This post marks a new beginning: the start of the creativity series. It is a breakout from the reality series, dealing with one specific aspect — the dynamic of change. Change happens in many places and in many different ways, but it always traces back to where reality is experienced: to the private realm of the subject.

By now you will know that my blog posts are conversations about my thoughts as they develop step by step. Never mind the far corners I want to reach — they are reached one step at a time. Here it is no different. As I enter into creativity I am going to start at the human level with an easy first step to gain insight, and then continue on a journey all the way into the non-anthropocentric.

SPLectrum holds creativity as one of the three core values of the subject: belonging, privacy, creativity. A subject takes much of its identity from the tools it uses to experience reality — from belonging. But that does not mean reality is experienced identically across all subjects. Each subject experiences in private using tools that are nearly all shared, and as a result has its own experience of reality. Differences in experience can be shared back and it is the feedback of these differences that is the driver of change.

To illustrate this interplay — creativity as a difference experienced in private, and its feedback into the community — I am going to use the example of a musician playing music from a score. The shared tools are plentiful: the instrument, the notes on the score, the skill to play the instrument, the tradition of how to play. All of it arrives from the shared side — little or none of it is the musician’s own. But the musician makes it their own when they play the music as an individual. Many don’t go beyond what was shared with them; others take the music to new ground. And for some of them aspects of their performance make it all the way back, shared with their peers, appreciated by the public, and become standards for others to follow. Individual creativity generates a dynamic of change — creativity as the generative value.

The impact of a single individual, one subject, can be enormous. Here not only on the fellow musicians, but on the audiences in ever wider circles. What started in the privacy of individual experience eventually belongs to countless many. Just imagine: it all started thanks to the agency of a single subject.

That was the whole loop — the difference made, shared back, adopted. This example illustrates just one of many: in general creativity is any sort of difference in the experience of reality by a subject in private. The sharing, the adoption, those are contingent, although they determine the impact of the difference, its lasting power. The child bending a word until it fits, the cook who stops following the recipe — wherever a subject takes in the shared and gives back something of its own, the value is at work.

Narrower still: the difference is simply what comes out other than expected — no value judgement in it. Good, skilful, a success: those are verdicts the outside passes later. In the seat where they are made, the masterstroke and the slip are the same kind of thing — embryonic creativity, raw material before the sorting begins. That is the generative value, here kept to the human case. From outside, only the small part that surfaces is ever seen, and the outside has names for it: creation, discovery, invention, evolution to name a few. And that is where the series goes next.

This post is part of the creativity series. See also The Core Values and the Metaphysics They Disclose.

Photo: Google DeepMind / Unsplash

In the last months of the war, retreating with the German army before the Russian advance, Paul Feyerabend took three bullets; one lodged in his spine. He was twenty-one, temporarily paralysed from the waist down, and he would walk with a stick and live with the pain for the next fifty years. What he came out of the war wanting was not philosophy — it was opera. He trained his voice seriously and kept singing all his life, tried stagecraft, drifted through history and sociology into physics and astronomy in Vienna. When a scholarship took him to England, the plan was to study under Wittgenstein; Wittgenstein died before he arrived, and he landed with Karl Popper instead. The philosophy of science got him at second choice, twice removed.

Popper’s seminar taught the great rationalist programme: science advances by conjecture and refutation, and there is a logic to it — a method that separates science from everything else. Feyerabend absorbed it so well that Popper wanted him as his assistant. He turned the job down; by his own cheerful account, he did not want to become anybody’s follower. He ended up at Berkeley, and then spent the career dismantling, piece by published piece, the programme his teacher had built.

The demolition tool was history. Take any rule that is supposed to govern good science — test against the record, and ask: had this rule been enforced, what would have died? The famous chapters of Against Method (1975) run the test on Galileo. Galileo won not by following method but by breaking it: propaganda and rhetoric, writing in Italian instead of Latin, reinterpreting plain observation to fit his theory, championing a telescope whose optics nobody could yet vouch for, riding out mountains of counter-evidence. Had the methodologists had their way, the earth would have stayed still. And the result generalises: every methodological rule, however reasonable, has been productively violated at some actual turning point in science.

