

# Prosophy

After Philosophy

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By Paolo-Ugo Brusa

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Revised, October 2017

Copyright 2014-2017 Paolo-Ugo Brusa

Smashwords Edition

This free e-book may be copied and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.

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To Father and Mother,

in loving memory.

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# Summary

Foreword | More and About | Table of OSM Terms | Glossary | Colophon

PART I - COMMON GROUNDS

1 - On life as it is; 2 - Events and views; 3 – Abstraction unlimited; 4 - The agreement escape; 5 - The problem with relativism; 6 - The tech factor; 7 – A better understanding; 8 - Parmenides' truth; 9 - Reason's predicament; 10 - What to search for; 11 - Logic and prologic; 12 - Acts and facts; 13 - The premise [that]; 14 - On past and future; 15 - The presentarian; 16 - Origin vs. originarian; 17 - A guess from within; 18 - To take as given vs. to weigh up; 19 - On meaning & sense; 20 - The & concept.

PART II - BEING TO THE WORLD

21 - A scent in the breeze; 22 - Fichte's brave stance; 23 - Arise, decide, relate; 24 - The A|D|R identity; 25 - Can the A|D|R identity be verified? 26 - Necessary and sufficient; 27 - The all-including trait; 28 - Irreducibility; 29 - Inherent liberty; 30 - The all-engendering trait; 31 - Transducibility; 32 - Kafka's Mutter problem; 33 - Intra- & inter-act nexuses; 34 - Local paradigms; 35 - The quest for the basic paradigm; 36 - The O|S|M pre-paradigm; 37 - A thorny wisdom; 38 - Worth of a wallet; 39 - SS-Hauptsturmführer's Weltanschauung; 40 - Hegel's owl and mine.

PART III - PROETHICS

41 - Any uses for the O|S|M pre-paradigm? 42 - After philosophy; 43 - The fourth seed; 44 - Human ethos; 45 - Proethics

# Foreword

We (the Humans) have never been so free to learn, move, improve, elect, connect, as we are now, a few years into the 21st century: a rich garland of options at hand, forever expanding. There's much to rejoice, and it seems reasonable to expect more over the decades to come. Yet, this astonishing bounty of opportunities looks like the casual effect of technological advancements more than as the outcome of constructive care, mutual sympathy, and beneficial understanding between nations and groups. An abundance of know-how meets ancient walls of obduracy and enmity. No matter how generous our efforts to foster mutual comprehension – mainly through a mass of codes, controls, and bulky institutions – contrasts prevail almost effortlessly. Attempts toward a radical comprehension of our native liberties produce different views of passing appeal. Contemporary philosophy, with all its pragmatism and relativism, provides no common platform of judgment.

Down the centuries, philosophies typically set off from principles pleasing some local or personal way of thinking; they expanded on what supposedly ensued from the chosen basics. In the process, they rejected or revised other doctrines. At some point, no philosophy could start without a robust pars destruens. Different viewpoints were competing against one another for truth. Western philosophy's ultimate worth rested on its power of conception, which seemed strong enough to handle a few decisive elements of discernment and their underlying conditions. Yet, however brilliant and thought-provoking, its output was seldom free of biased inducements, self-absorbed concerns, and misty ideals. Under the name of truth, thinkers pursued whatever granted the pleasure of persuasion.

Homegrown reason is ineffective against its own beliefs. Dogmatism in its various forms provides people with what they covet, but it easily turns to cultural bigotry. Science and technology control limited fields of knowledge and use preordained meanings for their constructs. They drop their notions and products from an artificial sky, knowing very little of human life as a whole. Sectorial knowledge, even in the refined form of scientific results, is awfully partial. Its unwitting manipulation can be pernicious. Even stringent reason is often teased by its own dialectics.

After World War II, against the devastations of totalitarianisms, a new perspective took hold in various forms. Let's call it 'judicious relativism'. The judicious relativist concedes that, while difference of judgment is inescapable, it isn't a calamity. It can be of great benefit to humankind, as long as people: - a. openly communicate and try to understand one other; - b. conform to sound, mutually utilitarian agreements; \- c. stick by them once reached; - d. value diversity; - e. revere a few universal values; - f. consider traditional systems of thought and faith as if they were candid narratives, if not old embarrassing sagas. Briefly, what is asked of the judicious relativist is very demanding, to say the least. In addition, such requirements stand on a very flimsy theoretical platform, as if people would gladly make do without a comprehensive worldview, or any view could do the job. In the meantime, scientists had discovered, ironically, that in their fields too, absolute truth was nowhere to be found. Ultimately, peer-reviewed provisional notions and a few operational paradigms – this is all a scientific community needs to allow refinement in knowledge and possibly shun dogmas.

Now, what can it be that deserves to be called a 'worldview'? A worldview is described as - 1. any local viewpoint proving its completeness and coherence in explaining whatever is the case in its own terms; - 2. an all-inclusive vision, comprehensive of each and every local viewpoint. According to rule 1, an opinion, no matter how biased, ends up looking like an all-round theory if its supporters judge it to be so. Rule 2 adds what a local vision must meet in order to become a persuasive universal worldview. The latter entails the former, but it doesn't immediately follow from it, since beliefs are self-affirmative by implication. Any vision, however bizarre to the ears of people who aren't endorsing it, can stand on the first condition alone, appear to its followers insightful and compelling, and be revered as the ultimate truth. Nowadays, trolls use the Internet to start fake news as if they were launching some sardonic meta-truth.

On the first rule alone, all transient, locally-endorsed worldviews wind up as necessary and universal. Thus, the crucial recommendation for a worldwide view to be true to its task is the second one: a universal worldview should prove its completeness and attest its coherence in front of all self-styled worldviews, and ultimately encompass them all. In a multicultural world, it's easy to find a ready-made vision pleasing our interests and fascinations. If we cannot find an apt one, we're free to start a new vision and feel satisfied with it. Anyway, in order to fulfill the second condition above, what we should look for is not just an appealing conception, but a sensible broad depiction of what is required for anyone to form any view.

Historical philosophies were born in pre-global contexts. They had to be consistent with their native environment. Their universal reach was curbed by the universe they were born in. Together, they show in impressive detail what the human mind can make with the first of the above conditions, if the second one is more or less overlooked. But this old scheme, where a full system of thought is derived from some exclusive principle, seems behind the times, nowadays, and a petty service to our worldwide needs. A multicultural world wants a global worldview accounting for all local views. It should help to prevent any separate body (any nation, ideology, economic power, tech giant etc.) from forcing its standpoint on the global community. Globalism can be terribly sectarian if it doesn't know how to detect and test its own tenets. An all-inclusive, debatable mode of knowledge might lessen the risk of being stuck into some weird new form of tribalism. In order to go global and survive, people should learn to see beyond their beliefs and confront the foundations of relativity – an intellectual and practical paradox, not an easy task.

Here's where I put the 'prosophy' word into use, meaning a way of thinking that doesn't add one more engaging doctrine to the long list of human attempts on the road to a satisfying truth; instead, prosophy looks for a neutral frame outlining what makes every act and fact feasible, every thought thinkable. People nurture their different visions of what being is, or is about. Prosophy portrays a conceptual environment effectively appreciating all those different visions in what they share. It scans the universal condition of 'being to the world', which was there, for man and beast, long before the first philosophical paradigm was conceived. It endeavors to cover, in general terms, all individual and collective visions, except where a particular viewpoint hampers another vision from being understood as well.

This essay sums up the whys and the hows for going 'prosophical'. It comes in three sections: - i. On the postmodernist wave: some remarks about its plus sides and shortcomings; - ii. On the basics of life: the conditions affecting any being to the world and human-like beings in particular; - iii. On the foundation of multicultural ethics. Part ii is where prosophy's perspective is introduced. It focuses on one topic: the hidden premise embedded in each and every act. A whole lot of long-standing philosophical questions are involved, which this text doesn't examine, its purpose being different. Therefore, the book will seem poorly connected to the old background where its topics come from, as well as absurdly ambitious in scope. Furthermore, it introduces nonconforming concepts of origin, meaning, sense, time, world, being, logic, and ethics. Scholars will turn their nose up.

Yet again, this survey is all about the absolute norm: it digs up what basics we humans share as self-conscious beings. It doesn't talk in the name of the learned few as much as to anybody sharing the basic experience of being alive. The reader, any reader, will either find my suggestions good enough to that end – a most general depiction fitting everybody's experience, including hers – or she will reject them as inconclusive. The question will not disappear. It will linger unsolved as it has during so many centuries before present, waiting for a more effective sketch to be offered by somebody else. To be sure, this quest's results – on life's raw ingredients and their basic interactions – will seem awfully elusive to anyone keen on neat principles and tight deductions. Life as it is, the broadest of all fields of research, wants a fluid conception. Formal thinking has long thrived from ignoring this obligation: an educated neglect, so to speak, whose dubious rationale was the need to grant theories strength and even beauty.

Actually, our theme – all that is lived the way it is lived – seems to outwit what on earth anyone might devise to tame it. Any effort to overcome it is misleading. Life has to be appreciated in its original 'freedom of becoming'. Because anything at any given time can make a difference in anybody's life, it's better not to venture into a squared system of thought. Instead, what we're going to do here, reader and writer, is kind of scouting around a vast neighborhood we already know very well for our lot of experience. The survey seeks to sketch out a map roughly suitable to all residents.

On this most general of debates it's essential, at first, to signpost the essential: it's not a matter of what books have to say, but of how people seem to experience their own being to the world. Accordingly, I have renounced all those pluses (quotes, bibliography, etc.) that lend papers a scholarly look. My suggestion is that readers react and quote their experience, counter-imagine cases, and see if their data are such as to endorse or oppose what is argued here.

But again, why prosophy? Isn't philosophy the most fitting word for human drive toward truth? Sure it is, but its picture-perfect aptitude is part of the problem. Since its Pythagorean beginnings, the 'longing for wisdom' has reified (i.e., assumed as a matter of fact) the separate existence of an arduous wisdom, often thought of as godly, and of the urge for it, or transcendental eros, ascribed to the human soul or mind. Eros was supposed to conquer the beauty of Truth through the power of Logos or Revelation. Thus the search began with an implied announcement of its results.

When plans are to embrace all that is the case, hasty assumptions seem like a bad move. Recently, after ages of incompatible theories, postmodernists decided to pronounce philosophy dead, leaving the originarian issues unsolved. That was a bad move too. The quest for an elementary comprehension of human experience should never be dropped, particularly in our time, when there's no barrier left to shield cultures from clashing against one another and tech gadgets to encroach on human life as if from a stolid, alien universe of binary digits and algorithms.

All particular fields of understanding are valuable, all cultures are significant, but humans need to muster an overall vision of what they share, not to beget a horde of conflicting dogmas. So the 'pro' element in 'prosophy' means 'instead [of bullying wisdom into what fancies us best]' and 'in favor of [an all-encompassing, unbiased conception]'. After philosophy, the impending task in times of breathtaking change, boundless opinion, and astonishing disorientation is to think up a fresh approach to what all humans embody as natural beings who are equipped with enough awareness to care for life on the whole, for its meaning and sense.

# Part I - Common Grounds

What prosophy departs from is, in one word, postmodernism, which in turn heads off from philosophy as we knew it, the common mood nowadays being one of ironic estrangement from the grand themes and schemes that were all the rage for twenty-five hundred years. Last century, confidence in Western culture's overall hold declined, due to a variety of failures. Among which, to name only a few, the brutality of imperialism at other cultures' expense, two catastrophic Europe-centered World Wars, the foolishness of totalitarianism, the liabilities of democracies, the manipulative power of technology, the ‎nuclear arms race, the dialectics of enlightenment, the crisis of the concept of method, the suspects raised on human cleanness of conscience by the likes of K. Marx, F. Nietzsche, S. Freud, followed by more suspects raised on these very authors' ideotics (see Glossary), not to mention a score of emblematic self-suspicious authors, Kafka- and Wittgenstein-style.

This great discontent was both good and bad news. By now, a handful of postmodernist notions (the likes of attitude, perspective, agreement, program, gesture, grammar, storyline, scenario, systemic game, cultural trade, conversational rule, educational irony, and of course all kind of personal no-matter-what liberties) bear much of the speculative burden. The good news is that it's impractical, if not altogether impossible, to launch a massive, compact ideology on such frail pillars of wisdom. But they don't offer much understanding. Loose opinions may bring about social disruption and limit freedom the way fierce theories often do. They have ratified all sort of deal, backed very strict viewpoints and even justified patent injustice. Thus the bad news is that, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have spared no overall vision against new dogmas. We're left with no common ground, while the 'we', which used to be very local, has expanded to cover everybody on earth for good.

The demise of philosophy by postmodernist critique has left a void in the deep that waits to be filled. At the same time, no all-encompassing comprehension can be found where philosophy lost itself, on an improbable path toward some consoling/controlling Big Answer. Pluralism is a huge conquest, no doubt about that. But can it survive on goodwill alone? And is it a proper pluralism the only one we know, categorically based on Western values? Isn't this biased pluralism another form of presumption, all the more vulnerable in face of new dogmatic attacks? Now that cultures are merging in one big pot an unbiased overall vision is crucial. How to build it out of everybody's 'being to the world' is prosophy's mission.

# 1 - On life as it is

What do all life forms share from birth to death? What is operational in each and every human act? What is always there, before and behind our every thought and utterance? These are preliminary, capital questions. We could ignore them and proceed toward a particular vision, but such a move might leave us deeply ignorant of what we're talking about. Let's see the answer to those questions as the overview that allows all inquiries to be made and all results to be reached.

Life is the widest and most varied subject one can possibly imagine – life as the result of whatever a living thing experiences, each organism in its own distinctively plentiful and defective way. A subject you don't treat as much as try to figure out, because the act of living is obviously unavailable except as it is – as it feels itself, moment after moment. The individual alone who enacts it can make out its inner, often precarious truth. Between the strictly personal, which is ineffable, and the most trivial routine, there's no absolute vantage point anywhere. Or countless self-licensed vantage points, if you like.

From our own history, here in Europe, we know that local visions and values can be heavily biased. In order to avoid prejudice as much as possible two ways are accessible: either falling back to one's immediate experience in its full variety, renouncing all intellectual filtering, or going for the misty edge of humankind's common horizon, the underlying, primary source of whatever people live. It seems an odd agenda, but our aim here – an outline of life as wide-angled as possible, fitting all experience – is far from eccentric. In this largest of all domains, where each and every experience uniquely matters, can we trust to ever understand our own hypotheses unless absolutely nothing of what is lived by no matter whom is left out of the picture? Any sketch lesser than an all-inclusive picture is inadequate.

What was commonly expected philosophies to provide, until not long ago, was a satisfying explanation of what we are as human beings, where we come from, how we should reason and judge, if there's an afterlife waiting for us, and so on. No doubt these questions are still very appealing, but people have already answered them in a great variety of mutually weird ways, each of them satisfying someone at a given time, none of them fine to anybody anytime anywhere. To the point that, now, even the hope of attaining such an elementary comprehension looks amateurish. Who's to judge the soundness of our primary judgment? After all – it's the usual argument – all judgment is primary. On the very essentials of life dissent is very common. Sweeping doctrines are mostly based on military power, political dominance, socio-economic might, entrenched tradition, fear of change, misuse of 'reason', or straight dogma. In a way, the dissent that multiplies opinions makes our first evidence.. Humankind's secret hides under its unending dissensions, which most intellectual elites rejected as trivial opinion.

But this means philosophers have missed their highest goal, which was to expose what fosters all that difference and comes first without exception. In point of fact, with postmodernism they have almost repented all the time spent in search of the originarian truth. Postmodernism is a glossy variety of skepticism. Prosophy's starting point is that the quest for truth was indeed biased, by dogmatists and skeptics alike, all the way from the dawn of philosophy. Still, its thought-provoking failure should motivate people to enhance their search, instead of cutting it short. Briefly, the focus should be on general (or elementary) biography, i.e. on a comprehensive view of the nuts and bolts of intelligent life and of human life specifically: an overall outlook that waits for a suitable way of thinking; a quest on what meta-view anyone might possibly adhere to, so as to comprehend every familiar or alien view, leaving all native sense intact.

# 2 - Events and views

On the two sides of comprehension: what each and every living act implies, against what one may think of it. The uniqueness of each event, the mass of angled views.

Understanding life – this end is so general that all routes must be just as good to reach it. In case a single impasse bars access to where all other roads seem to lead, then the answer falls short of its target. Let's tempt to figure out this most general search, of which there's one of a kind, by way of a couple of mental scenarios. In Inferno's fourth canto Dante and Virgil visit the great spirits of pre-Christian ages in limbo. The two poets don't even think of cross-examine the sages about their wisdom, but in their place we'd like to: You can no more add or subtract anything to what you've held on Earth. Now, can you please just tell us what is it that all of your cogitations, diverse as they are, do actually share?

Or imagine yourself as a universal being, living since the dawn of life on Earth, who has lived every experience anyone, man or beast, has gone through – every perception feeling action reaction process opinion dialogue memory story dream etc. When you're ready, try to figure out what your elementary understanding of life would possibly be. Also, suppose you're going to meet for the first time a neighbor, another universal being on a trip from an alien world. What basic knowledge the two of you do share for sure that can be the starting point toward understanding one other?

And here's another path to the same comprehensive end: dead opposite to the universal being let's imagine a singular one, such an ephemeral creature as to be granted just a one-event life, but endowed with an infinite intelligence to understand it. This creature will spend its single act to determine what life is all about. What's the answer going to be like? Even as we don't know how many modes of life the universe hosts, the answer we're about to single out must apply to all possible living beings and life forms. We need to find out what a singular and a universal being, together with all other beings in between, have in common.

Actually, any event must do to our purpose, precisely because we are looking for nothing in particular. Like when a child is learning to count, it doesn't really matter what she's counting, whether beans or Barbies. This freedom of choice is extremely expedient since the catalogue of events is endless. Suppose a young lady, Joan, a fashion designer, has baked an apple pie for her teammates. Some of them have just a bite, some ask for an encore. A few, amongst them Bob, judge Joan's pie very good, others seem unimpressed; Ted has an encore out of hunger, but he doesn't love apple pies so much, as he tells in an aside to Bob; Joan's best friend Jean, a slim girl, eats just a crumb but reckons it terrific out of sheer kindness – and so on with the other guests. In short, a vast array of events lay hidden in what might look, from a distance, as just one fact, the serving of a homemade pie. This abysmal multiplicity disappears behind most so-called facts, including meta-acts (musings, feelings, narratives, etc.). Life's show must go on, new 'facts' rush in.

Any set of acts may be lived as a single fact, or as a multiplicity of cases, or by grouping features and traits into something else to one's liking. A casual observer will easily wrap up the various instances in a single sentence and be satisfied with it; a team of social psychologists would gladly spend a seminar on the different approaches of Joan's colleagues to her pie. Accuracy suits the description's purpose, no more and no less. In point of fact, if nobody objects, then the description is accurate; its grade of vagueness is de facto deemed irrelevant. On the other hand, each of the events above mentioned is an only-one-of-its-kind. Jean's sympathetic appraisal of Joan's pie has no share in Ted's off-hand remark. Anyway, as we're going to see, even if Joan's pie had been eagerly eaten and judged delicious by all guests, the single acts would host an assortment of disparities.

Each act is ultimately unique and irretrievable in its fullness, being part of a different string of events, or evenience, unfathomable segments of somebody's life. Yet, all acts share whatever is basic in life. But what is it? In order to answer correctly, we should find out what is unquestionably pervasive. But how can a particular being trim down its experience to the 'essential', that is to what is absolutely ubiquitous? Life allows for a very limited number of experiences per single being. So much so that, as individuals and groups, we feel pressed to reach for something more compact, an answering solution, a defining construct, an abstract scheme.

# 3 – Abstraction unlimited

An abstraction is a cluster of aspects derived from experience, facets of so-called things or facts. For an abstraction to form, a selection must occur. Abstractions are but masked agreements on what to select. Together they put up locally acceptable answers to all sort of questions.

Let's say a word on what is normally thought of as the brick and mortar of all understanding, the concept. Mental constructs are of course both unavoidable and preciously valuable. We do not have to count all the beans in a bag to call it a bagful, nor to check all the bags to call it a truckload. However, all mental constructs are – ultimately – facets of acts, even as we are in the habit of thinking of them as entities, qualities, forms, etc. For instance, each so-called notion a math teacher tries to instill in her pupils is but a knot in their net of eveniences. The opposite, an event being part of an abstraction, will never occur, except of course as a mention in a different construct, assembled and available only in someone's evenience.

What is perceived as meta-something must be lived too. There's no separate meta-fact anywhere to be met in this world, only additional acts. For single concepts and entire cultures to survive it's obviously crucial to count on people living and enlivening them. Mental constructs are just tools for life's millwork. They will possibly help us reach our goals. The outcome depends on what we use those constructs for. Should we be duped into using a pure abstraction in a wrong context, the result might be a very wicked one. Questionable uses of constructs like faith, nation, heritage, reason, freedom, progress, etc. are all too common. Abstractions become whatever our mental operations and actual deeds make of them. Thoughts are the offspring of life's contingencies. This is true also of an utterly logical concept as A ≡ A (the relative identity principle, which says that everything is one and the same with itself). Most people consider it a truism of little use; others think of it as the universal and necessary incipit of all reckoning. Both opinions are locally right as far as they function as certainties in someone's evenience.

There's a way to make good use of our concepts: an articulate, careful, open, and joint management of what we mean. To this end we need to choose our authorities and how far they deserve our trust. But it's all too easy to observe that, at any given time in history, there's been a bunch of widely respected authorities who have built and taught theories, not to mention practices, we now think of as absurd, ignorant, chimerical, etc. Nothing, apart from obtuse self-delusion, allows us to assume that our time is going to be an exception. Ironically, we're left – after a remarkably valuable effort to show the opposite even the most positive epistemologists tend to agree – with just one clear-cut way out: our constructs are true only as far as we agree them to be so. Knowledge is ultimately founded on well-argued, considerate agreements.

When a mental construct – even very matter-of-fact concepts such as 'speed' or 'food' – is put into use in someone's experience, it enters a complex, multipart process. It may become anything else, maybe by way of a personal recollection or a rare figure of speech. This process, its elementary terms, is what general biography tries to inspect. There's no doubt that a construct can be used as it is (i.e. conventionally) in an act of life. Also, some ideas look so forceful that people tend to act in blind accordance, rather than suitably use them in order to reach a deserving goal. The basic fact, however, is that every ingredient – no matter where it comes from or how it has formed – falls into life's oven, where it bakes into a new event. Previous meanings will give way to a new sense.

We'll come back to the meaning-sense bond later. For now, let's add that all mental constructs are linked to the past, where they have been put up, facet by facet, but they can only be effective at present. To Joan the concept of 'party' was the result of what has been collected by her around such a topic during her lifetime before tonight's party; but from now on, what she'll think a 'party' to be will account for the sense she's going to add tonight.

The Socratic tì esti, or 'what is it', was supposed to hang around for us to grasp as a compact rational wholeness; our tì esti here, the lived one, is just the opposite, the more or less anomalous result of life's eventfulness. Thus, in our inquiry on the basic elements of human biography, we have to account for the multifarious presence of abstraction in our lives, without relying on time-honored words like form, idea, essence, substance, logos, etc. Briefly, we should de-idealize and re-conceptualize our search.

# 4 - The agreement escape

Postmodern philosophical hopes are often based on the concept of contract, which guarantees that people give their informed assent to specific constructs or conjectures. Shared beliefs take the place of dogmatic assumptions of old. Unfortunately, contracts cannot help against error, partisanship, or small-mindedness. Indeed, it's easier to put them together around prejudice.

If the best we can say about our constructs in postmodern contexts is that they are brought about by reasonable agreements, let's look further into the limits of this perspective. By definition, agreements, once they have been reached, tend to appear rather satisfying to the agreeing parties. They are often handled as final. Afterthoughts are often dismissed as disruptive of the newfound order. A rooted convention looks factual; it obliquely enforces the agreement's rationale. A convention makes whatever it touches true, at least as far as the agreement goes. In fact, the only certainty should concern the deal having been attained, but people readily assume the agreed-upon notion to stand firmly on what those 'in the know' have assessed. By the way, counterculture does the same contrariwise: whatever those in power assess is tainted, wicked, and harmful.

Beliefs aren't but agreements of people between themselves. Agreements reify whatever they touch. However, for hypostases to become realities of someone's life their three-fold source must disappear. To be real, each one in their own realm, things, facts, ideas, etc. must appear as native, standalone, independent of the mind that comes to see them. A fact is an autoctisis ignorant of its foundation. From the inside, autoctises are difficult, almost impossible to detect as concoctions, until something surfaces that compels to break the agreement.

Agreements are everywhere; we have built our inner life, as well as our cultures and societies, on myriads of macro- and micro-agreements. They help us manage not only true vs. false assessments but fuzzy situations too. They are immensely useful, we cannot do without because as a culture expands, its contractual needs ramp up. However, as we look further into a lot of them, doubts raise on what exactly has been consented and to what extent. In the best of cases – to an open mind, in a free cultural environment – most local convictions come across as sensible conventions. These are supposed to be more or less strict, depending on a patchy set of circumstances that take account of the individuals concerned, of where and when they're doing what and to what purpose. All the same, some enforcement is implicit in the concept, even when the agreement has not been made into a law. Customs can be appallingly forceful. They are liable to be judged reasonable against all odds. As civil history thoroughly exemplifies, people consent to all sorts of perceived truths. Conventions are known to beget truths so positive that dissidents are put to death.

Concepts too are based on agreements. In the end, a conceptual agreement is but a shared creed with an eye on its practical outcome. Meanings, rules, and ultimately acts are supposed to be beneficial to the adhering parties. Now, opinion (doxa) is just what most ancient and modern philosophers hoped to escape. To that purpose, they searched all realms of experience and discourse for sound principles and theories, such that everyone sound of mind would wittingly adjust their local assumptions to some unquestionable truth. Unfortunately, the search for principles and crucial foundations came upon a great abundance of them. Wary of so many divergent views, thinkers tried to elaborate views of views. Of these too a considerable number showed up. Soon the contractual solution resurfaced as the best-available basis of all knowledge inter pares. It's the peer-review notion first espoused by Protagoras and Aristotle.

Thus, at the end of modernity we are thrown back to where Indian and Greek philosophers started their search or very nearby. However, the three thousand-year grand tour has brought home a few crucial mementos. First, doxa can only be fixed by dogma, which bolsters intransigence. So it's better to endorse relativism and govern it conscientiously. Then, there's the peer-review notion itself, the primary importance of documented opinion and well-researched assessments. To cap it all, there's the relativist frame, by which both in research and daily life we arrange our knowledge around core patterns or scenarios that are provisionally 'true' as long as they stay interesting, serviceable, and equitable to all parties.

# 5 - The problem with relativism

Is relativism a minor evil in face of dogmatism? It probably is, but the weakness of its conceptual frame is evident. Local agreements, pragmatic solutions, and hopeful goodwill are all a relativist can resort to in the best of worlds.

With contemporary relativism, both the embattled idealist and the sterile skeptic surrender to the cooperative investigator, the judicious pragmatist. It is probably the most momentous of all pacts: we stipulate that we do not want stout principles to guide us, nor do we ask for supreme, unconditional truths. We just look for insightful clues, neat illustrations, handy descriptions, and so on. The aim is to offer functional solutions to communal needs. Big truths are no more necessary than they're attainable.

