INDIVISIBILITY OF PERSON + MEDIUM by George Kelly

Suppose we start out by making a distinction between what is man and what is his environment. There are some advantages in making such a distinction, although if you look at it too closely we will both have to admit that man versus environment is a somewhat fuzzy notion especially when you realize that most of us have about as much trouble living with ourselves as we have living with other people - or if you want to think of it that way each of us represents a rather large chunk of his own environment.

[George Kelly 1969]

VARELA’S VERSION OF INDIVISIBILITY by Francisco Varela

The first cut, the most elementary distinction we can make, may be the intuitively satisfactory cut between oneself qua experiencing subject on the one side, and one’s experience on the other. But this cut can under no circumstances be a cut between oneself and an independently existing world of objective objects. Our ‘knowledge’ must begin with experience, and with cuts within our experience - such as, for instance, the cut we make between the part of our experience that we come to call ‘ourself’ and all the rest of our experience, which we call our ‘world’. Hence this world of ours, no matter how we structure it, no matter how well we manage to keep it stable with permanent objects and recurrent interactions, is by definition a world co-dependent with our experience ... although the world does look solid and regular, when we come to examine it there is no fixed point of reference to which it can be pinned down; it is nowhere substantial or solid.

[Francisco Varela 1979]