emerges: the spatial relation between massive nodes changes over time in the same way, regardless of what the nodes are. What recurs is the way the boundary between "here" and "there" shifts as a function of mass and distance. It is a meta-stable differentiation: the most invariant skeleton of how certain distinctions behave across concrete cases.

The regularities observed in physics, chemistry or biology are patterns of differentiation discovered at a higher recursive level. When certain nodes differentiate in highly predictable ways relative to one another under specific conditions, we extract these invariances and call them laws of nature. At every level of this recursion the asymmetry holds: the one who distinguishes is above what is distinguished, because A and not-A exist only for the one who drew the boundary.

The subject can turn the operation of distinction upon itself. I notice that I am seeing green; I notice that I am noticing; I reflect on the reflection. Each turn generates a new level: the act that was performing the distinction becomes the content of the next. This is reflection, and it has no final step. Every act of self-distinction produces a new vantage point from which that act is now visible as content, and that point can in turn be made into content by a still higher act.

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The center of the subject is therefore unreachable from within. A subject can reflect on feelings and discover patterns in them, reflect on the patterns and find what governs them. Yet at each step, the one performing the distinction is already behind it, acting as the condition of the new level. The point from which all distinguishing is done, and which cannot itself be distinguished, is the meta-position.