This state-of-the-art philosopher looks very much as the common image of an alert person, experienced and knowledgeable, the ordinary prudent guy. The long quest for principles has backtracked to the starting line without much to report. Philosophy has disposed of itself, as if the search for truth could have been cut short long ago, instead of absorbing a great deal of speculative energies for ages. This kind of dismissal, rather popular today, seems of little help, though. Perspectivism is not a novelty, it goes back to the ancient sophists. It is prone to develop into a self-serving absolutism, whereby the search for an overall truth is deemed an idiocy. But is it? It may be that the truth about our being to the world is something so difficult to conceive that we still have to find the right path to it.

Nevertheless, the agreement answer to the truth question is what we're facing presently. As a general explanation and guidance, relativism is a prudent notion, no doubt about that, but the question is, What is going to be relative to whom? So numerous, different, and trickily intricate are the contexts we confront every day, that the very concept of relativity is doubtful. To make first-level relativities meet, we look for some form of circumstantial absolutism. Basically, we are – we have to be, if only to have anything done our way – random absolutists. In most events, scores of relativities crowd in. What we usually do is trying to sort out, case by case, an acceptable absolute. So it seems correct to say that our best understanding of 'truth' is both absolutely relational and relatively absolute. Still, from this to infer that there's no underlying pattern to be known or envisaged is more than gratuitous. It seems serviceable to an exceedingly committed idea of non-commitment.

The agreement solution, easygoing as it is, makes everything go as long as people agree with themselves. As a way out of intellectual conflict it is a self-contained and self-expedient one. For instance, Western individualistic democracies illustrate the best-available political implementations of the agreement solution... as far as we're talking to someone who thinks likewise. Maybe four out of seven billion human beings now living on earth do not seem close to agree. Also, some individuals firmly agree between them that threatening and killing at random to force-feed their religious standards is a good idea. Occasionally, even relativism has been crusaded around by such means.

In short, the pragmatist's perspective offers some direction but poor overall conception. It does it on purpose. To people living in an age of clashing cultures a cautious 'who knows?' seems a better option than any self-assured truth. So, in front of the global community of diversities our judicious relativist faces the future with dim assertions such as 1. Everybody are right in their own way; 2. Freedom is our most precious and undisputable right, no matter what it entails; 3. Understanding one other is mainly a matter of goodwill; 4. With a bit of luck, technology will help people find their way, understand one another, sooner or later... All told, we share this condition of being human, but we do not agree on what it entails. We don't know what our species sits on. Maybe, technology is so blindly powerful on us because we still aren't sure about what is preciously human.

# 6 - The tech factor

Lacking an all-encompassing view and wide-ranging guidance, means and ends lie on top of each other. Practically, it's difficult to discern when technology is a resource at hand or an end in itself against all will.

There's a risky connection, it seems to me, between contemporary relativism, the supremacy of naïve freedom, and the surge of technology in our lives. The vulgar pragmatist thinks that tech will somehow guide us to a kind of participated, comprehensive knowledge. This of course is but a candid hope. The pragmatist cannot really avoid that endorsement because a. Advancement in our time is mainly measured in terms of technical performance; b. Technology looks trans-ethical, value-blind; c. Relativism is the most suitable belief for a tech-driven, value-blind society kept together by a hazy scheme of agreements.

Ancient communities did not want so much of unchecked 'progress' as of understanding real-life situations. It was a very sensible approach, since understanding, deep and wide, provides the only way to access true freedom of choice. Current technology makes it misleadingly easy to avoid the complexity of personal and social comprehension. For instance, the political use of Web 2.0 apps is sometimes seen nowadays as a miraculous solution to democracy's ineffectiveness, rather than as a thorny opportunity, a new weapon in the hands of buccaneers. Shrewd leaders exploit the resourcefulness of the tool in order to escort citizens. The tool of course complies, since it is built to obey. Compliancy is its built-in major feature.

Even the simplest tool can be instrumental to a variety of uses. High-tech instruments, such as the Web, are instrumental to literally anything. As it is, technology leaves humankind with its major problem – how to exercise its in-born freedom – amazingly magnified. Again, a thoughtful relativism in a frame of broad, communal agreements is possibly our best option. Sadly, the chosen solution is often one of partisan agreements in a frame of wild relativism. There's a cause for this odd inversion. Even the broadest agreements we know of are partial to history, ideology, ethnicity, religion, custom, etc. They come flawed by the lack of what Greek philosophers were famously looking for, universality. Other than the usual humanistic rhetoric, we find little to say, from a universal viewpoint, to someone deeply entrenched in their own history, tradition, or frame of mind – particularly if we are talking to and for ourselves. There seems to be no way out of discretional relativism. We have even grown a learned snigger whenever we're asked to suggest anything to such an end.

# 7 – A better understanding

Compelling 'truths' may be hazardous to people, history teaches us so. But are we sure that renouncing truth in favor of its Ersatzen (contract, custom, structure, science, tech, perspective, etc.) isn't going to be more perilous?

That takes us back to our initial issue – the groundwork for elementary biography – with a somewhat clearer view of the task. Here's what we'll have to fit together:

a) We share life with every living being and the human kind of life with the rest of humankind. Sure enough, some trait must be necessary and universal. What is it that we all are subject to?

b) As an individual, each of us feels unique, looks special, and exercises diversity in thought and deed. How come we are able to inherit knowledge and govern our lives? What is the limit to our supposed free will? Why in most matters we feel both constrained and free?

c) We understand one other to the point that we can agree on no matter what and make it 'true' at will. Nonetheless, all agreements are based on some abridgment of experience, which is usually manifold and ambiguous, in favor of a particular outlook. Actually, we can as easily misunderstand one other and make a big difference of no matter what.

d) We must appreciate the source and extent of our relative views, if we have to live by them. We are called to take charge of our beliefs. The obvious fact that philosophy, as we knew it, didn't effectively answer our questions does not excuse us into thinking that everything goes.

e) Self-absorbed ideas and ideals have been common in the past. Nowadays, since we feel more enlightened than ever, it's easy for us to think that we have mostly dispelled self-righteousness at long last. This way we're flattering ourselves as our forefathers did, possibly more. For instance, it is sometimes taken for granted that in the near future the pool of neurosciences, in association with A.I. and all sort of scanners, will fully 'explain' the human mind. So, people are now likely to think, Why bother with ontology or epistemology? Or general biography, of all things?

f) Currently, the story goes that philosophy is dead. If its death means that humans are left free to agree on whatever they like and to make a fuss of whatever they do not welcome, then it died beyond doubt. Agreements are precious, but they should not supplant the effort toward some basic understanding of our common condition. The good-will principle is not good enough to behold the intricate tapestry of our life.

# 8 - Parmenides' truth

Western philosophy has thrived in the shadow of Parmenides' stone-cut idea of truth. Building on logos or beating it over paradox - these were the only available options. But maybe the form of truth is different from what it was supposed to be.

Old Socrates asked his fellow citizens to take the helm of their conduct through a better understanding of what they were as human beings. Sure, Socrates' suggestion is still a good idea; but how is human-ness to be properly figured out? Maybe philosophy searched a lot in the wrong direction. Some basic answers were avoided because they are indeed, as we're going to see, disappointing.

Anybody looking for a soothing solution is easily driven away from what seems unsatisfying and not a bit relieving. Conversely, whatever brings in consolation is likely to suit an emotional intelligence. Socrates' theoretical legacy has been accused by Nietzsche and others of intellectualism. On the contrary, I believe that its fundamental fault was, as Nietzsche's own primal error, emotionalism. With Greek philosophy, all down the line from Heraclitus to Plotinus and Boethius, reason has first and foremost been an instrument of solace against life's limitations. Ironically, only after Christian eschatology took care of those comforting duties, philosophers grew gradually free to think reason differently. No doubt we may use our reasoning powers to what purpose we like best, but it's far from clear what it is that guards reason from the choking embrace of our deep needs and wishes.

As Kant has decisively pointed out, human reason needs critique. Reason must choose reason as the best available way out of the impasse of being alone in the universe of understanding. Before and after Kant, the critical principle has backed some of the best intellectual efforts – in logic, math, method, physics etc. However, intrigued by so much knowledge in so many fields, it's all too easy for us to misjudge. What we mean by 'truth' can be heavily misconceived due to what we fancy a truth to be like. In a society where mutual concern comes first, truth tends to be found in dialogue; where conflict prevails, truth is typically unyielding, molded as a surrogate weapon.

In Socrates' time, the main war of thoughts was between Sophists' perspectivism, with its concept of truth as persuasion, and the Eleatics' rationalistic stance. Their founder, Parmenides, was attracted by the prospect of attaining the primeval source of all phenomena and opinions through the uncompromising power of logos. To such an end, he drastically removed the copulative ("This is white") and predicative ("There he was") functions from different instances of the verb 'to be'. This way he construed an empty 'to be' or 'being', which he meant to be the Being, the ineffable whole we were all born into. Such a daring maneuver launched the quest for rational (as opposed to reasonable) absolute.

The fascination with the concept of being and the Being idea has proved a long-lived one. Only, Parmenides was not able to tell very much about his find, except by denying what it was not (the Being couldn't be defined except as un-something: un-limited, in-finite etc.). The moment he said that it was like a perfect sphere, he was rightly accused of inconsistency. In fact, whatever one tries to say positively about such a whole, or Whole, turns out to be a diminution. The first question should have been: Why this concept tricks the mind's powers? But the fascination was too strong to die. Plato's undertaking was to sacrifice Parmenides in order to save his Being's perfection, though displaced from Earth. Plato's favored formula was "to save the phenomena", but his real endeavor was to safeguard the Idea. It seemed, in fact, a grand idea: to find at last the unique and unifying source of all becoming, logical and ontological, something up to the task of explaining all sort of multiplicity and – as Saint Augustine put it later – to quieten the anxiety of human heart.

This being roughly the picture, it is obvious why truth came to be perceived as substantial instead, e.g., as figurative or contractual. Likewise, the label 'true' stuck to anything infused, in the eye of the beholder, with the look of substance. The hypostasis of some ideal truth became inevitable as a result of the escalation of the concept of being. The available options were shortlisted to two: finding out how to emphasize the concept as far as possible, in order to cover its new universal meaning (this was Plato's course); or forsaking the mission altogether as an impossible one, the way the Cynics did. No redesigning of the original goal was anymore available. Thus, the overconfident voyage of reason in search of the ultimate explanation drifted into the modes of religion.

# 9 - Reason's predicament

Human mind is endowed with a phenomenal power which is also a self-deceptive catch. Understanding reason's defenselessness against self-approval is paramount. The autoctic trick should be explained in grade 1.

Within its limits, human mind masters all topics. However, to what extent are those limits given, why is trespassing them unbefitting, who sets them and to what purpose, these are questions beyond reason's critical powers, because anybody can hit upon a different answer. Even the reason to reason methodically – instead of randomly learn from mistakes or hope for a serendipitous way out – is ultimately inaccessible, as argued by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method (1975).

Reason can always find, in an abstract world of its own make, a proper way to operate on a favored ideal whole. Roughly the same can be said of all artistry and technique, by the way. In J. S. Bach's times, to perfect your concept of music you wanted a well-tempered clavier. In neoclassical architecture, a colonnade above a momentous staircase has been a must since Palladio's Rotonda all the way down to Nashville's Parthenon. The power of the rule is more in the ruling itself than in what it rules about. Strict form lets art flourish, but life outflourishes all forms.

Reason is part of the given lot. In trying to understand the variety of human experience as a whole, reason finds itself trapped inside that same whole. There's no way out, no outer space where to hover from and see what happens, much less an Archimedean lever. Reason's efforts get lost among countless different expressions of life's basics. This should not excuse our yielding to naïve beliefs, though. What we have to achieve is an all-encompassing conception through which our ways of understanding are themselves comprised.

Plato was well aware of what is at stake here. In a way, his scrutiny of this crucial issue was more clear-sighted than Kant's and Hegel's. For, while all three of them looked for reason-centered principles, Plato clearly acknowledged the pressure of craving, the erotic factor. In the dialogue Symposium, he famously portrayed Eros as the offspring of Want and Resource. In order to act, people want to want; but motioning toward any object of love is sort of being driven by the same. What comes first? Action or passion, reaching or being attained, loving or being seduced? One never knows.

Idealism was Plato's solution: in his view, we were supposed to re-discover – first through bodily perceptions, then by way of intellectual vision – the world of perfection we had lapsed from. The predicament became the remedy. The philosopher flew to a world of his choice for the very cause that had made him launch his search. This world of ours looks like a jumbled mass of sundry, incoherent experiences. To harmonize this confusing puzzle what is perceived as requisite becomes essential. Such a grand autoctisis, however, estranged the mind from the world it was made for.

Now, why revisit such well-known notions? Because Western philosophy, with very few exceptions, is more or less the story of these bold solutions, each of them soothing the local Zeitgeist in its own way. To a cool eye, though, self-catering contemplation looks more like fictional erotica. To gather a truly all-encompassing view of our vital experiences, our desires and partialities should be given up entirely. We have to set up our search so that, as it were, we were not looking for anything in particular. Let's follow this thread, thin as it is, which leads us into the labyrinth.

# 10 - What to search for

General biography leaves all particular learning to science. Specific areas are best explored by the relevant sciences. Human experience is not specific, though; the all-inclusive whole we live in is not a field of knowledge.

General biography's purpose is a lackluster one: to start the most un-assuming, un-resolving, un-pleasing philosophy ever. A cool task, if you like, but an edgy one too, for how can anyone be sure of resisting solutionism, its surreptitious pressures and pleasures? And then, why should anyone avoid useful, satisfactory explanations in most fields?

Luckily, there's a straightforward way out of solutionism, namely to distinguish the explaining action in all branches of knowledge from the general-biographic depiction of evenience. Finite explanations are best provided by the relevant sciences. We already know why. They are supposed to stand on reasonable agreements between the most knowledgeable people around. Such explanations are taken to be the best ones available in a given cultural space and time. On the experience of living, though, everybody is knowledgeable. Who knows more, who less about joy, love, pain, hunger, deception, commitment? Does the Nobel-prize winner make out more on this matter than the young refugee from a war-torn country? Like a Leibniz's monad, each individual truly reflects the whole of life in its own way. A sound comprehension of each and every deed may result from the most including attitude. It cannot be granted by science alone, for a science entails exclusion, or ruling out.

We'll come back to this key distinction later. Presently, let's gather whatever is said to be, in the broadest terms, an item of experience. A general frame for any experiential incident should include, to begin with, what humans judge necessary, inevitable, deep-rooted in their constitution. Some needs appear ingrained in the physiologic depths of our lives, e.g. to perceive react breathe move drink eat mate sleep handle etc. Other basics look more affected by native cultures, like loving playing worshiping celebrating. Whatever the case, it is of overwhelming importance, for our survey to be effective, that we do not decide what is or is not necessary from our particular viewpoint. Under the label 'necessary' we must allow for whatever has been and will be lived as such by whomever. Moreover, since we share the goods of life with other animals, elementary biography should not forget their partaking in life, their own basic experience of living.

Next, we'll have to make room for what humans think un-necessary or free to be willed. Here again, we do not have to argue about 'ontic freedom', whether we enjoy free will as God's creatures or are fully necessitated as an earthly form of life (or the other way around). These debates, as we've seen above (Chapter 4), are only workable under the agreement provision. This means that, to pursue a specific query and find the best answer, we have to pre-agree on what 'best' means (soundest? most popular? most practical? most ethical?). Subsequently, we'd be asked to rule out all opinions that disagree with the chosen answer. In short, to discuss any particular topic, we'd have to do exactly what we must avoid in order to allow for all live experiences to show up in our virtual inventory.

Even abstract constructs are items of experience. Hypotheses and statements, dominant theories and more or less educated guesses, together with the words, works, gestures, and symbols conveying them... every past and present mental product will get its entry in our virtual listing. We're not even required to be familiar with them, interpret their content, find faults, etc. The hermeneutic problem does not concern us in the least, at this early stage, because interpretation, even if it's conceived as a widening of horizons, tends all the same to select what is meant against what is irrelevant, while we have to list our items despite all distinction and selection.

Since we are going to include all sort of more or less conscious doings, let's speak in general of deeds or acts: acts of thought, speech, manner, reason, imagination; acts of behaving, handling, neglecting, and so on. We do not have to care about them being accurate or mistaken, matching or at odds, plain or inexplicable. The bottom line is that we drop all discrimination and save the phenomenon of living, exposing its core, the source for all evenience, buried in each and every deed.

# 11 - Logic and prologic

All sort of computation needs some operational logic to function. Life's deeds aren't merely computational. Logic doesn't cover the conflicts of evenience. An ontological divide cuts between logic and life.

There's much more to include: what we deem casual, for instance, or effectual, or when we assume to convey meanings. But before going on, let's share some doubts and try to answer them. A problem arises with the 'inclusion' concept, which is the very first step in our plan to find out what all acts have in common. In two words, is inclusion feasible? Most divergent acts are clearly compatible, even when they seem to overlap. Bob feels Jean attractive, Ted finds her a bit repulsive. However, when Bob and Ted argue about Jean's charms, they imply and share a great lot of assumptions: that they mean Jean as far as they know of her, as long as her mood is ok, as far as their skirmish about her is fair-minded, etc. Also, the two men share most of what they consider appealing (or appalling) in a woman, a colleague, a human being. Bob and Ted's friction about Jean rests on a great deal of unstated restrictions. Failing that, they could not even start talking about her.

Implicitness looks inclusive, but it is clearly a mode of exclusion. All acts involve much covert exclusion-inclusion play. When Jean avowed to be an avid Proust reader, did she own up by the same token of being an avid reader in general? Or of never being a sleepy Proust reader? And what about having 'avowed' it? Was it meant to attract Bob? What she did assert or deny could only be caught by herself in the act. In live deeds even math is hesitant. The act of making '2 + 2 = 4' involves the exclusion of an infinite number of results minus one. Nevertheless, it's hard to predict if making it 4 will look more to the point than 2 or 16 in a real-life situation. Two apples plus two knives make no foursome, just two peeled apples. If I need quarters, 2 + 2 dollar notes equals 16. Computational precincts are neatly marked; life often asks for imaginative short circuits. Also, it makes do with approximations and revels in blunders.

Acts are habitually perceived as meaningful, or declarative, by the onlooker, though to state what they declare entails a different act. Suppose an act of Bob's is correctly described as follows: "Bob states that 'either p or -p' is necessarily true". Does the fact that the agent states what he states (the principle of non-contradiction) partake of the act or not? Of course it does. No agent, no act. Or maybe it does not, since Bob's statement implies that logic skips ontology. What we know for sure is that his act will be true to itself, to its including and excluding assumptions. Exclusion is widely considered the primary assumption of math and logic, in such a way that, I'm afraid, even my calling 'either p or -p' an act may well seem an oddity to most readers. It does not look an act as much as a matter of fact.

Thus, in order to further inclusion are we compelled to exclude? I don't think we really have to. Formal coherence is nowhere to be found at the core of most acts. The analytical habit is responsible for picking out formal elements to play reason's game with them. For any logic to function there are some neat requirements to be met. Life is not obliged to meet such neatness. The logic of 'either p or -p' is nonrepresentational. It says the first and the second p to be the same one, assuming that p is distinctly defined so as not to be mixed up with any not p or dubious p. In life, though, perfect sameness is indiscernible, we'll see later why, and an amount of hesitation or ambiguity is always present either on the event's face or in its background. Actually, you have to forget what a specific p looks like in one's life to make it available for logic and formal operations.

An all-inclusive catalogue must allow for the presence of logic, illogic, and preterlogic factors in human acts. The exclusive elements have to be comprised as such; at the same time, it is vital to include what, from a stricter standpoint, they rule out as not compossible. A measure of preterlogic inclusion is what anyone sound of mind routinely accepts. That Bob finds Jean attractive does not entail that so she is, categorically; not even for Bob, for he admits to his part of partiality, at least as long as Ted does the same. The Bob-finds-Jean-attractive notion is understood by both men as an element of their current evenience. Elementary biography does not deny that, given such and such conditions, A ≡ A. At the same time it grants that, given different conditions, the event might develop as if A were different from A or as if 2 plus 2 equaled 2 or 16 instead of 4.

Prologic is the term we're going to use to signify this inclusive mix-up of relations. It includes all kind of local reasoning as well as the option of formal logic, but it also includes all that from an uninvolved viewpoint could be judged as alogic, paralogic, or illogic. An event is obviously true only to itself. The prologic concept reminds us that in most events we simply do not (and have good reason not to) care about strict logic. But prologic is more than just a reminder. I think of it as a field of research – on how the different elements which take part in the event get assembled and perform, both inside and outside the borders of logic. When Ted questions Bob about Jean ("How can you find her so attractive?"), the resulting event in Bob's life could be anything from an almost unconcerned shrug to a very eloquent rejoinder. In the latter case especially, many elements will possibly combine and turn out, so to speak, the essence of the event: that Ted's opinion on Jean is unfair; that Ted's question is unnervingly rhetorical; that it looks, in fact, rather spiteful; that the merits of Jean are undisputable; that those merits are indeed somewhat difficult to characterize; that the tone of Ted's voice in saying so had a weird shade of anger; that Ted's character seems poor on empathy; that maybe not, but Ted has a jealous way of resenting Bob's feelings for Jean...

Now, we all know from experience that most of the times such a manifold reaction can be effectively handled only thanks to our ability to bypass clear-cut logic, using it only as far as it seems helpful and viable. Roughly said, we bring about a kind of synthesis that employs, besides the well-known formal operators (and, inclusive or, exclusive or, if...then...else, etc.), a variety of prological links such as i. Yes and no, no but, maybe, most probably; ii. He's mistaken, but I understand what he means; iii. Ok, but it's not the case here; iv. It's too immaterial, you wouldn't even mention it; v. He did not even consider what is most to the point, etc.

Experience is mostly built from events put together through prological customizations. Logic plays its role, but we could as well be walking axioms if we weren't able to avoid the tautness of logic whenever we need flexibility and adjustment. No doubt, the setting up of 'prologic' as a discipline is going to be an uncanny task, even when one thinks of it as just illustrative, as opposed to explanatory. Still, the practice of prologic is so common that most of the times we wonder what is wrong with someone who proves inept at it.

As a field of research, prologic would assist idiography, the depiction of what is uniquely constructed, the human act. It's far from an easy task. Humans seek to look into events, but they can just live them. They try to inspect their acts as if from some outer perch, but in doing so they produce a different event, one that cuts across the inspected ones. It's a never-ending process. To break away from it an act must congeal into a fact.

# 12 - Acts and facts

An act is a very complex happening based on perceptions, reactions, intentions, volitions, expressions, and so on. Facts are supposed to be much more concrete and manageable. So why we don't forsake acts for facts?

General biography is interested in all sort of actuality, so as to envisage an all-inclusive picture of all that is the case. But is the act the originarian unit we're looking for? How about the fact instead? Bare facts like a gust of wind blowing off an umbrella, a wave rolling onto the shore, a lone ant on the table under the porch, a thermostat quietly switching on, the slow rusting of an old saw blade in the basement, a distant moon circling its planet... Many facts do not pertain to human biography, but they belong to our world. Facts just happen, so it seems, whether we take notice or not. They aren't usually called acts, unless they are ascribed to a superior Entity, but we need to consider them too, because they have an effect on our lives. Facts even look as more tangible than acts. If I look up for synonyms of 'actuality', I get 'real fact' 'actual fact'.

It's an old question. What is it that happens when nobody notices? A fact results from aspects of current or past events brought together by a perceptive organism. From the gentle sweep of the trees' shadows on the green, to the most calamitous earthquake an observer must be there to make anything happen. Without an observer, no-thing happens because anything can be said to be the case. It can be any-thing, so it is no-thing in particular – a gathering of anonymous forces, fluxes of energy, forms of all kind, myriads of potential perceptions, overlapping streams of undecided information.

It's easy to overlook how much has to be assumed in order to make out a fact. Let's consider two 'factual' extremes: the flagrant facts of Jean's life (the moment they are lived, the way they are lived) and a scientific notion, like the solar mass 'exactly' measured as 1,989E30 kg. At first glance, we tend to think of such facts – either experiential or experimental – as 'proven'. But is that so? A fact can be seen as rock-solid only if a. The observer avoids thinking about her part in conceiving the appearance of the so-called fact; b. A symbolic form of the fact is assumed to signify and meet what is meant.

All conceiving implies representation; likewise, the representational element implies a conceiving power. The so-called fact is a liability. Like Baron Munchhausen, a fact it's supposed to ponytail-haul its factuality out of the waters of any collection of events. The happening looks like a rock-solid fact because the onlooker does not think about the autoctic circle that produces facts, things, nouns etc. Once upon a time the Sun was a major god. Such a 'fact' was self-evident, thanks to the removal of the intentional aspects that were responsible for the emergence of it as a fact. They had to be removed for the fact not to look like an assertive act.

Facts being part of acts, a fact keeps changing as the stream of life does. As soon as we nourish doubts about a mental construct, its factual aspect collapses. In the end, a fact is what the range of experience of a living being allows it to be. The worst earthquake is perhaps no fact in the life of a grasshopper. 'Fact' means '[something] that has been done'. It came to English from Latin 'factum', past participle of 'făcĕre', to do. Facts should be viewed as traces of acts. To become what they are said to be they must enter one's life and be part of someone's evenience. No act, no fact.

The fact/act close connection is one of great consequence. Yet, it's easy to forget about it. Remember Dickens' Hard Times, the first line: 'Facts, facts, facts'. The teacher is so soaked in his positivist mindset that he misses the little girl's emotions entirely. With milder manners, we all favor treating acts as facts, facts as things ("An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things)" Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.01). Things are easily replaced by their images and names. Names, these shadows of shadows, become the skin of existence. Apparently, to handle the intricacy of their eveniences humans need to discount as much as they can.

# 13 - The premise [... that]

Facts surface from the net of events; likewise, no event stands alone. Besides being part of eveniences, all events come encased in a tacit premise. A full-grown consciousness should try to figure out what this most general premise implies.

No fact survives outside some course of action, even as we have to forget about the latter to firmly secure the former. Acts engender facts. This is evident with language, where words and forms must stay active to survive. As for a living being, activity for a word entails a web of associations. Usage makes the rule. Grammars employ terms like 'independent' and 'subordinate' to tell apart clauses in a complex sentence. However, the self-sufficiency of the so-called independent clauses, which looks unconditional inside a well-formed sentence, has only to do with the syntactic structure. Outside those structural borders, other sentences, contexts, assumptions, intentions, circumstances, and conditions loom. Let's represent this complex in a most general way with {ε}, where ε is any expression (sentence, gesture, sign, image, five-act play, thousand-page novel, etc.) within its world of reference { }.

Encased in its whole web of connections, our {ε} now seems as inclusive as it can be. Still, no matter how comprehensive it looks, it cannot stand alone. It comes subordinate to something else. It has to be produced. Like the goddess of wisdom, it pops out of someone's head. Ironically, the only self-contained {ε} would be an utterly undecidable entirety, embracing the whole lot of everything and, at the same time, meaning nothing at all, thus making no difference whatsoever. Briefly, our basic formula for whatever is expressed within its whole world of reference lacks an undefined premise. Complete with it, every {ε} looks sort of like this:

[... that] {ε}.

