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

Chapter 3

"Unity" is itself a product of recursive distinction. When I extract "green" from the tree and the grass, it appears that I have found a point at which they are genuinely one. This is an illusion. I have just created another code. "Green"

is a pattern extracted by comparing two prior distinctions. A third item has been added to the inventory: a code that marks a recurrence in the subject's own operations. The tree and the grass are no more unified by "green" than two strangers are connected by being photographed together. What is genuinely one in this situation is the subject who performs the comparison and produces the code.

One may argue that there must be something common between the tree and the grass independent of whoever observes them. Green is not a property of the subject, it is out there, in the leaves and grass.

The objection seems strong until we ask what "out there" means independently of the apparatus that registers it. Imagine an absolutely white, infinite sheet of paper. Does anything exist on it? No. (One might say that the whiteness exists, but whiteness is itself a concept derived from prior experience, from having distinguished white from black, and so on. Without that prior distinction, the white sheet is sheer undifferentiation.) Nothing exists, as there are no distinctions to make.

Now place a second observer whose vision is sharper before this sheet. Where the first saw uniform whiteness, the second noticed that one region is fractionally darker than the rest. He draws an imaginary boundary and the spot appears. Now an area exists, but it exists for him. For the first observer the spot is not there — his apparatus of distinction does not cut finely enough to produce it.

We say that the grass and the leaves are green. Yet the grass is not the same shade as the leaf. The leaf on the oak is not the same shade as on the birch. Were our vision structured differently, were our cones sensitive to other frequencies, these 11

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shades might appear so dissimilar that no common concept would arise. An organism with different perceptual thresholds would draw different boundaries, producing other codes. What we take for an objective property is the product of a specific perceptual apparatus drawing boundaries at some resolution and an interpretive apparatus grouping the results.

Every commonality and universal is generated by the intersection of perception and interpretation. At no point does the subject step outside the process of distinction to compare its codes against a raw, uncoded reality.

A realist may say: a spectrometer measures a wavelength of 520 nanometers. A stone falls on my head and leaves a bruise. These are the facts independent of any subject. The world has properties of its own, and our distinctions only discover them.

Each of these is a product of recursive distinction, a code built on prior codes.

One may object that a spectrometer cuts through the subjectivity: it reads 520

nanometers regardless of who operates it. But "nanometer" is a code. "Wavelength" is a model, a decision to describe the interaction of radiation with matter as a spatial periodicity. "Electromagnetic spectrum" is a classification, a map drawn across phenomena that have been grouped by the way they interact with instruments. The spectrometer does not bypass the chain of distinctions; it extends it. It produces a number: the outcome of a specific interaction between radiation and a diffraction grating, translated into a position on a scale, read by an eye, interpreted within a framework. Each step is a distinction. The instrument is a more refined apparatus of distinction, not a window onto what exists apart from distinguishing.

The stone is no exception. "A stone fell on my head" is already a fully interpreted sentence. "Stone," "fell," and "head" are codes produced by recursive distinction.

The pain is a distinction too, a sensory registration no different in kind from the green or hot. The conviction that physical impact is somehow more real than color or sound rests on the vividness of the experience, not on a difference in substance. Pain, digits on a spectrometer, and the concept of a stone tell us how we distinguish, not what the world is apart from our distinguishing.

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But if green is a subjective code, why do all humans agree that grass is green?

Millions of people converge on roughly the same color boundaries. This points to something objective.

What it points to is the similarity of the apparatus. Human visual systems are built to approximately the same specifications and produce similar codes. This is no more surprising than the fact that thermometers built to the same design give the same readings. It demonstrates the uniformity of the instrument, not the observer-independence of the result. The convergence breaks down the moment the apparatus changes. A bee sees ultraviolet and does not distinguish red from black. A mantis shrimp operates with sixteen types of color receptors where humans have three. "Green" is a feature of a particular kind of perceiver.

A human subject under the influence of mescaline looks at a familiar chair and sees something for which his ordinary vocabulary has no code. Huxley described this: colors acquire a depth and significance that the word "color" cannot carry, spatial relations shift, the boundary between the object and its surroundings becomes uncertain. The photons, the retina is the same, the chair has not moved. The chemistry of the brain changed, and the alteration has rewritten the world. Psilocybin dissolves the boundary between self and environment; LSD restructures temporal experience until sequence loses its obviousness; a sufficient dose of these compounds can dismantle the basic spatial framework within which objects are normally encountered. If qualities belonged to things, no alteration of the perceiver's chemistry could touch them.

One may point out that if the codes of distinction did not correspond to reality, organisms using them would fail to survive. The fact that our perceptual and conceptual systems have been shaped by millions of years of selection pressure proves that our distinctions track something real.

