The Human Predicament

Sensation may be more or less immediate, but experience is not.  Conscious experience requires not only raw sensation but also internal contrast and  external context. 

My senses only disclose the existence of ‘X’ if I can distinguish ‘X’ from ‘not-X’ and if I can locate both ‘X’ and ‘not-X’ in a shared context that makes the contrast relevant. 

Example: the contrast between red and blue is strongly relevant in the context of color while the contrast between the Gettysburg Address and a grain of sand in the Sinai is weakly relevant in the context of something like ‘things that can be named’. 

Ducking the important issue of pre-natal consciousness, birth is Event Zero. It is the only time in our 80+ year long existence that we will encounter ‘novelty’ per se. Everything is brand new…by definition.

To be clear, every one of our NLE’s c. 10^12 ‘experiences’ will be novel, but that novelty will consist of a specific contrast in a specific context; only at the moment of birth do we encounter naked novelty. 

Contrasts are immanent in experience! They are binary and linear. Specific contrasts constitute the essential substructure of any one experience. However, the semantic meaning of an experience, its defining superstructure,  always transcends the experience itself. That meaning is derived from context which by definition is neither linear nor binary.

A contrast has no meaning apart from a context and a context has no relevance apart from a contrast. It is through an immanent contrast that the transcendent context makes itself felt.

The defining contrast(s) of an experience are an essential component of the experience itself. The semantic context of an experience is never part of the experience; it transcends it, i.e. it gives the experience its meaning. 

If ‘experience’ is a legitimate application of Gregory Bateson’s famous ‘difference that makes a difference’ criterion, then ‘context’ constitutes the limits of that differentiation. Given X and not-X, contrast is what distinguishes them and context (what they share) is what ‘unites’ them. 

In effect, contrast and context template each other on an axis perpendicular to ‘experience space’: contrast is the anti-context, context is the anti-contrast. Whatever is not contrast is context and vice versa.

Example: Red and blue (above) reflect a contrast in the shared context of color. The concept of color transcends both red and blue but it becomes relevant only through such contrasts (e.g. the contrast of red and blue). 

Now all this sounds benign enough…but it isn’t! It’s deeply subversive, as Nietzsche was first to notice. Once we concede that an immanent contrast derives its significance from a shared context, we have opened the floodgates.

Any context, transcending a contrast, can find itself in contrast with some other context, transcending a different contrast. Extending our example above, if red and blue contrast in the context of color, color can contrast with heat in the context of the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetism in turn contrasts with gravity in the context of force fields, etc. You can see where this is headed!

If we’re not careful, some wise-ass punk in the 3^rd row is likely to shout out the G-word and we can’t have that, can we? But not to worry, we’re not there…yet (but we are getting warmer).

Nietzsche realized that once transcendence got its nose in the ontological tent, God would inevitably follow. To protect us from this catastrophic assault on our pride, he willingly sacrificed the concept of shared context.

Nietzsche’s world is flat! Which is ok, as long as we understand that none of his contrasts have any meaning; they just are. 

“…One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Twilight of the Idols)

Conscious experience consists of a contrast within a shared context. Any context can in turn contrast with another context in a shared meta-context. The process should continue indefinitely. But obviously, it can’t! 

There has to be an Ultimate Context (UC) regarding which at least one of the following statements must be true: (1) UC contrasts with nothing…by definition, it’s ultimate; (2) UC contrasts with itself, it’s ultimate; (3) UC contrasts with everything other than itself - again, ultimate. 

Note that this Ultimate Context is different from Aquinas’ First Cause. It is not intuitively obvious why there has to be an ‘uncaused cause’ but it is obvious that everything that is - God, Earth, my neighbor’s brat - shares a common context (Being per se) that is only contrastable with nothing…which is ‘no thing’.

But now suppose all three statements are true; then ‘UC’ is essentially synonymous with the Judeo-Christian concept of ‘God’. How so? 

First, God is incomparable (again by definition); nothing has anything in common with God. God is the ultimate Other (Buber, Tillich, et al.). 

Second, God contrasts with everything else (Creation) – the context is their mutual incompatibility. Fiat lux is the ultimate contrast; it contrasts Creation and Creator. It is also the primordial contrast: “Conscious experience consists of a contrast within a shared context. Then God separated the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1: 3 – 4) It is a contrast per se! (Everything else is just yada, yada, yada.)

Third, God is Process (e.g. Love, History, the Burning Bush); therefore, God includes internal contrasts between personae (persons) and God provides the context from which those contrasts derive their meaning.

Conscious experience, wherever it is found in the cosmos, is a hybrid phenomenon connecting immanent contrast(s) with transcendent context. The justly famous ‘human condition’ is a symptom of this dichotomy.

To be clear, we are firmly rooted in the immanent world of contrasts. We are the product of 30 trillion independent living organisms (cells) acting in concert. However, our gaze is just as firmly fixed on the transcendent context. Consciousness is the experience of pre-existing contrasts (sensation) deriving meaning from shared context.  

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Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930) distills experience into its most essential contrasts—color and line, presence and absence, individuality and order. Through the disciplined arrangement of primary hues and perpendiculars, Mondrian seeks the universal within the particular, transforming visual tension into metaphysical harmony. The painting’s equilibrium between opposition and unity mirrors the human search for meaning within structure, where contrast becomes the very language of context, and simplicity opens onto transcendence.