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The three core values

SPLectrum’s metaphysics starts from three values disclosed from the subject’s lived situation: belonging (what is mine living also in others), privacy (what I experience is internal to me), creativity (the tension between what is shared and what is privately mine). They are not a foundation but a stance — stand in them and a world comes into view.

No single thinker in the tradition holds the same triad. Several work with subsets, several provide structural analogues from different starting points. The landscape below maps the territory under three angles: thinkers who carry something like all three values together, and the per-value landscape where individual values are developed in depth.

The analogues — four thinkers who hold all three

Taylor — three axes of modern identity

Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989) traces three axes of modern identity: inwardness (the self has depth, an interior to be explored and expressed), the dialogical self (identity formed through shared language and recognition), and authenticity (the demand to be true to one’s own originality). The mapping is close: inwardness rhymes with privacy, the dialogical self with belonging, authenticity with creativity.

Taylor’s project is genealogical — he traces how the modern West came to live selfhood this way. The three axes describe a historical achievement, not an ontological structure. He narrates modernity rather than founding a metaphysics, and the scope is the human language animal by design.

Whitehead — Creativity, Many, One

Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) places creativity as the “ultimate” — the category that generates all others. The many become one and are increased by one. Each actual occasion prehends (takes in) the many that precede it and becomes a new one — a creative synthesis that adds to reality. Creativity, the many (belonging to a world of actual occasions), and the privacy of each occasion’s subjective aim form a structural triad.

The divergence is cosmological versus phenomenological: Whitehead’s triad is a feature of the cosmos (every actual entity, from an electron to God); the SPLectrum triad is disclosed from the seat of the subject.

Nishida — self-awareness, mutual determination, action-intuition

Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy holds self-awareness (the inward fold — what I know of myself), mutual determination (how I am shaped by and shape my world), and action-intuition (creative engagement where knowing and acting are one) as co-original — three faces of one act, not three separate capacities. The mapping is close: self-awareness to privacy, mutual determination to belonging, action-intuition to creativity.

The divergence is in resolution: Nishida’s three resolve into absolute nothingness — a groundless ground where all tensions are held in unity. The SPLectrum triad holds the tensions without resolving them; the values remain in productive tension rather than finding their identity in a common ground.

Bakhtin — dialogism as belonging, privacy, and creativity in one concept

Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism holds all three values together through a single concept. Belonging: meaning is produced between speakers, not within them — every word is “half someone else’s,” and the utterance is always addressed, always responsive. Privacy: outsideness (vnenakhodimost’) — you see me as I cannot see myself, and this surplus of seeing is constitutive of understanding, not a limitation. The other’s perspective on my life is something I structurally cannot have from the inside. Creativity: polyphony — genuinely distinct voices held together without merging into one, producing new meaning through their interaction.

The divergence is in register: Bakhtin holds belonging, privacy, and creativity as structural features of how language works — features of the utterance, the encounter between speakers, the novel as literary form. The SPLectrum triad holds them as values disclosed from the subject’s lived situation. Bakhtin’s dialogism describes what happens in language; the triad takes it as a stance and asks what it discloses about reality.

Belonging — what is mine living also in others

Martin Buber — “All real living is meeting.” Relation is primary: the I of I-Thou is constituted by the encounter, not prior to it. Buber gets belonging as encounter — not membership, not identity, but the meeting in which the self comes into being through the other. The framework is dyadic: it names what happens in the pair but does not develop the passage from the pair to the community, to institutions.

Emmanuel Levinas — the face of the Other precedes all belonging. The ethical demand is infinite and asymmetrical — the Other’s claim on me is not reciprocal. Levinas places the other at the centre but resists the mutuality that belonging implies. He also develops interiority — the subject as separated, enjoying its own inner life — which places him across belonging and privacy simultaneously.

Martin Heidegger — Being-in-the-world is always already Being-with (Mitsein). The self is not first isolated and then socialised; it is from the start situated in a shared world of meaning. Heidegger gets the structural priority of the shared. His account of the shared world is oriented toward everydayness and the they (das Man) — belonging as the condition from which authentic selfhood must be won, not as a value.

Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel — the communitarian critique of the unencumbered self. The self is constituted by its community’s traditions, its shared moral frameworks, its practices. You cannot step behind your attachments and choose from nowhere. MacIntyre develops the point into tradition-constituted rationality; Sandel into the encumbered self against Rawls’s liberal abstraction. Both get belonging as constitutive. Neither develops a metaphysics from it.

Privacy — what I experience is internal to me

Thomas Nagel — “What is it like to be a bat?” The subjective character of experience is irreducible: no amount of objective description captures what it is like to be a particular subject. Nagel draws the scope at the impossibility of a view from nowhere — privacy as the structural feature that blocks complete objectivity. His concern is epistemological (what we cannot know from outside) rather than value-centred (what privacy makes possible).