There's no {ε} to be found anywhere without its subordinating premise. No {ε} – however rich and erudite, or else naive and artless – comes out of nowhere. The [... that] element stands as a reminder of what frames {ε}, of what controls it unbeknownst. It underlines such questions as: What is absolutely basic for any {ε} to occur? What has to be concealed for an {ε} to appear self-contained?

Now, if all semantic acts are subordinate and all intentional acts come with some meaning attached, then all acts are likewise subordinate, unintentional ones being by definition subservient to some impulse. For instance, reaching her workplace Joan launches her standard "Hi, guys", i.e. "[Here I am saying as usual] {Hi, guys}". The square-bracketed part comes unnoticed, but something like that has to be there, whether Joan behaves perfunctorily or self-consciously. Meanwhile, Jean has just said "Morning, Bob" to her affable colleague, a shortened address which possibly implies a very large {ε} – a greeting, plus an acknowledgment of sort, some mutual understanding, a few surfacing memories, we'll never know. Jean herself would never think of listing all her implications. At any rate, when all the lived facets of her greeting were detailed, the resulting {ε} would still be lacking a vast array of unnoticed connections to the rest of Jean's life and of life in general. If Jean calls Bob "Bob" since ages, she won't even imagine of calling him "Robert" this morning. Nonetheless, the 'fact' of his first name's regular form being 'Robert' is buried somewhere in her experiential stock, the forgotten source for her calling him "Bob". Ultimately, each and every {ε} is accurately defined by what lies hidden in the premised [... that].

My implication here is that even so simple a feat as calling Bob "Bob" is much more than a linguistic act in J. L. Austin's sense; it's an event, part of one or several eveniences, portions of somebody's life and of life as it is. No matter how deeply lived, an event always hides an unnoticed, taken-for-granted premise, by way of which the event, so to say, is posited as not posited, i.e. as just lived. The [... that] {ε} formula applies to everything everywhere, from single gestures to whole lives, also to ideal wholes such as nation, history, mankind. Even the universe needs our meek subordinating premise to become something: with no sentient beings around, it could never surface from its abysmal anything. So, the big question goes about the most general universal premise, the one that introduces each and every {ε} no matter how inclusive it is. Elementary biography backtracks what lies hidden in the all-engendering premise, what to place in lieu of the dots.

# 14 - On past and future

Cultural and personal identities are built on past events, touching one's lifelong memories, local recollections, people's stories, handling skills, habits, etc. Also, on perspectives, hopes, and fears about the impending future. Self-consciousness entails projections back and forth in time and space. Thus, it's easy to forget that whatever we live is bound to be lived here and now.

Facts look more manageable than acts because they seem to escape the flow of time. Acts can only be lived on the spot; life's place in time is now. This inescapable truism may seem unbearable to a conscience free to go back and forth along different timelines, at least in its thoughts, but nobody can escape it: life is presentarian. To represent acts, facts and interactions, we distribute them along a timeline, even as time is the outcome of our representations. No depiction, no time; no time, no depiction. The powers of conception in a living being determine how much it is aware of the flow of experience and how structured its image of life is. The various concepts of time in a given culture (this moment, a moment ago, today, tomorrow, the future, the near past, the time of our life and so on) are effects of its ability to tell apart the representational intricacy of the here-and-now.

For most living beings – whose life reiterates just a few basic interactions between the organism and its environment – immediacy is the only time they are alert to, presumably. Humans can introduce as many figures of time as they want, and live by them. They happen to be fascinated by images of time they have never experienced. A lost Golden Age was a common topic in ancient mythologies; the appeal of eternity is strong in most religions; early Christians believed the secular world to be very near its end; a brilliant future of progress was the lure of Enlightenment; an all-absorbing, day-to-day present ravaged the French Republic in 1793, just when Gothic novels rewrote the Middle Ages. A century later, the Belle Époque felt of itself as an age of bliss. Of course, people who fancied these different 'times' couldn't help but live the present continuous of their life, like we do.

Time is awfully tempting to discuss. It has enticed philosophers from Heraclitus to Heidegger. Here, let's focus on what seems most relevant to general biography. First, to face the presentarian as the unescapable context of all acts and facts is a very demanding task, for it disappears as soon as it emerges, or so it seems. No wonder people prefer to break it down, resorting to concepts of time suited to a more orderly vision. The time generator has to be instrumental to the present management of our lives, which needs much recalling and overlooking, adjustable selecting and neglecting. In animal life it doesn't favor much diversion, not to interfere with the fullest appreciation of what is currently lived – the immediate smelling of food, mate, or menace. In humans it happens routinely that a singled-out image of time (one of a nostalgic past, for instance) leads re-present-ations away, back or forward, from the present course of evenience.

"Carpe diem" is not such an easy advice to follow. Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am" reads a famed essay by G. I. Gurdjieff. Yet, when I'm mowing the lawn, the moment I'm living by is afterwards, when the lawn will be mown end to end. The time people live by is often postponed, it's the time of completion and result. The ideological time of Bolshevism and Maoism was the future of mankind – to such an extent that it has wrecked tens of millions of lives unfortunate enough to live just their present life. In our time, a self-styled caliphate struggles to cancel what history has brought around since a remote prophetic past, even as the clock of consumer technology ticks the future imminent. The mobile phone has evolved into such a versatile device, that when I buy a new one I have to divine what its being in my hands will futurize in my life in a couple of weeks. Still, we all know very well that every hope and fear, each perception and hallucination cannot but happen presently. It's all part of the presentarian.

# 15 - The presentarian

Cultural models of time break away from the qualms of raw evenience. Also, they try to escape some unwelcome certainties like decay and death. The yearning for solid knowledge has often disturbed the appreciation of life's authentic time and space as presentarian. A flexible presentarian is the human framework for whatever is lived.

In Western philosophy two time models have been dominant: the line and the circle. Both go back to Plato and beyond. To him, the circling skies showed the sensible likeness of eternity, while the soul's storyline, with its fall from heavens and painstaking recovery of the lost perfection, was a narrative of human destiny. Both models involved ontological, psychological and moral traits that have steered the course of Western thought along the ages. But if we drop all academic hypostases and the attached poetry, that kind of time disappears. We are left with memory's contents, which can only survive through live re-present-ations.

The worst to think about the present is that it just slips by, a moment at a time, somewhat mindlessly. It's worth asking how come most ideologies tend to either step back or run forward of the present. First, the present is intrinsically on the move, unsettled. The current game is never over. Its sense-meaning mix isn't clearly discernible. Explanations of what is ongoing look as if cut away from life's very frame, still bleeding. The trick of assembling memories into 'facts' that fit our favorite visions, makes us believe that we sit on solid evidence. The same easy steps make the future seem a lot more manageable.

Secondly, a simplistic model of time lets people withstand the overwhelming profusion of life. Thinking by simple patterns and linear procedures lends experience a realistic look. Nonetheless, the presentarian, shifty and elusive as it comes, is the only four-dimensional non-fictional element we can really walk through. Even Bergson's celebrated durée lacked much of the latitude inherent to everybody's habitual presentarian: it was mainly a projection, on an ephemeral screen, of either previous or anticipated incidents. The advantages of a stripped-down model are difficult to resist: its tiny fragments of life, perceived as a film of tidy frames, admit a storyline, a notional edition, an uncluttered description, any kind of contented reduction or critical angle of attack.

But humans clearly need a more generous concept of what their 'present' is like, one that makes room for all images of time they happen to come across, while yielding to none. We have to build on this biographic evidence, that whatever we live we cannot help but living it here and now. Also, whatever we went through in the past or fancy about the future can only surface as an aspect of what we're living now. Life is always in the state of occurring; the present is its only location. Time can only be experienced and the time of experience is now.

The presentarian, in all its nuances, is what we have to fathom, when we're sounding the depths of life. But if life is presentarian, most things we're dealing with – words, concepts, symbols, tools, customs, etc. – come to us with their history attached, and we often act as if they were delivered to us block frozen. The persistence of things is a mental product of expediency, agreement, and habit. When we drive, a red light high in front of us at a crossroads means that we have to stop our car. It's a good idea to take its meaning absolutely for granted. Nonetheless, things survive only through their reappearance in one's presence of mind. Actual construals of what is going on are the only abode of time and of what keeps flowing in it. They are the dwelling of every fact and concept, view and vision, meaning and sense. All those things, facts, and thoughts are just what their actual presence in somebody's evenience lets them be.

# 16 - Origin vs. originarian

Through the idea of origin, in most cultures some myth of the past has encumbered the vision of the originarian, which the here and now of life exposes in each and every act.

Fundamental in most cultures is the concept of 'origin'. Searching for the primal origin and the Original Fact or Act has long been such a widespread trait – in myth, religion, philosophy, science – that we sometimes fail to notice how peculiar an endeavor it is. There's a number of heavy ontological prerequisites, plus their logical counterparts, to be met in order to set foot on the supposed original thing, namely: a. that the phenomenal world (what we perceive) is coherent with its ontic counterpart, which is assumed as existent on its own; b. that diversity is the outward display of an essential harmony, or the result of primeval conflict; c. that the multiplicity of experience obscures, under our own eyes, some governing principle; d. that this initial source of all things (Chaos, Cosmos, Fate, Fire, Nature, God, Logos, etc.) is basically inscrutable and/or ineffable; e. that the origin has to be, as a principle, both unbending and dependable, an absolute cause for the entire galaxy of effects.

Ironically, the thick layers of ancient and modern disagreement on these subjects have produced the appearance of some solid matter. So it's easy to forget how much agreement is required to devise an Origin, for all conceptions of it are themselves originated. Like everything else, they are products of the presentarian, which is the proper originarian. Therefore, what we're going to look for, within general biography, is no such a construed origin, but the driving forces behind the originarian-presentarian. We'll examine the dynamo of evenience, the key elements behind each and every act: what is always proactive in our experience, no matter what we're doing, when or where we're living, what we know or ignore, etc.

# 17 - A guess from within

Presence is our lot, the impelling consciousness at work. In order to understand the originarian, the presentarian should be examined in full. Presence being effective all the time, comprehension must be reached deep from within. There's no external vantage point from where to take a comprehensive look.

To be is to be present. We have to be present to nature's routines and upheavals, our own physical and mental selves, other people's selves; present to what we produce as words, devices, images, songs, symbols, hopes, fears. To sum up this concept of life as presence and of presence as interaction, I'm going to use the expression 'being to the world'. The comparable formula 'being in the world' (In-der-Welt-sein), introduced by Martin Heidegger, has a look-alike aspect but the use is very different. The German philosopher's concern was, in the end, a theological one: going back from the wrong paths of Western metaphysics to the misty origin of the ontological issue so as to behold a shadow of the ineffable Being and learn at last to live in awe of It. I hold as proper, on the contrary, that this locution - being to the world – should not be parted from its immediate meaning. It has to stay true to itself. It does not pertain to anything Else, because there's no 'else' where to go for illumination.

The being-to-the-world condition should be sought out starting from the concept's immediate implications. These allow for the countless expressions of human life. 'Being to the world' – as we're going to understand it here – assumes them all as matter of act. Let's say a word about this extremely unusual task that we're about pledging ourselves to. For, in this most comprehensive of all inquiries, we have nowhere to stand except on the very place we dig in. We have to learn what 'being to the world' means while we're actually being to the world. We have to concede, at the same time, that our usual being to the world is far from all-embracing. It's liable to all sorts of shortcomings and misapprehensions. Besides, there's no way to be a scientist on these matters or for any science to be decisive about it. This is a fascinating irony. In both inductive and deductive reasoning something is posited – empirical observations or formal principles, respectively. A method or routine is selected, by which the researcher's bias is bypassed. Brief, to start a science you sort the wheat from the chaff. But what is chaff and wheat in life? What should be ousted? Who's to set the sorting principle? Machines (not just supercomputers, also a pair of scissors) 'understand' everything within their 'worlds', because their worlds are one and the same with the range of their 'understanding'. They may be perfect, but there's a catch. Embedded in those mechanics or electronics a builder's worldview is always at work, an existential sprite which is responsible, since the beginning, for all that is noticed or ignored and for the kind of operations involved (remember the subordinating premise [... that]). We are the originarian entity behind our artifacts, but what is originarian with regard to us?

No general knowledge can be merely rational, much less a universal requirement of all that is the case, the keystone of our being to the world. Strict reason can only operate on 'something'. But who's to give us that 'something', where does it come from? It has to be a practical and a moral affair, as well; it should be sensible, prudent, considerate, and all-embracing. This awareness brings us back to the inclusion project, with a few additional cautions: a. no logical or ontological prejudice should interfere: fact and dream, truth and opinion, reason and folly, worth and weakness, etc. – every condition and circumstance should be comprised; b. no creed, no principle, no training, no method is better or worse than any other; c. no previously reached agreement, no matter how popular or knowledgeable, can be invoked in order to leave anything out of the hot cauldron of events; d. we'll have to guess at what burns under it from within. The all-embracing task must embrace itself too. The hunter is fowl.

# 18 - To take as given vs. to weigh up

The presentarian can only be local and finite. In a given circumstance, of all the accessible aspects only a few come into sight. In addition, some of these convey what really matters, the rest is taken for granted. Events focus on what has to be weighed up.

Now, as we need a handy example, let's consider the unstated 'contract' between reader and writer by which this essay comes partitioned in short chapters: a feature that a particular reader (let's call her Jill) has either taken as given or weighed up. Taken as given, possibly as an obvious option for a little book like this one, it went nearly unnoticed with Jill. Thus, no act in her life has been spent on it. With 'unnoticed' I do not imply that the feature was utterly ignored; it just went by thoroughly unremarkable in the stream of events associated with this reading. Maybe it has been instrumental of Jill's pondering about something else, but it has never surfaced on its own. Second option: the book's partition happens to catch the reader's eye. Maybe for a split second, she consults her relevant notions and scenarios in order to weigh up that trait. Because of that, an event comes about in Jill's life. How can we inspect it from a general-biographic perspective?

Here we'd better be cautious about what we imply, for nobody knows how to examine an act of life from a general-biographic viewpoint. How may we approach it without indulging in some local assumption that we aren't aware of? The problem with these questions is that they are kind of off-cultural. Everything cultural is local, but what we look for, the way all human acts are engendered, cannot be answered effectively from a partial standpoint. At the same time, we are never talking from nowhere. The risk of a biased judgment is indeed high. So I suggest to stay where we are and neatly tell apart, for the benefit of our quest, the taking as given from the weighing up. To this purpose it seems suitable to use 'meaning' and 'sense', respectively.

The Oxford Dictionaries' Online Source (OEDOS) lists five acceptations for 'sense' as a noun. Number 1 and 5 ("one of the faculties of sight, smell...", "direction of motion") do not apply to our search. Of the fourth one ("a way in which an expression or a situation can be interpreted; a meaning"), which is all but synonymous to 'meaning', let's retain "[the feeling that something] can be interpreted [in one way or another]." Number 2 and 3 tell closely what we're looking for: 2) "a feeling that something is the case"; 2.1) "a keen intuitive awareness of or sensitivity to the presence or importance of something"; 3) "a sane and realistic attitude to situations and problems"; 3.1) "a reasonable or comprehensible rationale". Here's an apt term for whatever Jill was weighing up: she was looking for sense (see OEDOS, s.v. 'sense', www.oxforddictionaries.com).

About 'meaning' as a noun, that same source lists just one, well, meaning: 1) "what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action" (see OED on line, s.v.). Please note that this definition is recursive, a meaning is said to be whatever is meant. But far from being a lexicographer's fault, self-reference is at the very root of the concept of 'meaning'. Under the same number, the source identifies two more definitions of 'meaning': 1.1) "implied or explicit significance"; 1.2) "important or worthwhile quality; purpose". 1.2 doesn't apply here, while the 'implied or explicit' specification in 1.1 is very interesting to examine, because an implicit significance isn't going to work as an explicit one in real life. Anyway, what is taken as given in an act we're going to call its (the act's) meaning. Therefore, an act mixes meaning and sense.

# 19 - On meaning & sense

The current of life ensues from transitory clusters of meaning and sense in prological connection between them and with the rest of evenience.

Let's consider the ordinary blend of meaning & sense. As we have convened, the major difference of connotation between 'sense' and 'meaning', once we start parting them, is that a meaning is given, while a sense has to be explored. Even the most momentous sense, once it has been grasped and matched to some habitual meaning, soon subsides. It fast becomes kind of drowsy, if no further sense in it waits to be ascertained. Just a trifle of attention is enough to keep it going. We just mean it and that's all. On the other hand, a sense, however immaterial, cannot become a mere meaning as long as it is explored. If we are still seeking to encompass it, there's no chance to simply mean it. As long as we're striving for its sense to emerge, what's available is just a raw sketch, a tangle of questions.

This said, let's figure out what pure meaning and pure sense look like. In both cases, we're going to face an odd answer. In a pure meaning, what comes to pass is just taken as given. On the bus to work, Ted overhears someone saying: "...walked the dog this morning." A minute later he identifies the E7th Street crossing. Then a few people alight on the platform in front of The Mermaid Inn, and so on. To make a series of pure meanings out of these details, we have to presume that Ted paid no attention to them, even as he was subconsciously aware of them occurring. He just took them for granted. They got their usual meaning because, over this morning's situational context, they didn't get any new sense. Their latent meaning was left untouched. Thus, those incidents – and many more indeed – have but disappeared from Ted's evenience today, except for them persisting as usual.

Briefly, a pure meaning is always beside the point. There's a trick behind the 'meaning' word. We need more than just a meaning to find something meaningful. What we want is interest, concern, doubt, alarm, curiosity, passion, partaking, and the like. In order to be meaningful, our meanings must be part of a sense we're interested in. By the way, the natural subsidence of a mere meaning is what our brainpower requires so as to unwind as much as possible. Mental energies must be saved for what really matters. At the same time, thanks to our mind's backstage workings, we're able to promptly count on myriads of idling meanings.

Things come reversed at the opposite end. A pure sense (100% significance to be weighed up, 0% ascribed meaning) is something we cannot handle. Suppose Jean turns up a bit later at work this morning, only to learn that Ted and Bob have quarreled between them on the landing, all of a sudden, coming to blows, Bob falling down the stairwell. Now Joan can't wait to inform her that she, Jean, was the cause of the brawl. Presently, she feels the stare on her of a dozen colleagues. She's more than astonished, more than horrified. What did actually happen? An incongruous tragedy? A bizarre comedy of errors? Free-range silliness? What did they quarrel about, exactly? About her what? Her character, her looks? Is she liable to be found at fault? Could she have prevented this folly? Will the press mention her? By name? What else? Her husband. What will Sam think of such a mess? When a moment later her colleagues burst into laughter, the fake drama having been put up by those guys to 'celebrate' her advancement as department manager, regular meanings start to flow again through Jean's mind.

Pure sense looks senseless, pure meaning meaningless. Sense is what we're after, provided we can afford an answer in meaningful terms. When too many aspects wait to be weighed up, the mind goes astray. Jean does not even know what to think first, how to react. It's a sudden fall in pure sense, zero meaning. To regain her poise and feel again at the helm of her life, Jean has to get some solid meaning out of that mess. Her friends' laugh offers a quick way out. Actually, there's no need of a big drama to upset somebody's sense-meaning balance. A minor accident can turn a whole life upside down. An episode that leaves Jean frantically wanting for sense, maybe Joan would have dealt with in no time, and little fun on her colleagues' side, as one more case of male foolishness. The actual sense-&-meaning mix is impenetrable. There's no way to sort out the two in a particular real-life event. Elementary biography should stay deliberately vague as a discipline, if its goal is to find out what's the basis for all meanings and every sense.

# 20 - The & concept

The unfathomable blend of meaning and sense in our acts suggests a first general-biographic notion, the concept of an unpredictable gathering of different factors in human evenience. When reason tries to rein life in using its logical weapons, it doesn't properly face life as it is.

We're usually very clever with our meaning and sense management. Far from being either stolid replications of our customary selves or baffled wretches begging for explanations, we're capable of choosing, event after event, what to take as given and what deserves a quest. We sort of apportion the measure of meaning and sense in our lives. We blend them smoothly, if at all possible. Meaning and sense are like two sliders on a mixing desk, treble and bass. Act after act, we adjust them to our music: needs, hopes, forces, emotions, expectations, etc. From the resulting medley we gather the overall feeling of what we're living.

Let's denote this concept of continuous tuning between opposites with the ampersand logogram (&), as in sense & meaning. For us, it's going to stand for an adjustable mixture of merging and diverging between two or more components on a case-by-case basis. It can take into account any couple of concepts. For instance, while the usual 'me and you' equals a standard 'us', 'me & you' would imply an indefinite real-life mix of the two, a specific me/you association occurring in someone's evenience. So, while 'me and you' can be said to just mean 'the two of us', 'me & you' signals the presence of some content amalgam waiting to be inquired.

From a scholarly viewpoint, such a vague notion as '&' is an easy case for the skeptic and the dogmatist alike. The skeptic says: You see, reality is ambiguous, truth is beyond our reach. The dogmatist counters: Truth always faces the mind's eye. You don't see it? It's your mind at fault. They don't acknowledge, both of them, that their particular image of truth as a rock-solid conundrum has been posited well before their pursuit took off. An isolated truth is always absolute, but life has little to do with abstract truths. Live truth is always relative to people involved and to their quest's terms. Likewise, expediency & inconvenience, order & disorder, harmony & dissonance, means & ends are all couples of case-by-case adjustable sliders.

The & concept, which pertains to prologic, applies to single words too. A dog is always a dog-in-a-sense, which is either a sense we have previously agreed upon and now we take for granted (a meaning) or one we're looking for right now. As humans, we can only be delighted by such an abundance of color shades to choose from, against a meager black-or-white alternative. After all, why should we fight for just one solid truth, if we are free to enjoy a whole palette of them? Regrettably, there's a hideous side to be aware of: the & concept applies to anything, including right & wrong. Justice is going to be meant & sensed as everything else. But from the viewpoint of a victim, the abundance of shades on hand for the criminal to excuse himself may well look as a vicious asset of the human condition.

# Part II \- Being To The World

The skeptic-pragmatic standard now prevalent in Western philosophy seems a good thing. It's open to scientific teamwork and humanistic dialogue. It is weakly structured, opposes dogmas, scrutinizes ideologies, favors freedom of speech. It has left behind the vicious partialities of modern rationalism. Yet, it's far from universal in concept. Like so many isms before it, postmodernism is exclusive, incompatible with most other worldviews. It's a grand, patronizing frame of mind more than a plain discussion of what being alive actually entails for everyone. Postmodernists despise the old quest after universal truth. It's their way of still being assertive. As a result, no common ground is available for opposing outlooks to connect. Local narratives either subsist in isolation or adhere to the loose scheme handed them over by an intellectual élite. Maybe five percent of the world's population feels inspired by such a conception. So, what happens when worldviews differ? What if a faithful Marxist, a Zen initiate, a devout Amish, a traditional Catholic, an old Anarchist, and a Millennial nerd meet? What do they share? Being alive as self-conscious beings, at the very least. But what does being to the world imply? Prosophy aims to reach as many people as there are faiths and frames of mind. It either stands up in all courts, or its potential worth as an all-inclusive view is lost.

Part II exposes prosophy's kernel, general biography, a basic depiction of what happens to a human being just because of its being human. The unit is the live act, the molecule of the being-to-the-world condition. This most general inquiry asks for a great deal of conceptual dispassion. We're required not to feel involved. Pressed to solve and settle, we would hurry up and install categories before even knowing where to start from, instead of considering the whole process as if from any conceivable viewpoint. However, even the most careful detachment does not guarantee such an overall search from partiality. Only, to be partial is also a form of action. Whatever we do, either we accept a local foundation or we're brought back to the being-to-the-world puzzle.

A way out of this apparent impasse takes the following steps: 1. find out what is always and everywhere present in each and every human act, lucid or stupid, evil or good; 2. see to it that, apart from humans, such fundamentals apply to all living beings, for good measure; 3. do not name or treat these elements as if they were things or even phenomena. Being truly originarian factors, hidden deep behind all our acts, we're never in contact with them; 4. avoid resorting to a particular logic. Make them open to all logic, alogic, and analogical mix-up; 5. consider that general biography has to be neutral with respect to the variety of cultures, since it's supposed to portray what begets them all. It does not endorse, promote, or put forward any particular Weltanschauung; 6. a rendering of the originarian elements and of their interrelations should be found in all present and past cultures, theories, narratives, etc.; 7. general biography is descriptive. Values result from choice. To choose is to act. Moral choice is subsequent to the being-to-the-world condition.

# 21 - A scent in the breeze

Now, assuming that all our habitual beliefs have been put on hold, we should be ready for a basic conjecture to suit all events in everybody's life, no matter what epoch or organism we're thinking about.

Let's briefly restate what our hypothesis should account for: a. it has to be applicable to all acts, feelings, behaviors, constructs, theories, etc.; b. it has to include everything, even what is ordained to exclude; c. it will make room for all sense-&-meaning mix; d. it will not answer to any particular logic; e. it must be unfailingly operational where the originarian constituents of life – self-conscious life especially – are at work; f. because of a) to e), it won't answer any particular question, it's going to be just an overall premise; g. what we'll be able to do with such a general theory, we cannot tell beforehand; h. we are not seeking any reassuring solution or consolation.

Also, let's say again that scientific knowledge and technical know-how are impressively efficient resources, whose ultimate worth leans on underlying agreements – about what is worth knowing, to what extent, who's funding whom, who's regulating what, etc. If this is true for scientific research, the most peer-to-peer disciplined field in our culture, it's reasonable to think that the agreement principle should prevail in all other fields too, the alternatives being pressure, allure, trickery, coercion, and the like. Our best option is expert contribution and mutual overseeing. Given that, the obvious point is that about life in general everybody is knowledgeable. On life's basics, who can be said to lack knowledge? Who's to decide who owns or lacks what? Thus, to achieve its purpose of an all-encompassing vision, general biography should understand all local narratives without interfering with their content. It's not its problem if the different views do not match, if a belief looks at odds with another one to the point of mutual exclusion in somebody's overall vision.

After all, there's no logic connection between the truth value and the deal value of any agreement. The first principle of logic, A ≡ A, can only be denied, as Aristotle famously stated, by someone renouncing all animal faculties and surviving mutely as a vegetable. Now, while this surrender would indeed be drastic, it would not be enough to cancel the basic experience of living. It is not logic that guarantees for friendly contracts and ignites differences of all kind. We can agree on some absurdity and still be happy. Strict logic is an intellectual artifact, a concern of a very small number of creatures. It is not prerequisite for living, whereas living is prerequisite for logic.

Let's go on, now, and consider a very common act, like picking out a scent in the breeze. An act entails an indiscernible blend of meaning & sense (Chapters 19, 20). However, since we want to inspect it as a dummy for any act anybody could possibly live, it does not matter if we're unable to discern between its sense and meaning sides. After all, a meaning is a frozen sense, while a sense is the anticipation of a meaning. What we're going to do, instead, is a kind of itemization of that experience, in order to toss out all description of it that would restrict its use as a general test for all that is the case.

