Philosophy Café - Session 3 "Illusion" (22.10.2025)

 

Illusion

This week’s concept is illusion. Illusion lives where feeling reshapes the world, softening or distorting its edges. It flickers through the senses, summoning presences that vanish on closer touch. Do the spells that illusions weave guide, or mislead? Join us in the shimmering interval between experience and reality.

Plan

📍Casino for Social Medicine (Sonnenalle 100, 12045 Berlin)
📆 Wed. 22.10.2025
⏰ 18:30 - 20:30

Some reflections after the session

Atop the glistening cobblestones, atop the muddied Pflastersteine, on a bench surrounded by a cluster of chairs of metalwork and wood, we met under the lamplight for another session of the Philosophy Café, cushioned by the sketchy ambiance of the Sonnenalle streetside, confronted by the cold and the noise, and comforted by the presence of others, of a cobbled-together community organizing around the exploration of ideas of intuition and intuitions of ideas.

Illusion, the concept through which we exposed our intuitions and ideas to ourselves and those around us. We began with a task: who are you —here, now— if not yourself? Who are you the illusion of, or, said otherwise, who is the illusion that you are here as, if you are not yourself? From the very beginning, the expression of oneself as an illusion prefigured reflection as a modality of illusion inherent to any introduction. Reflection relates to illusion the following way. A reflection is a doubling without addition. In a sense, there is still only one —one person, one thought, one intuition— which is reflected through some medium without being changed. There is a thing or a process and its reflection, and, because the reflection depends essentially on the thing or process that it is a reflection of, perhaps we can consider the reflection not as a separate thing or process, but rather as part of the thing or process which extends the thing or process through a medium. If reflection is a modality of illusion, it shows us that it is conceivable that illusion as a part of each thing or process, to the extent that it impacts and is reciprocally impacted by the things or processes in the world that it interacts with.

This idea was a strong thread woven through the intuitions, conversations, and conceptualizations that arose throughout the Café: we are certain that there are illusions; we ask and examine instead: is there anything that exists without illusion? If illusion —its magnitude, its effects, its qualities— depends upon gradients of positioning and positionality, not only those of socio-cultural construction, but also those of sensory modes of relationality, is it something that we can ever get out of? Is there something that exists without it? Is it rather more informative to consider the convergences and divergences of texture, the ways in which metrics of heat and coolness, luminescence and shadow, closeness and distance, and porosity and rigidity are conditions of existence which everything shares? The concepts of these polarities arose throughout the evening in different ways as each person grasped at their intuitions, wrote down their thoughts, and shared them amongst the space and the others. Indeed, the concept of physical sensation, once presented and mapped, rested undisturbed at the cusp of the non-example, unclear but firmly there, while concepts such as feeling, certainty, belief, and recollection were mapped and remapped across gradients of clarity and divisions of exemplification, pulled up and away from their initial points of entry and remapped, or re-re-mapped. Curiously, the position of the laws of physics did not last long in its initial location at the coordinates of a clear non-example, being moved somewhere near the unclear and the boundary between example and non-example, finding a resting place in the neighborhood of jogging and math, examples of illusion, and cooking, a non-example.

What, then, do our intuitions tell us about laws that may govern us, but not affect our experience? Furthermore, what, then, how do our intuitions express themselves, how do we express our intuitions, when they are, we are required to map them along gradients of clarity and axes of example and non-example? We have not defined example and non-example. Definitions of example and non-example, or indeed of intuition, are often multiple and always provisional to each Café, each group, each consolidation of intuition —whether spoken or implicit. Any consistency is secured by the methodology, thoughts and contributions, the willingness to explore ideas, and the acknowledgement that, though it may be tacit, binaries such as these hide multiplicities —though these multiplicities may not be symmetrical. Example and non-example. A slice of cake and everything else. A cake that is everything but the slice. There seems to be a tendency to converge on existence. Is it that existence demands convergence? What orientations in thought privilege what can be seen, extracted, cut away from, served on a plate and amenable to presentation? In some ways, the café is an expression of another kind of convergence, a convergence on impression, yet impression that does not favor existence or non-existence, but how they interact. From this, we find our intuition.

But, this act of finding is, or can be, also an act of creation. Creation and discovery blur, not only in intuition, but in illusion —perhaps characteristically so. In thinking about illusion’s origin, borne from frustration, from promise, from need, desire, or necessity. Lengthy discussion unfolded about illusion and memory. What does illusion do, if it is constitutive of the way in which we make sense of the world, of which we are also a part? Maybe through illusion, we take control of time, making the future now and the past present. A memory, if judged according to accuracy, is certainly an illusion; a prediction, a motivation, the end-point of a process, if justification for an action in the present makes illusion a constitutive part of the act. Illusion to escape can be a memory projected into the future. Illusion as necessity can be a future pulled into the present. Is the binary between presence and absence still relevant here?

