Our Vital Adventure

Manifesto
and Grammar of human experience

By Maarten van Schie

Preface
Stories, narratives, ideologies, philosophies, ideas. In their abstractness they sometimes seem like very little indeed. Since the only place they really exist is in our minds youd even be forgiven for holding them in contempt as fantasies. But thats just it: in our mind is where the magic happens. That is where ideas begin to be real. They guide us, help us to make choices and make us feel a part of something that is bigger than ourselves, and in doing so they affect our actions and thus become a part of the world. Abstract though they are, ideas are the human translation of experience into a form that give us the material to understand what goes on around us. They dont exist without us, but we cant do anything without them either. Stories give us a destination to reach beyond the problems we face and, when we face multiple options, a basis to choose. They make us feel safe even in duress because they show us that in the bigger picture things are still going the right way. Stories give us something to fight for and a reason to deal with our problems. A lack of credible and inspiring stories is a serious problem. It reduces our capacity to cooperate and hampers our drive and sense of direction. We face such a lack. I face such a lack, but I am under the impression this lack is widespread. And in the face of such a lack we satisfy ourselves with smaller and smaller stories, most commonly in the all too familiar us versus them format. Not because we want to but simply because the bar is lower and they are the best thing available. Even the intellectually accepted informed me versus general public follows this format. A grand project of humanity seems nowhere in sight, and we have done a good deal about this ourselves. First of all we spent a large part of the past century deconstructing stories as actions that legitimise or enforce power relations. By thus reducing stories to interests we have enforced the larger tendency towards a focus only on the material aspects of our lives. Of course we had good reasons for this as the twentieth century has given us too many examples of how convincing stories can have horrible effects. As a consequence we have become wary of ideas that compel us into action, let alone that makes us enthusiastic. Secondly, we simply have many more stories available to us, and out of the comparison we find less and less reason to pick any one over the others. Thirdly, those stories that have been created to transcend the problems of the first two have been increasingly abstract and removed from our daily lives, to the extent that very few people nowadays can see the use of philosophy and even fewer can relate it to their own everyday life.

As a result we have become tremendously distrustful of ideas (especially those of others), but also of cultural elites. It is little wonder that in the absence of these larger stories we have turned more and more to the only basis we really have to relate to anything, our personal experience. There we engage mostly with personal betterment and perhaps romantic love as the goal of our lives, and increasingly interact with the rest of the world on the basis of necessity and quid pro quo. This in turn enforces our belief that everyone is just looking after number one, increases our distrust and disconnects us from the ideas and interests of others. Meanwhile the project of democratisation continues. Maybe we thought and think that as long as everyone has a say we could avoid the dangers of dictatorship or oligarchy, but reality has proven more flippant than that. And while before at least we could blame the state of the world on people like Hitler and Stalin, now we really have no one left to blame but ourselves. We have reached a democracy of ideas. What we really need now, are better ideas to infuse into such a democracy. But what story will we now readily buy into? Such a narrative must fit into the context of the twenty-first century. It must conform to a number of rather challenging conditions in order to inspire and unite people. First, it mustnt represent anyones interests in particular; secondly, it must leave room for the stories already in existence and preferably even create a framework in which they all fit; and thirdly, it must relate to the everyday reality of people. These conditions make the venture of formulating this narrative sound extremely difficult. But the best place to hide something is in plain sight. Somehow we often find it hard to believe that what we think and do in daily life really matters much. Thats because we look at stories the wrong way: we think that they must be told by someone. We have learned to look at ideologies and ideas as abstraction as representatives of a Platonic reality that is even more real than the one in front of us. We have learned not to believe our own eyes and our own thoughts. Yet how did we ever progress except based on human sight and thought? The story of the twenty-first century is not that there is no overarching story, only that this overarching story can no longer be told by any one person. This story is a story told by all of us, each affecting the world at every moment of their being. This is true because individuals have the power to change how many others think, and thereby act; this is true because our experience affects how we see the world; and it is true because society exists only in the thoughts and actions of people. If that overarching story cannot be told in words, what can? And does it matter? Yes, it matters: for what we speak of determines how we organise ourselves. Our