We'll examine the picking-out aspect, first. On the dictionary, a scent is defined as a rather pleasant smell, but in our event we cannot really tell beforehand. Maybe it is perceived as a supposedly pleasant scent but actually felt as unpleasant. Also, the unpleasantness has perhaps been ascribed to the nose or to the breeze having muddled it up with something else, or to some repulsive reminiscence. Or maybe it has been judged as too snobby, too popular, out of place, démodé, etc. We might well extend this methodical dubitation to different aspects, to the same effect. How about that scent being possibly helpful, or dangerous, or immoral? It's easy enough to imagine a circumstance by which a scent is deemed pleasant attractive disgusting helpful dangerous and immoral all at once. A sandalwood essence, which Bob likes very much, is distinctive of a fragrance favored by his best friend's wife. That scent makes him feel dangerously attracted by her. A decent fellow, Bob is able to make out the dangerous lure of the fragrance, even as he feels delighted by it. Generally speaking, we may well choose a name to designate what we perceive, but it seldom covers all the aspects of the sense & meaning mix in a live act.

Now, let's try and make out the scent-flow and in-the-breeze sides of the event from the picking-out one. Is this scent more of a chemical or psychic phenomenon? An objective or subjective affair? An environmental mishmash? A thing of sort or just a message? Has it been detected by the mind via a bodily organ, or has it forced its way through it into the mind, or has the organ itself mixed it up from synesthetic scraps? From an all-round, general-biographic perspective all options seem fairly compossible, in a way or other. Moreover, aren't similar uncertainties belonging to all events?

# 22 - Fichte's brave stance

_The all-inclusive being-to-the-world view seems at first to rebuff all attempts to break it down. The corporeal, psychical, and symbolic aspects cannot be told apart without some conceptual exclusion. The only view granting total inclusion is found in what might be called_ pragmatic tautology _: the meaning & sense unique blend of an act may only be caught in the act itself. If so, how is it to be understood and translated into knowledge?_

An act of life is all about discerning and choosing (usually very fast) from a pool of options. Most of them are pre-established as meanings; a few are weighed up for the event's singularity to be figured out. Stripped of its distinctive meaning-&-sense blend, the event fades away, an indefinite merging of occurrences. So, in order to grant inclusion we don't take sides (the scent side, or the picking-up one, or any other side), we don't even assert anything to be this or that. The most we're able to say is that our being to the world stems from meaning-&-sense mix-ups, which in turn result from our being to the world. Our scouting around has backtracked to the starting line. There's no way out (except of course with taking a meaning for granted, which is what we're trying to avoid), so let's consider this conclusion, apparently a straight tautology, as our first step into general biography. No explanation is likely to comprehend a live act in full. Explanations are alternative acts, they make the event resemble what they want it to be.

Admitting tautology as a first step into philosophy is unusual, but not unheard of. It's more or less the same ground on which Johann G. Fichte secured the foundation of his doctrine. It's instructive for us to consider his concept of what is truly original. In Fichte's system, two processes – the logical identity and the ethical choice – come first: the I posits itself as the absolute I. The rational tautology doubles as moral freedom and becomes the source of all that is the case. This way, Kant's transcendental principles of thought (Ich denke) and action (Pflichtbegriff) become one and the same. The self-seminal I, the one and only principle of knowledge and action, begets a full world of truths and values. Fichte's doctrine brought together Aufklärung's rational lesson with the ardors of Romanticism. To him, the old idea of an unambiguous logic – a reliable Logos sovereign not only over the practice of reasoning but over every object of reason too – was a haven against irrationality, recklessness, and folly. So, he wouldn't endorse the postmodernist concept of a panel of different logic instruments, readily available under the one and only agreement principle; much less that of a greater prological environment where all events, if adequately inspected, find their critical explanation.

At the same time, Fichte was a romantic spirit indeed. Mankind's manifold freedom appeared to him exceedingly motivating. So his originarian concept became that of an absolute I, endowed with such an inner might as to craft its own world, both rational and emotional. The individual humans were like vigorous feelers of the universal I, engaged in an epic struggle against the non-I. The private I was responsible of the crucial choice between an object-constrained or a subject-responsive Weltanschauung. Scholars see here a system of 'ethical idealism', where the whole world is nothing more than "the material of our duty made sensible", as Fichte himself put it. His followers have no choice but to be held accountable for the logical form and practical destiny of the whole big world. If the real world is squalid, if it does not match to the grand idea of a supreme I crafting its own splendid fate, the individuals are to blame. They do not devote themselves enough to their own fulfillment. They aren't fit for destiny.

Briefly, the German thinker was well aware of the pragmatic tautology involving all human acts (i.e., they can only be true to themselves), so his philosophy encouraged its adepts into breaking the original tautology thanks to individual willpower. The result is not only intentionally irreconcilable with other views, but likely to spawn conflicting views of its own. The exclusive trait is what makes it so compelling, a critical virtue from the philosopher's viewpoint.

General biography is much less engaging. It doesn't dump the indefinite tautology of human being to the world. It favors no particular solution. No need to oppose other conceptions. Its basic notion, the event, is inclusive by design. But there's a poignant question the German philosopher might plausibly ask. Will such an uncommitted stance be of any interest in real life? Let's suppose we bet, like Fichte did, on human willpower, to the effect that all people do their best with the being-to-the-world concept. What might humankind learn from it? Is there anything to be gathered under such a general tenet?

# 23 - Arise, decide, relate

It seems that whatever we happen to live ensues from the blend of three seminal factors. These seeds mingle with one another, even when we try to behold them separately. So what has to be learned, first of all, is how to think them properly, since ordinary thoughts have always to do with the outcome of their combination.

Both the pragmatic tautology (Ch. 22) and the premise [... that] (Ch. 13) expose the obvious: all that is the case comes encased in a live act. No life, no event whatsoever; no event, no life. Therefore, some generating interactions must always be there for anything ever to happen. An inner process governs the outer result. Generally speaking, three constituents are always required for any relationship to materialize: the connecting, connected, and connective factors. Accordingly, human (and non-human) acts prove always three-sided: whenever something happens, a triplet of seminal components must merge. My words are palpably ill-suited here, but then no word does the job. For, in order to mention those components, we have to make them happen, if only as notions we're now debating. We're compelled, that is, to gather the three of them together. We can only see them combined.

It's a native catch-22 situation: what co-produces every single act cannot be exposed alone. So we'll never taste these ingredients of each and every act separately; we can only savor them from the resulting blend. Like Empedocles' primeval forces of Love and Strife, they are never to be met alone in our world, because everything comes out of their association. They are mutually reactive: the three of them together sort of trigger the event. This uncanny condition must be kept in mind, all the way from before even trying to name them. I'll call these co-factors 'seeds', but verbs become them better than nouns, because we're talking of reagents. The verbs I propose in order to mention such being-to-the-world triggers are arise, decide, relate:

to arise, or to come up, to "occur or present itself, especially unexpectedly" (OED on line, s.v.). Consider a feeling, a gesture, an image, a concept, whatever. Think of it the moment it comes about in someone's experience, imbued with the sense-&-meaning mix of the event. For this 'thing' to emerge, here and now, a spur is crucial, a physical/mental/symbolic spark must set off;

to decide, "to make a choice about (something)", to determine, to resolve (Merriam-Webster Third, s.v.). There's no chance for the arisen aspect alone to become an event without it being established, consciously or unconsciously, as 'being' this or that, e.g. a clear sensation, a blurred message, an ordinary object, a rare quality, an accurate or inaccurate quantity, an interesting or disturbing knowledge and so on;

to relate, to "give an account of (a sequence of events); narrate" (OED), i.e. to mention, to refer by way of a symbolic medium. Here again, no chance for the arisen and decided aspects alone to produce an event. They need to be connected, intentionally or not, by means of what is contextually allotted the role of messenger: a nod, a glance, any linguistic expression, a structure, a style, a scent, anything currently carrying out the job.

Arise (A), decide (D) and relate (R): for anything to happen, these existential prerequisites must merge. Each happening is an A|D|R affair, the result of their meeting up. None of these seeds comes first, because each of them comes to light by reacting to the remaining two. Nothing happens before the three interact, so there's really no 'before' that we can talk of. The triplet functions as the originarian identity from which everything follows, an identity of intrinsic diversity & cohesion. The A|D|R identity is not easy to allow for. We all find it more straightforward to think in terms of ready-made things, thoughts, words, etc. It would be disturbing, intellectually and emotionally, to disassemble our actions in such a way as to determine, act after act, what has arisen, what has been decided, and what codes, signs, and symbols have negotiated the event. Moreover, we could never succeed with such an attempt, because each of the three seeds is nothing/anything before its mingling with the remaining two. The moment we ask ourselves what has arisen, we start a new event which will stand on another A|D|R arrangement.

Actually, our mind-body system keeps a faint track of the A|D|R proceedings. It does so in a muted mode, for it would be extremely exacting to stay aware of the assembling process; however, the system cannot afford to discard altogether the perception of its own deep-level operations, which are awfully valuable for a better governance of future eveniences. It is also tempting to think of these 'mechanics' as the machine language of our cognition, against the user-friendly look of our inner desktop. But it would be a mistake. In machine language, we find just a raw expression of the very same operations we're so at ease with on our notebook's desktop. It's just a matter of literal translation from a digital to an analog idiom. In our being to the world, instead, the sense-&-meaning mix of what is going on is nowhere to be found before the A|D|R coupling has produced its offspring.

Nota bene. A|D|R has the same meaning as A&D&R (see Ch. 20). To avoid the bulky look of the latter I'm going to use the vertical bar instead of the ampersand. Moreover, if the ampersand symbol (&) is a valid substitute for the logical operator AND, the vertical bar ( | ) is a valid substitute for the logical operator OR. Together the two symbols, which logic sees as opposites, remind the prological background of human agency.

# 24 - The A|D|R identity

The identity of a simple organism is based on what it interacts with and how. The same is true for a human being, but for the interaction levels being manifold and the communication modes very complex. The three-seeded identity can only be lived, so everyone should try and examine it on their own. My sketchy depiction here is an invitation.

The arise|decide|relate identity brings us back to the being-to-the-world model. For something to happen, a being to the world must be operative, whereby the following notions are comprised:

[being to] the world: a more or less natural environment, teeming with chances for 'things' to pop up;

being [to the world]: a degree of selective awareness and a deciding presence;

[being] to [the world]: a symbolic connection conveying some depiction of the proceedings.

Fichte was right, what we must allow first of all is an identity, though not an I-identity (a deciding Subject struggling against a passive non-I) but a three-seeded one. It's a combination always in want of itself, an identity scanning its own becoming. The vital process requires the incessant rearrangement of the A|D|R seeds. These three concomitant factors define our identity and identify our diversity, both as human beings and as individuals.

Born to a given environment, any animal enjoys/suffers a range of experiences, outside of which there's only impotence, stupidity, and death. To survive and have the upper hand against these evils, an identity must meet its own A|D|R constraints and thrive under their rule. The more fortuitous the environment, the more difficult for a fixed A|D|R identity to survive. On the other hand, within its A|D|R restrictions every being to the world gets, so to speak, a comprehensive feeling: the autoctic impression of D. actually meeting A. the factual world R. via an apt depiction. Most animals seem indeed unable to detect the self-referential circulus (species-specifically virtuous, logically vicious, and prologically neutral) that is the basic bond of their being to the world. They typically live by preset arrangements of A|D|R relations.

A range of potential arisings, a deciding awareness, and a mediating apparatus are embedded in the neural/behavioral system of any being allowing it its assortment of experience and knowledge, as far as its environment doesn't change abruptly. If the viewpoint is fixed, unwavering at the center of the self-referential A|D|R circulus, comprehensive feeling and plain ignorance tend to coincide. Humankind is different because its countless viewpoints shift incessantly and may become themselves the arising matter of more A|D|R identities. The predictable output is a multitude of narratives. The form of humankind's universal necessity is a multi-narrative, which develops act after act. The self-contained, all-inclusive sphere of being, which was Parmenides' vision of truth, depicts just where our consciousness starts from. The starting point is the appearance of unity, the naïve synthesis of the originarian seeds. To learn is to mark facets on the sphere, a lot of them, day in day out. Through experience we come into contact with our initial ignorance and with its inner cause.

Socrates' famous finding – "[...] what I do not know I do not think I know" (Apology, 21d) – is a very sensible rule of thumb for anyone aspirant to general knowledge. The plurality of viewpoints is something we're all well acquainted with since babyhood, but it's anyway hard to accept. It's easier to get away from it, seeking refuge in a fixed worldview. The three-seeded identity is easy to guess, if only one avoids the rush to explain the resulting variety o opinion by means of a rigid format of conception. For instance, if we're eager to plant the D seed of our being to the world on a substantial ego, we'll be prone to decide, once and for all, that there's a soul in us, or a res cogitans, an Übermensch, a computing mind, etc. Anyway, the urge to solve and secure cannot cancel our true identity; it just hides the arise|decide|relate multiplicity under one of its countless looks, the locally favored one, like a clown's mask grants a face to stay funny all the time.

How can we be sure that the A|D|R multiple identity is truly the common, originarian source of each and every event? Actually, it's far from difficult to conceive a simpler explanation. A Democritean reader says: What you're fond of calling a being-to-the-world event is but a casual encounter of atoms in the void. There's no matter of any kind, would likely retort Bishop Berkeley, we are lesser angels, and the world is staged by God for us to perceive His perfection. These extreme theories of the originarian, together with the many more in between, forget to account for the premise [... that], the inherent precondition of every act, reason's performances included. When everybody on Earth since the dawn of time had embraced the Berkeleyan (or any other) vision as the one and only irrefutable theory, the premise [... that] would still have been operative all down the line. We cannot avoid it, since it's the only available stage on which to dramatize what we live.

Now, at the heart of the crucial premise [... that] we find the same general-biographic structure that is exposed in the A|D|R concept. In saying "I enjoyed that ride", the speaker is actually implying something like: [I'm stating that] "I enjoyed that ride". When ignored, the premise gives way to a comprehensive feeling of things having occurred just like that, actually and factually; things become, to all intents and purposes, what they are contrived to be by the A|D|R blend of the moment. Even the inborn premise of a kitten leaping on a mouse is something like

[my nature is such that] {ε},

where {ε} stands for the impulsive act itself and its context. In A|D|R terms, something has appeared in the environment that the kitten's instinct (D) has read (R) as a prey (A), prompting it to act accordingly. That's what humans do when they take a meaning for granted. For instance, the dot after 'granted' at the end of the last sentence has just been taken for granted, by writer and reader, with its obvious meaning attached ('Here ends this sentence'). So that it can be said, with little rewording from the kitten's case, that something, the typographic dot, has arisen in front of us, which our reading/writing routine has assumed as a sentence-closing flag, and we have acted accordingly.

# 25 - Can the A|D|R identity be verified?

The variety of viewpoints available in our times guarantees all hypotheses a fair trial; but in order to fully acknowledge the A|D|R identity, a few otherwise valuable instruments of judgment should be reconsidered.

The arise|decide|relate configuration cannot be investigated. At least, not in the usual way, for it is originarian. It is not something as much as it's a triad of no-things that together can bring about anything. Nobody can peek behind the A|D|R spreading identity. There's no antecedent principle on which to set it up. Try as we might, we'll be always facing it as a compound whole. On the other side, anybody may attempt to falsify it. As a theory, it is in fact falsifiable, as Karl Popper suggested all sober theories should be. Even better, one doesn't have to be a scientist or a philosopher to discuss it. It's enough for anybody to discover just one instance, of anything occurring out of the A|D|R three-party wedlock, and the whole thesis is going to be nullified.

But refutability alone does not guarantee that a theory is right, unless the number of occurrences is finite within the limits of human check and available to inspection. In our case, nothing is as widely available to scrutiny as the A|D|R triad, since it is on duty everywhere all the time; the problem is with the number of cases, which is unlimited. Hence, we must apply to the A|D|R hypothesis the same rule applied a couple of pages back to George Berkeley's immaterialism: let's restore the premise [... that] and see what happens. Suddenly, a gap appears that neatly tells the two worldviews apart. Berkeley's idealism (like all supposed universal theories appeared in human history) reveals its being partial to its own ideology once the removed premise is restored to its place. The same applies to the A|D|R triad as a theory exposed by someone in his/her own words, but for the premise [... that] being at its very core. Since the former duplicates the latter, when the premise is restored, the A|D|R identity remains as universal (i.e. open to all diversities) as it was meant to be. No three-seeded invention is vetoed.

This does not mean that we need not doing our best in order to falsify our A|D|R-based individual conceptions. On the contrary, I'm quite convinced my personal idea of the A|D|R identity/diversity to be more or less biased by A. what has arisen in my life until now and has left a conscious or unconscious mark; D. the way I'm accustomed to decide; R. how richly or poorly I'm able to make out the countless messages in different lingos that cross my existential space. I'm sure, for example, that my being a Westerner used to alphabetical (as opposed to ideographic) writing has fashioned my approach to the R seed in a way that an Easterner would possibly find peculiar. Also, if you've lived all life in a thoroughly orthogonal, flat urban space, like New York's, you're maybe attuned to different arise-decide connections from those of a resident in downtown Siena, with its basically circular, rolling topography. However, to find a specific partiality in someone's grasp of the A|D|R identity is not the same as to hit upon a bias in the A|D|R thesis itself. Of course, this can be said of all theories, that they are not liable for how often people misunderstand them; but there's something worth considering in this case, for the A|D|R thesis predicts, indeed implies as unavoidable, the incompleteness of all individual and collective A|D|R visions, with no need to posit an arcane truth beyond human reach.

Behind the A|D|R identity there's no ideal integrity to be recovered, no ontological perfection assumed, no structural entirety required. Every single A|D|R connection is, so to speak, angled in its own right. A pianist's hand has no strong a grip as a blacksmith's; it's got other qualities that do not match with the ones fine to forge iron. The truly abstract hand must be rendered so as to take account of all actual hands as they are seen and felt in people's eveniences, even the ghost hand of an amputee. The proper abstraction is the culmination of experience.

General views of the exclusive kind have to put on some machinery to survive against rival doctrines. Their favored instrument is antithesis. Earth and sky, good and evil, true and false, one and many, spirit and matter, beauty and ugliness. Polarization was the cradle of dialectics and the first format of Western philosophy. Polarities are easy to construe and useful. They magnetize the intellectual and emotional environment. Instead of an elusive infinity of grades and nuances you just deal with two opposites. Antitheses may bring clarity to our thoughts, of course, but do they really make our thoughts to contact the inner truth of the being-to-the-world condition?

# 26 - Necessary and sufficient

Most difficult to concede is the necessity of three seminal constituents which do not subsist individually. Here is where general biography connects to its prological underpinnings.

Briefly, the arise|decide|relate triggers are necessary and sufficient for an event to take shape, but not in terms of formal logic, nor of causation, because separately they do not exist. Properly, they should not even be thought as 'antecedents' to whatever springs up as a result of their meeting up. Antecedent and successor to an event is perforce another event. Each seed's necessity can be inferred, though. Try to remove one of the three and nothing happens, no event, no evenience:

R. Without the relating seed, it would be thoroughly impossible not only to speak about or to describe our sense & meaning construals, but to mean or sense anything except as a total 'blank'. Lacking the R seed, we'd be left with the purest bewilderment (as in Jean's case, Ch. 19) or the plainest, dimmest as-it-is.

A. In a similar way, without the arising seed's contribution no decision could be taken, because there'd be nothing out there to be decided. Actually, without the A input everything would seem a no-thing. This is the case of a myriad 'no-things' that brush our lives at any time, potential arisings that don't affect us in the least.

D. Then, with no here-and-now involvement of the deciding seed, all signs, symbols, and words would linger mute. They'd hang about, the way two hearts engraved on a tree's bark are glimpsed from a woodpecker's perspective.

The A|D|R factors must join as a score, a pianist, and a piano must connect for the music to be heard. Such a three-sided process is required for anything to happen. And if the arising has to do with the deciding or relating side of an earlier event – like when, e.g., one becomes aware of a verbal gaffe – then a new D and R must occur for the matching act to form. The three seeds are mutually necessary and sufficient: no event forms if one of the threesome fails to convene; whenever one appears the other two always follow. Plain and simple, the act is their interaction. I see no exception to this rule.

What we've observed (Ch. 12) about acts and facts – namely that facts are but stripped-down, curtailed acts – applies to the A|D|R constituents as well. Taking one of the A|D|R sides out of its triad, as if it were an independent entity, is tantamount to 'factify' it, i.e. to assemble an 'it' from the stream of evenience, while dismissing all reference to its having being put up, where from, what for, etc. It is a most useful practice whenever we agree on something – a sign, rule, recipe, taxonomy, etc. – to just mean what it's supposed to mean. This way we spare mental and social space-time and make room for what really matters to us in live eveniences. As humans, we tend to forget about the A|D|R identifying diversity because we need to solve problems. In most animals the A|D|R concurrence is pre-established by species-specific adaptive behavior, so that to them only mere meanings are available. Humans may add sense to meaning and mix the two (Ch. 19) so as to craft their innumerable eveniences and viewpoints. So the question is, What makes humans so prolific with their A|D|R identity, given that their experience is based on the same basic elements that all other animals live by?

# 27 - The all-including trait

The A|D|R identity is only credible as a prosophical concept if it shows how to effectively embrace eventfulness in all its extent. Let's see how it fares with events that summon up things, incidents, episodes, etc. from the past.

This A|D|R basic frame – Does it reach back to the primary source of whatever is the case? Is it truly originarian & presentarian? Can anyone think or do something that the A|D|R frame does not contain? Again, my ultimate resource is the falsifying power of my readers. They may well find out a fallacy in my reasoning or a case speaking against it, so I look forward to their remarks. In the meantime, let's account more pointedly for the inclusion pledge (Ch. 10). Is the A|D|R identity truly all-embracing, leaving absolutely no human deed out of its frame? Also, is it all-engendering? Is it really fit to bring up no matter what a human being might eventually live?

Ironically, all-inclusiveness must take account of two sets of events that are nowhere to be found: past and future events cannot help but being hosted in someone's present (Ch. 14). They fill a great volume of everyday life. Does the A|D|R identity cover them too? Assuming the arising side of a present act is something that, by all accounts, occurred somewhen in the past, this A element (e.g., William, duke of Normandy, prevailing at Hastings in 1066) must meet up with some present D and R. Alone, that potential A would kind of float in the void. Eventually it would disappear altogether. Only if you add your D and R what did once occur reappears here and now for you (for instance, the 1066 event has just resurfaced here as a mere token for any past event). The arising here and now of William's conquest of England in someone's mind is just an appetite, sort of, to be filled immediately with its deciding and relating sides.

No doubt, this is a rather cautious approach from history's viewpoint, but it's by far too sweeping a reconstruction of the two strings of events, the actual (here and now) and the evoked one (then and there) from a general-biographic viewpoint. In fact, what even the most competent scholar of William's times can compel is just a sketch of what really happened in the eveniences of all people who have shaped those events at the time or were concerned by them later. Our knowledge of the 1066 event is not a memorized collection of granted meanings, nor a dim interest in all possible senses, but a sense & meaning enactment which adds one more William's Conquest to the endless series of events covered by that label.

Historians appreciate this kind of comprehensive approach. Nonetheless, if they want to expose their subject, they must select and discard, assume and propose. The all-inclusiveness of the A|D|R horizon bars it from becoming a branch of learning in the usual sense. It cannot explain history more than it explains gravity. It takes account of what has been handed down from past generations as well as what has been dumped, of what hasn't been fully conveyed, even of what has been just rumored, falsely circulated, poorly interpreted, and so on. This largesse, which borders to nonsense from a scholarly viewpoint, may well seem too much even from a hermeneutical standpoint, but it's the required fish-eye lens that elementary biography needs so as to attain an all-encompassing view, true to our being to the world.

Hermeneutics tends to think of interpretations as visions (rather than events) by which all souls are supposed to put together a communal multifaceted truth, akin to the ancient ontological logos. In this very hypothetical vision of all visions, there's a prodigal measure of a typically academic attitude, the high-minded modus ponens of the learned. The all-inclusive A|D|R frame is pre- and pro-hermeneutical: it comes first, allows for all exegeses, comprehends all horizons, the famed Gadamerian Horizontverschmelzung ('fusion of horizons') included. The A|D|R concept grants that no live act is overlooked. Even the poorest version of Hastings by a peasant of William's times is ideally accounted for. There's no historical truth to be discovered in the arise|decide|relate format, no immanent infinity to be revered, no Hegelian sublation or Heideggerian authenticity to be satisfied. Through the A|D|R frame, the presentarian enactments of life's pre-hermeneutical uniqueness wait to be cautiously described. Each act adds to the variety of human evenience.

# 28 - Irreducibility

Many of our acts review past events. Even as we feel as if facing them fixed in memory, the three seeds are always active. With every new act, they re-act between them and make a new synthesis. Their inherent, respective liberties combined bring the act into being.

Before venturing further on, it's worth considering that, having exposed the originarian-presentarian as an open concurrence of cofactors, we find ourselves founding elementary biography on the very fluid elements which philosophy, religion, and science have long tried to strengthen. So we'll be careful with concepts derived from the A|D|R ensemble. Let's keep in mind why we've called the A|D|R concertante relationship an identity: because it cannot be identified with anything else but itself. The most vicious arrangement, the most terrifying power cannot tie it up for good.

In everyday life, though, we are not going to deal with the originarian triple freedom in full force. We need steady meanings, so we introduce momentary restrictions, standard limitations, rock-solid beliefs. In a word, we set up ideas. Ideas (in my wordlist) tend to restrain the A|D|R freedom with some ad hocery. Concepts (as opposed to ideas) retain some evidence of the seeds' limitless freedom. They kind of remember having been born from a threefold intercourse. A concept that overlooks its origin from the A|D|R identity turns into an idea. In our daily activities ideas can be very useful. When we're driving fast, whatever happens to lay in the middle of the road is just an 'obstacle', since we need to avoid it. But as humans we look for sense, too. A self-driving car could spare itself the question of what it was that could have caused an accident; a human driver will ask what it was and why it was there. Ideas help to think fast in one direction, because with them most of what comes to the frontline has been previously classified.

However, for a human being an absolutely ideal life, made up of static A|D|R concoctions, would be senseless. From the A|D|R concurrence something completely unforeseen may rise at any moment. Concepts derived from it, however subtle, not to speak of ideas, cannot bear the originarian fluidity. We may feel overburdened by our very flexibility, but as self-conscious beings we are bound to cope with the kind of life we were born in. To understand what we live, the best any of us can offer is a permanent vigil, a watchful reassessment of where our concepts carry us.

This said, let's introduce irreducibility. Speaking of the A|D|R seeds, 'irreducibility' states that it's impossible for an event to come about if not for their teamwork. None of the three can be left out. They co-occur, although in a variety of ways. If any of the seeds could be frozen indefinitely, human freewill, the end product of A|D|R adjustments, would be lost. The indefinite openness of human experience is firmly founded on the seeds' irreducibility: each of them has to be there whenever an event occurs. Also, each of them had to be there for any past event to come about. The so-called historic fact, as we've seen above, is an abstract construal that oversimplifies the myriad of original events.

In other words, of any event, if we pay attention to its arising side to the point that we forget about its deciding and relating ones, the latter are nevertheless there, although unaccounted for. The same applies to the D side against A and R, as well as to the R side against D and A. For example, when something strikes us as lovely, it's easy to forget about us finding it so and of that loveliness being conveyed through one or more markers. So, to Bob the more Jean 'is' an altogether attractive young lady, the more he factors out both D (his judging her so) and R (her charms being conveyed to him). Alternatively, Jean will seem an attractive girl to Bob, if he will underscore his being attracted by her; and a feature of Jean would connote her as attractive, if Bob were a semiologist.

