the world that doesn’t exist and what to do about it

“turning” as perceptual conversion

IMAGINE yourself across from another, situated in the three dimensions of spatial existence. Next, couple to this the three further dimensions of experience in the mode of relationality designated by the first, second, and third persons of grammar—“I,” “you,” “he/she/it.” In a prior reflection, I indexed the three grammatical persons to three domains of the Holy Trinity, which ordinally mirrors the grammatical persons such that the Father correlates with the third grammatical person and the Holy Ghost with the first. More on this later.

aphoristic notes on the Trinity

Returning to the scenario presented above, the reader can grasp his own situation in respect to “I,” to “you,” and to “he/she/it” even if it cannot ultimately be conveyed coherently by anyone else. After all, “I” is a title only we can give to ourselves—to everyone but me, I am a “you.” And if someone calls another by the word “I,” it is evidence that he has not grasped the meaning of the word and hence can only pretend to speak it. As long as I recognize the other as an I from his own side, he remains a “you” to me and we stand “face to face” and “know even also as I am known.”¹ This much is obvious. 

Imagine further, however, that from my perception of the other, I form a representation of him, as a model cast from a mould, or like the imprint of a seal in wax. Just as I can then remove the model from its mold and the imprint from the seal, so I can imagine this person as a representation in my consciousness irrespective of, and in abstraction from, his relation to me as a “you” and through which his “I” is mediated to me. Now I can refer to him as “he” or an “it,” simpliciter. Yet notice that the grammatical third person is experientially last to arrive and follows on the coattails of the other persons as an echo follows the cry of a gull or a “splash” follows a pebble cast into a well. 

Suppose, however, that I forget the common origin of all things and begin to seek for it among this “third-person” world of shadows—this model of abstract representations that I project as husks of my perceptual encounters. Suppose I begin to imbue the latter with the seal of my gnoseological authentication and go on to develop an entire method and program of research dedicated to ratifying and promulgating—under the imprimatur of “science”—the absolute reality of this exclusively third-person conceit, to which first and second-person aspects are regarded as epiphenomenal appendages.

It will, I think, be clear that what has come to seem most real to me is in fact most illusory and this “physical world” that I imagine to exist around me, and which I imagine to have pre-existed my arrival by eons untold except by illustrious physicists and astronomers, in reality never existed at any time except in my imagination and the collective consciousness of this generation and as a jewel on Lucifer’s belt of lies. The scientific method performs one further degree of abstraction to arrive at the scientific image of reality by bracketing away all qualitative elements of third-person phenomenal objects to form a representation of them according to their exclusively quantitative parameters. The shadows on the back of Plato’s Cave, however, would be more real than the supposed “scientific image” of things because at least the former are qualitatively of a piece with, and consistent with, the rest of the narrative while the objects of scientific study are conceived as transcendental “things-in-themselves” that human experience conceals behind artefacts of perception. To derive explanations for the phenomena we do experience from conjectured ones we don’t is an odd path of science, properly so called,² howbeit it is apparently the official one.

But the comparison to Plato’s Cave is a pregnant one. Suppose we were to undertake, in the spirit of the Philosopher, “a turning the soul from day that is a kind of night, to true Day—the ascent to what is, which is to say, true Philosophy”³ What would this mean in the terms familiar to the present argument? Like Mary in the Garden,⁴ the turning here indicated represents a turning from illusion to true being. It is both a “turning,” and a “turning about,” and perhaps a “turning-inside-out” of the whole soul—an inversion, a conversion, and eversion all at once. As Plato describes:

just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of Being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of Being, and of the brightest and best of Being, or in other words, of the Good.⁵

It is a turn from the “day that is a kind of night” in which we see only shadows to a “true Day” in which the spirit that shines through the “you’s” around us in all created things is no longer concealed behind our abstract spatial models, let alone our scientific transpositions of them into mathematics. Being turns it back to us and hides it face as long as we turn our backs on it by hypostasizing the objects of representational consciousness out into Newtonian space.

The turning is also upwards towards the source of this “true light,” the light that shines from from behind our eyes, the light from above “which lighteth every man.”⁶ Grammatically speaking, the first person is an identity with us and the second the most relationally immediate. A true vision of anything else is only granted through the I⁷ and not by any other departure point. Christ says, “no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,”⁸ and no man cometh to Christ except through the Holy Ghost. Being must be encountered through the I, by way of the you, or not at all.

Photo by Raphael Renter on Unsplash

1. 1 Corinthians 13:12

2. a “preposterous” one, etymologically speaking

3. Plato, Republic, 521c

4. Cf. John 20:

¹¹ But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre,

¹² And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.

¹³ And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

¹⁴ And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.

¹⁵ Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

¹⁶ Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.

5. Plato, Republic, 518c

6. John 1:9

7. Cf. Galatians 2:19-20:

For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me…

8. John 14:6