Commonness Happens in Differentiating: A Small Topology of Being and Appearance – or: vive la Difference

This presentation is part of the Unity and Difference track.

Our brain is an informational closed system. What we perceive is not a more or less exact image of a reality independent of us. Our brain actively produces it. Reality constitutes itself as being-in-picture. We have already been in the picture, immersed in a virtual reality of the 1st order (VR 1), which we call reality, world. According to Merleau-Ponty, this is the “primordial presentation of the non-presentable, “original presentation of the non-presentable” (Merleau-Ponty, 1986: 277, 261). Reality is a relational structure with individual topologies.

There is no emergency exit from the immersion area’s reality. This still makes the difference between VR 1 and a virtual reality of the 2nd order (VR 2) into which we immerse ourselves when we are reading, watching a movie, a theatre play, looking at a painting, lost in our thoughts, or in cyberspace. A Topology of Being is always a Topology of Appearance as well.

Topology as a mathematical discipline deals with the continuous transformation of structural correlations and their relational similarities, (homeomorphisms), but also with their ruptures and transformations into other structural correlations, i.e. other topologies (antimorphism). The latter is referred to as Non-standard topology (NsT).

The primordial leap, i.e. origin, of our differently and individually accessed world is the difference itself. The primordial leap occurs as a universal relationality. Heidegger considers the “relationship of all relationships” to be the “location of all locations and time-play-rooms” (UzS: 215, 258), and Merleau-Ponty sees it as a “universal dimensionality” (SU: 333, see 279, 315; AG: 33; Heidegger: VA: 189, 192; UzS: 13, 24 ff.; see Nunold 2000, 2004, 42 ff.). Like the emptiness the universal dimensionality is not substantial. It is rather something like a process-like thought of a substrate of our body-soul-mind existence, a physical-psychic-mental foundation and founding process, our second and real nature, if the first nature describes our biological existence. In the sense of an NsT, one can speak of a physical-psychic-mental pre- or basic state, to a certain extent of a physical-psychic-mental pregeometry (see Eisenhardt/Kurth, 1993; Eisenhardt/Kurth/Stiehl, 1995; Kurth, 1997; Nunold, 2004, 42 ff.) out of which all other structural correlations, all other physical-psychic-mental structures of relationship and reference emerge. An absence which only makes a presence, a “being-like-that” possible. It does not possess any metrics; it is excessive in the meaning of the Greek apairon, and it is no continuum. Originally, the basic state is an indefinite and fissured (see Heidegger, BPh: § 127, 156 ff.) or ruptured interrelationship. Kurth and Eisenhardt introduce the term fraktgen, which stands for the brokenness within the NsT (Eisenhardt/Kurth, 1993: 60). The NsT exhibits self-similarities, which, due to the penetration properties of non-standard-topological structural correlations, are “less organized” or “more bizarre” than those self-similarities, which are known from formations of fractal geometry (ibid, 46; see Nunold, 2000, 2004: 44 f.).

Reality is already infinitely differentiated and discontinuous in the primordial leap. There is no solid comment base, no solid reason on which we can build and to which we can hope to return to someday and in which the inconsistencies cancel each other out. They are sinking in the bizarre fraktgen discontinuum. Everything whichever emerge from it as a reality is discrete, complexity-reduced, antimorphous and fragmentary primal presentations or archetypes.

Reality will always have constituted itself to us in individual structural correlations. It will ever been shattered in poly-contextual multi-verses (cf. for example: Günther 1978; 1976; 1979; 1980). There is for us no meta-system that subordinates other systems, worlds or realities and forces their being together in a structure of a holy order. The individual worlds may be more or less hierarchically structured; the relationship among them is heterarchic, a can-be-possible-together (compossibility). The worlds can be interlaced with each another, (cf. McCulloch 1945; von Goldammer 2000).

There is no master narration. Reality is not one and differently of what demagogues, dictators, political and religious fanatics, a patriarchal metaphysics us to believe. Reality is never totally transparent and consistent. Each reality is an antimorphous and like it is only possible for finite nature, complexity-reduced antimorphous picture of presupposed reality. Only delusional systems are free of contradictions. They are monocontextual and totalitarian. Delusional reality systems are coercive systems, in which large groups of humans can live and be confirmed mutually in their delusion. We all captivated in our day-to-day accomplishments, self-, world-, and appearance-oblivion, in a more or less distinct monocontextuality. With all the things in common and all the similarities - and it is always a matter of similarities and not about truth when it comes to pictures -, which we discover or also only find and may invent, the essentially common to us is the literal origin which can be understood, that primeval difference. From it all further differences emerged, which again produced all further differences, to say it with Bateson.

Even the most abstract language speaks in pictures. Metaphorical concepts however structure all our feeling, thinking and acting (cf. Lakoff, Johnson: 2004). It is to a certain extend world crucial, which metaphorical concepts for our reality producing and ours being-in-picture to which pattern terms for us leading and determining. The more or less distinct mono contexts emerge from themselves will be let different measure to it, whether they are connection and compossibility capable, thus not others into their own and wilful leeway of possibilities and thus in their freedom to cut.