A bit of which he surely is. Hyperconnected with the rest of the world, people are now very much aware of A|D|R irreducibility. The R seed, in particular, its ubiquity, its molding powers, are more evident than ever. It's unlikely even for a stern patriot, today, to chant the national hymn in full immersion, without taking notice of himself feeling somewhat emotional, thanks to the score being solemn on purpose. This increased awareness of the general public is linked to the unparalleled amount of situations, viewpoints, and messages now filling all ways of life. Only straightforward fanatics succeed in keeping their one-dimensional world of supposed facts and truths neatly ideotical, built on stern ideas, never available to meet the fluid multiplicity of existence. Until very recently, narrow-mindedness in the form of devout commitment to national or racial chauvinism was still allowed, indeed fostered. Amid lingering clashes between opposed ideotics, we're now moving from the age of nationalism to globalism, from culture clatters to social chutneys. Even so, we need a very cool self-priming to steer clear of oversimplifying solutions

A|D|R irreducibility seems of little use to any particular science, for it allows all construals but endorses none. Humanities too cannot count on it to care about their assorted interests and values. So what is it good for? First and foremost, A|D|R irreducibility guards all concepts (including itself) against misguided partiality, for it allows no self-absorbed naivety. The challenge of saying something of interest for everybody about humankind's being to the world, with no ideological strings attached, is a most fascinating one. With the A|D|R irreducibility concept, prosophy prompts us to address it.

# 29 - Inherent liberty

Far from rebelling against it, humans had better treasure their seminal ambiguity, which shields their originarian liberties – of perception, conception, and depiction – from the impulse of reductive thinking.

I have mentioned freewill, a big subject in philosophy and divinity. Essentially, three divergent speculations have been put forward: 1. determinism (freewill is apparent: Nature's mechanics or some other looming Power rules at all levels); 2. individual idealism (freewill as a personal duty: Souls fight Matter to regain perfection); 3. cosmic idealism (evolutionary freewill: Reason's advancements increase self-determination). From prosophy's viewpoint the question is, What is it that lets people put together such different construals? What made Martin Luther, e.g., assume that no freewill (only faith) is available for women and men to enjoy because Satan, the Adversary, rides non-stop on them like as many donkeys? Answer: the originarian arise|decide|relate statute leaves everybody utterly free to envision whatever they want and to find it sure, forceful, useful, appealing, playful, and pleasing as they like. All historical freewill ideas are, so to say, ironic symptoms of what our inventive powers can do out of those three seminal liberties. The actual freewill engrained in our being to the world comes out of their inescapable interaction.

The native A|D|R identity spawns so much diversity that it appears inherently baffling. If a particular A may attract any D and R, what might result from the collection of all A|D|R permutations is altogether unfathomable. Most often, personal habits, social standards, strong beliefs, acquired skills, etc. maintain an order of sort over the chain of events. We cling to what looks effectual and reassuring. This is definitely the case of ideologies, whose main point is to block out all explanations but those their supporters think of as the right ones. The purpose of a doctrine is to establish an unwavering world order. Formal reasoning, too, abhors the overflow of chance; it was born to kill uncertainty. From everyman's viewpoint, however, it is perfectly suitable and even expedient to human nature not to crush the infinity of its potential being to the world under unbending rules.

As to the past, irreducibility implies that it is lost to us. It's A|D|R arrangements will never be back. The abuse of history by politicians and ideologues comes across as immoral because they disregard the seeds' originarian irreducibility. When Mussolini ordered the Mediterranean Sea to be labeled 'Mare Nostrum' on maps posted in Italian classrooms, he usurped an R element that was born in Roman times within altogether different A|D|R settings. History has been and is going to be forever the playfield of sense & meaning concoctions. Even abuse confirms that humans are inherently free to reshape their world at will. People spend their re-creating freedom on sensible purposes and on zealous goals. No one is innocent of abuse, not even the wisest of men. At the same time, a bit of wisdom is enough for most individuals to meet complex A's with prudent, competent D's and helpful R's. In calming a five-year-old who's missing her teddy bear, her mom is aware that, while the object's value is nix to her adult perception, in the girl's eyes it is worth a great deal of imagination and feelings. So she'll face the loss (A) as if from her daughter's viewpoint (D), finding words (R) suitable to soothe her.

# 30 - The all-engendering trait

_From act to act, the three seeds can merge, swap, and give way to one other. Irreducibility's twin trait,_ transducibility _, accounts for the inventive side of evenience. It projects our inherent liberties on all future acts._

With its inclusive trait the A|D|R frame turns out steady-looking events: events that, with their three-seeded pattern defined, appear as if they couldn't be different. The event looks like already there and we meet it as it is. Or, so to say, there's an already-there that becomes right away the stuff of the event. The act springs forth from its own A|D|R factors, as all acts do, but the prevailing idea is that a meaning has been passed on, something to be taken for granted, since it looks as if reappearing as expected.

This is more evident when the case is felt as one of mere transmission of knowledge. Knowledge is anything interesting for us to be informed about, hopefully the soundest opinion agreed between the best learned on the topic (see Ch. 4). Now, since sound people feel absolutely best-learned on just a few topics, or maybe none, they're easily persuaded, with regard to countless issues around, to trust their best sources. The old Ipse-dixit pattern is always in force, only for the 'ipse' spreading unevenly all over the map. There's obviously a problem of what sources deserve our trust. But what is interesting, here, is that the more our source looks trustworthy to us, the less we want to question its A|D|R prepackaged answers. Thus, a lot of knowledge reaches us, as it were, from the past. There's always a look-back quality to what is taken for granted.

Luckily, general biography shows that the all-inclusive recto is coupled with an all-engendering verso. We're free to distrust a source of knowledge, to fight off its wrapped up A|D|R solutions, or to adapt it for our particular needs. Irreducibility is just Janus' all-witnessing back face. Its all-envisioning front face I call 'transducibility'. It means, literally, '[said of something, its] quality of possibly being moved [into something else]'. At any time the doors are ajar for an original event to come about, due to a change of inception, conception, or depiction. The three seeds of evenience are always in charge; any change concerning any one of them alters the whole and engenders a new event. Like irreducibility, transducibility is something people constantly exploit for their adjustments of sense and meaning. The two, irreducibility and transducibility, are so mixed together that we're going to employ the & concept (Ch. 20) and a combined tag – I & T – to mention them.

But first, let's take a closer look at the transducibility trait, the pivot of human evenience. To put it simply, whatever has served as the arising factor in a former event can morph into either the deciding or the relating factor in a later event. The same is applicable to the D and R seeds: they can transduce into A or R and A or D, respectively.

# 31 - Transducibility

The morphing power of each seed forever alters the resulting whole. Act after act, transducements between seeds make anything happen. Out of control they'd pour out a mess of crisscrossed impressions, suppositions, and suspicions. To achieve a level of constancy in human life, transducibility must be restrained. So the need for firmness in knowledge challenges our inherent liberty.

Think of the five-year-old girl, Sue, whose nonstop crying on her lost teddy bear her mom took as a forceful sign of the child's pain. The toy is nowhere to be found, though, and after a while the infant's cry becomes for her mother more of a nuisance. Then, the very word 'nuisance', carelessly attached to the child's cry, becomes the A factor of a new event, where the woman determines that she's too tired tonight and about losing her temper. Here's a sketchy outline of this piece of evenience:

  * Act 1 – A: The whining and its cause; D: The child's feelings above all; R: "Here's Mom, helping you to get Terry out of the bush!"

  * Act 2 – A: The whining does not dwindle; D: Poor me! R: 'Such a nuisance!'

  * Act 3 – A: Did I say a 'nuisance'? D: I'm too tired tonight; R: 'Keep calm, so not to lose your temper'.

Let's see what happens in this sequence. A1 excites D1 and R1. Together they form the 'good mom' event. A2 is just about the same as A1, but it prompts D2 and R2. The result is a very different, 'bad mom' feeling. The re-emergence of the child's cry in A2 exemplifies irreducibility. An arising factor cannot outlast its event. The next A, however similar to the old one, can be the occasion for a very different event. The meeting of the factors is the limit: the three of them must always be there and react to each other.

Given that, what links Act 2 to Act 3 is different and distinctively human. Here, the R2 element reappears as, or morphs into, the A3 factor. The relating word used in Act 2 starts a new act. 'Nuisance' becomes the new A, asking for its own D and R. It's a case of transduction A  R. After that, maybe the D3 factor will cause another act to follow, where what the woman thinks of herself tonight turns into the A element of Act 4, and so on. With transducibility, there's no limit to what Sue's mother might summon up tonight: her daily routine, her motherliness, her life's prospects.

A great number of assumptions and expectations lay nestled, more or less detailed, in the overall premise of her current life: her being a loving mom, her only child squeezing much selflessness on Mom's part, her inner language hardly ever being inordinate, a self-claimed reputation of never losing her temper, etc. This and much more is understood in lieu of the dots in her basic [...that] {A|D|R}. Imagine Teddy having been found behind the coach in no time. No need to go on until Sue's tears become a 'nuisance', no need for this mom to rebuke herself for having thought of her child as a 'nuisance'. Above all, no need for her to retrace her steps from the ordinary of her life to what latently backs it, the purring mainframe of her being to the world. However, if what is enfolded in her usual premise [... that] were exposed, an ulterior [... that] would replace the old one, a new three-seeded horizon of the events.

Evenience, needless to say, is rarely as streamlined as I've exemplified it thus far, particularly when an intense interaction of the seeds speeds up the flow of evenience. Nonetheless, human being to the world is not necessarily convoluted. The repetition of meanings in everyday life, together with the containment of far-fetched sense, is usually enough to spare most of the intricacies. Handling the amount of life's A|D|R diversity is a task most people carry on effortlessly. Normally, how to do it, to what extent go back to habitual meanings or search for sense, these are issues of personal choice and character.

Now, to add a few more hills and hollows to our basic assumption, let's briefly consider the following: a. that an individual's life is usually unfolding as one broad narrative, not as a random collection of episodes; b. that it's very often the case of an A|D|R identity actually being a triple connection of compilations from past events; c. that the A|D|R intra-act and inter-act connections are mainly prological; d. that the fractal depth of each seed is ultimately contained only by the act having to be lived.

# 32 - Kafka's Mutter problem

Transducements from seed to seed (A D, D R, R A, etc.) are commonplace in everybody's evenience. To what extent a transducement is effective in one's life and effective to what, there's no way to foretell. The range of viewpoint alteration allowed by transducibility is as vast as the human universe.

Halfway into his 24 October 1911 diary entry, Franz Kafka treats us to a neat example of R transducement. "Yesterday, writes the 28-year-old insurance-company clerk, it dawned on me that I haven't loved my mother nearly as much as she deserved and I might do, because the German tongue has kept me from doing so." This seems a bizarre remark coming from a son: "Sorry, Mom, I do not love you very much but you know what, the problem is I call you 'Mother' while we're supposed to speak Yiddish." Was the way Franz called his mommy answerable for what he felt about her? Well, the A|D|R perspective makes this weird statement quite realistic. If of any arising I'm free to decide what it implies and how it's conveyed, then of any how-it's-conveyed I'm free to make out a different arising.

But things are of course a great deal more complex. It all depends on where such a remark came from and where it went in Franz's life. From the outside, we may well judge it as either a sensitive or arid remark; but of course the outside, from where we are looking into Franz's existence, is our own life, an altogether different chain of eveniences. And while of Kafka's inner feelings about his family relations we seem to 'know' a lot from his own hand, his actual being to the world, its unique sense-&-meaning mix, will forever elude our grasp. This said, there's ample evidence in Kafka's writings of how laborious was his existential quest. The I & T interaction in him appears to have been dreadfully active. In a sense, it was responsible for him to backtrack to the basic values of life. Maybe the 'Mutter' problem brought Franz's thorny rumination on his filial affection to greater depths or just diverted his attention to a very peripheral explanation. To guess from his journal, letters, and fiction Kafka's intuitions came from R transducements quite often. Typical in a writer, the modes of expression attracted his attention. The D transducements are rare in comparison; Franz lets know what he feels, but he's seldom eager to scrutinize the D factor separately. Whatever the seminal type, with him such insights do not strive to unite on a common ground of comprehension, being more like sparse aperçus, between the painful and the ironic. This loose mood reflects on Kafka's works and sets them famously apart.

Where Franz's 'Mutter' problem comes from? Into what is it going to be transduced or reduced? The I & T ratio is here at issue. This more or less applies to all eveniences. Every shift in the A|D|R chain of connections is just as likely to enhance as to trim down a person's view of his/her being to the world. A life is normally felt as a continuity of experiences, where all A|D|R momentary identities add to the rational and emotional content of one's existence as a whole. When a startling event causes an individual's stockpiled assortment of A|D|R associations to fly apart, the output is ecstasy or misery. An overall reset of values is likely to occur.

A living act resonates, so to speak, under the existential nave; then again, there's no nave but for the joint effect of the reverberating acts. Moreover, some events seem to muffle the live echo of evenience. They do not add to the chorus, they sort of subtract part of the sound. The broader our concept of the originarian-presentarian, the deeper we live our own being to the world. Eventually, a concrete continuity is reached by living each presentarian A|D|R identity as a stitch in life's big embroidery. Such metaphors sound vague, though, and we have to go on and strengthen our analysis in order to make general biography interesting and useful enough, a sensible companion in ordinary life. So let's expand a little about the A|D|R identity as a rich polyphony of transducements (points b. and c., end of Ch. 31).

# 33 - Intra- & inter-act nexuses

In order to be effective and engender things, selves, words, symbols, etc., A|D|R seeds need to connect between them in each act and in doing so they build up eveniences. A|D|R seeds breed prologically, even when the surface concern is all about logic. Moreover, the three seeds being originarian, they don't share the same prologic.

As eveniences are threads of life, and events are strands of eveniences, so a number of filaments blend into a single act. The A|D|R identity is rarely triggered by a single A element, coupled to just one D and one R. In most events, for each seed several seminal ingredients meet. For instance, a plain act as switching the TV on can be the meeting point of such A elements as a1) having an approximate notion that it's about our favorite sitcom's time; a2) noticing that there's no one around who might wish to watch something else; a3) a passing reflection about there being no other concern or priority at the moment; a4) the last episode having been so-so; a5) the hope that this one will be on a level with the best of the series... Now, the D sub-factors of the same act need not to match the A elements one by one. Some of the latter will just contribute their granted meaning and elapse; others will maybe merge with a D factor in line with them or completely out of line. The two last A elements might connect with both a certain eagerness to watch the program and a fleeting reluctance, a wavering attitude that would be part of the D side of the event. The screen still blank and the thumb doubtful on the remote would possibly function as R elements, marks of that hesitancy. There's no limit to what we may gather as having part in a live act, but for the act having to be actually lived – which poses the heaviest possible limitation, for there's no way to capture an event other than by living a new and different one. This is why the description of anybody's being to the world must be maintained on very general terms and the candid hope for a full-structured existential rationale disabused.

At this point, it's easier to see why we need to bring in the variety of prological nexuses (see Ch. 11), connections of any kind, no matter how labeled from a logical viewpoint. Where do we need nexuses? Facets of the D, R, and A seeds (like the five a's above) must connect to form each of the three seeds of an act. Then the three seeds have to merge into an act. From act to act a connection is also wanted, usually several of them. Likewise, between eveniences... Here, it will be enough for us to distinguish between intra-act nexuses and inter-act connections. But, apart from where they do operate, are they categorically different? It does not seem so. Both intra- and inter-act factors can align, merge, fuse, collide, be at odds, and so on. And they do so to a certain extent, neatly or messily, with respect to this but not to that, etc. Trim logical ties are often implied, but the overall motion is prologic. It admits of ambiguity, double entendres, similes, contradictions, self-deceits, ironies, and absurdities.

As to intra-act nexuses, how come they exhibit, from a logic standpoint, such a jumble? Basically, I think, because human experience is messy and we have to mirror it to a certain extent. We try to tackle life's conflicts with adaptive responses. In practical matters, humans prefer their acts to be pliant to real occurrences rather than true to some abstract non sequitur. As to inter-act connections, the main catalyst of prological nexuses is transducibility itself, which can turn any A, D, or R factor into a D, R, or A factor of a subsequent act. In general terms, the logical problem with transducibility is that there's no intrinsic consistency between the three seeds. Being originarian, they come out as unique and irreducible. It has to be so for us to maintain our specific liberties. Human being to the world would fall into bare animality if the three seeds collapsed into mere aspects of a back to back association among organism, information, and the environment.

From the proper logical standpoint, we know (particularly after Bertrand Russell's and Kurt Gödel's theorems) that, for a formal logic to function without incurring in paradoxa, a theory of types must be introduced and ranges of significance established. Basically, this means that, in order to keep my logic sound, what I'm now living at an A (or D or R) level should not meddle recursively in what I'm going to live afterwards at a meta-A (or meta-D or meta-R) level, respectively or not. But this trespassing is what we need to do all the time in real life. Suppose that 1. I've waved at a friend who happened to pass me by on her car. Presently, just an instant or maybe hours later, 2. I'm not happy, I'm afraid my hail was not cheerful enough. So, in act 1 the gesture was meant as expression (R) of the greeting intent (D), reactive to the occurrence (A) of my friend passing by. In act 2 the mode of the gesture – its dubious promptness, jollity, eagerness, etc. – has stepped forward. Now it stands for itself, the A factor of a meta-event. Its sense has to be weighed up, decided and related anew. Even to call act 2 a meta-event is biased on the side of logic, for the relationship between the two acts is elusive; they are more like positioned on crisscrossed levels of experience. In fact, there's no way to maintain a logical continuity between act 1 and 2, for their ranges of significance are mutually inconsistent; but their existential continuity is of course very strong.

# 34 - Local paradigms

Now we have to stretch general biography a bit farther, so as to see through its broad categories what actually happens in human eveniences, which most of the times are piloted by local paradigms.

Here, in an abrupt way, we seem to reach the end of general biography. There's little left to muse on, except this universal shiftiness of all that is the case along a succession of A|D|R transducements. When we go as far as to break our being to the world open, down to the subatomic level of the A, D, and R particles, there's no more matter to be found, just a plasma of vital energy, carrying globules of scrawled information. At such a stage, offering little more than a vague synopsis, elementary biography seems ready to become a powerful weapon in the hands of the skeptic.

Yet, prosophy is not going to be a variety of skepticism. What it looks for is a broad survey of human life, covering everything from procedural reason to emotional impulse in general terms. Unbridled relativism is a phony solution, dogmatic and insular in its own way. Sure enough, general biography upholds the relativist's drive to combat narrow-mindedness in our cultures; but the problem with relativism is that it has long lived in the shade of doctrines more as an opponent than as a proponent of a comprehensive account of human existence. So where we are now is not the end as much as the proper beginning of general biography. To this point, we have just flown over this largest of all fields, surveying the landscape. Now we should land and take a closer look. Again we have to move cautiously, as if we were anybody else, just a human-type being, living no matter when or where. Our field survey must expose, as it were, the X-ray sheet of human life. From this viewpoint, the most striking feature of our day by day being to the world is its overall fluency. Most of the time, we oversee our sense-&-meaning mix quite self-assuredly. We do not seem at all befuddled by transducibility. We get along with a number of A|D|R mutual bonds, usually without much mulling over intra- and inter-act nexuses. How come we normally cope so easily with the details of evenience?

This question invites to discuss the way evenience is actually conceived. An event comes three-seeded for all living beings. This does not mean that it has to be lived as a shaky relationship of vague factors. Humans are animals, first of all, and their visceral ancestry involves much habit. They learn to roam the realm of A|D|R freedom, but they also know how to manage their lives and obtain a sustainable mélange of coherence, efficiency, expense, stress etc. Plato's old myth of Eros' parents (Ch. 9) is still valuable here. It resurfaces in modern concepts like Jean Piaget's assimilation and accommodation: assimilation tries to adapt the environment to what it's easier for the individual to apprehend or comfier to deal with; accommodation presses minds and bodies to adapt to the world, so as to maintain the most beneficial exposure to it. Both accommodation and assimilation are risky by themselves; the trick is all in their balance. Accommodation alone entails huge costs, massive pressure on body and mind; straight assimilation threatens life itself, or the best part of human freedom at the very least. Therefore, a sound negotiation between the two is more than desired, it's required.

General biography detects a similar compromise in whatever we do. For, to spare mental energies, sort out our thoughts, keep anxiety at bay, etc. we don't pay close attention to the A|D|R minute adjustments; it's enough to survey what happens according to a more manageable scheme, i.e. to conform our sense-&-meaning artifacts to a suitable chart. We sketch an outline of our arise|decide|relate goings-on, an approximate instrument of self-governance, and stick close to it as long as it does not impair our being to the world. It is both tempting and down-to-earth to allow ourselves such a compromise. Given the vastness of human experiential chances, a good measure of act-by-act accommodation & assimilation should never be missed.

From a strictly rational viewpoint the problem is hardly different. If anything, it is more pressing. Intellect poses itself as the agent of intelligence, so it has to find a way to grasp reality. The risk for a strong intellect is to indulge in its own estimations and see reality – the complexity of human [A|D|R] {A|D|R} circumstances – embodied in what it's able to grasp. Now, as we've observed in the last few chapters, the triggers of human evenience, the arise|decide|relate seeds, are shifty and elusive because a. they grow together, blend into one yield, and are harvested as one crop; b. being irreducible and mutually transducible, the A|D|R factors are short-lived. The intellectual remedy to this constitutional state of human affairs is to model reality after a paradigm. The problem is, all paradigms are fictional, but it's tempting to take the favored one for real.

# 35 - The quest for the basic paradigm

The originarian A|D|R identity is fully experienced by all human beings, even as a close description of it is extremely difficult to provide. So, different paradigms have flourished in history, struggling to tame the originarian diversity of the one human identity.

Myths, legends, religions, philosophies have offered more or less fascinating adaptations of the A|D|R identity. Historic paradigms present different answers to the same originarian question or aspects thereof – locally sought-after solutions that have been molded over time, after social, economic, technical, and ideological changes. Paradigms, each one in its time and space, were considered rightful worldviews, if not ultimate answers. Actually, they were just different readings, locally reasonable, of the universal being-to-the-world experience. So let's borrow Thomas Kuhn's paradigm concept, moving it from science history to general biography: individuals and societies model their conception of the A|D|R identity after a local paradigm. Paradigms are made to curb the seeds' originarian drive.

How do these paradigms compare to one other? It's an interesting question that leaves elementary biography. Paradigm description and comparison is the field of cultural biography, bordering on cultural anthropology. To keep on with biography in general, we have to look for what all paradigms have in common, the shared preparadigm, the missing link between the A|D|R flux and the local models, whether formally rendered or simply lived off. Now, to find out what the preparadigm might look like, let's consider the following:

  1. A paradigm's main purpose is a sizeable cutback of the A|D|R unsteadiness without losing touch with life's eventfulness. Like an anchor, a paradigm has to retain life's boat against the drift, while letting it float freely to the tide.

  2. The stiffer the paradigm, the less suitable its connection to the flow of life as humans face it. At the same time, the steadiest paradigms are found in animal life, where humans come from, and in all sorts of practical and conceptual automata, which most of us love to think as valuable proxies for human abilities. So, it is not strange at all to see how very welcome are, every so often, formats of understanding that are strict and even authoritarian.

  3. As far as there's a need for meaning (Ch. 19), a paradigm indication is unavoidable. Meanings rely on established agreements, and no agreement is achievable without an explicit or implicit reference to an overall pattern of 'reality', which in fact is an assumption about the premise [... that] and what it implies.

  4. A grand hope of myths, religions, and most philosophies was to explain life as a meaningful consoling Whole. So they sort of had to be paradigmatic, since uncertainty offers little consolation.

  5. Given the I & T freewheeling interaction (Ch. 31), there's quite a few obvious ways to secure a firm A|D|R relationship. The instrument is forced reduction: the reduction, for instance, to one supreme entity with three complementary personae, or to three conflicting entities forever irreconcilable with each other, or to a hierarchy where any of the seeds rules over the other two (as in Fichte's heroic idealism, where the D seed's primacy was paramount), or the subjection of any one of them to a diarchy of the remaining two (as in Husserl's phenomenology, which focuses on the A/D, object/subject bond).

  6. With the above points in mind, we confirm the all-including goal: a plausible preparadigm should befit all historical paradigms and every individual overall vision. It's a loose scheme that we're looking for, connecting the A|D|R originarian identity to the variety of its depictions.

Now, starting from the fleeting A seed, if we look for something slightly more constant, very soon we find out, in all cultures, the concept/idea of objectity. The arising seed is approximated as an objective presence. The noun, object, sort of ossifies the verb: what was transient becomes durable, the unrestrained serviceable, the nameless effable. By the same token, from the D seed to the idea of a thinking subjectity the route is easy. A subject involves "a thinking or feeling entity; the conscious mind; the ego, especially as opposed to anything external to the mind." (See OED on line, s.v., 4). As to R seed, there are a couple of very general ideas matching its twin relation to D and A: medium and logos, respectively. I prefer 'medium' and its derivates to 'logos', the logos concept being too deeply sunken in history, overloaded with all kind of secular and spiritual expectations.

So the general concept/ideas (depending on their usage) of object, subject, and medium are called for to grasp the inner relations of our being to the world, the A|D|R identifying diversity. In other words, once the A|D|R cofactors come to the fore as ubiquitous aspects of evenience, the human mind tries to cope with them. To this purpose they are substantiated as object, subject, and medium/logos (O|S|M). Compared to the full relativity of the A|D|R originarian seeds, object, subject, and medium (even in this most general, transcultural acceptation) should be called indeed ideas. Just think of how objective was God's existence all over the Middle Ages, causes and effects before Hume's critique, a scientific fact under 19th century naïve positivism, class struggle in Marxist ideology, early-age seduction and trauma in Freudian psychoanalysis, and so forth. However, compared to what has been deemed objective, subjective, and logic in past paradigms, they deserve to be assumed here as concepts, because we know that they are, in fact, nothing more than intellectual appropriations of the A|D|R originarian intricacy.

Traditionally, the more a worldview tried to be unique, the more effort it put toward O|S|M demarcation. A 'good' ontology was supposed to tell apart what's objective from what's subjective by way of a specific, clear-cut language. Categorization was the mind's weapon against the unpredictable course impressed on evenience by transducibility. Ideologies cordoned off the originarian diversity at the heart of A|D|R identity. Prone to self-validation, systematic thinking reverses the natural order: from its viewpoint, it does not resort to force its credos upon reality because the A|D|R identity outwits all categorization. Quite the opposite, it is confident to outwit A|D|R 'apparent' diversity with its dogmas, so it has a right to force them on it. This is a vicious argument, of course. However, a shift toward O|S|M categorization is unavoidable and even reasonable. Let's examine why.

# 36 - The O|S|M preparadigm

The object|subject|medium preparadigm turns out to be a good approximation of the real thing, an educated guess at what our being to the world workings. The cumulative result is good judgment.

