Correlationism can be portrayed as an anti-realism, or perhaps merely as a skepticism, about the Great Outdoors. In thinking or merely in knowing, we are confined,to our correlations with what is out there and cannot reach what is absolute. Indexicalism responds to this by recommending a realism about the Great Outdoors and about the outside, the exterior, the other. It is a way to take the Great Outdoors as what it is, a disrupting limit that ought to have an impact on what is thought or known, even though it cannot be fully converted into content of what is thought or known. The Great Outdoors, which is a figure of the metaphysics of the others, leaves its traces in thinking and knowing –haunts them– and precisely because the exterior is irreducibly exterior. The exterior is thought through from inside and it is from the inside that it has to be exterior. Otherwise, something else is going to be exterior given any indexically mapped position. This is akin to what Levinas called the ontological argument in favor of the Other.

Correlationism can be portrayed as an anti-realism, or perhaps merely as a skepticism, about the Great Outdoors. In thinking or merely in knowing, we are confined,to our correlations with what is out there and cannot reach what is absolute. Indexicalism responds to this by recommending a realism about the Great Outdoors and about the outside, the exterior, the other. It is a way to take the Great Outdoors as what it is, a disrupting limit that ought to have an impact on what is thought or known, even though it cannot be fully converted into content of what is thought or known. The Great Outdoors, which is a figure of the metaphysics of the others, leaves its traces in thinking and knowing –haunts them– and precisely because the exterior is irreducibly exterior. The exterior is thought through from inside and it is from the inside that it has to be exterior. Otherwise, something else is going to be exterior given any indexically mapped position. This is akin to what Levinas called the ontological argument in favor of the Other.