/lit/ - Literature

Tangents and tangents, as the story goes.

The mutual touch of the divergent differentiating adventures of these tangents forming a mutual circle that becomes ever more circle-like with the introduction of more tangent-perspectives around it.

From "The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality by Elizabeth M. Kraus, pgs 16-18:

>To present a complete explanation of the doctrine of prehension and the correlative doctrine of the organicity of the world is virtually impossible in a subject-predicate language; however an analysis of various types of experience can reveal elements whose synthesis in the imaginative leap yields a model at least adequate for Whitehead's purposes. The experience of volume is a case in point. When abstractly considered, from the standpoint of the geometer, a volume presents itself as a bland multiplicity of endlessly divisible subvolumes, a continuum in which there are no topically singular points - which is to say that all possible subvolumes share the same mode of connection. None has any individuality, any unique characteristics unshared by the others. However, when a volume is an object of conscious experience, it possesses a unity of structure of a different sort - not the sort of structure which would be grasped by a privileged observer in his view from no view-point, but a structure unique to each possible perspective within the volume.

A concrete example may serve to make this point clearer. If you view a doughnut from an angle, it appears to be an ellipse whose degree of flattening is a function of the obliqueness of its angle. If you view it on edge, it appears to be a solid object, the hole having been obscured. If you view it "head on," it appears the characteristic torus shape, but the reverse side is invisible. No one of these perspectives on the doughnut can be absolutized as "the way a doughnut is." Each is the way a doughnut looks from a particular point to the environing space.

>Furthermore, each position is the perspective which it takes on in the other included subvolumes. In other words, the structure of the volume from the perspective constitutes the perspective. It is important to note, in addition, that it is not the full determinateness of each sub-volume perspectivally grasped which is appropriated in the grasp, but only an aspect of it. The aspect from the perspective enters into the constitution of the perspective. Therefore, it is equally true that the togetherness of the perspectival aspects constitutes the perspective and that the perspecive "decides" the aspects. Each is what the other makes it to be.

>In the doughnut example, from no single position can the entire doughnut be seen, only that aspect of it visible from whatever position in the environing space the observer takes. The doughnut "in itself" is the unity of all possible doughnut-views, each of which is sui generis.