The breaking of a heart is the most excruciating goad to transcendence. The love that was ignited in a nucleus must awaken to its inherent disinterest if it is to survive in that shattering pain, because that is the only way it ever could have meant, even when it was exclusive. What happens to the scandal then? If anything it becomes even more shameful. We avert our eyes from one made holy by suffering, as if everything excessive, everything exclusive, everything peremptory now has designs upon us.

The indelible scandal of sexual intercourse is only in part due to the series of taboos that must be broached in initating the act. A detailed description of these could be quite lengthy but the essence is perhaps the willing replacement of our highly developed sense of respect for the other in their personal integrity by a violence of desire that disintegrates them and us into a succession of a simultaneity of parts, both sensual and moral. And yet on the other side of these transgressions we re-emerge within a world that is unequivocally good. “Imparadised in one another,” is a phrase that has often come to mind for this state and it indicates as well the exclusivity that is the remainder of the scandal. The social sanction that various forms of coupling receive may be significant but it is the phenomenological exclusivity in the act itself that I am addressing. Two (or more) people engaged in making love have momentarily broken their social contract with the world, their bliss is uttered in a private language so that when it is over even they will be unable to locate the referents.

What role is played in the constitution of experience as being that of a self-of-moment-in-affairs by the possession of deep time? This is the time of forgotten memories and intimations from childhood, it is what may be reawakened in epiphanies of the sensory world, what may suggest Achimedean regions beyond the flow of passing time to a Proustian sensibility. My vivid but infinitely distant sense of early childhood and the conviction that it is the very same nameless Self questioning the dream now as then – an identity so emphatic that now and then become of one nature, forms a quiet but vital part of all my personal memories. And yet it seems more an artefact than a datum, the very mechanism of memory seen in a certain angle of the light, because the content of the memories matters less than the way they are recalled.

The real inquiry or the inquiry into the real is a race with death, and so also a race towards death. One cannot say that it is of any interest, since the interesting is what arrests the flow of time, like an eddy, and creates a habitation for a picture of me within a picture, circling gently until it is swept away again. To meditate is to practise dying, or indeed to die as much as that can be an action, because it is to surrender everything that has been gained by interest.

Some discoveries beg to be shared even before they have been fully considered. They may be no more than pretexts for an imaginary sharing which is itself a way to buy off the others, to misdirect them, so that I might return to the real inquiry which is solitary and shuns communication.

To sketch out the subjective logic of an event, as I have been doing with “death” is an exercise in the imaginary in the broadest sense of this term. To this it could be answered that, death is a collision with the real and so is beyond any categories of imagination or thought – except that I have just evoked a category, the real, for what is outside all categories. That the real enters into thought, in the form of death, of ultimate material exigency, can hardly be denied. It functions as a term for what is outside all the other terms which may be phenomenologically or logically full, it casts a shadow over them because it must remain radically empty in these respects. Death prevents me from invoking any Parmenidean identity of thought and being, but it does so not as third term on a par with these, but as an infinitely gentle, infinitely devastating irony.

I cannot say there were no pictures before I was born, because there was no time, or there is no memory – two statements which are not exactly equivalent. At most I can say that the phenomenological colour of having-been-waiting forms no part of my earliest memories. Similarly, neither does the sense of a transition of the subject – rather it seems as if the subject came about together with the crystallisation of the inner time sense. Is the subject like the character on the screen? No, because he carries within him his own source of illumination – a cogito which twists aside all forms of mapping. Is this like a battery, running on derived power or is it a source in itself and hence identical with the one source by the strange logic that obtains there?

The white cinema screen is the pure possibility of all individual movies, but we cannot say that all movies, past, future, real, imagined or unimagined exist in some sense in the blank screen – although such a fantasy may be useful to an artist. It is rather that the screen – and the spectator – are unchanging realities that condition the unreality of the ever changing photo-play. The diegetic possibilities which make the meaning of the show are underwritten by the pure possibility inherent in what is always empty. Again, one can say that the movie was never really about the doings of the characters in it but only about the life of the spectator of which there has never been but one.

“No more pictures.” This is how Saul Bellow’s elderly narrator in Ravelstein responds when asked for his understanding of death. But where pictures have once been there remains always the possibility of further pictures, the pictures are less real than the screen on which they appear. To put it another way, the ontological status of possibility is such that it cannot be swept away like phenomena. And hence there is a rigourous separation between all phenomena and what can only be indicated with the words possibility or principle. Action or passion of the subject is this separation.

I am a history and a climate reflecting that history and roiling with its mismatches and soured appetites. I am a multitudinous overlapping community of partial selves, reactions, mirrors, mimicries and masks realised in demands and silences of the ever-changing moment. I am this fatigue, this vague nihilism of failed self-knowledge, this mildness, passivity, clouded curiosity, sceptical absence of a soul. I am what precedes the effort to say “I”.

This track, this desertification of the subject, is the furthest reach of only one kind of truth. It lies in a landscape almost entirely undiscovered, so that one thinks of cutting across to other places on the periphery when the empty sky becomes unbearable.

“It’s gone, it’s gone!” So much so that I’m unable to say what it is that has gone. Weeks on end with no questions and no surprise. What do I know? Who is it that would be compelled by the knowledge of death? What speaking position to open? It is good not to know, or to seem to know that it doesn’t matter who or how or in relation to what I sink into the moment as into a warm bath.

“Meaning is coextensive with significance” – this version of the pragmatist’s creed may well be true, or even a tautology, without entailing that there is a complete correspondence between structures of meaning and of significance. To view some area of meaning as textual is to see that it is based upon a play of material signifiers but this does not imply that the relations of meaning within that field are guises for the relations of signifiers, or even that they in some way reflections on the failure of such a correspondence. In the end what is at stake is the licence for interpretation, and the point is that semantics or semiotics cannot underwrite the extension of such a licence, but only make us doubt that there could ever have been bounds.

Most subjective verities fall under the rule of the will-to-believe. We discover them, but only as sustained by a subtle and mostly hidden effort at bringing them about and keeping them there. This is like forgery, except that there was not some prior reality that these take the place of. There was nothing there at all; we are the sole authors of what we need and it is the reality of the need which is shaped in this way into viable ideals. The more we are aware of the power at work in this the less real the underlying needs are seen to be.

