Meaning of hyperexistence | Babel Free

Definitions

The state of being hyperexistent.

uncountable

Examples

“Thought is habitually "structuralist," if one can be allowed to employ an overworked term which has therefore become almost useless. It means that our understanding of anything whatever rests exclusively on the pairs of opposites of which the understood quality happens to be an element. In other words, we understand only through contrast, only when we can comprehend that which is the absence of the comprehended: an object can appear only against a background of a universe which it is not. The act of recognition or identification of things is simultaneous with the movement of thought which reaches what the object being recognized is not: Omnis determinatio est negatio. In saying that something is such-and-such, we know what we are saying only when we know that some other thing is what this thing is not. Hence, all naming which aspires to describe the properties of "everything" — for instance, "The world of experience" or "the whole of what is known" — either has only an illusory meaning, or immediately evokes the counterelement of that "all" which creates a contrast for it in a paired opposition. Thus, in the act of recognition there is an inertia which, in the face of questions regarding "everything," immediately calls up a second universe that gives a meaning to "all." "All" thereby ceases to be all, but itself in turn becomes a condition of an understanding of that second universe — hence, the birth of the Myth of the Cave or similarly shaped structures, thanks to which the whole of the experienced universe may be taken as a reflex, a sign, an appearance, or a veil of another universe. They support each other, for the hyperexistence of Platonic Ideas is only comprehensible in relation to the impermanence of palpable entities — and not just the other way round.”

“It might have been less discomfiting had I been able to see the viruses that were wrecking la Reine's machine code. If they held manifested themselves as visible predators and tangible parasites they too would have had that superior solidity, that imperious hyperexistence, and her death would then have seemed more like the victory of a superior power. As it was, the software saboteurs did their work beneath the fabric of the illusion, corroding and corrupting everything without any apparent presence of their own.”

“For some unfathomable reason of His Own, at this exact noninstant of the eternal, unbegun Now that filled Heaven from one infinite end to the other, God had chosen to manifest Himself as a Sequoia Tree, albeit the largest Sequoia ever to exist. The crown of this enormous redwood standing in for the ineffable Face of the Creator soared into the heavenly clouds—galaxies?— far out of sight of the two human figures standing at its gnarly base rooted not in soil, but in the very stuff of celestial hyperexistence. Despite the immeasurable distance separating the two auditors and the invisible foliage of the God Tree—from which Crown as from a Burning Bush one might reasonably assume any Voice ought to issue—the words of God resounded quite plainly in the ears of the man and woman standing tensely at the Tree’s base.”

CEFR level