Let's imagine a particular scene from ages ago. An artist is shaping a clay figurine of an ancestor to his clan. In preparadigmatic terms, we might suppose that, at first, a lump of clay (O1), the man (S1), and his mental model (M1) join to form the focus of the event. As the artist puts himself to work, the O1|S1|M1 structure dies out. A human figurine materializes (O2), representing (M2) the dead ancestor (S2.1) for his living offspring (S2.2): transducibility causes O1S1M1 to converge on O2; irreducibility excites S2 and M2 to fill the voids. However, the prehistoric artist would not be satisfied with our description. To him the clay figurine, once done and adorned, will take the place of the ancestor; it will turn into the ancestor himself. A rite will consecrate it. Clan members will worship it. The artifact, now imbued by the dead's soul, is going to trade O2 for a transcendent S3, which in turn will prompt its matching M3 and O3. For the people involved, it will never come back to being a lump of clay. It has grown into something different in essence and effect. Briefly, beliefs govern transducibility. They need to do so, because there's something in them, the dogmatic element, that the believer takes for granted. Strong beliefs are supposed to convey uncontroversial meanings. Instead, the preparadigm can state no particular meaning, because it hosts them all. This absolute neutrality deprives it of the fascination typical of ideas. The preparadigm value as a concept rests on its being impartial with regard to all local paradigms and their added beliefs, hopes, solutions, consolations, etc.

Meanings are everywhere, like floor tiles under our feet. Meanings deliver what is taken for granted (Ch. 19), so they recede to the background or framework of the present act, the foreground being occupied by the sense-building aspects. A reader, for instance, prevents the text's black-on-white appearance to encroach on higher-level reading processes. Actually, in skilled reading all lower levels of activity are deadened, mental energies being devoted to the higher ones, the overall expectation that stems from the written text meeting the reader's mind. Suppose the text is an warm e-mail from Jean to Bob. He's going to live it as an experience of express contact with her: an S-denoted act where, for the time being, the ordinary O and M aspects (the trifling details, the known turns of her style, the appearance of the text on the screen, etc.) are either subdued or switched off. Even the odd off-key word won't possibly disrupt the overall feeling of a genuine S-to-S contact. However, the O and M factors stand by, ready to re-claim the scene and launch a different act as soon as something interferes. Assuming Jean has selected, for that long e-mail to appear very personal, an eye-tiring handwriting font, Bob is going to see his attention sidetracked, no matter how peppery his liaison with her. The font's appearance will possibly become the leading O-related aspect of the moment. A moment later – one more transducement – he'll reach back to the S side, but on a different O|S|M blend: objective will appear the strain for the eye. The font will mediate an impression of naivety on Jean's side, an unpleasant nuance added to what Bob thinks of her.

Likewise, water to a novice swimmer is hyper-objective. It floods her nose, mouth, eyes, and ears. It mostly means challenge. Her whole self is called out, asked to gain control on the non-native element. Evenience in such a case is made of many events in a row, each of them underlining a new facet of the trying experience. A few months later that same person will swim without even noticing the 'fact' of it, her mind free to relax and think something else. Eventually, the very objectivity of the water will fade away. Objective will possibly appear the work-out, the resulting fitness, etc. Similar developments cover training and routine in every field, indeed they affect the entire life. We all get an ample supply of O|S|M continuity and variation from daily eveniences.

Language of course mirrors it in many ways. It happens that a single adjective helps to clarify the O|S|M alignment of an entire sentence, like when we hear someone saying: "A corpulent man entered the elevator," where the adjective carries on itself the main denotation of the sentence, one of rather obtrusive objectivity. Compare with: "A stylish woman stood in the doorway," which conveys the appearance of a hidden M to catch or an appealing S to deal with. At any time, a cloudy sky may join one's present gloominess (S), come across as a natural blend of air and vapor (O), or as a flock of sheep (M). Or one may ignore the sky as a whole, see just one cloud, maybe a camel in its stead, a weasel, a whale.

Presently, let's get back to the originarian formula of whatever is the case (Ch.13): [... that] {ε}. We now understand it as a fleeting three-seeded synthesis, wedged into an unstated overall frame, the three-seeded structure of all being to the world:

[A|D|R that] {A|D|R}.

How does the O|S|M preparadigm, the embedded form of all intellectual notions, compare to this formula? It offers just an outline of the originarian condition. The three seeds come out more fixed, more manageable, while less true to life. The main differences are found in the stiffening of A|D|R roles. Specification is transient and fuzzy between A, D, and R. The three originarian seeds are strictly concomitant, meaning that they become available only through their mutual concurrence. Anyway, their joint venture allows a reflective mind to earmark the various aspects of an act as either more A than D or R (objective), more D than A or R (subjective), or more R than A or D (symbolic).

In point of fact, the O|S|M preparadigm takes always the stricter form of a local paradigm, clinging to some worldview. At that point, is the originarian A|D|R richness still visible? It all depends from the refinement of one's consciousness. Can a paradigm's stickers, even the most refined ones, stay true to the A|D|R originarian contents? No hope. Even the O|S|M preparadigm, underdetermined as it is, depicts the A|D|R seeds in a static relationship. Why? Because this is the minimum required qualification for anything to be devised, let alone described. So, the more we delimit objects, subjects, and signs in an A|D|R originarian relationship, the less of presentarian diversity we allow ourselves to access.

Anyway, together with irreducibility, transducibility is operative in all evenience. Nothing hinders it from being active, the cramping weight of ideas excepted. If nothing obtrudes, what is lost for diversity in a single O|S|M arrangement can be reclaimed as soon as a new act takes place. In such a way, evenience captures both the identity and the diversity of human being to the world, within the bounds of personal history, available notions, cognitive power, emotional richness, and the espoused paradigm.

# 37 - A thorny wisdom

The A|D|R identity as a bare concept seems to be of little use in life's daily management, except as a methodical warning against all narrow-mindedness. The O|S|M preparadigm, on the other hand, borders the realm of ideotics. Can it offer reasonable control and sensible guidance?

Ideotics, that is, schemes of ideas, are thick and dangerous as a source of judgment; human history is gloomy from their nefarious costs. But there are catches with the O|S|M preparadigm as well, the pattern of conception more akin to the being-to-the-world dynamics. Here's a provisional list its features. It is open 24/7 to all kind of transducements; it allows prological conjectures to overtake logic arguments, for better or worse; it does not offer prepackaged knowledge; it approximates the A|D|R originarian interaction, which is always, to some extent, waiting to be known; it is perceived early but matures late in life, if at all, and it's awkward to convey; it does not solve nor soothe the way a paradigm does. On the plus side, the O|S|M preparadigm does not suffer from ideology; it is never abrupt or final; it's open to divergence; it allows people to basically understand the flow of evenience, their own as well as alien ones; it suggests what a transcultural workbench could be like.

As long as the wisdom we're hoping to achieve points to an encompassing apprehension of all visions, the O|S|M preparadigm is our natural frame of mind; however, we feel compelled to harden it as soon as we aim at a specific vision, not to mention a creed. The O|S|M preparadigm grants each seed a sketchy distinctiveness, but it does not curb the I & T interaction. It lingers in close proximity to the originarian A|D|R interaction, seemingly too close to be put into any use, whether ideological, political, or moral. It is indeed useful whenever we look around and try to make sense of what we live, but it cannot enforce our treasured meanings.

By such a general paradigm, the wisdom we're supposed to acquire is a thorny one. No wonder knowledge and wisdom have been at odds with each other all along. All formal knowledge avoids vagueness as far as possible. As to ideologies, they abhor hesitation, which would ruin authority. Within an ideology's walls, all that is the case must be either meant or discarded as senseless. With philosophies, it isn't that different. They do not just need to rein in the arise|decide|relate polyphony; they must tame the object|subject|medium preparadigm too. In order to meet their requirements they stiffen it up. Hence the miscellany of historical paradigms that have established what object, subject, and medium essentially were supposed to look like, so as the three seeds did not get in each other's way, except as far as the adopted worldview let them interact.

Meanings are more efficient than senses (Chapters 18, 19). They are kind of professional, very good at their job. Obviously, to be efficient they have to be assigned proper jobs. Ironically, job assignment is not something a meaning can do. It requires a balancing act, an assessment for which the entity behind the being-to-the-world structure should be responsible. Sorry to say, though, there's no evidence of a pre-extant entity, apart from whatever (A) we choose (D) to assign (R) for doing the job. Whoever is in charge – soul, cogito, mind, Homo sapiens sapiens, picture it as you like – was born from past A|D|R operations lent over to a particular O|S|M paradigm.

At all times, this self-referring circle has been perceived as frustrating. It was precisely what divine revelation and/or human reason were required to break through. Hence their struggle against its resilience. However, no mind can outdo its own being to the world for good; it is there by default, before, during, and after the mind's attempts to rise above it. This essay is not meant to show how single philosophies were built around their distinctive O|S|M-based paradigms. The impelling question here is a different one. Imagine we overcome that frustration and accept our being to the world as it is. Nothing else to manage it except the O|S|M preparadigm, the nearest we can get to the originarian triple identity. What kind of approach should we choose in order to make the most, day after day, out of such an all-encompassing Weltanschauung?

# 38 - Worth of a wallet

Can anybody live up to the preparadigm alone? A measure of creed seems unavoidable. Human life is built on O|S|M permutations, but it is conditioned by all sort of factual compromise and inspired by personal values.

Humans radiate all kind of values. If only to be made out, let alone to be consistently lived, a value requires steady O|S|M interactions, which may easily grow into dogma. So where is the limit, the golden mean between sensible flexibility and ideotics? The general-biographic preparadigm hosts all values but upholds none in particular, allowing much scope but little assistance when choice is due. However, if you spot here a fault on prosophy's side, consider that perhaps the most revered moral virtue in Western tradition, phronesis, was explained by Aristotle as the acquired habit of choosing wisely when, why, how, about what, and in relation to whom act. This brilliant truism cannot be overestimated: the golden mean is never available beforehand. It has to be determined over and again in face of evenience. At the same time, virtuous behavior needs practice and reinforcement. General biography upholds the phronesis concept in that the originarian A|D|R identity is only accessible in evenience, forever subject to meaning-&-sense arrangements.

So the question is, Can we live up to the preparadigm alone, which calls for an earnest reassessment – over and over again – of O|S|M deals? The national and international landscape illustrates the opposite. Zeal brews ubiquitously: political parties routinely avoid concerted action, their particular concerns being touted to motivate quarrel. Bipartisanship – meaning just two sides getting together – looks as if sort of miraculous. In the U.S., to a Second-Amendment chauvinist the gun, his faith's symbol, embodies the individual's untouchable self, to the point that even minor restrictions are felt as an intolerable objective affront. So much so that, by the same token, he pillories the manifest 'communal' meaning of the Second Amendment, where the right of the citizen to bear arms involves a very different O|S|M construct: "a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state".

The procedure by which ideotics are built is standard:

a. exploit the I & T levers to allow for one's favorite solution (FS) to be introduced (for instance, the Second Amendment's de-facto amendment);

b. block the relevant sense-meaning dynamics: resist any additional weighing up, take FS for granted;

c. remove a. and b., so as to consider FS self-evident.

Passion crimes too thrive on the collapse of A|D|R-based discernment. They're often described as psychotic fits, inexplicable deeds. My implication here is that a broader awareness, fostered since childhood, of how our being to the world actually works, of its sublime and perilous freedom, could eventually lead to more inner and outer empathy, to the effect that even in distress one would be able to perceive different O|S|M arrangements, instead of acting out as if obsessed by the silliest one.

People tend to stand by their favorite O|S|M cocktails. Meaning, if at all possible, prevails on sense. Fine-tuned relativism is much talked about but little practiced. Think of what is money and career to some people, of what is status, style, look, even abdominals, but also learning, integrity, loyalty, care. Coherence, no doubt, deserves much reverence. It isn't always the mediocre companion once reviled by R. W. Emerson. An answerable parent only on weekends or a vegetarian every other day would seem kind of farcical. And if our friend Joan really wants to show off (S) in her sports car (O), a primary status symbol (M) to her, she's to keep it spick and span (O) and will indeed opt for a matching haircut (M) and attitude (S). Also, she'll replace her car as soon as it won't be all the rage (M), never mind how faultlessly it eats the road (O). Human originarian identity offers unsteady, forever-arguable answers. As a result, to most people a stringent structure of understanding looks more persuasive than any open approach to the essential variety of human life.

Thus, here's humankind's tight path: Can we proceed inclusively (Ch. 27) and detail O|S|M shifts without fencing the originarian open space of all being to the world? Moreover, assuming we tray and embrace a general-biographic worldview, can we achieve anything in terms of theoretical or practical knowledge as a result of its very broad concepts? In my opinion, the answer in either case is a problematic yes. Yes, since we do it all the time, mainly in daily matters of little consequence. Problematic, because bringing O|S|M operations to light does not provide an answer to anything in particular, nor does it soothe us with any short-term, quick-fix intellectual device. It's more like a challenging meditation, at the end of which the intellectual, emotional, and moral burden of being to the world rests on our shoulders heavier than before. But first, let's exemplify, in O|S|M terms, how people the world over manage their knowledge in matters of little or no ideotical concern to them.

Let's imagine what Bob's wallet might be to him. A wallet is a "pocket-sized, flat, folding holder for money and plastic cards" (according to OED on line, s.v., 1). Bob's O|S|M-defined wallet is a lot different. As an object, it is no doubt a holder, but how about the modifiers? It unfolds, it flips and opens out as well; it holds just paper money, no coin pouch inside; apart from different plastic and non-plastic cards, it usually accommodates some proofs of payment, etc. So it looks more bulging than flat. But the objective trait Bob most values about his wallet is hidden behind the 'pocket-sized' modifier. His past wallets were pocket-sized too but bulkier. This one is newly designed, a mini pocket-size thing, barely wider than a credit card, fitting all pockets, very snug. Three and a half years into using it daily, he's still grateful to the person who chose it for him. This reminiscence conjures up more M and S aspects. A birthday present from his best friend Jean, this cozy nappa thing is also a treasured sign of her affection. It makes him think of her good taste in choosing what is contemporary, stylish, innovative, and no-nonsense. Through this present of her, Bob almost sees her in person. On checking out of a Paris hotel, last year, he couldn't find it. Had he misplaced it? Had he been so dumbo as to let a pickpocket steal it? For half an hour he was frantic, a multifarious A|D|R anxiety where the loss of the wallet as a friendship token had its place not far below the much more substantial loss of banknotes, all sort of cards, driver's license, and what else. Then, the moment Bob retrieved it in the recesses of his luggage, one more S-linked layer did coat his wallet. This time the implications bore on him: How came he had lost his trip's most important valuable in his own bag? Could it be a sign of memory loss? Was he developing something or what?

# 39 - SS-Hauptsturmführer's Weltanschauung

There's no ontic nor ethic being to be found anywhere. Or as many as you want. Human experience shows a composite being to the world, brought about by complex patterns of O|S|M occurrences, which are more-or-less steady constraints against the A|D|R identity.

Thus, to Bob his wallet is a leather article (O), a messenger (M), and part of him (S) too. On the whole, it's an O|S|M gathering of facets, a patchy pattern of object- & subject- & medium-leaning aspects. The event that he's going to live will determine what the wallet will actually 'be'. Usually, its object-leaning aspects stand to the fore. This is due to most acts implying its O-leaning aspects oftener than the M- or S-leaning ones, for obvious reasons. But imagine decades later, an elderly Bob unable to do any more driving or shopping. The worn, empty wallet holds only old memories, but it still smells style (M) and love (S) to the old man.

At close range all so-called things, facts, entities, phenomena are but shifting event-shaping patterns based on O|S|M collections and connections:

an O|S|M collection is an evolving cluster of as many seminal facets as a particular being to the world is able, at any given moment, to focus on;

an O|S|M connection is an evolving interaction of as many prological nexuses as a being to the world is able to deploy.

Thus, the objectual side of an act, its objectuality, results from the prological sum of all objectities partaking in. In a similar way, an act's subjectual side, its subjectuality, follows from the prological computation of all partaking subjectities. And an act's medial side, its mediality, ensues from the prological calculus of all its median input. To ease term congestion, the following table may help.

Because of irreducibility these terms do not refer to anything real; reality springs from triseminal concurrence only. So what's the use for these concepts? They help to steer clear of ideotics. People already count on such mobile concepts most of the time. Actually, it's of vital importance for anyone to avoid unbending views, at least when they are detrimental to one's interest. A measure of creed is unavoidable. We can live neither by A|D|R quicksilver guesses nor by neutral, dispassionate O|S|M patterns. But as soon as a measure of creed is allowed in, there's no sure way to control its outcome, being implicit for a creed to be indulged. Self-interest makes all sort of seemingly good reasons bloom. In Transatlantic (2013), Colum McCann imagines following Frederick Douglass, the Afro-American social reformer and orator, in his 1848 Ireland tour. The country is stricken by famine. He's affected by what he sees, Catholic peasants dying from starvation, no public assistance, etc. But his hosts come from the affluent Anglican elite, he needs their money for the cause of abolitionism back home. After a fruitless effort to have them just talk of the appalling humanitarian crisis all around them, Douglas muses (Bloomsbury, 2014, p.66):

"There would always have to be an alignment. There were so many sides to every horizon. He could only choose one. No single mind could hold it all at once. Truth, justice, reality, contradiction. Misunderstandings could arise. He had one cause only. He must cling to it."

Partiality is so easy to justify, even by the noblest of minds. To maintain an emergency exit from self-sympathetic reasoning should be seen as a moral obligation by every decent fellow. But then, the multiple-horizon idea itself can be made to comply with the worst of causes. Listen to this rumination by SS-Hauptsturmführer Aue, the main character in Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes (Gallimard, 2006, p.284). Wehrmacht Leutnant Dr. Voss, an erudite linguist, has tried to convince him that Nazi racial arguments based on language history are by all accounts groundless. After Voss's tirade in defense of sound scientific standards, Aue remembers having said to himself:

"Mais Voss, malgré tout son talent, avait les opinions tranchées d'un jeune homme. Les choses étaient certainement plus complexes qu'il ne le pensait. Je n'avais pas les connaissances pour le critiquer, mais il me semblait que si l'on croyait en une certaine idée de l'Allemagne et du Volk allemand, le reste devait suivre naturellement. Certaines choses pouvaient être démontrées, mais d'autres devaient simplement être comprises; c'était aussi sans doute une question de foi."

["But Voss, despite all his talent, had the definitive opinions of youth. Things were certainly more complex than he thought. I didn't have the knowledge to criticize him, but it seemed to me that if you believed in a certain idea of Germany and of the German Volk, the rest should follow naturally. Some things could be proved, but others simply had to be understood; it was also probably a matter of faith." (see J. Littell, The Kindly Ones, Harper Collins, 2009)].

From Aue's viewpoint, obduracy was on Voss's side not his. He was kind of broad-minded instead. He knew his Dilthey by rote. He was being receptive to verstehen as a superior way to approach complexity than through plain erklären. By the way, neither officer is concerned about the killing impact of racial ideas, the butchery all around them, perpetrated by their own corps. Aue's faith in a given idea of Germany was strong as was Voss's in one idea of science. The linguist was right as far as they were talking science, but his arguments were lost as soon as Nazi ideology was thrown in. While Dr. Aue's professional skills are unclear through the novel, one more living metaphor of the banality of evil, Dr. Voss knows the lot about Caucasian dialects; yet both of them seem to ignore the basics of human being to the world: the making of evenience, how a concept is formed, how easily it metamorphoses into an idea, object- subject- and medium-centered dialectics, the complex meaning-sense dynamics, the mix-up of logic and prological nexuses in ordinary life... Without this crucial know-how, intellectual, emotional, and ethical values are up to grabs.

# 40 - Hegel's owl and mine

The O|S|M preparadigm does not classify things. It treats them as maybes. It reasons about O|S|M facets and their transient clusters. This way, it scans the complexity of evenience like no other theoretical approach can possibly do.

Such a deep ignorance, though, does not show in the two SS's daily routine, as the novel fittingly portrays them. They are competent in social relations and comradeship; they know their share of subtlety, dignity, irony, joke, flair, regard, fair play, etc. Life has taught them self-control and negotiation, the art of comprehending by way of a balanced approach to the many sides of so-called reality. How come they perform so gullibly on account of some absurd party-sponsored ideas?

On the idiotic effect of ideology much has been proposed and reversed. All through his novel Littell evokes psychoanalysis as a frame of reference for authoritarian personality, oppressive family ties, emotional perversity, and moral debacle. Others would suggest social pressure, class identity, mass psychology, intellectual stubbornness, economic forces, media power, ghosts from the past, covert interests, bad conscience, bigotry, you name it. One by one, they are interesting explanatory efforts; all together, they offer an interesting storybook of what we humans think of ourselves. However, in a sense they are part of the problem, for they miss the premise [... that], the basic framework of what they strive to explain and of the explaining act. Here the mind enacts its effort as if from the outskirts of evenience, from an immanent afterlife, a beyond at hand. From prosophy's viewpoint, all assumptions should be assumed as elements of an all-inclusive scenery. Here's where the terms collected in the above table find their use, once the O|S|M basic preparadigm has been introduced. Let's represent their use on a specific case.

In everyday life, a constant A|D|R activity turns out different objectities, subjectities, and mediants. An objectity (o) is this chinaware owl on my writing desk. Its shine is also an objectity, its brittleness, its bizarre white-blue coloring, its cartoonish plumpness, the shop's sticker still at its base are as many objectities (o1, o2... on), all of which I presently happen to bring together as facets of just one 'thing'. However they might as well be noticed alone or in connection with other o's not pertaining to the owl thing. It's a sunny summer afternoon and I happen to be annoyed at too much glitter over my desk – stainless clips, reading glasses, lamp's stem, notebook's case, etc. – the owl's shine is just one more facet of this objective gleaming. Also, the owl's humorous plumpness matches the playful roundness of the alarm clock's design; together with the pen-holding chopper they add a hint of objective jocosity to my desktop. At the same time, this owl thing is a collection of subjectities (s1, s2... sn) and mediants (m1, m2... mn) too. As a mediant, it points to vivid alertness and acumen, to Greek goddess Athena as a symbol of mind power, etc. As a subjectity, it evokes my fondness of its teasing gravity. Also, it reminds to me a visiting friend linking it in irony to my pensive efforts.

Sure, in any given act I rarely compile such an overall inventory. Usually I pay no attention to all those o's, s's and m's as a whole. I just see what I need. I select, I forget, I add on. I bring into play just one facet or a few at a time, those of concern to me in the here-and-now of evenience. Suppose I notice that the owl has somehow drifted to the desk's very edge. Quickly I bring it back to where it usually stands. In doing so, I objectivize its fragility and nothing else. Weeks run on and I do not dwell on the owl thing at all. It kind of disappears from my desktop's objectivity. Then I fall upon a quote from Hegel's famed 1820 Vorrede, where "die Eule der Minerva" – scouting at dusk, when the day is over – is singled out as an apt simile of what philosophy does, namely to etch gray on gray what the Spirit has crafted in full color. Instantly, my plump, comic, bright-colored owl steps in anew, and because of these three peculiar objectities, I mediate it as an ironic post-Hegelian metaphor. Its objectuality (O) still being the same, its mediality (M) is now somewhat more plentiful than before. Maybe even its subjectuality (S) has changed a bit, if I see myself jokily competing with this squatting bird against Hegel's soaring one.

# Part III - Proethics

Human being to the world involves a behavioral heritage that is far from principled, much less fair and just. Part III touches on the ethical paradox we humans have to face: there are "so many sides to every horizon". A license to envision is awarded to every newborn. All viewpoints are created equal. Reason cannot effectually oppose visions it doesn't agree with, because reason itself must be agreed upon. There's no way to make out good and evil except by agreement. And then nobody is out there to make sure that what we agree about is right. As a rule, we deem right what we agree about. Human basic condition is freedom – aesthetic, epistemic, phenomenic, and ontic license. Sadly, it entails no existential justice. Law provides some correction, but the best-case scenario for laws to be willfully abided by is when people's needs harmonize and so do their values. But then no law would be required; goodwill and custom would do the job, as it was the case in archaic communities. In other words, laws tacitly rely on the concept of 'people' to stiffen up as '[such] people [as we, the people, think we should feel, judge, and be like].' The abstract people addressed by local laws replaces the actual plurality of groups and interests. This was the case both under ancien régime and revolutionary ideologies.

In our multicultural age the concept of 'people' should be open to all paradigms. The problem is, the different meanings of 'people', 'law' and other crucial concepts within different groups of the same people are likely to clash. In dire straits, even for a very cohesive people, one tightly unified by religion and mores, it's awkward to maintain a collective vision. In Night (1958) by Elie Wiesel, the well-known novel/memoir on his people's ordeal during WWII, two bitter reflections overshadow all other misery: a. the way self-delusion and absurd hopes prevailed over coherent, matter-of-fact thinking with most fellow Jews under Nazi attack; b. how soon solidarity lost ground against aggressive, crudely selfish behavior amongst victims. Eliezer's most painful memory? Not Kapo brutality nor physical pain, but how he, a teenager at the time, couldn't gather enough moral strength to stand by his father to the end.

The cause for human self-delusion is what we have tried to explain in Part II. One doesn't need to be in deep trouble to cultivate illusions. Our native A|D|R freedom enables us to fabricate all sorts of customized views. Philosophers were supposed to be serene and detached, yet they came out regularly as self-deluding visionaries. The A|D|R limitless interaction, which lends us the ability to build worldviews, is open to all kind of vindication. We seem to think adroitly, but most of the time we are just structuring our wishes. So Eliezer's first shock was due to the brutal revelation of the dull side of human brilliance.

As to Elie's second shock, the question is, What's the standard of moral integrity for anybody who's suffering from injustice? Only the victims can tell. Justice is not rooted in human ethos, which remains nonetheless unaccomplished without radical justice. Without it, humankind as a plural whole and a manifold society of individuals cannot fully enjoy its native freedom. So this is prosophy's message to philosophy: If justice were honored, it wouldn't really matter what individuals might fancy of themselves, what cultural games societies like to play, how people figure out the mechanics of the world they were born in, or what prevails in philosophies and other creeds. But radical justice is far from established between humans, so it's imperative to let everybody see the paradox of its necessity. Is it just an oddity that the oldest bit of Western philosophy – Anaximander's fragment – struggles with this very predicament?

# 4   
1 - Any uses for the O|S|M preparadigm?

General biography suggests that all so-called things, forms, perceptions, ideas, etc. be better figured out as shifting mixes of objectities, subjectities, and mediants prologically connected. People add on and pick out aspects at will, making endless meaning-&-sense adjustments.

We objectivize, subjectivize, and mediate as the case may be. Again, we need a lot of mere meanings in everyday life. This behavior is not only normal, it is very expedient too, if only we bear in mind that each particular objectity (o) is but a facet of a copious, open-ended objectuality (O). This two-sided, single-faced/multi-faceted nature of all eventfulness affects the S and M seeds as well. An effectively sound behavior does not lose track of the whole inventory. The inner eye (or the neural circuitry, if you prefer) quietly monitors the available O/o|S/s|M/m stock, from the trifling detail to the overall conception. For instance, my alarm clock's ball-like roundness does not suggest to me the use of it as a little ball, because I'm well aware, even without thinking about it, that its objectuality comes with ball-unlike objectities attached. A little child would rather try to make it roll on the floor; my O/o|S/s|M/m overall awareness allows for the child's viewpoint, but includes my concern over the object's frailty at the same time.