The great idols of life, those marvels in which I hoped or dreaded to find myself: fear and desire, art, intoxication, derangement, sex, rage, serenity, bliss, contemplation, worship, history and the rest, or love in which I seem to find myself in spite of myself … In the sober afternoon light they are all revealed as artifacts in the common landscape of humanity, passages rehearsed over and over, symbolic coral. This sober light has its own not inconsiderable attraction: Where “I” was, there It shall be.

The objective world is a subset of the subjective, and the subjective world is a subset of the objective. This is not a paradox, as in mathematics there is no logical problem with such a dual relationship, but in so far as one can be the cogniser of each of these conjoined propositions one cannot be the simultaneous cogniser of both. Cunning theories can be proposed to overcome this, but they miss the point, which is just to see how the incompatibility points fleetingly to what or who has invested in a world which makes such questions possible.

The phenomenon is a way-station in the surrender of truth just before it disappears into the living stream of experience. Being true to myself I acknowledge that it is just the positive feeling for life which maintains the sense of a spatialisation, a clearing, for the wonderful illusion of a truth to things themselves. The feeling for life, whatever its colour, is inseparable and dark and unreasonable.

Experientially the subject is a horizonal phenomenon, logically it is an impossible one.

The phenomenon: that something shines and reveals a true facet of itself in the knowing which is apt for it. The substance of the phenomenon is the very knowing of it and yet it bespeaks nothing if not the independence of the known. There is enough constancy in what is known in the phenomenon that inquiry can pivot on it and defer to a related or constituent phenomenon a so-called subject, however the original phenomenon was all of a piece if it was anything at all. Thus, what seemed to be on the side of the subject of one phenomenon proves to be another phenomenon of equal status but differently situated, and looking back we can never say that it was actually present in the original complex. The phenomenon is plural but it is so by way of indefinite plurality.

Hegel’s method is usually identified as the triadic dialectic, but in fact he plays this like a sort of cat’s cradle on the combinatorics of the subject/object relation – is the object out there or in here? Am I out there or in here, since there is nothing but here, and here is only what could ever be there etc.? In this as in many succeeding systems of the actual subject such as psychoanalysis, a structuralism is in counterpoint to a phenomenology. In contrast to this there is the aspiration towards a pure phenomenology such as Husserl’s. The value of the idea that justifies Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness”, that there is a something which is just what it feels like to be experiencing x (Hegel’s “sense certainty”) is that it is equivalent to the non-triviality of pure phenomenology.

The limits of thought are thinkable, but they remain the limits of thought.

Subject and object form a mutual inverse within my experience when it is reduced to the essentials of solipsism. This does not imply a belief in only the self however, since by the very fact of enunciation solipsism is intentionally inverse to relationship with an other. This openness to another haunts the very silence of being as much as but differently to the incorrigible priority of consciousness.

To think different perspectives or realms as mutually inverse or conjugate views is one way to try to posit an underlying order to what seems an otherwise inexplicable diversity in being. It is a speculation directed at the most underlying law, but as itself a view it must belong essentially to one branch of the diversity that it seeks to compass, so it can never deliver its ground to the thought which undertakes it, no matter how sincerely. The same limitation applies to every system of thought from Hegel onwards which in its cunning ventures to include what it is forced to acknowledge as also unthought. This is the same history in which philosophy begins to voice the demand to stop thinking.

The attempt to state a true philosophy must take into account the competeing claims of structurally exclusive perspectives such as subjective and objective, individual and relational etc., but the moment it relies on a schematism to hold them in place it forfeits its philosophical basis, since it has lost sight of the only philosophical question that remains, that is why and how are there such alternatives.

The gears of dialectic do not engage, we remain in neutral.

If we place the proposition that there exists a self-object next to its negation, that no such object can exist, then it is clear that the latter is more true than the former. In a certain light it abolishes it entirely, but the resulting state of certainty has no warrant to declare itself Truth absolute. Indeed the being of such a creature may be ruled out by the same observation since a possible knower being absolutely correlative to the known would be another self-object. Not truth, but reality, one is closer to reality – but only relatively so.

The function of the mind is the practical anticipation of the world-lines of objective congeries – this is, as in the current orthodoxy, what has most survival value. The belief that s = o means that there must be an I-object and so it becomes a concern of the mind, or rather its world-line does. Experiences of bodily emotions such as fear, desire, arousal, anger, pleasure etc., are taken as clues to the wholly contingent fate of this object, and so the I-object, which is never seen, is contingently identified with the practical reference point of these emotions. I never identify with anything, that would be a logical impossibility. Instead, a variable, o, in an ongoing project – anxious concern for the fate of o – is conveniently identified with the object of another salient project – maintenance of bodily homeostasis, or surrender of homeostasis to pleasure, or the continuity of some objective abstraction, for example.

The term f(R) as the relative constant and hence finite function of reality can also be interpreted as Limit or Law, that which necessarily determines the mutual relation of force and action or intention and consequence or of inner freedom and outer necessity called fate. The concept of Law itself marks a junction point between subjective and objective realities.

There is no move possible for the subject of the everyday sense of reality to the awakened subject. As long as some form of s = o prevails, even say, in the form s = k*o for large k, the key understanding is lacking. Systematically increasing k forms the so-called positive way, which can doubtless produce some spectacular results but nonetheless remains subject to the former dispensation under which any movement in s is also a movement in o.

We call the sense determined by s = o, and hence o =/= null the everyday sense of reality and that determined by s =/= o and o = null the awakened state. The s and o here refer to the subjective and objective correlates of self, and so while the former case is based on s = o it is clear that this can never be directly experienced, it is a belief, or more accurately a lie, and one which must be sustained by tactics of deferral, denial and mediation from which all of the psychology of the I-object can be derived. In particular its core anxiety. The tactics do not include a knowledge of what it is they are defending against except as a sort of virtual point (death) masked by the same defensive negations, but the play of this virtual point in relation to the “life” of the I-object gives rise to a major element in aesthetic experience.

An enormous number of consequences may be drawn from the formulation in the previous section, not least is that the fundamental equation is now equivalent to f(R) = null*inf, so that all functions of reality are of the form null*inf, and hence "the sense of separateness" which is a concomitant of finiteness is a mere appearance on a relation of infinities, which if not one of utter sameness is not one of difference either. (Definition of infinity: something which can be equal to a proper part of itself.)

