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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Nicolas Vantis
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2026.02.008
Independent Scholar, Brest, France
What is spacetime? How do we perceive this medium? How can we fit it into our everyday linear lives? How can we situate ourselves within it in our post-industrial worldview, in an unsustainable world? This philosophical essay adopts a phenomenological method to interrogate the meaning of this fundamental dimension of reality. Spacetime is interpreted not merely as a physical structure but as a plastic field whose instability shapes inner and social life. Yet the contemporary human condition is marked by a profound alienation, much of which derives from a self-inflicted existential disorientation: I once chose exile and moved to a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean, becoming my own research material. In search of genuine contact with nature, the nonverbal appeared as a necessity. I turned to music as an archetypal language, in the Romantic sense of a medium offering pre-conceptual access to the real. I composed Light Atlas, a six-movement work aiming to capture the flight of seagulls and the eternal struggle between light and darkness. This led me back to physics, to my original question: the lived perception of spacetime.
phenomenology, philosophy of physics, spacetime perception, philosophy of music, Anthropocene
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