The World of SPLectrum
Home > Reality > The Core Values and the Metaphysics They Disclose
The Core Values and the Metaphysics They Disclose
SPLectrum’s metaphysics takes shape through disclosure, not derivation. It starts from the seat of the subject: whatever happens around us, whatever is claimed about it — it is always witnessed first and shared second. No stone tablets from outside. Reality discloses itself to us, and it does so through three core values.
The three core values
Belonging. Reality is experienced through a language medium that is shaped by shared language tools — the toolset of perception given to us by our species and community. We are already primed with specific language tools prior to experience. Belonging to a community means sharing how one perceives and understands.
Privacy. The experience itself is private. There is no way I can let others look through my eyes, hear through my ears, or feel through my skin. Everyone lives the same structural equality: the privacy of experience first, sharing into belonging second. The realities are genuinely many, (re)created in private by each of us.
Creativity. Creativity lives in the tension between what is shared and what is privately mine. Although we share the same language tools — in private we can apply them differently, the lived difference between the common ground and the personal experience. Shared reality is added to, not read out. We create and share — and that is what makes diversity a strength.
These values are sufficient to lay out the nature of the five pillars. The five fall into two realms of relation. Epistemology, ontology and aesthetics form the realm of realisation: the subject with reality, disclosed to it and enacted by it in the same movement. Ethics and politics form the realm of coexistence: the subject among other agents, who play their own games and make their own choices.
The five metaphysics pillars
Epistemology — the process of experience and learning. We learn from the feedback from our private experience into the (shared) language tools. It all starts with the individual and works its way into the community through sharing. Our shared language tools provide stability, a common understanding. But nothing is absolute: what we hold true is only achieved through converged subjectivity.
Ontology — the concepts of the language tools. Language is about relations between entities, the concepts. Language is our medium of experience so the beings of reality map to concepts of that language. This goes from concepts that are very specific to very general but are always already abstract to some extent. We experience them, we create them, we share them. Variations of the shared sets converge on a common catalogue. They shape the knowledge of the community. And it is easily forgotten in the process that everything started within the privacy of personal experience. It could have been different. We created it.
Aesthetics — the dynamics of meaning and language. There is no private experience without sensory experience, and sensory experience is mediated by language — and not only verbal language, but the many registers that work the senses. Where ontology holds the concepts at rest, aesthetics is the field of their motion: the dynamic in which they are worked. It is the painter’s palette, where shared colours are mixed into newness and uniqueness — the pillar where reality is created. Here the shared register and the private charge are worked into a meaning that was not there before. This is the pillar of liveliness. The dynamic does not only express reality, it adds to it: what takes hold settles as new tooling in the shared store, and that accumulation — made in private, held in common — is how reality changes, and across scales, how it evolves.
Ethics — the values a language game holds. It can be the ethics of the language game in its entirity, or of an actor within. Since agreement is based on convergent subjectivity, it is necessary to approach ethics from a common base of understanding - this can be in agreement or disagreement. So the same configuration of values stands differently depending on the frame: read from the inside, within the subject’s own language game, it may be wholly coherent; read from the outside, from the community’s shared game, it may not hold at all. The inclusion of a common base of understanding adds a richness - a whole new register to play in - and makes the ethics applicable in a wider scope of subjects and communities.
Politics — the dynamic of coexistence. Where ethics reads the values an actor holds toward the other, politics is the dynamic of living-together among diverse actors who each hold their own — run at every scale, from a single subject reconciling its own colliding memberships to communities sharing a world. It is named as a field of concern, the whole range of living-together from deep common ground to its breakdown, not by any one successful state.
See also: The three core values (close affinity) · Aesthetics — the dynamics of meaning