In self-inquiry as a spiritual practice the equation s = o is replaced by its categorical negation and one pursues every objective manifestation of self in the light of this. The only possible result is o = null (zero, empty set), which immediately implies that s = inf, so that our fundamental equation is now null*inf = f(R) (= finite reality). This seeming paradox is resolved mathematically by the theory of Non-Standard Analysis in which the null-term is actually a non-standard infinitesimal, and something analogous may obtain in spiritual awakening, at least to the degree that the very knowledge that any system of understanding fails to fix reality becomes productive of a whole new understanding of understanding and a deeper immersion in reality itself.

We can play with this derived equation s*o = f(R) in some interesting ways. First we can combine it with the everyday sense of identity as expressed in “I = me” or s = o = self. The original equation transforms to (self)^2 = f(R), or self = sqrt( f(R)). This could, for example, be seen as justifying the humanist axiom that “Reality is (only) experienced in human relations.” Such an interpretation however presupposes an incommensurability between a term and its square root, but if our field is the reals, in other words if a certain degree of reality is accorded to all terms then what we have here is a description of the way in which reality determines the self. The last of the equations above should actually read self = +/- sqrt(f(R)) reminding us that there are actually positive and negative valences at play. A term of positive valence is one that pushes back against another term with at least equal force, a negative valence is one which invites in the term which it meets with at least an equal yieldingness. Thus a positive reality (waking life) gives rise to a positive or negative self of less certain valence than the reality itself, while a negative reality (dream life) gives rise to an imaginary self indeterminately negative or positive (mathematically, i and –i are perfectly symmetrical).

We know, in a wholly pre-reflective way, a mutual coordination between subject and object. This accounts for the plausability of Lacan’s narrative of the mirror stage and also of all aesthetico-philosophical phenomenological monisms. Indeed, insofar as it too is plausable it provides a better motivation for the indelibly phenomenological component of the pronomial group operations mentioned above. Closer consideration, however, reveals that this mutual coordination is in fact an inverse relation. The more weight is given to subject the less to object, etc., but neither can be made to solely predominate in this way as the cost of annihilating the other would be infinite. It is as if a constant is maintained in the mathematical product of subject and object, s*o = k. The constant k is of course not an absolute but a relative constant, and so we might call it a function of reality, f(R). Thus there is never an irruption of the subject (as in one interpretation of the mirror stage) but an irruption of reality.

Self-inquiry always remains a possibility since no matter how subtle and encompassing our thought becomes there is always an “I” term in reference to which the posited objectivities appear. This term cannot be assimilated to the world of these objectivities without losing its nature as “I”-subject, yet everything points back to its actuality and hence directs a further inquiry.

The moves in the linguistic scheme are indelibly phenomenological in that the choice of moves in a particular situation produces and is produced by the context, the understanding of that situation. I can regard you as you, or as he or even as it, and I can regard myself as he or it on your behalf, or otherwise.

“I” and “me” are conventional designations with the peculiar logic of the shifter in which they are part of a combinatory scheme with all the other pronouns. The moves that transform between “I” and “me” in this scheme are probably sufficient to generate the entire set; the move from “I” to “me” presupposes an interlocutor, a “you”, and since the “you” is not anchored to the certainty of the “I” (or since you can say “I” but it is not my “I”) the “you” implies plurality, and hence a “he” or “she”, etc. In the innermost consideration of “I = me?” I becomes interlocutor to itself – I view myself as if from the outside then ask myself what it is that I see. This is not quite as paradoxical as it sounds since “I” designates both a term in the scheme and that for which the entire scheme is actual, hence it is as if the “I” is the player behind the mask of all identities as well as appearing as one of the identities (commonly known as “me”).

“Why am I me and not somebody else?” If there is any sense to this question then shouldn’t it rather be, “Why am I me and not everybody else?"? And is this the same as the meditational question: “I = me?"?

The late phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty carries a tremendous charge of revelation of the obvious, of what is more near than at hand, and it seems to resolve all conundrums of the subject and the object etc., but this is not a philosophical but a poetical revelation. It unfolds what is latent in metaphor and in the deep joy at presence to a world, like Valéry’s swimmer in Le Cimetière Marin it answers core doubts with the wisdom of the senses.

The non-dual imaginary may be regarded as the ground of compassion, and hence as an ethical space, but at best this could only be in a limited sense since it lacks an objective difference on which to found decision. At any rate it is more immediately productive of mimetic desire, the most violent and self-enclosed desiring relation to the other.

That I seem to know the other but may be completely wrong, this possibility rests on a non-phenomenological void which opens an ethical space, and also a space of desire, but these are hardly to be distinguished.

The view, the father of which is perhaps Merleau-Ponty, of the self as immersed in a world continuously re-configured by an enactive monism is seductive but incomplete. On the one hand the immediate and non-dual knowing which it places prior to discursive consciousness has no warrant and is in fact often simply wrong. This poses no practical problem since we have learned to use it only as the first hypothesis in a quasi-scientific enquiry, another of whose working premises must of course be radical separation and pluralism. On the other hand it does not allow sufficient room for the symbolic, which while entirely embodied in its own way does not rest on any form of analogy, as for example in our primordial apprehension of sexual difference.

When I see another human being I see them with my whole body in such a way that on some subtle level there is a confusion of feeling and even of identity. Subliminally and spontaneously my body reads and is read by their body and a knowing is enacted in this way which is distinctive to personal relations. This may be mediated by the so-called mirror neurones, but phenomenologically it is more precise to say that where inanimate objects return my gaze, and hence locate me in metaphysical space, other sentient or personal beings absorb my gaze and so locate me in ethical space.

The ugly or kitsch object does not impose itself on being, it imposes itself on us. As if we were (already) being, and nothing more natural than to use us to get to being. This is a backhanded insult.

Does what we are impose itself on being? It seems not, since we seek to do so by our engines or influences with such a failing success that we must always rebegin. We are not at home in being. If you touch the quick of us we respond in too many modes, in all temporalities, punctual, durational, fictive, real, in too many to ever be contained in a collection. Hence the futility of attemps to equate us in any sense to consciousness.

The beautiful object is not disinterested nor does it seem inadvertent, it imposes itself on being, indifferent only to its creator or would-be possessor. This imposition is an analogue to ethical substance, hence the way that to many people the destruction of an art work is a moral evil.

