How we do this is by the art of comparison and proportioning. Analogies and metaphors are inferences and arguments about objects, necessarily phenomenological. It is nonsense to say that this object is different from that object but is the same. Aristotelian categorization and mathematical Platonism, let alone a Newtonian imperative and Schrondinger’s cat, demand that difference be expressed.
As a thought experiment: if there were only 2 things in the universe, their difference can only be explained in terms of the other.
You create other objects with these parts of speech : bracketing two objects, one (or both) of which can be the self. But you cannot use these parts of speech to define an object itself; rather, you use these things to magically cast objects into being the same way that you use other types of figurative language such as antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy, or simile. Your use case may be deductive, inductive, exploratory, didactic, revelatory, obscurant or humorous. You may express this in rhetoric or painting or song and your success may or may not be as robust as desired by both you or your audiences.
In the fractal of the present, the time of creation, then, is the splendid feeling of Goethe. And while Goethe argued that “modernity” was destroying this sense of the “now” or the “present”, it can be argued that it is only an arrogance of persistence that does so and once freed from this constraint, harmony is restored.
This arrogance of persistence is the way that I see Tristan Gracia’s substantive challenge: seeing objects before we figure out the variables that we (as humans) are using to grasp it. This seems to be simply affects and aesthetics, concerned with how things are understood. But without vectors since objects have vectors, not Tools. Hence the issue with deploying Garcia’s thinking in a world of literal objects.