The Edges of Everything

In this essay I explore the considerable variety of edges that help to shape the places where we live and between which we move. Descriptions are given of inner vs. outer edges; edges that include and those that exclude; edges that give structure to things, people, and other occupants of the lived world; and edges that underlie and support growth as well as those that signal dismantling and destruction. I designate as “synontology” the enterprise of which encountering and cultivating edges form an integral part. The primary effort is to reconsider the life-world as a world composed of edges rather than as a collection of substances. This is to restore to edges a much more prominent place in the phenomenology of the life-world than has yet been attempted. Edges of several sorts both complicate and complete the places where one lives and between which one moves.