2.52
To let metaphoric ontology affect our customary metaphysical habits requires that we be careful with how we understand the metaphoric structure of worlds.
For Zwicky, reductionism is partly the impulse and attempt to arrest the movement of a metaphor; instead of allowing two contexts to meet before being released each to each, reductionism tries to pin down what is common between the two contexts: it tries to hypostatize what is common and treat it as “basic metaphysical stuff.”[1] Reductionism tries to prioritize similarity over difference, which it takes as sameness or identity or objective reality.
We’re adopting a reductionist framework if we insist that the cube is just a series of lines that creates an illusion of projection; if we insist on the priority of what the two projections have in common, we reduce the phenomena to similarity and deny difference. We thus guarantee and ground sameness and identity by neglecting the true phenomenal appearance, for the cube is actually both of its projections.
The cube metaphorically gestures to the way that Being ‘is’ disclosed: Being opens in different ways, like the cube that projects in two ways. When I claimed above that Being metaphorizes itself, it’s reductionist to take Being as a basic metaphysical ‘thing.’ There’s no fundamental Being disclosed in different ways. Rather, there’s ‘fundamentally’ difference and divergence. Within every ‘is’ whispers an ‘is not.’ – There are different disclosures disclosing themselves. Disclosures disclose other disclosures, but never reconcile.
Let’s approach this problem from a different angle, and take a tree as an example. This tree can be approached in many ways. It shows different aspects to a biologist in the woods than to a physicist. A gardener sees it differently. And yet, these ways of approaching it are unified in its basic sense for us. However, it could also be encountered by someone in another world as an abode for spirits.
The reductionist move, which flattens the phenomena of the cube and takes it as a series of lines, would be to take the tree’s similarity across worlds as indicative of a sameness. I’m taking ‘this tree’ as phenomenally appearing within different disclosures without grounding it in an objective, universal fundament. In fact, its appearing in one world is internally related to its appearing in other worlds. In other words, this tree could not be if it weren’t also the possibility of being taken up differently. It ‘is’ and ‘is not’ ‘this tree.’
The metaphoric structure of things means a being flashes into different ontologies—divergent Beings—which themselves flash out over all beings. In these different worlds, the thingness of the thing—e.g., that it is a tree—is up for grabs; it need not be individuated/ontologized as a thing in the way it is in our world (§2.5).
Instead of seeking an essence to the thing—a point at which to arrest all movement—we should instead see that the tree gives aspects differently and relationally in different disclosures and thus becomes different: for, in a disclosure, the tree is the aspects given. Several wholes occupy—not the same space—space in common, temporarily (§2.10).[2]
A more sensitive type and style of response would seek not to identify or determine the foundations of things or worlds (e.g., what they really are), but would attend to things, to fit or resonate with the thing in question.
Metaphoric ontology speaks to the similarity and reverberations amongst things, but holds tight to their difference: to collapse difference is to enact a different kind of violence, borne from inattentiveness.
Nonetheless, things always resist their gathering: this is why the lines are always slack; this is why we can be pierced by thisness. Things call out to us, plead with us, to accept the display of other aspects. Attentiveness is to see that our concepts, our language, our perceptions and the gathering itself, aren’t perfect — and could never be. — There are cracks through which all things bleed and grow.
—— Any explanation is held in place by its context of relations, which includes this explanation.
— I want the snake to eat its tail, but it cannot.
[1] Zwicky, W&M, LH80. ‘Hypostatization’ is also a term used by from Zwicky: e.g., see W&M, LH62.
[2] Understanding a successful metaphor (a key component of wisdom for Zwicky) “has to do with the grasp of wholes that occupy the same space, yet are different”; W&M, LH93. However, even the spaces that each disclosure discloses aren’t the same, but diverge while sharing commonalities.