What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 226e

Deep within the Cave, the shadows on the wall take the form of words, words grouping into ideas, ideas into concepts, concepts into habits, and habits into forms of life.

There is nothing special about a word. Like all things, it is a form of repetition and transformation, an echo. A signer signs a sign through a locution, forms a relationship through illocution, and oceans into becoming through the perlocution. The locution yelps, the illocution dances, and the perlocution wanders. Waterfalling down, the tools of logic structure our echoing, providing move-sets for our illocuting. There is nothing that grounds the rules but the echoes themselves and we only logic while dwelling in our form of life. We move to D4 through the conditional, but only on the board of our inhabiting, which frames our becoming-together.

Becoming is an echoing, a disco of possibility, the modal waltz. In doing through being, the one kaleidoscopes into the many. From one, each successor both mimics and morphs, ontological sublimation tapping history. This history or histories, the echoic ocean of becoming-together, is what we divide into patterns, or categories. A sign is a conceptual unit of a stream of patterned echoes, these patternings splitting off into languages, boards for our forms of life that weave together through the spiraling of history. Words have meaning through their position in the pattern, the way they connect to the whole, defined through how it echoes its surroundings. Communicating is being rocked by the waves.

The unity of science is metaphysically possible but linguistically impossible. The all grows out of the same ground, breath inhaling electron clouds and exhaling time. However, we are not solely beings of breath, but beings whose breath breathes meaning. A quark never intends, but its arrangements experience and in this experiencing intention, attention, and meaning arise, becoming fundamental components of being. We do and we intend to do and our doing is a meaningful attending, but this attending flows through the forms of life that we inhabit. This inhabiting seeps into description, the tools for understanding the world being the same tools that are born from our forms of life. Our descriptions thus justify, through emanating the form of life that it echoes. But by this meaning and justifying, the unity of science collapses into the sea of being.

Our being is an echo of the all but the air that echoes it vibrates history. History means when the all dwells in silence. We sit in our aporia and as we sit the world appears already-here and already-having-been. Time lights a candle in the Cave.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Image: Time Before History by Sam Gilliam (2012)