Imagining the thing-in-itself
An attempt at imagining existence without either space or time, using similar methods of elimination for both.
As philosophers, we really must consider what it would mean to be original reality. We must dispense with this mediated, re-presented image of objects in our consciousness. No matter how tempting it is to stick with this familiar format, we must consider instead what is really behind it all. Original, in-itself reality is not a carbon copy of our representation; it precedes it entirely.
Let us begin trivially with imagining what a sphere would look in and of itself. What does a planet look like when it’s not the 2D circle which we actually see? If our vision could take it in all at once, it would not have a horizon concealing its opposite side (as this is just our inability to take in the whole image at once), nor would the shape have beginning and end points as conveyed by a world map. In fact, as odd as it sounds, it would in some sense be flat and uniform, but without any kind of boundary or edge. It wouldn’t “repeat” as you travel around it. It would be an all-at-once overview, and therefore you wouldn’t the need to cover its full distance to discover that it “repeats”. In the same way that your visual field is a totality unto itself without presenting a contrastive boundary, so too would the all-at-once overview of the planet apprehend the whole image without showing a contrastive boundary.
Despite being a trivial and merely prefatory thought experiment, something truly strange is being forced upon our imagination, and we haven’t even transcended the ordinary world we see yet. It’s simply asking you to imagine what a sphere looks like without its usual 2D representation. We can already say that even the simple 3D world, in its original non-represented format, has an inconceivable character as far as we’re concerned. Of course, by rotating the object and seeing the other side of it, we might pretend to ourselves that we are seeing it as it really is, but this remains just a series of partial images which we add together.