The most potent inadvertency of substance is beauty in another, and acknowledging this helps us to see how the object, or lure of desire is created by ethical substance. A purely passive beauty doesn’t do it, but a beauty good, or bad or proud or gracious or indifferent does. The ethical substance provides the context for the crystallisation of the object of desire; it is almost a truism that the same woman (or man) excites us quite differently according to the context in which we come to know her (him). The thing that we long to experience of the other and which drives us insane when we are jealous is the crisis of the will to the opening of themselves to us (or to him or her, the third person).

To see the beloved, momentarily, merely being, stationary as it were in her essence, is to apprehend her in the inadvertency of ethical substance, in something she shows (us) in spite of herself while her attention is on something else. This is a great fueller of love but it cannot be its entirety, at best its ground, its drone, its bourdon.

This is not quite right since there is also love which is a will towards the other as merely being. Being however is a concept with no shape so the intention to it needs to get hold of the object by some active force, namely its will to persist in being, which is already ethical.

In love of another the intentional object is the ethical substance of the beloved, almost as if to say, I love her because she is good. What is it I am calling ethical substance? Broadly speaking that which makes waves, or ripples in the direction we are going as we move through the world, that by which we implicitly put ourselves up for judgement. To love is then to will to intervene in the judgement awaiting the beloved. But this will is also culpable: the ethical substance is also that of the other, touching which, we render ourselves answerable.

Love cannot be the basis of ethics since it would be unethical to cleave to the good only as one loved the good. Love implies a choice which is seated in the marrow, but the ethical requires a choice beyond you, an Other’s choice. Of course the ethical imperative may well be “(to) love”, but that is a different thing. Here love would already be a test whose implicit, though unacted, penalty for failure would be death. All ethical imperatives marshall death and in this way underwrite their law-like status. Even if the imperative were, “survive” it would still, as an ethic, be directed to an overlife failing which it would be better to die.

Is “otherwise than being” the same as loving someone so much that you would die for them? I would give up my being for their being – this is something that is felt directly in passion, but it is not always so loving. There are numerous ways that humans love or worship certain objects or objectives unto death - a child, a nation, a god – this can be an immoral idolatry of the being of that object: that it or he may prevail. Death is an inseparable part of the imaginary of love, but isn’t that too, just an imaginary death, even if it passes to the act? The other-of-being folded up and waiting within being – that is hardly a surprise since we know what gives being.

Autrement qu’être. A thing cannot call me to account the way another person can, with their gaze, their attention, their listening, their silence. Animals, well they are somewhere in-between: dogs are easily fooled, cows seem to peer straight into my carniverous soul.

Knowing an other is like knowing in a dream – the object is inconstant and indeterminately compounded of one’s own projections, and it challenges, irritates, evades so that the centre of gravity of subjectivity seesaws back and forth between the poles. Am I reading her or is she reading me? Which of us holds the other hostage?

The history of a thing; a stone, a shirt, a song, an old tin can or an axe that’s had two new heads and four new handles. There is an endless catalogue of things and of modes of things, material or immaterial, originals and copies, dreamed and not-dreamed. The res, the matter, the real thing… “Here’s the thing.” How naïve of moralists like Buber to distinguish a relation to “thou” from a relation to “it”, as if the latter were somehow one-dimensional. The thing looks back at you, at least the not-dreamed thing does, and it tells you where you are, what sphere. Try getting a “thou” to do that!

Many questions about the self founder on the limit expressed by the saying: there is no thing like what I am. Which is as much as to say that what I am is not thing-like. And not a lesser being either, since, in as accurate a phrasing as possible, Am gives Being. Yet ghost-like in a world of things. In some psychologies the subject strives for the solidity and monumentality of a thing, labours against its essential negation, but perhaps the nature of “thing” is constituted by us just for this antithesis and so it can tell us some-thing of ourselves. The way that things inhabit time and space is an endless meditation for art.

It is not a positive way that is sought, however, but with infinite deference the practice of a subject that is, in the most local sense, the differential between knowing and realising heteronomy. This on the one hand, but on the other an open secret, a heterognosis, realisation of anterior freedom without a subject.

Like the scenery from a moving train are the various articulated dimensions of personal history, running off. The slow moving mountains in the distance may be the body or society… but here already the metaphor breaks down, since sometimes body or society are the most rapidly changing frame of all. The distant stars, the observer in the carriage, all are moving within themselves like the slow seething of clouds.

We seem to shed skins frequently, or better say we act a succession of diverse roles in the slowly evolving costume of the body on the (usually) even more slowly evolving stage of the world. Seeing someone with the already natural gestures and language of a new station in life it seems they have outlived their former self but to us they carry their dead somewhere about them.

Death constructs this as (a) life, and hence the possibility of history as truth, finding the origins of illusion, or of sin, of psychological or spiritual scission, whether under the banner of Freud or Proust or whomever.

Death, contemplated with its ineffable and inexorable gentleness, defamiliarises desire. We see how far we have strayed, how many layers of holding-on we have set within us, how it all must be traversed again in the opposite direction. What was it you wanted? This is an invitation to a relentless historical regression.

Sein vs. Dasein. To be is not to be here, the latter expresses an implicit attempt to interpret being motivated in part by awareness of death. When one of us dies he is no longer here, when I die here will continue, but without me. But was there a here lacking me before I was born, is this what we study in history? No, the most we can say is that here is some of the flavour of being. We cannot speak, as many do, of death as “leaving the body”, although it is clear when we look at the corpse of someone we have known that he or she is no longer here. This object no longer gives here-ness, but this points to no there.

Consciousness is not self-presence; so we try to think it as other-presence in a scheme where an implied infinite (or indefinite) regression takes the place of self-adequation. Thus, “the subject is a signifier which represents the subject for another signifier” or “to be is to be the value of a variable”. Other-presence is however just an antithesis to self-presence, or perhaps even just a mathematical transformation of it. What if it was clearly seen that the question of self-presence could never even arise? Similarly the question of the simple being-here of “experience” could not arise, since it has no negation.

The great theoretical antithesis used to be between structuralism and phenomenology, which in turn was the successor to body and mind oppositions. Psychoanalysis, cognitive science, various theorisations of embodied and computational mind locate themselves in the interspace of these polarities. What all of these point to is that consciousness is no longer consciousness (it is never self-presence) and structure is no longer structure (it is never pre-given out of purely material considerations, but is as if teleologically determined by possibilities of knowing.)

