The Seed and Human Reality

I started a seed section on the site because I thought it was important to separate what can be deduced from the principles from what gets built on top of it. Even if that means the section is small. How wrong I was, I had no idea of how much follows from the common properties of language - the relational - expressed by seed principles. 10+ pages? Not a problem. This post is the first in a sequence dealing with human reality which should bring us to the introduction of the central focus of SPLectrum moving forward: Interrelational Pluralism.

In this post we start with our personal relationship with human reality. Why? Because we are very anthropocentric, it is the measure of what we experience and do. We are issued a pair of human-coloured spectacles, and from the moment we open our eyes to the world we are educated into the human mode of being and tune our body accordingly. Unfortunately too often we are too eager to differentiate ourselves against ‘the other’ and become blinkered and dismissive towards what we don’t understand. That isn’t differentiation — it’s negation. The other doesn’t appear in opposition to us; the other doesn’t appear at all.

Those spectacles are shaped by our evolution into human beings, our historicity, our anthropocentrism. They are not something we put on; we are born already wearing them. This then feeds back into our personal experience. As a person I am at the centre of my experience — a body, sensing, always already in some language. A doctor sees pathology where others see discomfort. A musician hears structure where others hear sound. What reaches us comes through the languages we hold — different languages, different realities. In Language, Experience and Reality I explored this through fire: the flames already labelled, the body absorbing warmth, sound, light before a single conscious thought crosses our mind. Experience is personal and private, but soaked in human ancestry.

But behind the spectacles, the eyes are mine. The doctor’s seeing-pathology is the doctor’s; the musician’s hearing-structure is the musician’s; what reaches me through whatever spectacles I am wearing reaches me. That is what waking up to the personal looks like — not taking off the spectacles, which we can’t, but recognising they are ours to wear. Different languages, different interpretations, different realities. The differences start here — in how each of us takes up the human inheritance and makes it our own. We can shape how the lenses sit, which we sharpen, what we let in, what we leave. The pluralism is structural, but it isn’t only out there between communities. It starts inside. That is what we bring to the table when we share.

Now the shared space. It follows from the seed that we never interact directly. Think about it — if all my experience is mediated by language, I never reach you unmediated. What we experience as conversation, as being together, is emergent. One of us acts on the environment — speaks, writes, gestures — and another interacts with the effect and extracts similar information from it. Speaking the same language, in seed terms, means being able to take both sides of the same interaction: producing and receiving, matched. A family builds its sense of what matters around the dinner table this way. A profession builds its standards through decades of this shared practice.

What happens between us when subjects meet? The seed gives the structural fact — we don’t interact directly. What that leaves room for is the next move.

This post is part of the seed series. See also Human Reality on the seed.

Photo: Joel Mott / Unsplash