Simon Gros

Example of parallax

Parallax refers to the apparent displacement of an object, the shift of its position against a background, caused by a change of the point from which we observe it. The philosophical twist to be added is that the observed difference isn’t simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object that exists “out there” is seen from two different points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an epistemological shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.

[Paper removed due to copyright takedown request by Sohrab Ahmari, editor of Compact Magazine. You can buy the entire text here: https://compactmag.com/article/a-cancel-culture-parallax]