A Metaphysics of Disclosure

Three posts into the Reality series, it is worth stopping to see the shape of what we have built. The series started with Building from the Seed, where I made the transition from talking about the structure of reality to talking about what populates reality and the three values that come with the grain of being a subject: belonging, privacy, creativity.

Armed with the three values I started to explore SPLectrum’s metaphysics: epistemology, ontology, and its special kind of aesthetics. Epistemology is the process of learning: turning private experience into clearer language, into knowledge shared with others. Ontology is about the static side of language — the units of meaning, the concepts. SPLectrum’s aesthetics is special, not the art-appendix of philosophy but concerned with the art and dynamics of expression of meaning. All three together describe a single movement — the dynamic of reality disclosing itself to a subject shaped by the language that subject holds.

And here is the thing I most want to be clear about. This is not a philosophy that tells you what to believe, or what to do, or even how to do it. It does not posit a world behind experience and ask you to accept it. It is more modest, and I think at the same time bolder: it is a philosophy about how we relate to reality — and the agency we have in that relating. Two things about the agency stand out.

The first is that subjectivity is where our agency lives. Reality is disclosed to a subject, from its own seat — not surveyed from nowhere. That seat is not a limitation to apologise for; it is the place from which anything can be seen, engaged, and worked at all. To be a subject is to be a participant in reality, not a spectator of it.

The second is that the vehicle of that agency is meaning and language. Every scrap of experience arrives already wrapped in meaning — what we see, hear, touch, and even what we take for pure abstract thought, all of it annotated, concepts standing in relation to concepts. That meaning is what the subject is given; the agency is in what is done with it. Here is where the subject authors: working the given in a private dialogue, using the language tools we share through belonging, but shaping within the privacy of the subject. Shared medium, individual expression — that is where reality takes its form for me.

SPLectrum wants you to feel free in your beliefs. A scientist, a person of faith, a sceptic — each relates to reality through a subject’s seat and through the meaning they hold, whatever the content of their convictions. The description competes with none of it. It sits underneath, describing how any of us come to hold a reality at all — science and faith and doubt alike. Because the description is of the how, it leaves the what to you.

That is also why the insistence on the absolute — a single true account, a theory of everything that would settle reality once and for all — is wrong. Subjects converging is a natural process one can have confidence in: knowledge stabilises the way any meaning stabilises — steadied by being shared by the many, tightening the fit as new language is made.

We are ready to continue our journey, as the metaphysics turns outward. The subject moves from learner to actor, from the fields of epistemology, ontology and aesthetics to the fields of ethics and politics. And I want you to do it with this realisation: you have far more sway over your reality than you may realise, or than others may lead you to believe.

This post is part of the reality series. More in the positioning area of the reference library.