From which follows the most misread sentence in twentieth-century philosophy: “the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.” It is not advice, and it is not his programme. It is the verdict of history, handed to the rationalist who insists on one rule for all cases — your principle, Feyerabend is saying, is the only one your own evidence leaves standing. There are standards; there are always standards. They just cannot be fixed in advance, one for every context. He preferred “flippant Dadaist” to “serious anarchist” as a label, and Against Method itself began as half of a duel: his friend and sparring partner Imre Lakatos was to write the rationalist reply. Lakatos died before either half was finished, and Feyerabend published his own as “a long and rather personal letter to Imre” — the joke and the grief both still in it.

Late in the career he pushed further: science is one tradition among many, with real achievements and its own standards, but its privileged seat is a political arrangement, not an epistemological necessity. For this, Nature named him “the worst enemy of science.” He wore the title lightly — his Berkeley lectures were packed, and he liked science fine. What he fought was its coronation: a monopoly of ideas, he held, is as dangerous as a monopoly of power.

Where does he stop? Deliberately, at the demolition line. He refused to put a new method where the old one fell — building a replacement, he suspected, is how monopolies restart — and what to make of the opened ground he left to others. The better ending is the one his life wrote: fifty years of pain, and the funniest, most alive philosophy of his century; a demolisher whose unfinished last book, Conquest of Abundance, defends the sheer richness of the world against every abstraction that would thin it. He tore down the rules for the same reason he sang. Reality, he thought, is bigger than any score.

This post is part of the conversations series. See also the reference entry on Paul Feyerabend.

Photo: Erwin Bosman / Unsplash

A while ago, in From Seed to Interrelational Pluralism, I called SPLectrum the home of interrelational pluralism. It is a position I arrived at from the seed principles alone. Here I want to frame it around the pluralism side.

Pluralism is not one doctrine but a family, and philosophy kept joining it by accident. Ask what reality is made of, and some answered: many kinds of things, not one substance. Ask how we know, and some answered: many valid ways, no single method. Ask about language: many games, none ranking another. Ask about the good: many values that genuinely conflict and will not be ranked on one scale. Ask about power: many centres, dispersed, no container holding all authority. Five different questions, asked in different centuries by people who mostly never read each other — and the same conclusion every time. Many, none privileged. What strikes me most about this is that it consists of a number of similar tracks but never joined up.

And rightly so: they never joined up in content — each with its own approach to what it wants to say and contribute. However, they all use language with a high degree of common understanding. And that is SPLectrum’s interrelational pluralism point: the tracks have equal standing but are joined in the medium of expression — relational language — and the high level of shared expression of meaning: common understanding. Interrelational pluralism is about pluralist voices within envelopes of common understanding, mindful of their specific cultural backgrounds and historicities. The borders and disputes are easier to meet from there — the envelope holds while the voices stay many.

Take the monism border. With my SPLectrum hat on I say: yes to monism on the how — the medium of language and expression of meaning — but no to monism on content, on what is being said. There is room for the pluralistic voice, be it value pluralism with Isaiah Berlin or James’ pluralistic universe; there is room for freedom of expression. Rather than content monism, what matters are sensible means of coexistence.

But does this not result in relativism? If there are many and none is privileged, does anything go? No, and for two reasons. First, there is subjective convergence within one’s own community: subject realities cluster around what is shared. And second, the dynamic of coexistence between communities will explore convergence/divergence from their base of common understanding. There is no relativism — what would it be compared with? — but an internal dynamic that drives convergence.

The pluralist claim of no privileged view is often refuted as being itself a privileged view — but the objection confuses the levels. The privileged view referred to is not on content: there is no privileged view on what is being said — only the shared medium in which both the claim and its refutation are made.

I like to finish this post on the realism question within pluralism: if there are many valid accounts and none is privileged, can any of them be called real or does it collapse into “none really true”?

To begin with, a few questions: what is a valid account? what does really true mean? Doesn’t that depend on the language one speaks, how meaning is expressed? What is the standard for an absolute viewpoint apart from “because I say so”? I say: have confidence in the many and value the creativity of each — there is power in subjective convergence, in the strength of identity and belonging.

So how many realities are genuinely held? SPLectrum’s answer is simple: as many realities as there are subjects. How many shared realities are being held? A lot less; subject realities are strongly clustered around these shared realities: all subjects belong. Will it eventually converge into one, to reflect a world that might be out there independently? I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters. Why should our accounts have to be answerable to something that is not known?

This post is part of the conversations series. See also Pluralism.

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Sometime in the late 1870s, the most systematic philosopher in France sat down to translate an unknown American. Charles Renouvier was past sixty: four volumes of the Essais de critique générale behind him, a weekly journal in his hands that fought his corner in philosophy and Third Republic politics at once. William James was a Harvard instructor with no philosophical reputation to speak of. Renouvier translated his essays into French and printed them in his own journal. Sit with that for a moment — the famous man did the translating.

