Most accounts of M. C. Escher begin with a claim that he “tricked the eye” or “deceived perception.” This is a mistake, and a conceptual one. It is also the moment at which we risk misreading the very phenomenon we intend to understand. Escher does not mislead. He does not create illusions. The images he produces are stable, law-abiding, and internally coherent. To call them “optical illusions” is to misunderstand what they are—and to obscure what they show us about the limits of worldhood.
Stable Perception, Not Error
Consider Relativity (1953), one of Escher’s most cited works. The staircases, the figures, the gravity-bound movements—all appear impossible at first glance. Yet closer inspection reveals that each segment obeys its own internal rules perfectly: figures ascend and descend according to consistent local gravity; the stairways are logically continuous along their own plane; architectural details align without contradiction within each local frame. Nothing is “wrong” in the image. There are no perceptual errors. What we perceive is stable.
The instability arises not from misperception but from aggregation. When these locally coherent frames are combined, they produce a structure that cannot be actualised as a single inhabitable world. Escher is not breaking the laws of vision; he is showing us that local lawfulness does not guarantee global integrability.
Construal, Not Deception
This insight aligns perfectly with the relational ontology we have been developing in our previous series, Worlds After Meaning and Fictional Worlds as Systems. In that framework:
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Construal refers to the process by which a system—or an image, or a narrative—brings forth a world.
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Instantiation or actualisation occurs when that construal coheres across scales to be inhabitable or actionable.
Escher’s work is an exemplary case of construal without actualisation. Every component of the image is perfectly construed; every local relation obeys a law. And yet the global structure refuses worldhood. The failure is not perceptual. It is systemic. Escher’s work does not deceive the eye; it exposes the limits of the world-forming capacity of lawful relations.
Rejecting the Optical Illusion Narrative
To frame Escher as a visual trickster is to misread the lesson. It is a familiar misstep: the striking “impossibility” invites a narrative of cognitive failure—our eyes, our brains, our psychology. But Escher is not about human error. He is about structural impossibility under maximal lawfulness. Every line, staircase, and plane is precisely correct, and every paradox arises only when we attempt to unify them as a single, inhabitable world.
We can summarise the distinction in terms familiar from our work on fictional worlds:
| Fictional World | Escher Image |
|---|---|
| Narrative and spatial relations allow inhabitation | Relations are consistent locally but cannot form a coherent world |
| Instantiation succeeds at the level of the world | Instantiation fails globally |
| Meaning is distributed across inhabitable paths | Lawfulness is distributed across non-integrable frames |
Escher images therefore offer a mirror to the ontology of worldhood itself. They show that failure can be lawful, that impossibility can be systematic, and that stability at the local level does not imply coherence at the global level. Nothing goes wrong—but the world does not hold.
Conclusion
Escher is not about illusion. He is about exposing the boundary between lawfulness and worldhood. In doing so, he provides a counterexample to any naive assumption that a world emerges automatically from consistent parts. Here, for the first time in this series, we encounter the motif that will guide us forward: systems can succeed perfectly and still fail to be worlds.
In the next post, we will examine exactly how this pattern unfolds in the structure of Escher’s work—how local validity can coexist with global impossibility—and begin to understand the mechanics of lawful failure.
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