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Politics — the dynamic of coexistence
Reality is disclosed in language, and where ethics reads the values an actor holds toward the other, politics is what opens once those actors are living together. Ethics reads the values a game holds and surfaces the collisions between the several games an actor co-inhabits; it stops there, at the surfacing. Politics is the next move — not a fresh reading of values but the dynamic of coexistence among the diverse actors, and the diverse games, now in contact: the value-holders sharing a world.
That dynamic is read off the actor/game configuration like everything else in the framework — not measured against a standard set over the actors, because there is no seat above them any more than anywhere else. Politics names a field of concern: the living-together of diverse actors. It does not, here, work any of that concern out — which arrangements hold, which question resolves how. This page bounds the territory; the field within it is surveyed across philosophy, and where SPLectrum’s concern is read across that field is in close affinity.
The concern
Coexistence is the concern, not a state to be reached. The whole range lives inside it: deep common ground and easy convergence at one end, friction, domination and the breakdown of living-together at the other. Conquest is not outside politics but the dynamic going badly, one game overrunning another rather than sharing the space. The concern is named by what it is about: diverse actors living together.
Both scales
The concern runs at every scale, because it is read off actor/game and an actor is found at every scale. Communities in contact, each its own game with its own values, sharing a world, are the apparent case. A single subject is the other: a member of several games at once — a religion and a country, a family and a profession — whose values collide, so that the subject is itself a site of coexistence, the colliding games living together within it. This is the multi-membership the ethics page surfaced as collision, read forward to the scale of one. Same dynamic, both widths.
Where the concern runs out
The far edge is not where the common ground runs out — the living-together is hardest there, not absent — nor where coexistence fails — abandonment and conquest are still the dynamic, at its failure end — but where there is no shared world to co-inhabit at all, nothing held between the actors to be political about. That is the field’s own boundary: the point past which there is nothing for the dynamic to be a dynamic of.
See also: The core values and the metaphysics they disclose · Ethics — the values a language game holds — where this pillar’s seam begins · Epistemology — learning and knowing · Politics (close affinity) — where this account is read across the field