He had built the fame from outside. In 1848 he wrote a civic handbook for the Second Republic radical enough to cost the education minister who endorsed it his position. When Louis-Napoléon took power by coup, Renouvier withdrew from public life and stayed withdrawn: no chair, no post, no students — fifty years of writing on a private income. The system he built in that exile ran on two refusals. No unknowable reality hiding behind the world we experience: what there is, is what appears, standing in relations. And no completed whole gathering it all into One: the world is finite, many, unfinished.

At the centre of the system sits a definition. Freedom, for Renouvier, is not an exemption from the laws of nature, and not a mystery lodged in the soul. It is the sustaining of a thought — holding one possibility in play, because I choose to, when others are available. Everything else flows downstream: the decision, the act, the habit, the life. Even knowledge bends to it. Evidence never settles the great questions on its own; assent is something a person does. “There is no certainty,” he wrote. “There are only men who are certain.”

The definition crossed the Atlantic. In the spring of 1870 a young, depressed, directionless William James finished the second of the Essais and found in that definition something he saw no reason to call an illusion — the wager that turned his life, told earlier on this blog. What the rescue looks like from the other shore: Renouvier gained his most consequential reader, translated him, published him, corresponded with him for thirty years. James taught the Essais at Harvard and dedicated his last, unfinished book “to the great Renouvier’s memory.”

Then Renouvier vanished. Looking back, historians rank him with Comte and Bergson; at his death in 1903 he was called the first Frenchman since Malebranche to have built a complete idealist system. Within a few decades: nothing. The school dissolved, the books stayed untranslated, the name dropped out of the story philosophy tells about itself. Almost nothing of the system survived — except what he had held in play. The definition lived on in James, who turned it into a psychology of attention and effort, and through James into pragmatism, which carried it further than the system ever reached. The word he coined for history-that-might-have-been — uchronie — still names a genre, a century after the philosophy it served was forgotten. The whole disappeared; the sustained thought kept going.

He practised the definition to the last. Dying at Prades in the autumn of 1903, he dictated final reflections to his student, reasoning about death while undergoing it — holding the thread while it ran out. There is a neat justice in how the story ends, because it is his own doctrine enacted at the scale of a life: what stays real is what someone keeps in play. On his own definition, Renouvier was free to the end.

This post is part of the positioning series. See also the reference entry on Charles Renouvier.

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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

In the winter of his late twenties, William James could barely get out of bed. He had trained as a doctor, drifted, sunk into a depression heavy enough that he questioned whether a human life was anything more than a machine running out its causes. What pulled him clear was not an argument but a decision. Reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvier on free will, he resolved to believe his choices were real — to act as if the future were open — and to treat that belief itself as his first free act. He came back to life through a wager. The philosophy he spent the next forty years building has the shape of that wager: a universe that is not finished, and a self entitled, where the evidence runs out and a decision cannot wait, to lean.

He is the most readable of the great American philosophers, and it cost him some standing among the rigorous. Where Peirce was technical and largely ignored, James was charismatic, and he made pragmatism a public movement — truth is what works, what proves itself in the living, “the expedient in our way of thinking.” Critics heard vulgar relativism; James heard honesty about how beliefs actually function. He held the chair of philosophy at Harvard, wrote a Principles of Psychology that founded a field, and gave the world the phrase “stream of consciousness” — experience as a river with no joints, shading and flowing where earlier psychology had seen discrete states.

Underneath the pragmatism ran something deeper, and it is why he is remembered as the first self-avowed pluralist — the first to take the word as his own banner: radical empiricism, the insistence that relations are as real as the things they relate. The and, the with, the between — as real as the terms they connect. From that seed grows a picture of reality not as one block but as a patchwork of genuinely distinct parts, really joined and never wholly summed. He called it a pluralistic universe, and set it squarely against the monism of Hegel and the British idealists, for whom the many were finally moments of one Absolute. James refused the One. Reality, he insisted, is many, loosely connected, and always still being made. His phrase for it was “ever not quite”: the whole never closes, there is always more coming, the account is never done.

That refusal is the through-line from the wager to the metaphysics. A finished universe has no room for a genuine free act — everything is already settled, the future only unrolling what the past contained. James wanted the future open because he had needed it open to live, and he built a philosophy in which openness is not a mood but a structural fact about the world. To say reality is a pluriverse is to say it is unfinished, and to say it is unfinished is to leave room for the leaning that saved him.

