ABSTRACT
The psychologist James Gibson returned to the significance of the ground in his pioneering work on the ecology of visual perception. He begins, again, with what sounds like a truism: 'The ground refers, of course, to the surface of the earth'. There is much in common between Gibson's understanding of this surface and what both Marx and Kant had to say about it. On the one hand, Gibson insists that the ground is 'the literal basis of the terrestrial environment', 'the underlying surface of support' and even 'the reference surface for all other surfaces'. And yet, on the other hand, it is a surface that can only be arrived at through a process of abstraction and reconstruction. Thus all ground is above-ground, since the ground itself the solid base on which all else is supposed to rest turns out to be none other than the fluid ocean.
