WARNING: This post is a process of understanding, not a product of understanding. That means it will cause anxiety, not relieve it. I am opening questions I do not know how to close.

Isn’t openness exciting, though? Isn’t openness liberating? Hell no, openness is not exciting or liberating. It is oppressive and dreadful until it is closed again, and closed better.

True openness allows the primordial chaos to flood back in and submerge us in dread. This is the infant’s element. It is what makes babies cry when left alone in a dark room. A philosopher’s proclivity to open what best remains closed — to welcome back chaos — is the real reason philosophy is hated by those who already know enough. The experience of being born is dreadful and none of us want to relive it, but reliving birth is the very business of philosophy.

What makes us feel liberated is to re-ask a question whose answer has overwhelmed us or paralyzed us or depressed us, and to re-answer it more compactly or more productively or affirmingly. (I’m reminded of Thomas Kuhn’s criteria of theory choice: Accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness.) We feel liberated when we replace unsatisfactory answers with good ones. And if it seems that we like to re-open questions, it is only for this.

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Some metaphors for the unknown:

• concealed
• disguised
• unnoticed
• microscopic
• dark
• in darkness
• invisible
• distant
• beyond (over the horizon)
• forgotten

Many of these metaphors (like metaphors in general) are visual.

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For any particular event of vision to occur a number of conditions must be met:

• a subject of vision (the seer)
• a capacity for vision (sight)
• a medium of vision (light)
• an object of vision (the seen)
• a situation in which all the conditions are present in specific relation to one another

The situation in which an event of vision occurs contains a number of relationships:

• the situation is finite; it is understood that things are outside the situation
• the subject seeing is characterized by possessing sight (to count them as separate — suspicious?)
• the subject has an objective presence in the situation he sees: he is situated as an object among the objects of the situation
• the subject seeing relates to the objects seen in a perspective, where closer objects are larger, and more distant objects are smaller, and the most distant objects disappear
• in relation to the seer and to peer objects, objects closer to the seer may obscure more distant objects
• light also has an objective presence in the situation, in that some object or objects in the situation emits the light by which things are seen
• light relates to the objects seen in illumination, where objects closer to the light source are brighter, and more distant objects are darker, and the most distant objects are no longer visible
• in relation to a light source and to peer objects, objects closer to the light source may cast shadows on more distant objects (and this includes the seer as object)
• multiple light sources may illuminate shadows from other light sources
• objects may reflect light onto other objects, and behave both as light sources and objects (and this includes the seer as object)
• the seer and sight is always one; where light sources and objects are always at least one, but potentially multiple

Of course, some objects in an event of seeing are respected as fellow seers, but strictly speaking, to “see” this into the metaphor is to confuse it. A fellow seer is to be heard, and what one hears might change what one sees.