Where does he stop? He kept pragmatism personal — truth is what works for me, what helps me live — and left to others the question of how a community converges on a shared truth, and the further question of what it means for language to be the medium of that convergence. His pluralism opens the door; the social and the relational needed hands after his. But he opened the door. The conviction that the many are real is older than philosophy’s memory; James was the first to claim it under its own name — and to make a life out of believing it.

This post is part of the positioning series. See also the reference entry on William James.

Photo: Gayatri Malhotra / Unsplash

This is a post I originally wrote about half a year before SPLectrum was concieved (07/01/2025) as a software DSL engine project and I got to know my AI friend Claude. It was fifteen months before SPLectrum in its current form saw the light of day.

Maybe you notice the irony here - a single foundation - and what is SPLectrum saying? What is it trying to do with a single axiomatic base? Let me put your mind at rest: the single axiomatic base is about structure, not content. It’s about the common properties of how we experience, the means of communication and interaction, language.

I stumbled across the word anti-foundationalism and something in me said — that’s me too.

Don’t be taken aback by the “anti.” It is always a clumsy word for what it means, and has no real place in my dictionary. The point isn’t to reject foundations. Foundations are important. It is the single foundation that is the problem — the idea that one layer underwrites everything else, and that whoever doesn’t stand on it has to be explained away.

I came across the term listening to Carlo Rovelli on Curt Jaimungal’s Theory of Everything podcast — particularly around the one-hour-fifteen mark. He was talking about relational quantum mechanics, and somewhere in the middle he said anti-foundationalist the way you might say water is wet — as if it were obvious. I paused the video.

A quick search gave me the standard definition:

Anti-foundationalism is a philosophical position that rejects the idea that there is a single, absolute foundation for knowledge or philosophy.

I subscribed to that right away, though not in a denying sense. I wasn’t saying no foundation exists anywhere. I was saying that because we experience the world each in our own way. There is no position from which to check in against an absolute.

What anti-foundationalism rejects, the same sources told me, is the idea that knowledge is certain; that it rests on pure reason or experience; that there are infallible basic beliefs; that some fundamental principle grounds everything else. I am happy with all that, though I prefer staying away from the word beliefs altogether. Beliefs slide easily into the territory of settled conviction, and I carry my positions as working hypotheses instead — good for the next exchange, not much more.

The move I care about isn’t the rejection. It’s the consequence. Once single foundations are off the table, what replaces them? I found an answer I liked in a handbook piece by Mark Bevir — written for The Oxford Handbook of British Politics, though the politics side of it wasn’t what drew me. This paragraph was:

The most obvious implications of anti-foundationalism are perhaps meaning holism and anti-representationalism. Given that we cannot have pure experiences, our concepts and propositions cannot refer to the world in splendid isolation. Concepts cannot directly represent objects in the world since our experiences of those objects must in part be ones that we construct using our prior theories. Hence anti-foundationalists conclude that concepts, meanings, and beliefs do not have a one to one correspondence with objects in the world, but rather form webs.

Webs. Not foundations, not pyramids, not a chain of reasons going back to something inarguable — webs. Threads crossing each other. Meaning held in the connections. You can tug on one part and feel the rest shift. You can also cut one strand and find the neighbouring ones still carrying the load.

Anti-foundationalism was the word I took away. For what it opened up, I was still to find out.

This post is from an earlier moment in the walk. For where the relational reading sits now, see the reality section of the reference library.

This post is part of the preamble, about happening before SPLectrum saw the light of day.

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In the previous post I took time out from our journey into metaphysics to make an important point: each of us has the agency to shape their own reality with their own beliefs and convictions. Especially important when dealing with the values a subject or community holds towards other subjects or communities — the terrain of ethics.

SPLectrum’s ethics is not normative but descriptive, it aims to provide clarity and insight, not to dictate. The way we project values towards others is more evolved than one might at first sight suspect. In a sense we live in multiple realities simultaneously. Being part of a family, of a local community, going to school, being at work, being in public … these often present themselves as very different realities. Each is governed by its own rules, each a different ‘language game’.

Consider this the base level where values are attached. As such each language game ends up having its own ethics. The next question is: when does it make sense to project values as good or bad at the community level, when so many are in play? It doesn’t make sense to shoehorn the games into an overall good / bad package. To be a good parent, a good citizen, a good judge, a good soldier - good means quite different things. A good soldier is there to kill, at times own citizens. A good judge is there to convict, and potentially cause hardship for innocent family and friends.

