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view are available by way of the same Abschattung. In order to be defined, the object must be related back to the total series of which, by virtue of being one possible apparition, it is a member. In this way the traditional dualism between being and appearance is replaced by a straight polarity of finite and infinite, which locates the infinite at the very core of the finite. This sort of 'openness' is at the heart of every act of perception. It characterizes every moment of our cognitive experience. It means that each phenomenon seems to be 'inhabited' by a certain power, in other words, 'the ability to manifest itself by a series of real or likely manifestations'. The problem of the relationship of a phenomenon to its onto-logical basis is altered by the perspective of perceptive 'openness' to the problem of its relationship to the multiplicity of different order perceptions which we can derive from it. 11
This intellectual position is further accentuated in Merleau-Ponty:
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How can anything ever present itself truly to us since its synthesis is never completed? How could I gain the experience of the world, as I would of an individual actuating his own existence, since none of the views or perceptions I have of it can exhaust it and the horizons remain forever open? . . . The belief in things and in the world can only express the assumption of a complete synthesis. Its completion, however, is made impossible by the very nature of the perspectives to be connected, since each of them sends back to other perspectives through its own horizons. . . . The contradiction which we feel exists between the world's reality and its incompleteness is identical to the one that exists between the ubiquity of consciousness and its commitment to a field of presence. This ambiguousness does not represent an imperfection in the nature of existence or in that of consciousness, it is its very definition. . . . Consciousness, which is commonly taken as an extremely enlightened region, is, on the contrary, the very region of indetermination.12
These are the sorts of problems which phenomenology picks out at the very heart of our existential situation. It proposes to the artist, as well as to the philosopher and the psychologist, a series of declarations which are bound to act as a stimulus to his creative activity in the world of forms:
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It is therefore essential for an object and also for the world to present themselves to us as 'open' . . . and as always promising future perceptions.13
It would be quite natural for us to think that this flight away from the old, solid concept of necessity and the tendency toward the ambiguous and the indeterminate reflect a crisis of contemporary civilization. Or, on the other hand, we might see these poetical systems, in harmony with modern science, as expressing the positive possibility of thought and

 
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