Grapholectic Thought and The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

(Originally published at 3quarksdaily · Link to Part Two)

“There are things,” Christoph Martin Wieland… contended, “which by their very nature are so dependent upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist.”…We are, at the very least, reminded that seeing is a talent that needs to be cultivated, as John Berger saliently argued in his popular Ways of Seeing (1972) “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.”

John A. Mccarthy, Remapping Reality

From the Greco-Roman period onwards humans have perceived themselves at the centre of a grand circle:

• The circle is physical: a heliocentric vision of the cosmos, where the Earth travels around the sun.
• The circle is biological: an order of nature, perhaps orchestrated by a benign creator, where the animals and plants exist to satisfy the needs of mankind.
• And according to Sigmund Freud, in his Introductory Lectures…