Wassily Kandinsky used to say that everything starts from a dot. He simplified, or forgot, that a dot is an intersection of lines.
Kandinsky’s statement emphasizes ideas of beginning, of origin, of causality. When one thinks of beginning, of start, one looks for origins, for causes of the existing. Discovering the beginning is the great question of science, it embraces every idea of creator and creature, referring to an absolute, an explanatory cause of everything.
Where does the self begin? When does the world begin? What is the cause of great passions and unfulfilled, interrupted encounters? What is the abysmal instant that collapses perspectives, the point responsible for change, for the contingent continuity that creates intersection? Often, the understanding of these questions is expressed by deterministic variables, which seek to encompass and specify what is considered an explanatory cause.
Nothing begins, nothing ends, everything goes on and that is the inexorable reversibility that creates the processes. It is the sequences of variables, infinite intersections caused by processes, as well as resulting from them, that establish points, variables, systems that insinuate beginning and end. There is no beginning, there is no origin, there is no end, there is no causality. What exists are relational processes, convergent and divergent movements, which create positioning, gaps and abysses. When facing them, we are referenced in contingencies and structures that determine our being in the world. These positions can mean beginnings as their configurating variables are discontinued, fragmented. To look for causes is to deny the dialectic of processes, to transform the process of human experience into a linear rule.
In the psychological sphere, wondering when fear begins, when the difficulty to relate begins, for example, and finding “traumas” as a response, or explaining it by the situation of poverty, wealth, or other situations in which rejection was constant, are explanations which do not globalize the human process, are ways of making it pitiable, since one is tied to historical and socioeconomic references. Fear is omission in the face of what happens, it is the non-response, the non-participation, usually resulting from having been positioned, broken up, depersonalized in other processes, in other variables that create alienated attitudes and behaviors.
Everything begins where it ends, precisely because the parameters that configure the realities faced are insinuated. It is the intersection of situations that prevents delimitation, as much as it allows the globalizing explanation. Imagining beginnings, points of origin and causes is Aristotelian, causal and Cartesian. Act and power, res extensa and res cogitans are linear approaches based on typifications, classes, on the division between dense and subtle, establishing dualisms and complexity such as the classical idea of matter and spirit, of consciousness as the pre-existence of knowledge, the place of the soul, later synonymized as subject, favoring approaches of introspective bias.
I think subject and object as aspects of a polarity, they do not begin, nor end, they are not in or out, but rather only poles of an axis. There is no world of the subject (classically configured as subjective by causalists in the philosophy and psychologies, especially those of psychoanalytic grounding), nor world of the object, of worldliness. There is a human being who perceives, and this is the relational dynamics of being in the world. Conceptualizations and classificatory denominations of subject and object create stagnations, divisions in the way of focusing man. It is through perception that subject and object are structured. The human being is neither a subject nor an object, it is a human being which, depending on its own perception, is configured as subject or object, the same occurring in relation to the perception of the other: the other, while perceiving me, configures me as subject or object.
Everything starts from a dot, that is, from the intersection of the lines that configure it. We know that the line is an infinite succession of dots, consequently, of intersections. Kandinsky always designed the relational, though he thought it all started from one dot. Configuring the trajectory of the dot, he sequenced its intersections.