2.63
A tree shows how it is with it in its particularity: Here I am, here is how things are right now. This can penetrate through any (particular) universalizing we try to do.
A thing shows its particularity, its thisness which, suggestively, opens onto a wisp of world: “Its thisness, then, cannot be fully articulable since any such articulation would require the articulation of a complete context, which in all cases is the world.”[1]
“Thisness is the experience of a distinct thing in such a way that the resonant structure of the world sounds through it.
“Each this focusses that resonant structure in a distinct way. But the structure so focussed is—of course—always the same. There is only one world.”[2]
The complete context for a this is a constellation, ringing out from this, reverberating in everything else: it shows a particular way that all things can be gathered. Granted, this gathering may reflect something about the one struck by the thisness (i.e., how, for me, things come together around this), but it may offer insight into how things come together for this. We may start to see how things are drawn in and push out from this.
But, hold on — how is there only one world? Doesn’t this go against what I’ve been claiming? Yes, and no.[3] There’s one ‘world’ in the sense that while there are different worlds, they each speak to the whole (each is a flash, encompassing all); they each speak to beings as a whole, for each world gathers things just so (§2.59).
But it’s also not the case that there’s one world. I’m proposing a divergent view of truth and worlds. While each world speaks to the whole, other worlds leave traces and have openings that gesture beyond themselves towards other ways that things can be gathered, globally. And no thing has access to beings as a whole except by way of their world.
As we saw, Zwicky writes of a “resonant structure.”[4] This structure is made possible by a distinction between things, the way they’re positioned and related in being-together; it’s dynamic and transient, for it emerges and dissipates in new arrays. It’s also an internal structure (§2.47), and doesn’t have a centre outside (§1.98), if it has a centre at all. A resonant structure could be the same only so long as the world is the same.
[1] Zwicky, W&M, LH53.
[2] ibid, LH55.
[3] Zwicky’s use of “world” isn’t the same as mine: see W&M, LH85.
[4] Zwicky, W&M, LH55, LH117.