Dialogue on the Threshold

Schwellendialog

13 August 2019

a beam of light

As we have seen, purely intentional correlates of connected sentences can enter into manifold relationships and interrelations. And since among the sentence correlates there are also states of affairs which occur in the ontic range of one and the same object, as well as states in which events and interconnections between individual objects are represented, the represented objects also do not lie isolated and alien alongside one antother but, thanks to the manifold ontic connections, unite into a uniform ontic sphere. In doing so they always constitute--quite remarkably--a segment of a still largely undetermined world, which is, however, established in accord with its ontic type and the type of its essence, that is, a segment whose boundaries are never sharply drawn. It is always as if a beam of light were illuminating a part of a region, the remainder of which disappears in an indeterminate cloud but is still there in its indeterminacy. 

Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: 
An Investigation  on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature
trans. George G. Grabowicz, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1973, p. 218

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