“With your thought you can’t encapsulate everything that an apple is, because you forgot to taste it. But biting into an apple won’t capture everything an apple is either, because you forgot to tunnel into it like a worm. And so with tunneling too. What you have, in each case, is not the apple in itself, but apple data: you have an apple thought, you have an apple bite, you have an apple tunnel. A diagram of every possible access to the apple throughout all of time and space—assuming it could be made (which it couldn’t)—would miss the kind of apple that a less complete diagram would capture. And in both cases you wouldn’t have an apple, you would have an apple diagram. But for sure there is apple data: apples are green, round, juicy, sweet, crunchy, packed with Vitamin C; they make an appearance in Genesis as the most unfortunate snack in human history, they sit on boys’ heads waiting for arrows to shoot them in stories…. None of these things are the apple as such. There is a radical gap between the apple and how it appears, its data, such that no matter how much you study the apple, you won’t be able to locate the gap by pointing to it: it’s a transcendental gap.”
—Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), xxix–xxx.
Via The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo 📚