The World of SPLectrum
The Politics of Coexistence
This is the final post where the metaphysics position is laid down, skimming the surface before the more detailed working-out that will follow. The post deals with politics. In SPLectrum’s world politics plays the dynamic counterpart to ethics in the same way aesthetics does to ontology: ethics reads the standing configuration of a subject’s values toward others, and politics reads the same territory in motion.
At the base level SPLectrum attaches ethical values to the language games. As a subject we are part of multiple, belong to many. And this is reflected in the values we carry, not a simple one size fits all, but a distribution. We have choice and agency to tailor these to who we are.
Politics’ concern is the art of coexistence. SPLectrum sees this concern wherever there is coexistence well beyond the more traditional fields of public life, all the way down into family and private life. Can you live happily being a father and a soldier at the same time?
At the heart of effective coexistence lies understanding. Understanding requires enough of a shared language, enough shared expression of meaning. Common ground matters far more than agreement or disagreement. Does the language game of coexistence have powerful enough meaning expression for the game to be played? Agreement can come later, or never.
Coexistence, then, is the dynamic of figuring out where we play together and where we play apart. A subject or community is an active participant with three choices: play the game as is, play it differently, or not play at all. The last choice matters most — we have a choice to exclude from our reality what we don’t want to participate in. And here is the turn: in choosing which games to play, a subject or community is choosing which values are live in its reality. The still picture ethics reads — this subject holds these values — is the settled trace of these choices playing out. To say it in a few words: life is a choice of games — and the choice matters.
Out of all this playing, a dynamic balance establishes itself. Not decreed from above, not handed down by anyone with the authority to say how the games should sit together — there is no such seat. It needs to be converged upon, and the result can be beneficial or not. An ongoing dynamic where the balance may shift with the play.
With politics set down, the metaphysics is complete — and it has a clear shape. Epistemology, ontology and aesthetics are one realm — call it the realm of realisation: the subject acquiring meaning, holding it as concepts, and expressing it in language. Reality is disclosed to the subject and enacted by it in the same movement, and realisation carries both senses at once — coming to see, and making real. Ethics and politics are the second — the realm of coexistence: the subject’s standing and its ongoing interactions with other subjects and communities — others who have agency of their own, who play their own games and make their own choices. Two realms of relation, realisation then coexistence, and across both the same refusal holds: no universal good handed down from above, no one seated above the games to decide how they should coexist.
I think this is a sound approach to metaphysics, a beginning where positions are laid out in principle. Not a finished system by any means — that will take time to build out. To me it feels like solid ground to build on.
This post is part of the reality series. See also Politics — the dynamic of coexistence.
Photo: Randy Fath / Unsplash