Expectation and expression can name two of the many cognitive subsystems which together constitute a “self-conscious life-form”. (We project mechanisms like this onto animals as well, especially our pets, to just the degree that we imagine them to be self-conscious.) Taken as within a subject each of these subsystems is in Time in its own way, and if there is a lack of correspondence, of mapping, between different temporalisations then we have all the phenomena that psychoanalysis ascribes to the unconscious.

I ask you for something and you refuse, derailing my expectation. This causes pain and so I tell myself that I shall never ask you for any such thing again. I forget the pain, but my disposition towards you has changed. Later on you let me know that you would now grant the same request, but I don’t ask you again. Later still I accuse you of always denying me this thing, and you retort that I never ask. In other words the expectation continues but the expression of it and the awareness of it are inhibited. This is a miniature paradigm of the psychological self in which we can see that the same phenomenon may be theorised in terms of the unconscious, or of temporal horizons, or of social scripts, or of ethics or language and doubtless more besides.

I am trying to expose the implicit assumptions that give the world the taken-for-granted quality that it has. To expose is to doubt, all the more so because the intellect is contemptuous of what it understands. So I create a structure of doubt where there was putatively a structure of will and of ‘bad faith’. If I am clever and do this well there is a bracing and enlivening quality to it, but this structure of doubt is in its own way just as presumptive and artificial as what it exposed. In any case there remains a feeling that it doesn’t all quite add up yet, that infinite tasks remain to be done, that the ‘undoing’ has just begun. In the way of structures defined by their relation to a vanishing point (which is indeterminately internal or external) nothing has changed at all. This is known as seeking.

Why do we say ‘always’ for constancy across duration, why not ‘all-whiles’? We implicitly admit that the flow of time is an accomplishment, the result of a certain method, or better of methods differently suited to whatever is current. The content of past and future is not being which is covered or uncovered by the flow of time but it is made strategically in the fecund relation of content (noema) and horizon. There are ways to all of it.

The flow of time is necessarily belated since it only refers to pasts. Present is not in the flow, but the flow itself is in the present.

What do I mean by saying that each of noesis, noema and noematic horizon is subject of the others – that is, stands in the relation of subject to the others as objects? Because the subject is always and with equal justice, pure (grasping) act, pure revelation of content and pure latent and unchanging precondition for any act or event whatsoever.

Let us assume a Husserlian analysis of the present moment into noesis, noema and noematic horizon. And let us further grant that these three terms are so inextricable and interdependent that we cannot draw the distinction of subject/object across them in any way, noesis is fused with noema whose horizon is its enabling and material condition. Each of the three terms is prior to or subject of the others. Let us further say that within this structure the temporalisation takes place by way of the sequential relations of protentions and retentions which are essential substructures of noematic horizon. This model seems able to elucidate to some degree the mystery of musical perception, or more generally of any durational topology. Why does it need to be so complex? Because it must strive to exclude the self-contradictory and belated idea of the flow of time.

Why does irony fail? If it were a matter of falling short in some way then irony would succeed after all, in an ironic way. The answer is in that ‘after all’. Irony is negation and negation of negation, but only after the fact. It does not derive from the negation that is presence, but from the negation of presence that enables position, from the flow of time. The archetype of irony is the contemplation of a past moment, or better, one past’s ‘take’ on another past as past.

In the function of negation there appears to be at least a momentary affinity with reality. This divine discontent that wrenches itself free from any resting place, even from itself, may be motivated by a prior intuition of the real, but even without that, in its very movement it is in alignment as unknowing with the unknown. To assert this is of course to immediately betray it; it needs to be negated again, and the solution to this double negative is by no means obvious, although many have taken it to be irony.

It is not purely scepticism that leads me to deny meaning to consciousness, that would be to dwell on the indeterminacy of the distinction between dreaming and waking. It is rather, and here I can only gesture vaguely, the extreme disjunction between the present moment and the immediate past. Meaning, or a datum is the past, and dependent on this, unknowable – which cannot even be called Present except by way of past.

There are no positive data of consciousness. To be aware of is always to be aware of being aware of, and there is no clear distinction between these layers. Even before it is perception say, a consciousness is in meaning and as such is multiply determined. The phenomenologists, hoping to light upon a term for the most primitive move of consciousness, chose intention, a loaded and ambiguous word which pre-empted their turn to an interpretative and essentially poetic discourse.

Explanation is to spread out in a planar fashion, but this is exactly what is impossible when we are to include both the thing and the condition of possibilty of the thing, object and subject, content and context. There is a topology in play but it resists us, not just because it exceeds our (physical) imagination, like a Klein bottle, but because we are ourselves inseparable from it. Nevertheless a tremendous amount of ingenuity has gone into answering to this condition with some kind of interpretational-act in which it is never enough just to invoke an impossible term, there must also be a doubling back of it onto the present act, a mise-en-abîme (to recall a once fashionable term). This move is a contemporary version of the cogito, a direct and momentary pointing to the untraceable this.

One could say that the problem of consciousness marks the limit of explanation, but this is not quite right since an explanation of limit could still be called for. It is better to say that it is a switch point in the path of inquiry where it is possible to leave explanation altogether. A change of gauge: no longer any such thing, but this thing.

Consciousness, qualia, free will etc. belong to a class of interrelated concepts which all have the property that in searching them out we only find reflections and allegories of our own seeking. This observation points to a topology and hence to a kind of logic that could provide a functional explanation for the persistence of these very questions; a logic of self-reflection can evade the paradoxes of self-reference but remains maddeningly too simple for the philosophical imagination to grasp and thence to find rest in. None of this lessens the mystery at any rate, at least for those who see the circularity in the very need to explain.

The intuition that consciousness is freedom is reflected in another register in the “global workspace” theories which locate consciousness in some central area of the cognitive mechanism having equal access to the results of all special processes. Here what is essential is that the subject can hover over several alternatives before making a choice. Practically, freedom entails responsibility which again entails judgement, and so we imagine the mechanism that enables it on the model of a courtroom. Or is the ubiquity of the court or deliberative council an embodied form of artificial intelligence?

Ethics and religion may help to define the terrain of this inquiry. They are monuments off to one side or the other while this pursues the narrow path straight ahead.

Divine law addresses us in our ultimate subjectivity which is also our deepest freedom. Where a religious system is hostile to the concept of free-will something else serves for subjectification. It may be God’s sovereign freedom (and our capacity to suffer or rejoice) as in Calvinism or it may be our ultimate equation with the divine as in the Atman is Brahman of Vedanta.

