A woodcarver at work with a chisel in her workshop, surrounded by carved figures

Hand someone the complete equipment of sculpture — the chisels, the technique, the accumulated tradition of the workshop — and something essential has still not been handed over: the knowhow of expressing in sculpture. That is acquired in the doing, and it is nobody else’s. No two sculptors cut alike, and the difference is not in the toolbox.

Every process has two sides: how it is implemented — the nuts and bolts — and how it is run, what is done with it. Cognition is no exception. The process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience is not only about an implementation that runs but also the way it is applied — and the manner is itself acquired. Among the things cognition acquires, through experience, is the knowhow of its own running.

In cognition is core I talked about cognition within the context of the seed principles as the process run by a subject experiencing reality, the process in whose running reality is disclosed. This post follows the second angle to what it implies. If cognition is the process that discloses reality, then how the process is run has a big influence on the type of reality that is disclosed. Two subjects can hold the same tooling — the same language, the same tradition, the same workshop — and still live in different realities.

SPLectrum sees the how as part of the aesthetic territory. Working with meaning to create meaning, the manner of going about using what one holds — this is named expression of meaning in SPLectrum’s aesthetics. One process, read by two pillars: as disclosure it is the heart of epistemology; as craft it runs deep into aesthetics. The journey from one to the other is no distance at all — it is the same running, seen from its two faces.

Worth a recap in full. Reality is disclosed — and the disclosing is relational: it happens in the interaction between being and the other, each subject’s cognition process running its side of that interaction in its own hands. But the running never starts from nothing. Every act of the craft is a variation to an existing tune — the creativity of a subject adds to an existing building, it does not build something completely new. The tooling arrives already loaded with others’ acquiring; the tune was playing first. The core values turn out to be the anatomy of this one process: belonging funds it, privacy is where it runs, creativity is how it goes.

The craft is not exercised on the world from a distance. The subject is in the world, not detached from it, and the subject’s attitude sets the tone of the interaction. The deepest part of the sculptor’s knowhow is knowing what not to carve — and so with cognition: choose wisely what you allow within your reality, because the knowledge and understanding you acquire and run with disclose the reality you will have to live in.

Which leaves the tune itself. Its historicity runs long, but the tune is no remnant of a distant past — it is alive, played and reshaped by living subjects, every one of us included. Making peace with belonging is coming to terms with a living thing, and it is not easy for everyone — creativity wants to feel entirely one’s own, and discovering that it runs on inherited tooling can feel like a debt, or a cage. It is neither. The tune is not what limits the variation; it is what makes variation possible at all. The building is not what constrains the new wing; it is what holds it up.

With the help of belonging, we are creative in private.

This post is part of the positioning series. See also The seed and Cognition.

Photo: Phong Phạm / Unsplash