2.6
The metaphoric relation, which I’ve likened to the transformative experience (§2.2), is one of loss. It’s rife with loss—the outlines that subtend the gestalt shift are the ones that held up the other image a moment ago (§2.5); the gesture of presence traces a shadow of absence:. But notice that, even on the cube, the outlines aren’t the same outlines they were before (don’t let their status as ‘lines’ deceive you). When the cube projects one way and you experience a shift so it projects the other, the outlines that are the hinge of what is common between the two change: structurally, they’re not the same (this one ‘travels’ to the other side of that one; this one now bears the weight; etc.).
It’s quite remarkable that we can never see both projections of the cube simultaneously—that each projection emerges from the loss of the other[1]—but also that we can get better at switching between the two. Sometimes we get to the point where we can alternate between one and the other so rapidly it feels as though we should be able to see both at once: but we cannot.
It’s difficult to provide a reason for this. (But, then, why do we want a reason? It’s simply a fact.) It has to do with the reorientation required in the gestalt shift to see one projection in distinction from the other: parts of the outline have to play different roles in different projections.
The cube, in my text, is a metaphor. The transformation of the world involves a new alignment in the relations of things and world. It doesn’t just reveal new possibilities, it reveals new possibilities for possibilities; because possibilities unfold within the horizon of our world (§2.4), a transformation of the world transforms the basis of possibilities themselves. We see a new projection of the world, analogous to a new projection of the cube: we shift from one world-projection to another.
Each way of seeing occludes other ways of seeing—this is the basis of the possibility of transforming the world—yet none is fundamentally more ‘natural’ than any other. This occlusion points to the absence and loss inherent in seeing. Not as loss of parts from a whole, for there’s no perspective from which we could see all projections; rather, loss as ontologically constitutive, as the condition of any presence.
But we can get better at switching between projections. Imagination is one way of doing this: we get better at seeing how things are or may be for other ways of being; for people in other cultures; for other lifeforms. Imagination is a sensitivity to the ways of being of another (which also reveals one’s own ways of being).
Projections of the cube are structural possibilities. The cube “could not be the one without also being the other (whether we see this or not).”[2] Things necessarily enable other projections. Zwicky drawing on Wittgenstein calls the ‘failure’ to see a projection aspect-blindness: “a failure to see what is there.”[3]
[1] Zwicky, W&M, LH56.
[2] ibid, LH98.
[3] ibid, LH25.