It is almost impossible to imagine an ethical agent or object that is wholly lacking in the (potential) feeling of being itself. An apparent exception is the comatose patient who is given no hope of recovery. A utilitarian has no qualms about terminating life support in such a case while a religious person may forbid it. The prohibition may be grounded in indirect ways on the possibility, in principle or in hope, of the patient’s recovery, but it may also be a direct consequence of revealed law, “Thou shalt not kill”.

There is a congeries of ideas here tacitly premised on what in another realm of inquiry altogether is called consciousness. Even utilitarianism, seemingly the most non-metaphysical of ethical systems, equates the ethical substance with the capacity for feeling. Or at least for feeling happiness or unhappiness which may be a further refinement of mere feeling.

Unsubstitutability is an ethical category, and indeed the presence of subjectivity seems to be presupposed in all ethical concepts, such as freedom, guilt, responsibility, reward and punishment. Even ethical substitution, as in amends and the various ideas of transferred guilt or merit, is only meaningful in relation to a prior unsubstitutability.

Many of these questions reduce to this: Is consciousness a kind of thing in the world? This in turn reduces to the question of how we constitute an actual world for interrogation. And so around the circle again.

It is hard to imagine an animal with eyes that focus and that engages in complex and playful behaviour, such as a dog, a cat or an octopus that does not have a subjectivity, that does not experience qualia, or of which it is meaningless to ask, “What is it like to be this creature?” On the other hand it is hard to imagine a robot or AI system that does have subjectivity etc. Is this just a fact about imagination or does it have something to do with the fact that in one case the consciousness is unsubstitutable while in the other it is not?

To wonder whether this is all a dream is not to look for evidences that reality has a dream-like nature, but simply to wonder whether it may not be revealed to be in truth quite different from how it has been taken to be. Evidences of how different in texture reality is from dream are of no avail precisely since we can imagine dreaming just such evidence and the conviction arising from it. To ask this question is to see how little we have to go on.

Some philosophers employ a thought experiment like this to show that our consciousness is not limited to this one organic framework: Imagine that slowly and carefully and piece by piece the neuronal circuitry of the brain was replaced by functionally exact equivalent silicon circuits. There would be no point where you would be able to report a change and yet beyond some point in the process your consciousness would be realized by a quite different physical substructure. A very similar thought experiment could be employed to show the duplication of a consciousness, and yet subjectively this is absurd. There is no functional equivalent for the this, here which belongs to body in its paradoxical unsubstitutability.

Embodiment is unimaginable. (This is why nothing we can know or remember or hope for can approach the reality of death.)

The term embodiment traverses a number of contextual spheres, since it is a commonplace that the body is culturally relative. The larger contexts are where we are infinite and quasi-immortal, the narrower ones are where we are finite but still quasi-immortal and only in the narrowest are we both finite and mortal. Of course death too is culturally relative, but not my death.

Embodiment is unimaginable. (This is why all pornography misses the point.)

I am listening to a recital of a Beethoven piano sonata, by way of a recording that was made 50 years ago by a now dead pianist. My attention is mostly absorbed in the occasion of the performance in which the pianist’s subjective realization of the work is conveyed to me through endless subtleties of phrasing. More than this, it is the myriad decisions expressed in each moment of the performance, the very life of the performer embodied as irreversible cuts in the wax master, that I respond to; and through them perhaps also to the decisions of the composer. To realize all of this I must listen with my whole body so that it can lend its life, its irreversible passing, to these inscriptions. The medium of the recording flatly contradicts this quality of once and once only yet faithfully conveys it, but only to the degree that we can hear it.

Functionality goes a very long way, as we are discovering all the time. Functionality plus embodiment goes even further and may even exhaust the ontological dimension of consciousness. Embodiment supplies specificity beyond specification. We know being in this way and this is a being that has nothing to do with Platonism or other onto-theologies, although these arise from the mythologisation of this strange kind of knowing.

To be here as us we represent ourselves to ourselves, whoever we be. This is functionality and feedback, and is true even of artificially intelligent systems. Such a structure cannot answer the question “Am I alive or dead?” since it can only interrogate an image of itself, and an image by definition is blind to this distinction. So again, is consciousness the bearer of an ontological dimension beyond functionality; is it the witness of being?

The ease with which we suspend disbelief for “The Sixth Sense” has nothing to do with intuitions about death. In this case death is an allegory of art which in representing beings in all their pathos consigns them, and us, to a strange inter-realm, a life-in-death and death-in-life. This is of course all the more salient in cinema where we routinely view the preserved performances of dead actors. It is not possible however, to separate the imaginary of art from all the other dimensions, social, linguistic and ideal that necessarily comport an imaginary dimension and which constitute us as human.

Would a dreamer’s consciousness be enough to “collapse the wave function”? It would seem not, since the dreaming form of awareness can register a situation without canceling all the other possibilities. How about an animal’s? Could Schrödinger’s cat witness its own state of health? What about a human in a similar apparatus? In the absence of external evidence can we witness the event of our own death? There is enough plausibility to the doubt to motivate the plot of a movie like “The Sixth Sense”.

We can imagine a qualia-giving consciousness that is still not quite a world-giving or ontological consciousness. This is why the nature of dream is so interesting. It is hard to imagine an ontological consciousness that is without qualia, although there is no quality per se of being. Nonetheless the two seem inseparable, as in the following observations of Whitehead: “In awareness actuality, as a process in fact, is integrated with the potentialities which illustrate either what it is and might not be, or what it is not and might be. In other words, there is no consciousness without reference to definiteness, affirmation, and negation. … Consciousness is how we feel the affirmation-negation contrast.” (P&R III,ii,4).

There are two different mysteries in what David Chalmers calls the “hard problem of consciousness” (link), that is, the explanandum which remains after we bracket away all definable cognitive functionings. One of these is the qualia, the very feelings of what it is like to experience the world, any world. This problem is addressed by a two-aspect theory of reality, where there is an objective outside and a subjective inside to things, it is amenable to a sort of “separate but equal” metaphysical apartheid. Any cognitively significant event is both causal (de facto) and specifiable in functional terms (de jure), and therefore the inwardness of things has no irreducible causal efficacy. The other mystery, however, is that it is the being aware of a world which makes a world, that irreducibly, for me, the world arises within my knowing of it. This problem, which is difficult to state clearly, is what is addressed in those Quantum based theories that attempt to connect consciousness with collapse of the wave function. Whatever the virtues of such speculations, they do address the conviction that consciousness makes the world to be.

