/lit/ - Literature

>>10711315
If a bystander came upon half an apple, what would lead him to consider that it was, in fact, a half, and not already whole in itself? But one who had seen a full apple would consider him foolish, and perhaps rightly so, but do we know that an apple is in itself full, and not in fact, merely one half of something else? For, despite this consideration, we are inclined to believe that there is some meaning in the notion of "an apple", a unity, a wholeness of completeness, which is not a negative or a positive of something but in fact completed, perhaps even annihilated, and it is this annihilation of opposites which actually constitues the full apple, which is at rest and thereby able to "be" a thing in itself. But can we know that the apple does not in fact constitute one half of something else? If two halves of an apple arise out of one apple, and the first man mistook this for a whole, whence arose the apple if not by division of something else? If we are unable to provide an explanation, then the person in our example who criticized the other for thinking that a half of something was in fact a whole something is guilty of the same criticism, in thinking that the apple is whole in itself.