The Birth of P0 — Being Is Tension

When SPLectrum was born the seed had only five principles about language and the relational. Then after having done the initial positioning posts the SPLectrum seed was ready for a bit of unpacking. This happened in two posts: SPLectrum from First Principles and First Principles — the Social Core. While preparing I ran into a bit of bother: where does language come from? My thoughts drifted Heidegger’s way - being is always already disclosed - and if that is the case, so must language, the relational. And so P0 was born: being implies language. P0 because this principle is of a different nature from the other ones, it is the principle of language origin.

P0 started as a simple statement — a bare acknowledgment — but has since become a genuine creational principle. The act of placing a boundary is the act of creation. You don’t create something and then put a boundary around it. Every instance of anything — a cell, a thought, a data unit, a self — repeats the same cut. P0 is the ground from which the other five become possible.

And it turns out this is nothing new. Over the centuries, creation has been formulated and reformulated as an act of differentiation. There is no being without its complement, without the-other. The differentiation, a tension maintaining the difference. I find it fascinating how so many independent traditions have arrived at the same insight, each in their own vocabulary, each with a different take.

Let’s start with a presocratic one
Heraclitus — the tension of opposites
Being and its complement are opposites, held together by logos. “The way up and the way down are one and the same.” The tension is not a problem to resolve — it is what holds reality together. Logos is the medium of expression. The earliest Western formulation.

Next we have a number of formulations from the more recent Western tradition. And let’s begin with the philosophical realm. Fichte is part of German Idealism.
Fichte — I posits itself through not-I
Being comes into existence through the act of differentiation. The I cannot exist without distinguishing itself from the not-I. The positing IS the boundary. Explicitly creational — the cut is not discovered, it is performed. The tension between I and not-I is where selfhood lives.

Heidegger is part of phenomenology.
Heidegger — being is always already disclosed
Being is not something that exists and then gets disclosed. Being is always already in a world, always already relational. Disclosure is not an add-on — it is constitutive. Being and world, the tension expressed as disclosure. There is no being without the world it is disclosed in.

French Post Structuralism.
Derrida — différance, the cut that never closes
The boundary between inside and outside is never perfectly sealed. Every clarification opens new questions. Every definition leans on terms that need defining. The tension across the interface is permanent and productive. Not absence — generativity. The fringes are where new meaning enters.

Other fields: linguistics and mathematics.

Saussure is in the field of structural linguistics. He takes it a level up - differentiation between signs: signs behave as beings in their own right - creations
Saussure — the sign is purely differential
The sign has no content in itself. It exists only through its difference from other signs. Language is not labels attached to things — it is the system of differences. The tension is between sign and sign, and meaning lives in the gap. No thing, only relations.

Spencer Brown’s formulation comes from within the field of mathematical logic.
Spencer-Brown — draw a distinction
The most minimal formulation. One instruction: draw a distinction. Before it, nothing marked. After it, a marked state and an unmarked state. The distinction is the creation. Everything else follows. The entire calculus built from one act of differentiation.

And as last group we have three formulations from the eastern tradition: Chinese cosmology, Hindu and Buddhist philosophy: Yin Yang comes from Chinese cosmology. Thousands of years older than any of the others.
Yin-Yang — the dynamic interplay of complements
Being as the tension between complementary opposites. Neither exists without the other. Light contains dark, dark contains light. Neither is pure, nor fixed — constantly shifting, constantly in tension. The interplay IS the reality.

Next Hindu philosophy.
Neti neti — not this, not this
The Upanishadic method of defining through differentiation. Not this, not this. Every differentiation is a negation. What remains is what cannot be captured by any distinction — Brahman. Being is known through what it is not. The tension between assertion and negation, the boundary traced by denial.

The Nagarjuna formulation comes from the Indian Buddhist philosophy
Nagarjuna — śūnyatā, nothing exists without relation
No being has inherent self-nature. Everything arises in dependence on conditions, on relation. Emptiness is not nothingness — it is the absence of independent existence. Being is constitutively relational. The tension is between the appearance of independent existence and the reality of dependent origination.

My formulation - Being is tension across the interface - came to me as I imagined a water droplet suspended in air. The droplet as the differentiation, the tension in the interface to keep the droplet together as liquid, suspended in a gas. Being suspended in its complement. The interface is where being meets the world.

This post is part of the seed series. More on the seed in the seed section of the reference library.

Photo: xcrap / Unsplash