We might say that the distinction between feeling and perception is based on the fact that perception is merely qualitative and provisional of data relative to pregiven contexts, whereas feeling touches the thisness, the haecceitas of things and is inseparable from its character as act, inclusive of subjective and objective poles. The distinction between content and act is somewhat off target, however, since what I am calling feeling is still qualitative. It is a matter of kinds of qualities, or of the kinds of attention that reveal it; the sense of being brushed by things, elicited, or that our inner elaborations of the experience are, so to speak, dialogic. We await the spontaneity of things. Openness is a comportment of (the act of) feeling, not of thinking or perception.

Do feelings pre-dispose a distinction of inner and outer, of within-the-body and out-in-the-world? Perception makes this distinction, although I would suggest nowhere more clearly than in the distinction between a dreamed space and the world in which we find ourselves awake. On the other hand there seems to be no feeling that cannot be deepened and extended by acts that have the body as their sole locus. In the feeling of something 'external' there is an intimacy with a counterpart that is known as other body regarding body. Aesthesis as inner feeling gives rise to aesthetic perception, an intimacy with 'externally' stabilised qualia.

A moment of consciousness can never be found, it is lived here and now, patently, and yet when we look for it it is gone. (So that it is always consistent to deny qualia.) It comes to flower only in a gaze that looks through it. Consciousness then is the tenor and feeling the vehicle. But we never intend feeling as such. Since feelings are not separable, to speak of them is to make distinctions in an ever-changing field, one that is multi-dimensional or a-dimensional. We know them but we cannot speak them as they are known.

The reference of feeling to an outer world seems to have a tension in it. Outer world being counterposed to body-in-feeling. So that consciousness is work in some thermodynamic sense. I'm really asking why it is we need to sleep, why this need is pre-understood in waking consciousness. A state of supreme lucidity, where thought flows effortlessly united with lively feeling is one that we know to be transient, a subtle strain on the organism. The waking state that seems closest to indefinite extensibility is that of insomnia which is one of fitful and incoherent feeling. Significantly, the closest we often come to the former state is in certain kinds of lucid dreaming or in creative bursts, when the pressure of the outer world, its gravity, is suspended.

Thought is separable from body but not feeling. Even when feeling is transferred through music or song it is always inclusive of a body sense with which it is not necessarily identified. The inclusion may be a function of the very impossibility of identification as when the body sense is indefinitely plural. Thought as distinct from feeling is an abstraction, a passing to the limit, but this is just what thought is, abstraction, limit, infinitary, functional. At other times however, I have noted that some works of Bach could be enjoyed by beings with no bodily sense, as if there were purely intellectual or spiritual emotions.

How can we even put this forward when it is only consciousness which provides the 'there is' in which to situate the very possibility of such a field? Because we are beings who know sleep and falling asleep, when consciousness flickers out while feeling remains continuous, although undergoing an involution.

There are forms of sentience far subtler than consciousness and which form the underlying field out of which it arises, like a flame playing over coals or a pattern of ionised gases in an electric field. More subtle forms of feeling with no clear boundaries so that the momentary answer to the question 'How are you?' is like the solution to an equation. (That is, a kind of trope which is neither metaphor nor metonymy, but which we know.)

Every moment is supremely open, that is its nature far prior to what we imagine could be brought out by any cultivation. This openness is paradoxically utterly private because it is intimate, with an intimacy that is the other face of its nature. It is not that the intimacy belongs to a subject, the subject is an hypothesis brought in as if to ground this intimacy, which otherwise seems to turn away even from itself. That Being simultaneously reveals and conceals is to be understood this way, and these indications of it which attempt to bring together primal openness with human spaces are themselves the openness of this indelibly mixed space.

From deep sleep, from dream, from immersion in the privacy of that syntax of afferent and efferent sensitivity known as the body we emerge into this common space, this "clearing" where we meet and lose ourselves again in the endlessly interwoven threads of our lives. Mundane, quotidien, these words belie the miraculous consistency of this reality, so regretted by the dead Achilles when he is summoned by Odysseus. The medium of this knowing is revealed in essence when it is just turned within itself. This is the fluidity of dream and flowing reabsorbtions of sleep, and yet rising to the surface, it becomes a world of recurrent mutual objects, whose very changes are subject to strict laws of conservation. Whether this all reflects the odyssey of a point subject or whether subjective effects result from the activation of phases of an immobile reality, the possibility of an awareness oblique to the diurnal round is breathed like oxygen and turns all jadedness to wonder.

These utterances are more or less successful at bringing this occasion to the surprising speakability of its origination. This occasion, as much that of this reading as this writing, although it seems as if a writer must formally present the shifter 'this' to the reader. Consider it done. Being alive, being awake, are successive frames for this knowingness which is the lighting of a multiply determined corner of a world. The perspectives implicit in these determinations belong by definition to a further inward transparency, but the constraints of the knowing which are the parameters and ontologies of the world can in no way reach there. Experience of the world and of the self teaches us of an extraordinary inconstancy as if to gradually accustom us to thinner air, thinner objects and surrender of the biographical knower. The events of themselves draw towards a fuller satisfaction.

I am suddenly roused from a thick afternoon sleep and a split second later am aware that the phone is ringing. This tiny delay represents the time taken for the screen of reality to knit itself together, the response to the ringing phone presumably following more immediate pathways as a result of a lifetime of conditioning. For the rest of the evening I am aware of the floating, constructed quality of the world. (It is no wonder that the ringing phone was used to just this effect in "The Matrix"). Again, on another occasion I am dreaming in a room with loud music playing when the alarm wakes me up. I am aware of the alarm but I can also "hear" the music stop playing, as if someone switched off the sound a moment after the scene blanked out.

It is possible to imagine an unending dream but difficult to believe than an unending waking state could have any consistency. The diurnal cycle is not only a habitual consideration of waking mind, at least in its caretaker role, but seems to be intrinsic to the constitution of all psychic objectivities. The self is already that which expends itself so that it may renew itself, and even the perception of colour requires a screen that is continually melted down and started anew. The things that belong most thoroughly to the waking world have in them a sort of strain as if they are pushed into unequivocal manifestation by a force that perishes in its very extension. In this sphere everything is known through the body, unlike dream where the knowing is entirely in body.