Evolution promotes operational effectiveness. An organism must distinguish predator from prey and safe ground from cliff; these distinctions must be effective enough to sustain survival and reproduction. They need not be accurate in any deeper sense. A map that gets you from your house to the river is a good map. It does not follow that its colors correspond to real colors or its two dimensions capture the actual structure of the landscape. Evolution selects

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for maps that work. The frog's visual system is exquisitely tuned to detect small moving objects. It will starve to death surrounded by freshly killed flies that do not move. Our distinctions are wider in range but identical in kind.

A code is the product of a specialized apparatus of distinction operating at some resolution. Change the apparatus and the codes change. A distinction drawn at one resolution can always be redrawn at a finer one, and the finer distinction is no closer to a final layer than the coarser one was. To reach the bottom the subject would have to stop distinguishing, and that means either to cease as a subject or to declare a postulate: here the cutting ends. The world apart from distinguishing is therefore not unknown in the way a locked room is unknown to someone without a key. It is unknowable, because every attempt to know it produces another distinction, not the thing the distinction was supposed to reach. The Platonic path to the simple was an attempt to reach this ground by descending through divisions.

One might concede the point for concepts like "green" while maintaining that the One is different. Color depends on perceptual apparatus, unity is a logical requirement: without it, nothing holds together or can be named. The One is the condition of experience itself.

There are indeed two kinds of abstraction. The first kind is extracted from experience. "Green," "heavy," "loud," and "warm" are codes produced by comparing perceptual inputs and stabilizing what recurs. The second is extracted from the codes themselves. "Unity," "justice," "substance," "matter," and "causality" are produced by distinguishing concepts from one another, by comparing the formal structures of prior abstractions and extracting higher-order patterns. No one has ever perceived justice or has ever seen unity. They are codes of codes, patterns found in the operations of the distinguishing apparatus.

This makes them more abstract than "green," and even more dependent on the subject. "Green" at least has an anchor in perceptions, but "unity" has no such anchor. It is a regularity of the apparatus. To discover that all my acts of distinction posit something as one is to recognize something about how I distinguish.

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The concept "one," therefore, is a fundamental regularity of distinction itself. It is a remarkably general code, more abstract than "green" or "heavy" or "alive," because it abstracts from the form of distinction rather than from its content.

Yet the Platonic tradition meant not a number but a reality: the ground that precedes every boundary. If we take this seriously and ask what, in our experience, actually stands behind all acts of distinction, what is present in every one of them without being reducible to any, the answer is immediate. The subject is the only thing that is there whenever a boundary is drawn.

The meta-position of the subject has a consequence that extends beyond episte-mology. If it is always above its distinctions, then any boundary can be redrawn and every code can be replaced.

Consider the simplest case. "Green" covers the grass and the grape leaf. Increase the resolution and green breaks down into emerald, olive, chartreuse, and moss.

Decrease the resolution and green merges with yellow and blue into "cool tones." Neither level is privileged. Neither is more real than the other. The subject selects the scale and determines what distinctions appear.

The same holds for objects. "Tree" can be broken into bark, wood, leaves, roots, each one a separate object of inquiry. It can be gathered with grass and moss into a "plant." "Plant" can be merged with "animal" into "organism." A step up erases boundaries that the previous level treated as fundamental; a step down reveals entities that the previous level smoothed over.

The freedom reaches deeper than the choice of where to cut. Space and time are modes of distinction — ways the subject organizes its field. Kant declared them necessary forms of any possible experience, assuming that every conceiv-able subject must organize its field spatially and temporally. Nothing requires this. A subject whose field is organized by intensity rather than extension, or by resonance rather than sequence, would produce something unrecognizable as a world to us — and we would be equally unrecognizable to it. We cannot imag-ine what such a field would look like, as imagining is itself a spatial and temporal operation. We can only note that our forms of distinction are our forms, and that the operation of distinction does not prescribe them.

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With abstractions the contingency is starker. Two people looking at the same tree will draw roughly similar boundaries — the apparatus is built to similar specifications. Two people using the word "justice" may share nothing beyond the word itself. One draws the boundary between just and unjust, when each receives what he has earned. For another justice is when each gets what he lacks or whatever a fair process produces, regardless of outcome. Each boundary organizes a different world, distributes praise and blame differently. The same holds for "freedom," "love," "dignity" or "rights." An abstract code is understood differently.

Consider a revolution. One subject draws the boundary between tyranny and liberation, places the old regime on one side and the uprising on the other, and sees the birth of freedom. Another distinguishes between order and chaos, and sees catastrophe. A third sees one ruling class and another and a transfer of power dressed in rhetoric. Nothing in the events themselves dictates which boundary is correct. The difference is entirely in where the cut is made and which codes are applied.

This is what was described in The Black Flame as freedom and acausality. The subject can draw any boundary whatsoever. The question is never whether a given distinction is possible but whether it will be shared. A person who draws boundaries that no one else recognizes is called insane. The difference lies in the social verdict, not in the operation.