to be developed

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millioins of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

There is no "other world."
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating.

Rumi^ref [1997: 71]

…recursive observation makes possible not so much the elimination of paradoxes as their temporal and social distribution onto different operations. A consensual integration of systems of communication is, given such conditions, something that should sooner be feared than sought for. For such integration can only result in the paradoxes becoming invisible to all and remaining that way for an indefinite future… [more…] Luhmann 1990: 75

System boundaries have to be drawn so that the world acquires the possibility of observing itself (Luhmann, Ecological Communication, 1989: 18).

The greatest progress in contemporary science has been effected by reintegrating the observer in the observation... (Morin 1992^ref: 5).

every act of knowing brings forth a world… (Maturana and Varela 1998: 26)

What the theory of the observation of observation holds, then, is that the world is not given – as in the traditional, representationalist frame – but is rather brought forth in the dynamic interaction of observer and observed. As Maturana and Varela put it, "Our intention is to bypass entirely this logical geography of inner versus outer by studying cognition not as recovery or projection but as embodied action: (Tree 172). But more than this, since that bringing forth takes place by means of paradoxical distinctions, it means, as Maturana and Varela put it, that "every world brought forth necessarily hides its origins. By existing, we generate cognitive 'blind spot' that can be cleared only through generating new blind spots in another domain. We do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist" (Tree: 242) (Rasch and Wolfe 2000^ref: 13)

How can we measure the veracity of a narrative against "the bare facts" when "the bare facts" are unintelligible without narrative? I do not mean to suggest that there are no "bare facts," but rather that we have no way of assessing them independent of the stories we tell… (McAfee 2000:^ref 142) 

What all these approaches share, however, is a certain productive disengagement from the wolr, one in which there is a clear separation, whether original or achieved, between the thinker and what he or she is thinking about.  In contrast, what I seek to delineate here is a practice of thinking and reflection in which the focus of our deliberation is not held fast in our gaze, but is given the opportunity to gaze back, to ask us questions about our very own being.  this project is set in motion by the suspicion, the strange idea, that we cannot adequately grasp either ourselves or the significant things around us, unless we bring all our human powers to bear on our contemplative practice.  It is just such a range or capacities and concerns that will allow us to grasp the significance of these things for us.  In contrast tothsoe common accounts of things that simplify in order to bring out salient features, this practie will attempt an enlarging vision.  Truth taken to ve the correspondence between a proposition and a fact will give way to truth understood as something like disclosive adequacy (Wood 2004:^ref 33-34) 

…there is not and there will never be a pure observer (he is always tied to a transforming praxis); no absolute knowledge… But, with the loss of the absolute, we gain in communication and in complexity… What we already perceive… through this translating, transducing, transforming, relativizing relation between the psychic and the physical, between the observer and the observation, is a first emergence of the relation between subject and object, because all knowledge, in an observer, is both subjective (self-referent), returning to its own interior organization (cerebral, intellectual, cultural) and objective (hetero-referent), returning to the exterior world. We can, therefore, perceive that it is never by excluding the subject that we must look for the object, that is it not outside of praxis, but in a meta-praxis which is a new praxis, that we must look for knowledge (Morin 1992: 365).

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