The sleepiness of the body is because the senses which constitute the life of the body do not of themselves distinguish inside from outside. The body's intrinsic picture of the world is of a space defined by the evanescent saliencies of an indefinite mass of sensation indefinitely merged with its own flickering movements and shadows of movement. (Possibility is before anything else a kinesthetic category.) This may often seem a sort of grey paisley world and quite poor in comparison to the one called into wakeful definition by the imperious outside, but it knows many more dimensions of motion and in surrendering to it we pass into dreaming, a state in which unlimited freedom is ironically countered by an almost total absence of control.

Each moment of waking consciousness emerges from latent body awareness. In fact it never leaves body awareness but if it has any sort of career before mysteriously being superceded it sculpts this plastic inner sense of materially being here into the appearance of those luminous and self-determined forms we call thoughts. When I am ill it is as if the body remains asleep in all of this and so my wakefulness is also moulded out of sleep. It is hard to believe that this is not just an exaggeration of the usual state of affairs, the flesh being almost always, almost everywhere enfolded in sleep.

The strong character is one that remains consistent in focus and direction in spite of the various reflections of it that are ascribed to others. This character seems to pre-exist its dealings with the world and to be founded on a base of knowledge. The weak character is one whose form is continually renegotiated through ideas of the world and which so lacks the constancy of anything to be known. The latter may however be more self-conscious than the former and in this way constitute a deeper if unreliable point of knowledge, which is an ironic knowing of itself and the world. This is a thoroughly Hegelian antithesis (cf. Rameau’s Nephew) but it functions as much on an intra- as inter-psychic level. We can find ourselves living it on a day to day or even hour to hour basis. Like a buoyant doll the "I" always bobs upright in any sea. (cf. also the character played by George Clooney in the Coen Brothers’ “O, Brother Where Art Thou? ”)

In some fields of mathematics we actually encounter the phenomenon of an expansion of context in which a previously infinite term becomes finite. This could be a model of the spiritual and psychological phenomenon called transcendence, but it may show only that mathematics is in thrall to the same illusion. Looking in the world for concrete examples of this paradigm we find that it is either so ubiquitous as to be banal or so rare as to be effectively non-existent.

In the songs and stories that we hear or that we tell ourselves emotion is so often evoked by love prevented that it almost seems to be identified with it. If self-love were to be included with love it might be possible to argue that all emotions arise in this way, but in the recurrent narrative mythos, love is very precisely defined as an opening towards the other, which may be narrow or broad, deep or shallow depending on the context. The essential association with emotion that is added to love in these forms threatens however the very possibility of such an opening. Love is a turning of the will, while emotions are a movement of feeling. It is only when the two are grasped as entirely separate that we may contemplate their synthesis. In Christianity an entire faith is based on a narrative that confuses love and emotion. This may be why the history of Christian love is such a chequered one.

Love and emotion, like commitment and ease, or reflection and suffering are not opposites but dialectically related parties in the sense that they appear as reciprocal identifications. As such they remain out of reach, each one blocked by its partner, and hence function as the vanishing points that define the more or less perspectival space of (human) experience. Wisdom is to learn their synthesis, which is no longer played in such a dialectical space. The terms then are realised as finite, infinitely fragile but attainable. This finite is truly mortal particular; we live once, we have to choose, there is no system.

This weariness at the end of a day in which consciousness is just a skeleton force. The wakeful reference to an "I" is discontinuous and the focalisation that is its special attribute is wandering and indifferent. Because it requires such deliberate maintenance it is a zero degree of waking consciousness and should therefore be more revealing of its essence than the mind of noon. But this consciousness merged with feeling is contemptuous of words. The realm of interest opened here as writing seems to be panoptic but it is virtually blind to the current of life which sustains it and which it worships.

Working with effort at the gymnasium I become divided into two parties, the one that is determined to continue and the one that begs for a stop. Each of these is a possible point of identification but in the moment I cannot entirely identify with either. For the most part I am the former. This is the one that then becomes implicit, it commands from a bridge in the mind while the other keeps trying to break in from the side of the body. It is as if they are vying for the alleigance of the one who actually executes the actions that constitute the lived moments. And the identification takes places for this one in an ongoing way. It is as if the "I" can only know itself through this process called identification, the reflexive accedence to one of the parties, and this knowing is not merely cognitive but practical since it determines its active choices. The reflexive choice cannot settle conclusively for either side since it requires a unity of meaning and feeling and these are divided between the two. Again, the oddity of this process may be just a reflection of the neurological incompatibility of the two dispositional systems.

All psychological objectivities are cultural artifacts, nonetheless, and crooked as they may be they permit us to dismantle the machine. Isn't this rather naïve? What you call dismantling is another artifact from the same tool chest and the degree to which these yield to one other is already delimited. We may imagine other tool chests and other forms of penetration, the fact remains that all awareness of the machinations of inner reality goads us to this task.

Narratives arise in the space where other narratives break off. This breaking off is the appropriate mode of ending for any story, since it leaves the possibility open for resumption. Always stories within stories, divagations, deferrals, multiple threads, so that forgetting or leaving aside is as much a part of this moment as resuming, as starting afresh, as gathering up into new sense. There is a resonant silence when a story breaks mid-sentence…. and then, another story begins. We are not sure if it is the continuation of the previous one or a new story altogether.

The most blatant form of discursive thought is silent inner speech, and this mostly has a more or less optional character. Even so, when we exercise the apparent choice to stem the flow of this speech, to halt the process of its forum, we merely still certain facial muscles and are able to sense that we have already acceded to the little bright sentential capsules that shoot from we know not where into the space of our attention. Regardless of this, at each moment we find ourselves in an ever changing life situation and the colouring and the solicitations that it bears with it as it comes over to us are also discursive although less obviously and less optionally so, and furthermore, by that very discursivity belong all the more fatally to us. This incessant process where feeling and quantity of life are transformed into narrative is where we naturally, unthinkingly, find ourselves.

Discursive thought, then, is not distinguishable from the flow of lived time, which it indeed seems to fix in an unequivocal sense. Its grammar, in both implicit and explicit insistence provides the topology of linearisation for that temporality in which we will always strive in vain to recover ourselves.