The world shows up for us in perception and thought, but it has a fragile presence. It shows up in very much in the same way that what a person means shows up for us when we are in conversation, to return to the language example. Misunderstanding, outright failure to understand, are always manifestly live possibilities. It isn’t only solid opaque objects that fail to reveal themselves in their totality to the single glance. What we are given, always, is an opportunity or affordance for further effort, engagement, negotiation, and skilful transaction. The world is present to thought and perception not as a represented totality—an idea in our minds, a representation in our brains—but as the place in which we find ourselves, where we live, where we work. The world is a big place, and so there is a lot for us to do if we are to secure our footing on its slippery grounds. But a slippery ground is still a ground, and we need to secure our footing.
Presence—in thought and experience—is fragile, in other words. Philosophy has been strangely resistant to fragility. Fragility is not fallibility. The point about fragility is that it is manifest. An object’s colour shows up for us as something with hidden aspects; it presents itself to us as something that is always on the cusp of variation, always ready to change with the least alteration in our perspective or in the conditions of viewing. A colour, no less than a solid object, has hidden aspects. We don’t experience these aspects as isolated atoms—as if we were confined to what the camera sees. What we see, what we experience, outstrips anything that can be understood in optical terms alone. For we see, we experience, and we also think about, a world that manifestly goes beyond what can be taken in a glance. Our skills—our understanding, to use the term that has organised so much of this discussion—gives us access to what there is.
That access is achieved, but not once and for all. It is not as though we consume the world in encountering it so that now we can make do with what is inside us. Access is a work in process. Presence is fragile, manifestly so; but it is robust.
Acknowledgements
I have presented this paper at Georg-August-Universtät Göttingen, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, the University of Iowa, the University of Pittsburgh, Yale University, and also in Riga at the Riga-Symposium on Cognition, Communication and Logic in May 2013, as well as at the 2014 Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel. I am grateful to these audiences for their helpful comments and questions. For comments on the talk, or on the written paper itself, I would particularly like to thank Michael Beaton, Andy Clark, James Conant, Caitlin Dolan, Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Kelly, John W. Krakauer, Zachary C. Irving, Edouard Machery, Thomas Ricketts, Jason Stanley, David Suarez, and Martin Weichold.