Might turning to mundane daily activities help? Appearing upon the map, undisturbed and ostensibly mundane, we found jogging and cooking. If jogging is an illusion, and if cooking is a non-example of an illusion, and if both jogging and cooking are unclearly so, what does this tell us about everyday activity and the orientation towards a point in time where we can claim to have done something or rather be always in the process? There is a sense in which this characterization makes sense to me, although I find it difficult to explain. Why does jogging seem so illusory? Why does cooking seem so un-illusory? The crashing of my feet on the pavement and the reliance on these two feet alone, the sense of passing through a world which is passing by, the growing tension and exhaustion, the cyclical movement… why do these culminate in illusion, if unclear? The gathering of ingredients, the distinct preparation of each of them, their combination for taste and time, their consumption and vanishing into the flesh underneath and of my skin… why does this seem so un-illusory? Where, within these does their counterpart exist, the non-illusion in the jogging, the illusion in the cooking?

During this iteration of the Café, we engaged in an experimental re-mapping component, taking a concept, and moving it to another place on the map, another valence within the whole space. To give the privilege, encourage it, to scoop up someone’s commitment, their commitment to a position, if only just a point, to position it somewhere else. How does the shimmering grounds upon which the map is held in provisional place —illusion— change or affect this? The glossy, white background, the constellation of reflections from lamps and lights, the fact that it was my hand and not yours —why were you (un)willing to enact a re-mapping?

Nightmare occupied a center line, just a touch above the center point, when thinking came crashing to meet it, pinned to the center point —a center point whose axis is the division between example and non-example, and whose closes gradients are two blurry, indeterminate edges of unclarity. Just below nightmare, just between the non-edges of unclarity, unclarity of example and non-example: thinking; thinking, on the map of illusion. What arises, and what journeys await, have gone by, are within, thought, if its terrain is illusion and its companion is nightmare? There is something real —I am not afraid to say— in our experience, from the roadside in the cold, to the bustle and the heat of an occupied space, something which carried thought along, not away from its nightmare, nor its illusion, but as an embrace of it, a carrying-forward of a movement, a reflection in a mirror of wishes. Passed around, it shines forth each time differently, transitioning through us together, we see a vision of our similarity.

Illusion - Disillusion

If the fundamental question of philosophy takes the form of a careful, feminine, magical, patient, and subtle task of un-covering —of bringing to light what perseveres in its concealment, of shifting thought from absence to presence— then, not without humor, we might say that philosophy could be a branch of optics. In that play of thought with itself, fertile paradoxes emerge: what remains unthought within thought is what appears as absent, and yet it is precisely this absence that gives thought its presence. To inhabit the presence of thought, then, means to bear witness to the absence that constitutes it. Paraphrasing what Foucault once wrote about fiction, the task of thought would not be to make the absent present, but to make present the degree to which presence itself depends on absence. That is, to dwell in that threshold where presence endures only through what withdraws from it —through what, as absence, also makes it possible.

To think as (dis)illusion. Illusion, disillusion, re-illusion. To question, to explain oneself. From one illusion to another. Ideas seem to have their own consistency —that of illusion. People simply navigate between illusions like children in a hall of mirrors. Illusion as desire, with object and all; it would imply directionality: strangely, to have control over illusion. One more illusion. Otherwise, delirium. Illusion as the knot that weaves, life, and allows us to navigate it. [And although it can be assumed as a mistaken perception (mistaken by lack of focus or by distortion, by lack of knowledge or lack of connectivity: timing), it can also appear as a chimera (incompatibility of images arising from the lack of experience in the exercise of vision).] Dialectic of fiction: whether by excess or by lack, always a matter of distance. Illusion as propeller of fear, producer of prefigurations, of mental images that anticipate experience. Illusion is also fraud, false dream, lie —the dark side of some mirror revealing what manipulation there is in what has been manipulated. Illusion as need, as hope; materializing in texture, in smell, in taste. A middleness that is not conciliatory but presents a pendular between extremes. A play of intensities that makes evident the porosity of curiosity. Illusion as bridge, slide, leading from frustration to freedom. Impulse of change, oscillation between opposites. Illusion and reality: necessary tension, necessary for reality as for illusion. [Is there, in the end, any difference between the two?] Illusion leaning toward future: illusion and imagination, opening temporalities of the possible. Ambivalent illusion. Pure ambivalence of the negative and the positive, between them. Illusion as repository of memory(-ies).

Is there anything that is not? Is there anything behind it? Or in front of it? Is, a noun, a verb, an operation? The disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world are nothing but optical displacements, decisions that do not confess themselves as such, in order to inhabit a world that never ceases to slip through our hands. The illusion is that it does not —and also what allows us to act as if it did not. Necessary self-deception, survival mechanism. A coat rack where we hang our beliefs and principles. A coat rack that, once we take down from it our beliefs and principles, no longer exists. Illusion is that part of reality that we cannot yet call such. A difference of degree, not of nature. Water–vapor–ice. The illusion of being able to account for what happens (to us), as if we ourselves were not also passing. Illusion anchor. Illusion hologram. Illusion compass and witch. Illusion delirium —and all the above simultaneously. Play of lights and shadows. Illusion, what an illusion!; illusion, damn illusion!