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About the necessity of links

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Limits and links

Fixed horizons become fluid: a Polish roadside shrine viewed from a moving bus

Are links to other places really always necessary for the identity of a place?

-- Why should a relational theory of meaning be applied to the place itself, leading to a yet wider web? Why not let the place be a final horizon*, as it often seems to have been historically? Why should the place itself -- or some finite assembly of mutually qualifying places -- appear as one item against a yet larger horizon?

-- We live our desires within a combination of self-aware pluralism, with a 'modern' need/desire for self-justification, and an implicit awareness of the conditions that make our being possible, plus a push for authenticity. These keep any horizon from being simply final.

-- Even if a place must have these constitutive connections, can't it be lived in an enclosed way, through Ignorance, ideology, illusion, inauthenticity, bad faith, and so on?

-- Places can indeed be lived in an enclosed way, but their structural complexity provides a constant lure for greater openness.