verbal interaction is needed to align our actions, and for that we need language on top of mere experience and action. Through language we organise the frameworks for action. There is perhaps no better example than the important role of law. We can reconsider what we need language for. Not to instruct people or impose a reality on them, but to collectively provide the best frameworks within which actions can take place. This relies on speaking not of the knowledge itself but of process. We would progress our collective story greatly by speaking less of the story and more of its grammar. When we do so we actually help each other in the telling and thus empower humanity as a whole to tell the best story possible. Such an approach shows wisdom and leadership and brings to bear the society I dare to believe in. That is what I stand for, and that is what this manifesto is about.

Manifesto
Reading aid
The manifesto has a structure that lends itself to gradual discovery. That being said, a preliminary introduction can be in order so as to nudge the first reading in the right direction. The basis for the work can be considered as the dichotomy between the self, whatever that may be, and the world around it intrinsically unavailable to the self. The distinction between the two is not immediately established however and is first mentioned in the second main point of the manifesto; just as we are not automatically aware of it from birth. I have tried to establish this and other distinctions point by point, as intuitively as possible. You will find a graphical overview of this philosophical journey at the end of this work. Referring to it may aid in the understanding of this work, as well as give a better grasp of its overarching structure (which it certainly has). The tags below might also be of help. Tags: 0. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Experience, a priori, whole. Cognition, division, identity, I. Perception, relation, not I, the world, truth. Action, body, ethics, I in the world. Interaction, time, change. Communication, social space, language, beauty. Society, collective sense-making, relation self to other. Development, personal growth, intuition. Creativity, progress, good. Love, spirituality, broader self-identification.

Here and there I have added points which are not necessary per se for the progression of the main narrative, but which are important points Id like to make either as comment or as elaboration to aid in the understanding of this work. These points are recognisable by being printed in italics. This philosophical journey is impossible without something that is present a priori; and for that starting point I have chosen experience itself, the pure and whole influx of it to the self that I cannot escape acknowledging. That is why, before starting with distinctions, I will outline a couple of points about experience itself.

A priori 0. There is experience a. I live with the fact of experience, it is a given. b. Experience is there whether I make sense of it or not. It precedes my making sense. i. It is there whatever sense I make of it. ii. This sense-making is personal. c. Experience is all I have to work with to make sense of things. i. It is the highest truth available to me, if there are yet higher truths beyond it I do not have access to them. d. I dont know what came before my experience, I dont know what comes after. i. I must make do with what experience I get. e. My thoughts derive from experience. i. Experience crosses a threshold into me and leaves an impression. ii. My thoughts are based on this impression. iii. Any logic inherent in me derives from logic in experience. iv. There is an impenetrable barrier to thought across the division between myself and the world around me. I can think with experience, I can base an understanding on it, and I can refer to it; but I cannot grasp it. f. Others too must get their truth from experience. i. I may still accept their truth without finding grounds for it in my own experience, but then I do so on the basis of my experience with them rather then what they propose. ii. I qualify these thoughts as working conclusion, deriving from this person, something assumed but not directly grounded in my own experience. 1. This structures the things I accept from others differently in my making sense than the things that make sense to me directly.