Now, let's replace the owl, the wallet, the alarm-clock with something else, practical or notional, rational or emotional. Anything else, in fact, the only condition being that we look at it from an existential viewpoint. It's easy to see that the O/o|S/s|M/m framework applies to all that is the case, since it affects our being to the world in all its joints. At all life's junctures, judgment depends from people's O/o|S/s|M/m awareness. Even the ultimate egotist is conscious of this existential complexity. He keeps a close eye on how his own favorite subjectities score in the wide world (how smart he looks, how famously he cooks, whom he's associated with, etc.). From a prosophical viewpoint, though, the typical narcissist's setback is self-restriction. He enforces a preset scheme on evenience, a vertical structure wherein, ideally, the entire O/o|S/s|M/m lot surrenders to the prime yearning for self-promotion. Strange to say, something like that happens in emergencies and in abstract thinking too. In a crisis, it is paramount to choose wisely what to spend time, means and energies for. Most sensibly, drills are meant to instruct people beforehand what to do in a crisis and what not even think to, since most of the individual O/o|S/s|M/m diversity had better be dropped in such a circumstance.

Abstract thinking requires a stringent selection as well. We already know how strict are logic and science's constraints (see chapters 3 and 33). If at all possible, they call for a drastic control of subjectual and medial aspects, which are acknowledged only as far as they contribute to the goal. A logician's dream, for instance, takes the form of a universal objective language, a 'characteristica universalis' in Leibniz's words. No ambiguity, no similes, no irony, puns, expletives: just one exclusive mediant for each abstract objectity, and the entire community of savants as just one big mind taking the same meanings for granted. The common hope is, of course, that these restraints bring about, in due time, a wholesome profit for humankind.

Yet, for all we know, is such a hope reasonable? If elementary biography effectively illustrates the way we humans work, it's worth doubting that humans will ever come to appreciate the full extent of their existential freedom by way of a selective, formal concept of knowledge. At the same time, the O|S|M preparadigm alone, as a neutral all-inclusive blueprint, can hardly provide a solid frame to access human diversity. Seen as the ultimate demonstration of relativism, it may cause discouragement, and even prop up self-indulgence. After all, once you see everything as an O|S|M mix, all reasoning, however far-fetched, gets a chance to look acceptable.

So, a major endeavor faces those who hope for an intellectual and practical use of general biography's all-inclusive view. The preparadigm, as I have outlined it here, is just a rough draft. It points to a complex structure functioning in all humans, which waits to be fully reconnoitered and appreciated – a deep structure that hasn't found till now its way to overt depiction, much less to educational, political, and moral implementation. The space and modes of this introductory essay are not roomy enough to accommodate a discussion on the uses of the O|S|M preparadigm, not to speak of the A|D|R concept. I will limit my notes, here, to a couple of themes: a summing up of prosophy's perspectives and a preamble to prosophical ethics.

# 42 - After philosophy

Philosophy has died of malnutrition: surfeit of logic-centered precepts, want of live prological nexuses; too much abstract talk about being, too little dispassionate study of actual being to the world.

The suggestion of a methodical veil of ignorance (in the vein of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Harvard U.P., 1971/1999), under which one should try to figure out how human being to the world would be described, if people never knew what their social, emotional, and intellectual upbringing urged them to believe, was never put forward. Yet, it would make a painless mental experiment, and a very interesting one. Descartes himself did not cling to his methodical doubt for more than a couple of pages before assuming his well-known formula – Ego cogito, ergo sum, sive existo – as the definitive, clear-cut description of what humans primarily are, that is, thinking matter. For a very long while, with marginal exceptions, Western thinkers observed the human universe as astronomers surveyed the sky before Copernicus, the whole system centered on the spectator. Worldviews befitted the narcissism of local intelligentsias. The rest was 'barbaric'. When the awareness prevailed of how dissimilarly this unique being to the world can be properly experienced and portrayed, cultural pluralism couldn't be ignored anymore. However, the nuts and bolts of human diversity weren't thoroughly reassessed to make room for a truly all-inclusive view of human condition. Several centuries elapsed before Western philosophy gave up the self-deceptive idea of its supremacy. In the 20th century it surrendered to its own metaphysical and ethical collapse.

In our time, elementary biography – the general depiction of all evenience – has become a topic of deep concern for a lot of people. Or so it seems. As ever, the way you think is a response variable of the way you live. When being to the world is constrained, its image in thoughts is hampered. Today, global economy and the Internet mix up interests and cultures. These forces are wiping out old manners of experience and knowledge, submerging them under a deluge of new trends. So people around the world are pushed to react, either with more cultural clashes, based on the old values (religious and national identities, ideologies, fanaticism etc.), or by way of new comprehensive efforts.

An all-inclusive conception of human being to the world seems unavoidable. However, the current intellectual and moral move toward tolerance and dialogue, mutual recognition and acceptance, has yet to prove itself a genuine one. What is the actual purpose of such a concern? Why most non-European societies do not seem ready to oblige in earnest? Why right-wing groups within Europe itself, not to mention the US, rebuff the universalist hug? Maybe once again Western-based intelligentsias take for granted, though now in a covert way, that other cultures will stoop to their 'universal' values. The framework of this local universalism assumes, naïvely, that all views should be weighed up and measured by one yardstick; on the other side, the framework of particularism assumes that human views are unique and essentially incomparable. Few doubt both opposites to be prologically true.

So the current drift toward a non-skeptic, all-inclusive relativism – which this essay tries to highlight from a very general viewpoint – comes after philosophy, the latter having failed to acknowledge our being to the world as it is, with its ultimate lack of principles and oversupply of variety, due to the supple A|D|R fabric of human evenience. But the fading away of philosophy's grand perspectives does not imply desertion of the originarian quest. A full conceptual appreciation of our common lot is still what we acutely need. Postmodernist philosophers favor pragmatism and communitarianism, dialogue and contract. It sounds reasonable. However, pragmatic accords and utilitarian interactions based on some temporary agenda have always been there. Nothing could avert their breaking apart as soon as the give and take failed to satisfy all parties. Behind all that intercourse stood no basic common understanding, no judicious agreement on how our being to the world actually works. Thus, in a deeper sense, philosophy is still before us. Prosophy re-designs philosophy's expectations.

By now, grand narratives of old have shrunken to almost nil. We cannot even regard them any longer as language games, since in the concept of game there's a unity of design, rule, and scope that lacks completely in their present use, fractional and erratic. The postmodern abundance of micronarratives (I'm using here, for brevity's sake, Jean-François Lyotard's terms) is very interesting, of course, but it may soon lead to an abysmal fragmentation of mutually impenetrable stances. However, 'narrative' is an apt word, in my opinion. It suggests where prosophy is likely to dwell in, this day and age. In a sense, it has reached back to where it once belonged, fable, with no strings attached (sense of awe, mystery, allegory, initiation, holiness, otherworldliness, etc.). If all that is the case is what the A|D|R identity brings into being; if there's nothing before and everything comes after it, then maybe a humble recounting is the best way to render its unlimited freedom of perspective, the native I & T activity of its seeds, the daily entanglement of sense & meaning.

In fact, our age is already one of recitation. We have developed an amazing variety of narrative instruments and impersonation modes. Day in day out, we're becoming more interactional. The global village puts much of its time into browsing around and commenting. This interactional fever does not seem just a submission to gadgets. There's a great deal of eagerness involved. As in Renaissance times, humans feel like exploring vital truths through direct participation and relentless depiction. The overall effect is one of revelation; a new era of critical discoveries is opening before us. Only, this time the New World is our own being to the world in all its tones and shades.

# 43 - The fourth seed

Our inner fabric lets us live and die the way we like. Our freedom is both wonderful and worrisome; it is efficient in everything but core justice. Now, in prosophy's light, injustice is a deprivation of that very freedom.

Prological perspectivism is very demanding, though, esthetically and ethically. Against it pushy ideas still prevail. Instead of widespread ideologies, we're now living on asteroids made of pulverized idiosyncratic ideocracies. Much of it is just desperate self-assertion against feelings of social and intellectual annihilation. Lacking a comprehensive frame of reference, the overflow of diversity may be perceived as an intolerable menace, if not a foolish mess. Some people inhabit raw categories: love or hate, friend or enemy, right or wrong, first or last, kiss or knife. This frame of mind spawns a great deal of narrow-minded assertions. In the dark area of the spectrum the neighbor is alien, crucial conversations become brash monologues and complex stories turn into vile propaganda.

On the opposite side, we all witness a wholehearted willingness to improve on the ordinary perception of the originarian-presentarian. Contemporary fiction strives to show readers the bottomless depth of human complexity. Several authors are trying fresh ways of inclusion in their works. Their artistic intent doubles as moral: a wish to carefully depict what we de facto live, the entangled course of everybody's evenience. Old formal must-haves – like unity, catharsis, mystery, adventure, romance, genial wit, cogent plot, ornate symbolism, together with the classic molds of comedy and tragedy – give way to new breeds of storytelling, so as to favor an immersive reconnaissance of what's actually going on in ordinary lives. I think here of the best of Alice Munro, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Colum McCann, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franzen, David F. Wallace, David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson, Meg Wolitzer, Jhumpa Lahiri – just to name a few in the field of English written narrative. Never before has 'fiction' striven to mirror the non-fictional multitudinous firmament of ordinary life as it does in our time. Consider, for instance, this excerpt from Ian McEwan's novel The Children Act (Cape, 2014, pp.76-77):

'And if refusing a blood transfusion should cause his death?' [...] Kevin Henry said, 'He'll have done what is right and true, what the Lord commanded.' Once more, Grieve waited, then he said in a falling tone, 'You'll be grief-stricken, won't you, Mr Henry?' At this point the contrived kindness in the counsel's tone caused the father's voice to fail. He could only nod.

The scene is a case in the family-division court in London and develops under the eyes of a High Court judge, Fiona May, the main character. It's about a seventeen-year-old boy, Adam Henry, who risks dying from leukemia without treatment, which he and his parents oppose because their faith doesn't allow blood transfusion. Kevin is Adam's father. These few lines alone offer the reader several hints of four perspectives: i. the father's, before and ii. after the counsel's adroit prompt; iii. the counsel's, his old-hand tone control, his "contrived kindness"; iv. The judge's, her surveying eye recording the ongoing dynamics. Moreover, the background is the battlefield of two opposing worldviews, v. secular and vi. religious, and the reader is called to follow what they become over a series of emotionally-charged real-life events; vii. there's a low-key back-background too, where author and reader agree to consider these events evenhandedly, no sectarian nor anti-sectarian prejudice, as if under the gaze of a compassionate, all-understanding god.

But a great deal of empathy is not enough to scan the full variety of human evenience. Ironically, these brave new authors convey the feeling that, after all, there's no depiction, no format, no art good enough to mirror existence as it is. No way to epitomize it. The artist is no more the omniscient, omnipotent Originator of old, now that the full extent of human evenience has been sized up. Then, that same profusion of difference excites an antagonistic yearning for strong, reassuring solutions in our societies at large. So the present revolution of diversities in all fields of behavior and knowledge is only partly prosophic in scope. The overriding mood is still one of self-assertion and self-absorption. The urge to be recognized prevails by far over the inclination to comprehend. The overall attitude is like, You should include my subjectity, objectities, etc. Or, It is my right that you include my subjectity etc. Or even, I'm going to destroy you if you obtrude my patterns of discernment. Plurality is all the rage as far as it is one's own singularity in contention. The problem is rarely seen as one of comprehensive, shareable O/o|S/s|M/m outlooks. Now, if human worlds were realms of justice, it would be funny to assemble myriads of dissimilar objectities, subjectities, and mediants in them, like toys in a fancy playroom. Any O/o|S/s|M/m personal framework could be lived as a fuzzy-ruled game, a prological exercise in A|D|R design, a personal fashion atelier of sort. Why should we look for clear-cut, uniform concepts of truth, beauty, sanity, reason, wisdom, holiness, etc.? Unfortunately, the originarian A|D|R seeds do not require fairness to combine and bear fruit. Liberté is ensconced in our being to the world; Égalité and Fraternité still wait to be added. Our rich worlds need no justice to flourish.

We all cannot but be partial to our own O/o|S/s|M/m outlines. The ideotic whole we're living in becomes the world. Like everything else, moral values are artifacts of the arise|decide|relate apparatus. They are molded (i.e. objectivized, subjectivized, and mediated) through our acts. They are liable to all kind of sensible or idiotic transducements. No matter why a deed is perceived as a misdeed, the resulting pain is subjectively real for the offended. The same applies to self-defense, goodwill, and the like. A mother has killed her three daughters of 13, 10, and 3, because she saw no affordable future for them. She didn't consider her daughters' viewpoint. The concerned killer is a genuine character of our times. There's a frame of mind for everything to look justifiable, so why bother with O|S|M inclusiveness. On the other hand, whatever other people take for granted can be charged with prejudice.

The mean fact is that anybody can construe anything as objectively unjust, subjectively undeserved, and misrepresented. So, the same root resources that allow us to live humanly let our being to the world elude justice. But lack of justice is not just a misperception: to lots of children, women, and men life is absolutely unfair. Chance plays its part, but a substantial portion of human misfortunes is manufactured. Intraspecific fairness is in bad want. Elementary biography shows why our being to the world is at risk of unlimited affluence in all fields but one. It is radically poor on justice. Here, the best humans have found is to enforce laws. Immediate or delayed retribution is what both spiritual and secular powers offer as remedy. The fact is that – apart from what people agree upon as a correction to its abuses – the natural right of vengeance, which was John Locke's fundamental concept of what secular laws are a substitute for, cannot be denied. Offence and retribution, like wrong and right, evil and good, weren't born before or apart from the A|D|R all-engendering equipment. They are paradigmized along the same lines as any other cultural element.

Briefly, humans are made to think and feel as they like. A wonderful and worrisome lack of restrictions; they are literally efficient in everything but justice. Now, in prosophy's light, injustice is a deprivation of that very freedom, touching on both the offended and the offenders. The former may not get to the riches of human freedom, intellectual and moral, because they are deprived; the latter because they bind themselves to the world of deprivation they enforce upon others. They are like mob bosses hiding in the basement. The lack of a specific seed for justice is both consistent with an A|D|R-based kind of life and inherently inconsistent with our being to the world, which can see through itself all the way to the origin of that radical lack. It's an existential discrepancy that calls for ethical amendment. Whatever we do with our all-encompassing freedom, we cannot say that we're living up to it if we do not allow every human being the opportunity to enjoy it as much as we do.

For humans, life entails a bizarre 'license of whatever'. The only limit is death. The A|D|R interplay makes all kind of beliefs easy to get to. This absence of transcendental conditions looks great in itself; it turns out to be foolish, though, unless a principle of justice is volunteered. This insight, the absolute need for radical justice, is our fourth seed, the only one specific to humans and all other beings similarly conscious of their being to the world. All paradigms can be described in terms of complex O/o|S/s|M/m arrangements. They are figmental worlds, free to enjoy their self-produced reality shows. Their allure has to do with a virtually unlimited supply of possibilities. Everybody can assemble their happy world. Enter the fourth seed, a very different appeal is revealed: the prospect of restraining that license on purpose, for the benefit of a superior freedom.

# 44 - Human ethos

While humankind's kit does not include a built-in moral tool, the want for justice can be fully appreciated as soon as the arise|decide|relate absolute relativity has been figured out. It's a matter of personal discovery where sensibility is central and book learning does not always help.

A comprehensive blueprint for our being to the world should include radical justice as its bonus seed. It is as hard to achieve as it is simple to explain: we find that we lack it, but we're also free to add it, so we feel we rather have to. In a just world happiness might be defined as the art of living the full range of one's creative pleasures. Ethics would idle in background, fairness volunteered by default. In fact, though, our local worlds and worldviews can be unfair to the rest of humankind, so we have to put ethics on the foreground. For brevity's sake, I'll try to sum up prosophical ethics as a five-station progress, starting from natural ethos.

1. All animals live by their ethos; it makes them behave as they do. Natural ethos can be described, in most general terms, as a steady structure of pre-established A|D|R results, whose subordinating premise isn't accessible to the animal. No living thing – on this planet or, I dare say, anywhere else – can evade the originarian prerequisite, the arise|decide|relate basic format of all being to the world. For all species such identity is the evolutionary outcome of assimilation & accommodation adjustments. Evolution kind of pre-agrees species by species what individuals have to live, the way we humans build O|S|M agreements. Species are natural history's meanings. Earth dwellers, humans excepted, cannot but conform to their native behavioral schemes, as if each individual had chosen its lot of freedom, necessity, and chance once and for all. It's a blind agreement between the living thing, its environment, and rival species. Humans partake of natural ethos. It's an unsigned pact with our genes and environment that we had better not overlook. Failing to bear in mind this animal condition has brought about no lasting benefit.

2. A higher ethical stage, this one typically human, is the effect of our freedom to transduce between the O|S|M existential seeds. Humans create and establish, doubt and assert, believe and interpret, agree and oppose, love and hate as they want. The most reckless efforts to remove diversity and force-feed conformity have failed against the unremitting erosion that irreducibility and transducibility bring about. All the same, the vital three-seeded license of human ethos has rarely been envisioned as a positive birthright, however tricky to handle. It has been perceived more often as an alarming attribute of human condition. Even in buoyant times, insecurity, diffidence, and every sort of anxiety press for stability, which often takes the reassuring form of a high-up ideal, made of preordained axioms, depictions, emotions, and expressions.

Born to all overtures, human ethos is also, by the same token, liable to all closures. Any vision, naïve or sophisticated, can be adhered to the extreme of idiocy, that is, to the point of considering it the only one worth considering. Badly in want of social, intellectual, and moral dependability, humans abdicate to their originarian license a moment after using it to claim whatever looks reassuring to them. For this reason most moral theories end up as self-centered systems of exclusion.

3. As we grow conscious of our originarian uniqueness, we see the human fundamental dilemma: to abide by customary O|S|M patterns or reach out and try to embrace alien arrays of the same, universal human identity. If we believe that reaching out is crucial, then we are about to take a big step forward. On this level, two opposite commitments have to be met: the rational wish to build a consistent general view for us to embrace, and the obligation to make sense of alien alternatives. It's easy to convey the sense of how demanding this third level is: here the theist tries to understand the atheist, as well as the atheist the theist; the speciesist honestly sounds out the animalist's views, and the animalist the speciesist's; the urbanite makes a serious effort to see the world from a peasant's viewpoint and vice versa, and so on. It's a tough challenge for anybody to take up, because whatever thesis we happen to believe runs into its antithesis, which we unsurprisingly tend to discredit.

# 45 - Proethics

General biography shows the A|D|R identity deficient. So the fourth seed comes out as essential. It must be adopted if only to make the originarian three viable. The sense of justice is an unconditional reply to the existential lack of it. We know we have to add what is missing, in order to become what we are.

4. Transducibility allows us two additional steep steps to the top of proethics. On a fourth level, we meet the virtual infinity of intra- and inter-act permutation. We come to see the human whole as product of unlimited prological license. Accordingly, we consent that there's no completion – such as an overall plan, a governing principle, a supreme truth, a universal reason, a divine providence – at the end of the journey. In fact, there's no end to the journey, no finish line, no prize. Ethics rest on goodwill alone. Moreover, what our goodwill will have to face we do not know beforehand. No matter how comprehensive we estimate the objectuality of our being to the world, we're required to eventually face a further, more plentiful one. The same applies to subjectuality and mediality as well as to the entire library of nexuses, which clearly exceeds what we're accustomed to work with. Compared to the full web of A|D|R intersections, with its amazing variety shown over time and space, our own personal O|S|M framework will possibly measure just an inch or two. Thus, proethics entail a baffling request, at first glance an unacceptable one: not only to accept alien views, but to consider the entire O|S|M assortment that we're able to envision as the visible mass of a much wider universe, made for the most part of A|D|R matter that is dark to us as individuals.

Proethics might, therefore, be called 'preternatural', divergent from what the animal nature of our mind urgently calls for – answers to rely on, anxiety mufflers and expedient 'truths'. Because of O|S|M transducibility, impermanence is structural; the I & T traits favor control and elusion at the same time. The best way to honor our debt of gratitude to human life's manifold freedom is to roundly embrace our being to the world, its built-in indetermination included. We're called to an ironic asceticism of sort, whereby we do not deny ourselves to anything, what obstructs radical justice excepted. Mindful of the A|D|R triple burden of liberties, we track the O|S|M activity around us, stick to a number of pragmatic agreements, scan the unlimited potential of evenience, and try to reconcile license with law, rebellion with adhesion, dialectics with dialogue, faith with doubt.

It used to be different. Old-time societies shaped themselves around core values. Their ethics expressed local views. Members had to revere the same tenets, together with the proper icons and embodiments. Customs were sanctified. It was an outright sacrilege to ignore them or just seem to think otherwise. Holding on to whatever was locally valued, without ever letting up, was the essence of virtuous behavior. In our times, after the biggest revolutions in human history, globalization asks for a big measure of indulgence. However, proethics require a more unequivocal commitment to diversity. Their aim is not merely to let us wade through cultural mix-up; the actual goal is the enhancement of mutual comprehension with an eye to the ultimate freedom of diversity, which the A|D|R-based identity offers every human being to enjoy.

5. There's one more stage to consider. General biography shows that everything happens through individual A|D|R-customized acts. Values like truth, beauty, goodness, and utility turn up within personal eveniences that shape them accordingly. The fullness of existence is achieved through the freedom to choose, day after day, what meaning-&-sense blends a person most values. A virtually absolute freedom confronts an intricate net of relativities. Not an easy job in the best operating conditions. So it's little wonder that those who experience injustice, or just assume to be put upon by life, find it hard to access perfect freewill in the form of a serene evenhandedness. Most of the times, they react and retaliate arbitrarily. The pain in them can obscure the original A|D|R identity; it does not just hinder the search for a more radical justice, it curbs their very freedom, sometimes to the point of evil deeds and self-destruction.

Now, not being able to rise to our originarian freedom means to lose access to our inmost dignity, to live the formula but not the function of human life. It means to be deprived of the creative richness of humanity, cornered between humiliation and violence, rancor and submission. The same is true for those who access a vast O|S|M array but fail to grasp the attached proethics. They regard their egotism as fair, their approach as uniquely rational, their advantages as a legal weapon for getting more of the same. Abuse, whether inflicted or undergone, depreciates radical justice, selling it off as something to be righted or avenged. The problem is, the very A|D|R identity that makes humans human lets them free to conjure up whatever they like. To say it bluntly, you never know what people might imagine to retaliate against you for. Also, you never know what your new neighbor deems unfair or preposterous. In 16th century European conquistadores judged fair and even pious to wreck pre-Columbian cultures. For mid-nineteenth century Māori it was a natural right to liquidate in blood and slavery the Moriori of Chatham Islands (as remembered in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell). Radical justice, the innermost guarantee of human freedom, is at risk of being nullified beforehand by that very freedom.

It seems self-evident, therefore, that only through some inner reconnaissance, rational and emotional, of our originarian being to the world we come to understand how radical justice, its absolute priority, its sublime worth, is entirely in our hands. At the same time, only the proethical progress of humankind will grant a wider cognition of our being to the world. This entails justice for everybody. Our being is not flawed because we do not know everything or cannot travel back and forth in time; it is hampered because it should be composed, for each and every one, of A|D|R existential freedom plus essential justice. Now, while freedom is inherent to the human being, always effective in spite of whatever has been contrived along the centuries in order to slash it, justice is preternatural. It's a crucial complement to our O|S|M license that sort of contradicts it, since essential justice limits our basic identity with an authority inconceivable in the latter's own terms. A structural inadequacy of human self-consciousness, radical lack of justice is fully made out only thanks to a thorough scrutiny of our boundless frame of life, of which justice is at the same time the only legitimate limit and the ultimate fulfillment.

# Glossary

&

The ampersand logogram signals a prological nexus, an actual connection of A|D|R factors occurring in someone's evenience. The | in A|D|R is basically an alias for &. An & stands for all sort of linkage, from the simplest logic function to the most jumbled association. The & concept involves the meeting of opposition and sameness, too. It connects irreducibility & transducibility, meaning & sense. No conceivable dialectic is complex enough to manage the web of identities & diversities issuing out of the & function. The & concept highlights an undecided proportion of ingredients, an undefined mix of coherence & incoherence, purpose & joke, conflict & harmony... An indetermination that isn't always due to lack of knowledge or deliberate joke, most of the times being a matter of hazy qualities, indefinite associations, shifting appearances.

A|D|R identity

The only common substructure recognizable in all that is the case is the A|D|R identity. This is prosophy's basic tenet. A moth as it is chased by a bat is an identity of the bat's world; Stephen Hawking's views about the 'known' universe are identities of his. Your bathroom mirror, tonight's image of your face on it, and yourself in front of it are as many identities of yours and, by extension, of the human world. All individual and social identities develop from the one originarian A|D|R identity.

Whatever we experience originates from the concurrence of arising, deciding, and relating. In philosophical terms, the A|D|R identity is what gets things into being, the proper ontological factor, the cause for anything to happen. It is originarian because it is presentarian, always in action. It never fails to be present and operative when anything takes form. This is why we cannot see it straight or think it suitably. But we experience it coming across in whatever we happen to live.

act

It's common to consider words as 'fact', 'notion', 'sign', etc. as elementary terms denoting in a general way the very bricks of everyone's phenomenic world. This usually harmless belief is inaccurate, though. A word, for instance, is actually an act of wording, a sign a signifying act, etc. For a fact to come around, a being to the world has to be implied for whom a particular A|D|R pattern is experienced as if it were a fact. The usual requirement for a fact is that it has to be agreed upon. But even in case of a wholly idiotic 'fact', something which I'm the only one to be concerned with, I need a factifying act, so to speak, before I can take hold of it as such. Furthermore, I must forget about my fabrication, if I wish to think of it as a fact in the usual meaning. As long as the making of the fact is on sight, the making is the fact. General biography reasons about acts. Acts find their value (fact-value, form-value, sign-value, image-value, etc.) as events in somebody's life. They are molecules of someone's evenience.

agreement

Our existential worlds are the combined result of innumerable acts, which in turn are the outcome of multifaceted A|D|R blends. No real, standalone worlds linger behind our existential worlds. So, how come that ordinary life seems so obviously full of data, facts, forms, meanings, structures, and reliable recurrences? The answer is, by either natural (evolutionary) or sociocultural consent. The meaning of high grass on a public lawn is 'food' to a cow, while it suggests 'poor administration' to the strolling visitor, since people agree that public lawns shouldn't be left unkempt. General biography borrows the agreement concept from the latest developments in epistemology. After trying hard to endow a scientist's research with a solid method granting factual truth as its output, epistemologists have wound up agreeing that the ultimate foundation of knowledge is... agreement. Peer-reviewed agreement, to be sure, but agreement nonetheless.

