The Threefold Way

Abstract

This essay is a study in the phenomenology of conception as distinguished from the more familiar phenomenology of perception. Its concern is with a particular resource of our cognitive strategy - one conceptual instrumentality for thinking about the nature of things. It investigates the idea that in contemplating the various aspects of the world’s arrangements, one can operate at three distinct “levels of consideration”: the levels of immediacy, proximity, and totality - of what is immediately at hand here and now, of what stands in the nearer offing at only a modest distance, and of what lies in the more distant and “visionary” reaches of an all-encompassing whole.