Chapter 5: Multidimensional Worlds
Chapter 5: Multidimensional Worlds

Summary/Abstract: The outside and the inside The “interiority-exteriority” is a fundamental metaphysical and ontological opposition of the human self-experience rooted in language forms: “…there is an intuitive connection between the deictic distinction of “inside” vs. “outside”: i.e. ‘X is here’ can be interpreted as ‘X is within the space which contains SELF’”. The notion of containment, or interiority, is “a very basic notion”, which might be introduced into the analysis of the meaning of other propositions (Lyons 1977: 699). The modernist paradigm presents a radical challenge to the traditional metaphysical distinction between the inside and the outside. In the first chapter of Creative Evolution, Bergson calls the existence of any isolated system in question — except live bodies, whose autonomy is functional, however. He underscores that science artificially cuts off threads that make any system part of a more extensive whole and extrapolates its “inside” into the “outside”. In Matter and Memory, Bergson depicts the observer’s body as the center of the personal world “cut out” from the physical world by the observer’s perception.

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