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the creative circle

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        In "The Creative Circle: Sketches on the Natural History of Circularity," Francisco J. 
        Varela examines the "biological" basis of our knowing and its location in the body. He 
        argues that consciousness requires a body. "We cannot," he says, "step outside the domain 
        specified by our body and nervous system. There is no world [no consciousness] except the 
        one experienced through those processes given to us and which make us what we are," and 
        then, neither can we "leap out of or choose [the] beginnings" of that consciousness. 
        "Whenever we do try to find the source of, say, a perception or an idea, we find ourselves 
        in an ever-receding fractal, and. . . we find it full of details and interdependencies. . 
        . always the perception of a perception. . . . Or the description of a description. . . . 
        There is nowhere we can drop anchor and say, 'This is where this perception started; this 
        is how it was done" (
      
      
        <i>The Invented </i>
      
      
        320). He concludes that if we follow the guiding thread of our own natural circularity we 
        may arrive at a different conception of interpretation and participation where subject and 
        object become entangled and interdependence may be revealed by our inability to find a 
        beginning or an end, much like the Escher engraving of the drawing hands in which one hand 
        rises out of the paper into the "real" world to draw itself back onto the paper. "By this 
        logic," he says, "we stand in relation to the world as in a mirror that does not tell us 
        how the world is: neither does it tell us how it is not. It reveals [only] that it is 
        possible to be the way we are being, and to act the way we have acted" (322). We can check 
        our perceptions against other perceptions, but never, as von Glasersfeld observed, with an 
        object before we perceive it. 
      
      
        
      
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