Emmanuel Levinas — interiority is positive, not a gap. The subject enjoys (jouissance) its own inner life before any encounter with the Other. Separation is a condition for ethics, not its obstacle — only a genuinely interior being can be addressed. Levinas places interiority and belonging in a specific sequence (separation first, encounter second) where SPLectrum holds them as co-original.

Hannah Arendt — the private realm is the realm of necessity, the body, the household — the precondition for the public realm of action and speech, but subordinate to it. Arendt values privacy instrumentally (it shelters the person who will appear in public) rather than as a value in its own right. Her framework elevates the public — plurality, action, the space of appearance — over the private.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the lived body is the site of privacy. Perception is always mine — embodied, perspectival, irreducibly first-personal. But the body is also intercorporeal: it reaches toward others, it inhabits a shared world. Merleau-Ponty holds the private and the shared together through the body without splitting them into separate domains.

Creativity — the tension between shared and private

Alfred North Whitehead — creativity as the ultimate category. Every actual occasion is a creative synthesis of its world. Whitehead makes creativity cosmological — it is what reality does at every level, not a human capacity but a feature of the cosmos.

Henri Bergson — the élan vital, creative evolution. Life is a creative impulse that diverges and differentiates as it advances. Creativity is not the application of intelligence to inert matter but the fundamental movement of life itself. Bergson gets the irreducibility and open-endedness of creation. His framework is vitalist — the creativity belongs to life, not to the subject as such.

Cornelius Castoriadis — the radical imaginary. Society creates its own forms — its meanings, norms, categories — through a collective creative capacity that cannot be derived from prior conditions. Autonomy is the project of making this self-creation conscious. Castoriadis gets creativity as social and ontological, not merely individual or artistic. The interface between individual imagination and social institution is described rather than fully theorised.

Hannah Arendt — natality. Every birth introduces a new beginning into the world — the capacity to initiate, to start something that was not before. Action is the human activity that corresponds to natality: unpredictable, irreversible, disclosed in a web of relationships. Arendt locates creativity in the public realm — it is what happens between people in speech and action. She resists the private as a source of freedom.

William James — the unfinished universe. Reality is in the making, not ready-made. The world is genuinely open; novelty is real, not apparent. James holds this as a metaphysical conviction (radical empiricism, pluralism) and as a temperamental commitment (the tough-minded against the tender-minded). He does not develop the mechanism by which interaction produces novelty.

Gilles Deleuze — difference is primary, not derivative. Repetition produces difference; identity is a product, not a ground. The virtual is the field of creative potential from which actual forms are differentiated. Deleuze makes creativity ontological and anti-foundational. The framework operates at a level of abstraction that resists grounding in the subject’s lived situation.

The positioning

The three values arrive separately across the tradition. Belonging is developed by the dialogical and communitarian thinkers (Buber, Levinas, MacIntyre, Sandel). Privacy is developed by phenomenologists and philosophers of subjectivity (Nagel, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas’s interiority). Creativity is developed by process philosophers and theorists of social imagination (Whitehead, Bergson, Castoriadis, Deleuze). Each strand carries its value with depth and precision.

The four analogues each hold something like the full triad, from different starting points and with a characteristic divergence. Taylor’s three axes map closely, but his project is genealogical — he narrates how the modern self came to inhabit these dimensions, not what they disclose about reality. Whitehead holds creativity, the many, and the privacy of the subjective aim together, but cosmologically — as features of the cosmos, not as values disclosed from a stance. Nishida holds self-awareness, mutual determination, and action-intuition as co-original, but resolves them into absolute nothingness. Bakhtin holds all three through dialogism, but as structural features of language — how the utterance works — rather than as values the subject lives from.

Each value-strand, developed in its own tradition, reaches a characteristic boundary:

Buber’s belonging stays dyadic. Sandel and MacIntyre develop belonging as constitutive without developing a metaphysics from it.
Nagel’s privacy stays epistemological — what we cannot know — rather than becoming a value that generates a world.
Whitehead’s creativity stays cosmological. Castoriadis’s radical imaginary develops creativity as social and ontological; the triad picks up the individual-social interaction his framework describes but does not fully specify. James holds the open universe; the triad picks up the mechanism of creative interaction his metaphysics leaves unnamed.
Levinas holds belonging and privacy together (interiority and the face of the Other), but his ethics demands asymmetry where the triad holds the values as co-equal.

The core values take these three strands — developed separately, each with its own depth — and hold them together as a stance: belonging gives shared language, privacy gives something to express, creativity is the act of expression. The world that comes into view — thick (privacy), porous (belonging), unfinished (creativity) — is a metaphysics disclosed from the subject, not a cosmology or a genealogy.