Place (1)

Abstract

Epistemology today distinguishes three separate aspects [of knowledge], object, content, and act, and discusses their relationship. Yet it seems to me that all that is being considered at the root of this distinction is the opposition between epistemic acts moving through time and the objects that transcend them. To say that objects relate to one another, constitute a single system, and maintain themselves, however, requires that we also consider both that which maintains this system itself and that within which this system is established and wherein it is situated. That which is must be situated in something, otherwise we cannot make the distinction between “to be” and “to not be”. Logically it should be possible to distinguish between the terms of a relationship and the relationship itself, and between that which unifies a relationship and that wherein the relationship is situated. Even when we consider acts, to the extent that in addition to thinking of the “I” as a pure unity of acts we think of this “I” in opposition to the “non-I,” there must be something that envelops this opposition between the “I” and the “non-I” and that establishes the so-called phenomena of consciousness. In accordance with the term used in Plato’s Timeaus, I will call this thing that we may regard as the receptacle of ideas, “place”. Needless to say, what I refer to as “place” is not the same as what Plato refers to as “space” or “receptacle”.