1.6
— “It is the essence of our experience of gestalt figures like the Necker cube […] that, however adept we become at performing the gestalt shift, we can never see the two figures simultaneously. So in the awareness of one is always the shadow of the loss of the other.”[1]
There are several key ideas here: the cube can be seen as projecting upwards to the right or downwards to the left, but we never see both figures at once; each figure carries the loss of the other; and, with that said, we can get better, more adept, at performing the shift.
[1] ibid, LH56. On the Necker cube in Zwicky, see also LH80, LH97–99, and The Experience of Meaning (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), p. 12–13, 17, 149–150.