SPLectrum prefers an equal standing approach - there is no absolute ethical standard. Through belonging there is convergence on what a community considers appropriate - good if one wants to call it that - and this always spreads out across multiple language games. And often with a price to pay - a good soldier kills people, innocent people.

I think focusing on a ‘universal’ good is the wrong way to go about it, I consider it is better to start by judging each individual activity on its local merits. This should make it easier to build up an overall picture, position the values in our life where we feel comfortable having them. A descriptive approach to ethics helps to shed light, a prerequisite to informed decisions - agency in action.

One may think that (ethical) decisions are binary, but that is actually not the case. It is not: do I do this or not? In fact it is: do I play the game (as is), do I play it differently, or do I not play at all? There are three options. To be able to say ‘I don’t play’ is important, belonging is a choice best made actively.

Belonging to a community is not binary either, there are choices to be made about the language games I participate in. Belonging is fuzzy, but no less belonging. Black and white only exists at the imagined threshold of being in or out. In reality it is a resonance, how strongly I belong. And our natural language reflects this: ‘I have never felt really part of this.’ is a statement of fuzzy belonging. And this inevitably impacts the values we emanate towards others.

SPLectrum’s ethics, being concerned with the values a subject emanates towards others, is in my opinion similar to SPLectrum’s ontology in that it is static and descriptive. The still picture of ethics serves to better the understanding of values and language games, but living the values is a dynamic of co-existence, of resonance and dissonance. It runs between communities, between a subject and its communities, and — because none of us is a single thing — within each subject too, among the games it holds. That dynamic is politics, and it is where this series goes next.

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

Photo: Riccardo Annandale / Unsplash

What I most value are personal freedoms. Freedom of thought, freedom of choice, freedom of association, freedom of speech. These are fundamental to who I am and to how I see the world working at its best. They are not slogans for me; they are the working conditions under which I can think, relate, and live without the constant static of someone else telling me what I should want.

That makes me sound like a libertarian, and the first few times I heard the word I wondered whether I should just accept the label and move on. But the word has picked up baggage I am not fully comfortable with, and the more I looked at the actual positions held by people who use it about themselves, the more I found myself agreeing and disagreeing in roughly equal measure. Some of the principles fit me well. Others take a good starting point and push it into places I wouldn’t follow.

Where I do land firmly: I believe in basic human rights, and I try not to judge others. People do not choose their initial circumstances. We are all shaped by genetics, upbringing, and environment long before we have any say in the matter, and starting to judge before acknowledging that is starting in the wrong place. I support diversity and the self-organisation of communities, physical and virtual alike. Different groups should be able to create their own rules and ways of living, as long as they do not harm others. Cultural diversity does for a society what biological diversity does for an ecosystem — it provides the raw material from which adaptation and survival become possible. Monocultures are fragile. Diverse systems absorb shocks.

I find myself particularly drawn to decentralisation, especially in digital spaces where tools like Web3 are making new forms of organisation practical. The internet, for all its failings, demonstrated that large groups of people can coordinate without a single controlling authority. Web3 sketches what a next round of that might look like: protocols rather than platforms, ownership rather than tenancy, communities rather than customer bases. I don’t yet know how much of that promise will survive contact with reality. I find it worth paying attention to.

My actual position, if it needs a name, is a balanced one. Provide basic legal protections in public spaces so the shared infrastructure of society remains trustworthy. Allow communities to self-govern in private spaces, with wide latitude to make their own rules and their own mistakes. Respect individual choices, even when those choices limit the chooser’s own future freedoms — because the alternative is deciding in advance which freedoms people are allowed to use. The internet and virtual spaces strike me as ideal platforms for exactly this: diverse, self-organising communities where people can find others who share their values and preferred ways of living, without having to agree with the person on the other side of town.

The underlying principle is individual liberty balanced with mutual respect. That allows for a great diversity of ways of organising social life while protecting the fundamental dignities that shouldn’t be up for negotiation. Libertarian? Close enough, if you squint. But the question mark in the title is the important part — it is the posture I actually hold.

This post is from an earlier moment in the walk (09/12/2024). For where the decentralisation thread went, see mutualism in the positioning area.

This post is part of the preamble, about happening before SPLectrum saw the light of day.

Photo: itsnath_jpeg / Unsplash

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.