The agreement concept – either within one's self or between two or more selves – accounts for basically all formal and factual occurrences in every field, without limiting our native A|D|R liberties. An agreement is valid until we stand by it. As long as we stick to it iteratively, the agreed datum or form tends first to substantiate itself, then to fade in the background. It becomes a matter of fact. When something unaccounted for intrudes, a new event is produced from a different A|D|R blend.

arising (A)

One of the three cofactors or seeds of all that is the case. If I forget to put my eyeglasses back on after a midday nap, something will likely arise in relation to the glasses-less situation. No matter what I decide the case to be and how I describe it, something must occur to spur the event – my not seeing clearly enough, my not feeling the usual burden on my nose, my hand mechanically trying to adjust the missing thing, etc. There's no limit to what may function as the arising factor for an event to form. It's often a deciding or relating aspect from some past event that reappears as the arising element of a new act. However, to become part of the event this 'something' must meet its deciding and relating cofactors. Because it spurs the event-producing movement, the A factor can be misguidedly thought of as factually objective, subjective, physical, mental, structural, linguistic, and so on, depending on one's overall philosophical frame of mind.

being to the world

A living thing is able to shape its own world. Basically, life is defined by the extent of this ability. The result is a being to the world, a collection of more or less differentiated identities put together by an organism. In prosophy, being to the world is an idiom conveying this most basic concept, that nothing is (exists) except as a blend of the arising|deciding|relating conjuncture. The conception (D), depiction (R), and spurring (A) factors are together expressed by the being-to-the-world phrase, the three sides of any event always linked with each other. Humans exemplify a form of being to the world that is capable of seeing into its being to the world's originarian factors.

This kind of universal and necessary truth is far from obscure. In fact, it is plain and simple enough to be experienced through and through by all living beings, although it offers no soothing answers, no instant solution to people's anxieties. The idea of a supreme deity, for instance, was always meant to be a solid substitute for it. Gods impressed an acceptable order to what otherwise appeared chaotic, deceitful, and corrupt. Both the idea of the divine and the being-to-the-world concept are as much comprehensive as unattainable in their fullness. We aren't going to pray our own being to the world, though. It wouldn't offer much solace.

concept

Humans are capable of self-consciousness. This means that they can represent, review, and edit experience, on the spot and afterward, through constructs representing what is going on, what has been the case, what one foresees, dreams of, hopes, fears, etc. Such constructs are themselves products of the being-to-the-world condition, therefore they are A|D|R formations. What's more, they are often brought into play over again as A|D|R facets of new constructs. This said, I call a concept any mental construct, appearing in someone's evenience, as long as it comes escorted by some recollection of its A|D|R origin. There's a kind of alertness to be exercised, so as not to reify the products of consciousness and consider as altogether factual what is just actual.

deciding (D)

One of the originarian seeds (or determinants, cofactors, roots) of all that is the case for any sort of being to the world. No dialectic order governs them. Thus, the D seed is not second more than it is first or third in the line. Each seed 'materializes' the moment it connects with the remaining two. They come in one bundle, so they can't be said to exist separately. Yet, it's easy to acknowledge their presence by trying to imagine an act stripped of one of them. A D-less act, for instance, isn't workable. To break the surface, the A seed needs a pronouncement, a taking-into-account, an assessment of sort of its occurrence. Without which it might be anything, from nothing at all to the most relevant incident ever. At the same time, an A-less act would be utterly blank, and an R-less one would be unintelligible.

evenience

A sequence of connected events. Human life is a disparate collection of eveniences. At best, what we may say about separate acts, let alone about minute A|D|R identities, is kind of reverse-engineered from the flow of evenience. Prosophy tries never to overlook this existential priority.

Evenience can be very fertile. It originates all worlds, natural and human. Natural evenience produces the variety of species. Each species embodies a bunch of A|D|R identities replicating in typical eveniences that are set in genes and operate in a sustaining habitat. Human eveniences are amazingly more varied, mainly due to transducibility (q.v.).

event

An act considered as part of someone's evenience. Events connect in eveniences, the main connecting device being – in humans and their peers, as far as I can imagine – A|D|R transducibility and its intellectual ersatz, the O|S|M preparadigm.

**fact -** See **act**

the fourth seed

What nature does with its millions of species, humans mimic with trillions of acts. A species shows a unique A|D|R pattern, the way any human act does. The ingrained ethos in both natural and human worlds is based on freedom: freedom of invention (or replication) and accord (or conflict). Freedom does not entail fair dealing, though. Nature's freedom of speciation admits carnivores on top of herbivores; humankind's sweeping freedom admits a continuity of conflict. There's no immediate basis for any particular ethics in our being to the world. Or, if you want, all ethics are equally grounded, from the most compassionate to the wickedest one.

Thus, humans were born, like Adam and Eve, ethically naked. More naked, if at all possible, than other animals, because an animal can be aggressive and destructive in its species-specific way only, while humans can be exceedingly inventive in all fields. By themselves, they make an entire nature of disasters. Obviously, a parallel remark is valid for the nicer sides of human behavior too.

Luckily, the unrestrained freedom of conception, granted by the A|D|R seeds' interaction, is also responsible for our seeing a. the lack of a fourth, ethical seed; b. the cause of that deficiency; the need for everybody c. to add – using their freewill, i.e. their freedom of conception – such an additional seed to their being-to-the-world basics and d. help other people in finding their way to that same very human liberty.

**general** (or **elementary** ) **biography**

Since there are no beings, things, facts, data, forms, structures, etc. except as A|D|R concretions, clusters of arising|deciding|relating facets produced by a being to the world through evenience, the fundamental knowledge (as opposed to science) is biography, the general description of how life is lived.

The liberties attached to the originarian seeds are such that it's impossible to found their knowledge except in general terms. The details of evenience can only be lived once. There's no hope to fathom them the way they are lived, like meteorologists select and compare their data. So humans are left with two opposite options, which are a. to cover all sort of biographic event in an overall draft, where only the most general functions, the ones encompassing all that is the case, can be properly devised, or b. to try and depict a fictional representation, an artistic rendition of some case or other.

The two options should not overlap, if only to avoid either the overall sketch to appear more detailed than it could ever be, or the fictional rendition to look applicable beyond its local horizon. Philosophy has long indulged itself on both these errors, the chief cause of its eventual collapse. General biography's duty isn't just to outline the all-encompassing sketch, but also to see that it doesn't spread out nor blur local diversities.

**idea -** See also **concept**

An idea is any mental construct pretending to cope with experience without an apt recollection of its A|D|R origin, like a moviegoer who, captured by the story, would downright forget his being seated in front of a wide white screen where all sort of image can be projected. Basically, ideas oppose concepts. Any A|D|R combination, or cluster thereof, may be worked out conceptually or ideally. A concept 'remembers' its native A|D|R pattern, while an idea stops thinking about that or never comes to know about it. Unaware of their inner and outer limits, ideas are restrictive even as they seem grand. Thanks to such unawareness they are likely to be revered as necessary, universal, sacred, worth dying/killing for, etc.

ideotics, ideotical

A neutral word I've coined from 'idea' and 'idiot' (in the original Greek acceptation of 'unique, cut off, only akin to itself'). Ideotical schemes can be very insightful, but they miss the universal premise [... that] by which all construals are just viewpoints, outlooks in want of an overview that can only be reached through a mediation with all other outlooks. Failing that, ideotics fall into narrow-mindedness. Many valiant thinkers braved current ideotics, then surrendered to the one of their choice.

irreducibility

Irreducibility & transducibility (I & T) are complementary concepts of general biography. They cover the question, What engenders evenience? What happens to the A|D|R seeds on their route from event to event? How come that from act to act the A|D|R factors seem free to become no matter what? The answer entails irreducibility, transducibility, and the & notion.

The I (irreducibility) component of the I & T concept is there to remember that, no matter how we may loose sight of the A|D|R cofactors, they are always there. No act can be performed without the three of them being together enacted. They can never shrink to zero value. Sure, they may recur. If all three recur just alike, then there's no event to be experienced, since perfect replication is indiscernible. If just one or two out of three do not change, it's likely that only the alteration emerges, and what doesn't shift is passed over. But one seeding factor alone will never turn out an event; it's always by a gathering of the three seeds that an event is produced. Irreducibility is the primary evidence of general biography. As an intellectual tool, it will keep us from unwittingly forging ideas instead of exposing concepts.

meaning

The debate on meaning has been dominant in 20th century linguistics with undecided results. In prosophy, a meaning is the output of an agreement by which something is exhibited (a stop sign, for example) that is taken by someone (a driver) to stand for something else (a specific obligation). The dot at the end of the sentence has just been taken by the reader to stand for 'Here's the end of this sentence'. The reader has taken the dot's meaning for granted and most probably hasn't even registered her granting that particular dot its usual meaning.

Meanings tend to disappear, the cause being that in a pure meaning the A|D|R cofactors meet just as expected and people are ready to respond accordingly, without even bothering being conscious of the process. It's indeed reasonable that attention's resources are given to what is doubtful, unclear, unassigned, surprising etc. For what is in doubt there's no meaning immediately available. It has to be looked for. What is looked for I call 'sense' (q.v.).

**median, medial -** See **O|S|M table**

nexus

As logic requires non-contradictory connections between terms and propositions, so life involves a variety of nexuses between the A|D|R cofactors for an act to form and between acts for an evenience to develop. Actually, two more levels should be considered: the inner nexuses governing the getting together, for example, of different objective facets into the objectual ensemble of an act, and the outer nexuses between different eveniences in one's life.

A live nexus pays little attention to formal logic. When it does, it's rarely for logic's sake. Ordinary life has to be pragmatic, because many streams of sense and meaning keep flowing together at all times. Strict logic may well result absurd or senseless. So the general form of the prological nexus is the universal &.

**objective, objectual.** See **O|S|M table**

originarian & presentarian

Perhaps the lengthiest quest in philosophy has been devoted to the idea of origin. Why an idea? Isn't it a legitimate concept? Actually, questions on origin are plentiful – of this universe, matter, light, life, soul, mind, of species, humans, nations, cultures, languages, laws, thoughts, dreams, etc. Moreover, every question begets many answers. But, as far as anything may be inquired about its origin, the inquiring act is, so to say, more original. It's originarian. The primary originarian factors should not be sought out in the mass of answers. It had to be already there when the very first philosophical question dawned on humans.

Prior to the matter of any query there's the act of querying. Now, while a matter of fact, being the result of an inquiring act, can be set anywhere in time and space, the act itself has got only its particular here-and-now to inhabit. Whatever is lived is lived here and now. Thus, the true originarian must also be presentarian. Indeed, originarian is only what we also experience, with no exception, as presentarian.

Being the hotbed not just of all origins but of everything that is the case, the originarian-presentarian will not provide an exclusive answer. It has to be all-inclusive, allowing for all possible questions and answers, no matter how far-fetched or short-lived. The originarian-presentarian structure, as prosophy outlines it, is the A|D|R identity, provided it is researched as a concept that, to be true to itself, has to grant a sweeping, all-encompassing synopsis of all that happens to happen.

O|S|M preparadigm

In themselves, the A|D|R seeds and their prological nexus are unavailable to plain reasoning. A reflective mind is therefore prone to trim down that apparent disorder, which limits the extent of its powers. In short, reason enforces some basic order onto experience so as to be able to reason. The philosopher's typical trick is to forget about having himself enforced that particular order, or paradigm, and consider it, rather candidly, as the true order of things. In everyday life too, we're likely to simplify the A|D|R intricacies whenever we reflect on what is going on. Most of the times, we overlook the subtle A|D|R shifts leading to a new event. We sketch out what happens in straight lines. We convert acts into facts.

This reflex has rarely been avoided anytime anywhere, the dominant impulse being to separate and sort of freeze (hypostatize) the A|D|R seeds so as to make them more manageable, freely available for any idea that's deemed essential. Hence all sort of local paradigms, where the A|D|R functions are pre-assigned to separate entities usually supervised by a godly principle, be it a mythological Zeus, a monotheistic God, Spinoza's Substantia, Hegel's Geist, Schopenhauer's Wille, Nietzsche's Wille zur Macht, or whatever.

Now, it seems to me that all paradigms, however dissimilar, share the tendency to reduce the arising, deciding, and relating cofactors to the categories of object (O), subject (S), and logos or medium (M), respectively. What we happen to see, e.g., as an objectity becomes an element of the originarian, a thing in itself, rather than the fleeting product of a particular A|D|R blend experienced by a being to the world.

I call that widespread simplification of the A|D|R complexity the O|S|M preparadigm. Beyond the variety of paradigms – formally exposed by thinkers or informally thought up by individuals – a common preparadigm looms on. This simplified, general view of all views is maybe as near as we can get to an overall conception of our being to the world.

O|S|M table

With the I & T processes always active it's impossible for people to track the procession of A|D|R syntheses incessantly issuing out of their being to the world. Brains are made to let us be to the world, not to meta-live our life as if from elsewhere. Still, in the process we collect a very rich set of samples from all kind of experience and may use it as a database. This way we become, willfully or not, philosophers. For to order our inner database we need a basic scenario, an overall paradigm. Such a paradigm slows down the incessant flow of A|D|R identities and sorts them out. Thus, the arising seed, which is accountable for the phenomenon of a world facing us whenever we're awake, engenders the object as an essential class of reality; the deciding seed, responsible for the appearance of a perceiving and judging mind, produces the subject; the relating seed, which grants a link between object and subject, prompts the medium and logos categories.

The object|subject|medium preparadigm has produced thousands of local paradigms, simply sketched out or richly rendered by poets, prophets, philosophers, leaders, and clerics of all persuasion. Actually, each human being lives by a more or less sophisticated version of the O|S|M preparadigm. In prosophy, however, we're bound to include all that is the case for each and every being to the world. Here's where the O|S|M table's terms may help.

A being to the world, seen through the preparadigm, is a vast, entwined collection of objectities, subjectities, and mediants. They come in clusters, most of the times. Let's suppose that in Jean's evenience this falling leaf arises as a. something she's going to brush off the porch in a moment; b. a thing she expects to make some crunching sound if stepped on; c. a tiny bit of this fall's foliage, etc. As a mediant, it possibly points to d. an overgrown branch that should be pruned; e. summer being over; f. colder days approaching; g. the view from the terrace soon opening up again on the far-off hills... As a subjectity, maybe it reminds her h. of having herself planted the tree the leaf is falling from; i. her having neglected the pruning, and so on. In short, some O|S|M occurrences compound a given event. All of them are true (or false) in their own way. It all depends from the result of their taking part in the event.

From an all-encompassing viewpoint, the putting forward of a single, detached objectity is at risk of producing an absolute meaning, an idea. This risk is often negligible. Practical hypostases are rather a plus, as it's the case with conventional signs and lab protocols. But, as a general rule, in most matters it seems a good idea to have single objectities comprised in as large an objectuality as possible. The same applies to subjectities and mediants. It's better for people to gather them into complex, open subjectualities and medialities, so as to appreciate the relative import and impact of each of them. This note is not going to discuss the implications of such a general tenet. Suffice to say that anyone of sound mind tries to navigate life relying both on neat, act-pertinent objectities, etc. and complex objectualities, etc. While an objectity grants a manageable meaning, its corresponding objectuality offers alternatives and allows a deeper sense to be looked into.

philosophy

Prosophy does not share with most philosophies the urge for a satisfying order, whether in the form of a strong system of principles or of a skeptic, ironic disenchantment. The utmost human experience is to recognize, so to say, the unlimited power of its limiting constituents. Such a condition is utterly congruous. It ensues from our being to the world at its best. It does not seem sound to regret the loss of something – faith, truth, order, conviction, completion – which was not just out of our reach but indeed disastrous in case it were not so. The originarian-presentarian is fluid. To a certain extent it is reasonable to try and govern it through a broad set of rational construals. But what is the extent of the reasonable?

Our time is embarked on a passage from ontology onward. The transit leaves behind the myth of the original opposites (to be vs. to become, unity vs. plurality, spirit vs. matter, quantity vs. quality, logic vs. absurdity, dogma vs. skepsis, etc.). Much of our culture is already on its way along new paths of conception. The old 'path' metaphor itself – still vibrant in Nietzsche's ropewalking (between ape and Übermensch) and Heidegger's Holzwege – is dead, replaced with open-space, entwined images (circuitry, web, grid, net, etc.). The inflation of experiential opportunities and of theoretical prodding in all fields has greatly expanded the perception of A|D|R intricacy. So most intellectuals nowadays refrain from adjusting complexity to ease solutions the way past intelligentsias were liable to. At the same time, dogmatic views persist, and even thrive, thanks to what is perceived as an effort to wipe them out by adverse forces of change.

the premise [... that]

Human mind toils on symbols, forms, principles, structures, beliefs, whatever. It also doubts, questions, marvels, etc. In doing all that it cannot avoid an unstated assumption, a subordinating premise. In saying something like "There's a cat over there", "May I ask when you did hear about us?", "What a wonderful day!", or "A ≡ A", we always imply that a. there's an omitted main clause, a premise like [Here I am, claiming that] "There's a cat over there" and b. if the omitted clause were exposed the sense-&-meaning mix of the linguistic act would be different. So the routine impels to forget the premise. There's a recursion to be avoided, if only to close the event. Communication is ruled by pragmatics. In fact, "Here I am, claiming that there's a cat over there" would imply its own subordinating premise, like [You see that] "Here I am, claiming that there's a cat over there", and so on.

The premise [... that] is ubiquitous and to drop it, indeed to forget about it, is the soundest thing to do in most cases. However, any general view built on its neglect ends in a wholesale misconstruction. Yet, most theories that have ridden the course of history were put up without an extensive reconnaissance of the universal premise.

How does this most general premise apply to the A|D|R identity? In the [... that] {ε} formula – where {ε} stands for any act and 'that' for any subordinating conjunction – let's first substitute {ε} with {O|S|M}, because all events come out of the originarian identity but for practical reasons the human mind tends to put up 'facts' and 'things' fitting a preordained paradigm. So, the basic scheme of all events may be represented as follows:

[A|D|R that] {O|S|M}.

The universal premise lingers undetected, while a temporary array of objectities, subjectities, and mediants convene and determine the act's unique blend of meaning & sense. Anyway, modern awareness asks for much meta-thinking even in everyday life. Meta-thinking may take in different views and views of views into the same act. So, the ordinary act is better comprised as an array of O|S|M additions, the originarian subordinating premise always present, albeit unnoticed. To take notice of it in its originarian, subordinating role adds up to renounce all local construals and enter the prosophical quest.

presentarian

As a noun, the full set of whatever is present to a human mind in a given moment. As an adjective it refers to a general conception of time that sees its various representations as images of what is actually and presently lived. The past, the present, and the future are but contents of the presentarian frame of life: they are products of an actual being to the world. The one time true to life is now.

proethics

It's evident from chronicles and daily news that humankind is equally available to good and evil. General biography shows why. A|D|R connections, in all other species that we know of, are pre-specified. In humans they became absolutely free. Through transducibility (q.v.), humans may assume anything to mean anything to anybody. This three-seeded freedom, far from being a sin, is their originarian lot. Unfortunately, supposing the color of an act to be its moral value, human freedom is colorblind. It entails no specific criterion to tell apart good and evil.

No doubt, people are often considerate, they are law-abiding, they sign fair pacts, battle discrimination, feel compassion, care for values, etc. Though, to be sure, the opposite is often the case too. Far from being metaphysical entities, good and evil result like everything else from what we do. They are the output of our acts, an act being the outcome of a discretionary talent, typical of our species, for putting up whatever we happen to be keen on. So there's much reasonable compromise in human affairs, a lot of goodwill, dangerous idiocy too, but no inherent justice.

We are all witnesses of an unlimited supply of disparate visions of what has to be done to grant justice – from dying in an effort to rescue other people to dying so as to better murder them. Justice is the farthest outpost of our being to the world. The limit is the principle. Justice has to be added simply because we see that it's lacking. It occurs as a fourth seed, the only legitimate idea, the meta-human horizon, something that our original freedom does not encompass, leaving us free to reach for it nevertheless.

prologic

What is evident about elementary biography – that it cannot be formally studied but in the most general terms – is all the more valid with intra-act and inter-act nexuses. In the course of evenience, nexuses quickly emerge and disappear more or less independent from logic. They may conform to a particular logic or follow anarchic and apparently irrational paths.

There's a prosophic reason to that. Logic is mostly useful in dealing with what is already at hand and defined, while in the current of life the sense-to-be is imperative. A logic is a general structure of nexuses. In order to logically apply any such structure one needs two classes of predefined meanings: the class of what has to be connected (terms or propositions) and the class of connectives (unequivocal functions).

Predefined meanings look back to some past experience. What has been seen, felt, sensed, reasoned etc. has accrued a capital of meanings. Humans live on the edge of evenience, though, looking for sense. The search for sense modifies meanings. Life is ambiguous, evasive, shifty, multidimensional, while logic looks for some linear or planar preordained order.

prosophy

Prosophy's field of interest is the continuous act of living, or evenience. Through elementary biography, prosophy illustrates what people go through in whatever they live. In doing so, it also affords a general theory of all that is the case. Understanding life in all-encompassing terms – this has been the aim of much intellectual exertion over the ages – in philosophy, literature, science, art. Also in myth folklore religion. So why a new term to name what is already there? Because an elementary, all-including understanding of human being to the world has never been worked out. The variety of opinions has been considered an impediment or at best a first, confused grade of knowledge on the way to some universal, enlightened truth. Yet, universal reason can be very confusing. As Kant noted, enlightenment is a self-assigned category. Philosophy has met its end because it couldn't afford its self-accredited idea of reason anymore.

Until recently, what limited the search in philosophy and adjoining disciplines was - a. a too hasty recollection of diversity, which was to be sort of untangled, as soon as possible, in some orderly, manageable unity. Still, diversity in humans is exceedingly deep and deserves a most accurate recollection, if we wish to deliver an all-encompassing overview of our being to the world; - b. the pressure for soothing solutions, whereby people are gratified in finding precisely what they are in search of as an answer to their problems. Prosophy offers no consoling answers, no prepackaged wisdom. It's an exercise in understanding evenience the way it unfolds, and nothing else, except for the fourth seed.

So what do I mean with 'prosophical', as in 'prosophical art' or 'prosophical vision'? I mean that a person or cultural product: i. shows some consciousness of the human originarian identity, A|D|R-based, and tries not to obstruct it; ii. cultivates conceptual scenarios and avoids ideotics, which thrive in A|D|R-oblivious theories; iii. knows that all science issues of judicious, peer-reviewed agreements; iv. sees the meaning-sense mix of every act; v. appreciates prologic haze in addition to logic neatness; vi. admits the fourth seed as crucial to human being to the world.

relating (R)

One of the three originarian seeds of human evenience and, as far as I can see, of any conceivable evenience. Being co-originarian the R seed never emerges alone; it only occurs in conjunction with the remaining two. If I try to detach it, I'm likely to trespass into the fake realm of ideas.

For anything to happen the arising (A) and deciding (D) factors must join with a symbolic representation (R). A list of R ingredients should include words, of course, plus gestures, emblems, icons, faces, shrieks, shouts, silences. Actually, in the making of an act anything may relate about anything else.

The perception of the R cofactor at work in all that is the case has led to a variety of hypostases, from the Pythagorean metaphysics of numbers to Gadamer's hermeneutics and much of 20th-century semiotics. The most successful reification of the R seed has long been the idea of an eternal Logos (later morphed into historical, dialectic Reason).

seeds

'Seed' is a metaphor for something that cannot be properly named, since to name implies the concurrence of all three seeds, and the output of their copulation runs away in the stream of life. What we are allowed to catch is just an account of it. Each seed is originarian and presentarian but never alone. It has to congregate with the remaining two to appear and produce anything. The concepts of arising, deciding, and relating are separately unattainable. So they can't even said to be concepts properly. Hence an insoluble difficulty that has engendered hordes of ideas.

The A|D|R seeds, their basic aspect, can be easily backtracked, anyway, starting from any event. Let's try a mental experiment, a meta-inspection of what is going on in any act: Whatever is the case, this is the experiment, let's try to figure it out, less one of the seeds. A thunder off the sky or a flower's scent with no one, man or beast, to notice it (to decide what it is). Or a 'notice' without its 'something'. Or something noticed without a sign to designate it. No way. For all events, there's something arising (A), someone registering it (D), by means of some language (R). That's why the basic molecule of all that is the case is not the fact but the act. It's also why prosophy's scientia prima isn't ontology, the study of being, but general biography, the description of being to the world as a three-seeded condition. This most general notion is so obvious, so seemingly unusable, and so disturbing that the powers of reason have been recruited to hide it under what reassuring overall vision was locally sought after.

sense

Sense and meaning are often taken as synonymous, while I use them as opposites. An absolute meaning is imperceptible, whereas an absolute sense is overwhelming, beyond words. In the typical act they are summoned together. Most of the time, what we experience is an adjustment of sense, which is what the act is all about, on a background of continuity, granted by meanings. Thus an event is defined by the sense-meaning layout of its A|D|R synthesis.

subjective, subjectual - See O|S|M table

transducibility

This term (shortened as T in I & T) means literally: "[said of something, its] trait of possibly being shifted into [something else]". It's about the A|D|R seeds: if irreducibility underlines their trilateral co-incidence in every act, transducibility says that they are able to morph into each other. From act to act, what was part of the A seed may transduce into a facet of the D and/or R seeds, and so on reciprocally. Or, to speak from within the O|S|M preparadigm, what was objective may transduce into subjective and/or median, etc. Transducibility is the powerhouse of human-like being to the world. It can be heavily manipulated by doctrine, ignorance, and fear, suspended or set aside by agreement. But it is always operative in spite of everything, ready to engender a new event by shuffling the three originarian seeds.

#  More on Prosophy

Prosophy is also at the heart of the following Italian trilogy by the same author:

Essere al mondo. Elementi di biografia generale

ISBN: softcover 978-88-66189978. YCP Editore, 2012

ISBN: e-book 978-13-01571178. Smashwords Editions.

Del che è & che non è. Pensare l'evenienza

ISBN: e-book 978-13-01174997. Smashwords Editions, 2009-2013.

Quasi come essere. Invito alla prosofia

ISBN: e-book 978-13-10516160. Smashwords Editions, 2013

On the Internet:

www.prosophy.org

www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/10630

www.lulu.com/spotlight/prosophy

itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/paolo-ugo-brusa/id589958154?mt=11

www.youcanprint.it/youcanprint-libreria/saggistica/essere-mondo-brusa.html

# About the Author

Born in San Marino, RSM, 1950, from Italian parents, Arturo Brusa and Maria Neri, I spent my school years in Rimini, 1958 to 1965, and Bologna, 1966 to 1974. I got a doctoral degree in Philosophy from Bologna 'Alma Mater' University in 1974 (master thesis on the education of James Joyce). I worked in San Marino public schools, 1974 to 2010, teaching Italian, History, and Geography in junior high until 1995, then History and Philosophy in high school. In the early 80's, I developed several computer programs in a ground-breaking field, at the time: personalized teaching aid for Down children. Works include also 'Parentesi', 1983, a collection of free verse, and 'Ripeness Is All', 2012, a gallery of pictures, both with R. Faetanini (www.riccardofaetanini.com). Father of three girls: Marcella (1976), astronomer, now at Unibo; Marialice (1977), historian, mother of little Agata (2011); and Matilde (2001), now half-way through high school.

# Colophon

Prosophy, After Philosophy

By Paolo-Ugo Brusa.

Written in San Marino, rsm,

January 15 to April 10, 2014.

Last revised, October 2017.

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Cover image:

The Fading Owl

Art and copy by P.-U. Brusa.

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Paperback:

Lulu Press, Inc. (www.lulu.com).

[ISBN 978-1-326-07305-3]

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The Prosophy Project

Readers are kindly asked to post their comments on

 www.prosophy.org

