“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, April 27, 2012

Boundary Issues

Several decades of Derrida followed by two glorious years of Harman have convinced me that boundaries in the ontic world are never thin and rigid, but always ambiguous, nay riddled with contradiction and anomalous entities.

"Alive" for instance means in part "to have an ambiguous boundary contested in many ways."

But since Sorites and Zeno's paradoxes apply to anything at all in ontic space, all boundaries whatsoever are problematic.

Did I say no boundaries? No. That would also be the metaphysics of presence--a One arbitrarily subdivided.

There are no (thin rigid) boundaries, and no not-boundaries. I argued this in Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought.



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