2.75
We sense divergence through the hinge of what is common (never the same). “Though the hinge—the hinge of what is common (§1.1)—is not on, or attached to, the outlines of things, it almost is” (§1.5). This shouldn’t be taken literally. I’m not saying that outlines of things are more real or maintain their existence through all disclosures, or that things are ‘touched’ at the precise point of the hinge. Rather, things are, in general, ‘touched’ all over, from one gathering to the next.
So, in what sense are the outlines of things almost the hinge? A particular kind of gestalt shift is possible wherein ‘what we currently see’ is oriented differently (§2.1). Our usual way tends to gloss over things. But there’s a way in which things reveal themselves, in a kind of global sense, more in their particular characters: things become more ‘alive.’
— — — Mysticism, or many strands of it, doesn’t start from ‘somewhere else.’ It’s empirical, in its own way.
I’m not really advocating for mysticism (and all that this is bound up with: in its standard opposition to reason and its contextualization within particular historical religious traditions, e.g., Christianity); I’m just trying to gesture to how different disclosures touch the world, just so.[1] And that there’s an experience from within our world where everything shifts, which reveals new facets. Not new facets of old things, but new facets of things themselves.
[1] Though, really, there’s no world that stands over and against its disclosure; hence, there’s no distance that would allow it to be ‘touched.’ That a world is gathered in a particular way is another way of saying that the world is.