Works in progress

It ought to be one of the most basic observations of any philosopher worth their salt that the perceptual objects, whether substantive or ideogrammatic, taken to exist outside of ourselves in a manner that is no less real, solid or permanent as the way we are apt to consider those very same selves, do not exist as fully-formed notions taken all at one glance, in a single instant. The permanence and solidity are all illusion. Everything in our perception changes. We survey the realities we inhabit, constantly moving from one perceptual configuration to another along a unique path both forming and informing the instants of our lives, never to be duplicated.

But it does not go nearly far enough to say that the objects of perception are merely perceived, at one time or another, from a variety of angles. It isn't just that we view the same object under many different lights, so to speak, or aspects, in the manner of a Cubist painting, while each perceptible entity remains essentially unchanged underneath the veneer of our peculiar perspective. Doubtless it is true that our perspective is always changing, and it is certainly to the credit of the experimental artists of the early 20th century, like Braque and Picasso, for calling the phenomenon to our attention.

 

                      Georges Braque, 1913, Nature morte (Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs)

 

Rather it is as if each of our perceptions is, to borrow Duchamp's apt phrase, a readymade, called forth as an object not so much by virtue of what it supposedly "is", underneath it all, in terms of bare essence, but according to the endlessly malleable content of its own immediate subject-hood. It is not the what-it-was-to-be (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) or "quiddity" that determines the essence of things, but the "what-it-IS-to-be": now, in this very moment; an eternally open question that is never completely answered, save perhaps by the inevitable but incomplete erasure of the next perception, the next moment in our existence. 

 

                          Marcel Duchamp, 1917, Fountain

 

And so the "is", the esse, the être, ser, essere, sein, etc., the "to be" in any language, is only ever a turn of phrase, belying the accumulative essence of everything, the geologic mutability of thought. Like islands ever forming and dissolving again under the plastic flow of raw volcanic turbulence, every object or idea, even that of ourselves, is a work in continual progress. We create those works through the process of living our lives, always retaining some parts while discarding others, according to the judgements we enact along the way. We are always the author AND the audience, the subject AND object of that which only appears to persist along our temporal trajectories.