hyperexistence

— Thought is habitually "structuralist," if one can be allowed to employ an overworked term which has therefore become almost useless. It means that our understanding of anything whatever rests exclusively on the pairs of opposites of which the understood quality happens to be an element. In other words, we understand only through contrast, only when we can comprehend that which is the absence of the comprehended: an object can appear only against a background of a universe which it is not. The act of recognition or identification of things is simultaneous with the movement of thought which reaches what the object being recognized is not: Omnis determinatio est negatio. In saying that something is such-and-such, we know what we are saying only when we know that some other thing is what this thing is not. Hence, all naming which aspires to describe the properties of "everything" — for instance, "The world of experience" or "the whole of what is known" — either has only an illusory meaning, or immediately evokes the counterelement of that "all" which creates a contrast for it in a paired opposition. Thus, in the act of recognition there is an inertia which, in the face of questions regarding "everything," immediately calls up a second universe that gives a meaning to "all." "All" thereby ceases to be all, but itself in turn becomes a condition of an understanding of that second universe — hence, the birth of the Myth of the Cave or similarly shaped structures, thanks to which the whole of the experienced universe may be taken as a reflex, a sign, an appearance, or a veil of another universe. They support each other, for the hyperexistence of Platonic Ideas is only comprehensible in relation to the impermanence of palpable entities — and not just the other way round.