A. Distinction () Out of the whole of experience cognition isolates parts; not in the last place the self. The first part of this work, as a corollary, distinguishes the fundamental motions and places. 1. I exist and make sense of experience. Experience comes to me as a whole. The first and essential motion of cognition is division of reality into parts, only then to reintegrate them: thus giving shape to distinction and identity. a. Considering the options of whether I do or do not make sense of experience, I cannot say I do not make sense of experience. b. I can make sense of experience because there is consistency in experience. This consistency is an expression of regularity; structure or organisation I may not know what that organisation is, but I can tell for sure that it is organised c. I make sense by way of isolating consistently recurrent subsets of experience from their surroundings. i. Consistency etches the outlines of recurrent things into me. 1. In the form in which I experience them. ii. That is, out of everything I experience, some things change less and recur more, giving merit to isolating them from their surroundings. iii. This is not just a matter of isolation but also a matter of connecting the internal structure of this subset. Isolation and connection go together. iv. As I isolate more things, other things come to stand out, available for further isolation. 1. And with several of these subsets available I can isolate recurrent subsets of subsets and thus isolate concepts. v. Since change is an aspect of my experience, I can connect subsets contemporaneously as well as consecutively. 1. Showing me what we call concurrency and causation. d. Due to the process of isolating and connecting an organisation forms within me that comes to resemble the organisation of my experience. i. From the ground up and limited, based only on what I have experienced and what I have taken out of it so far. e. This inner organisation provides me with reference material that I compare to experience.

i. The mind is a tool for copying and comparing (specifically situated). 1. We just have so much to copy. ii. I make sense of experience by way of this comparison and by way of this comparison only. 2. There exists the world beyond me whence this experience originates. One of the distinctions I make is the distinction between myself and the world around me. With it comes the recognition of a second fundamental motion, that of perception: from the world around me into myself. a. I make sense by comparing, but a comparison implies two distinct elements. i. One of them resides within me, distinct from the other. ii. I will refer to this distinction in many ways and with many words: where the inner world refers to what is me and mine, the outer world to everything else. b. I experience the relation between inner and outer world (as another layer of experience). i. I experience this as the difference or similarity between how the world makes sense to me and how I experience it. 1. These emotions thus emphasise the existence of both an inner, an outer world, and a relation between the two. a. Emotions are in fact the only proof of the three. Emotion arises out of the difference, thus highlighting the existence of both the one and the other. b. Emotion, in other words, is information on how my inner world relates to the outer world as I experience it (nothing more or less). c. Consistency exists in the outer world. i. I am unable to experience consistency where it did not exist in the outer world. ii. I might not always be able to experience consistency where it does indeed exist, but I am unable to see consistency in an inconsistent phenomenon. iii. The consistency I see might rely on conditions I am not aware of, leading me to internalise a consistency that does not accurately resemble that consistency in my experience.

1. But this is inevitable: I can only find out the patterns in my experience by first establishing a pattern of consistency and then finding further inconsistencies: details. d. Consistency implies organisation. i. I can form an inner organisation because experience is organised. ii. This organisation is expressed in the particularness of experience. 1. If my experience werent something in particular I couldnt make something particular out of it. 2. What is not something in particular is beyond my grasp: it does not get etched into my inner world. 3. I exist as part of the world and am subject to its organisation. I stand in a particular relation to the world around me: I am a subset of it. I am also a whole in myself however, and from that whole in itself derives the third and final fundamental motion: that of agency, from myself into the world . a. I exists within the outer world. i. This makes me and everything I do subject to its organisation. b. I exist within the outer world in a particular way. 1. If I am, it must be something in particular, somewhere and somehow. a. So let it be this. Let it be here. Let it be now. c. My inner world is connected to the outer world through a particular connection. i. This connection is my body, a worldly place and a worldly thing. ii. This body is already a part of that organisation. 1. Whether I am aware of it or not; and this is where I can fail to identify myself with my body, and identify more with a more spiritual component which is my derived making sense. iii. This body, moreover, is not merely subject to that organisation: it is a part of it and must interact with it to sustain its existence, and my existence in the world with it. a. I may fail to recognise this, but that would result in an instant Darwin award. d. I take in the world through my body.

i. My body is my window on the world, my vantage point. 1. This shapes how I take in the world and how I structure my inner world. ii. My body has a distinct relation to subsets of the world. 1. As I, my inner world or my consciousness, am intrinsically wired into my body, I am aware of this through the feedback of my body: a. Affecting how I relate to the world. b. Since my body is worldly, this is the world saying: dont just sit there. Come out and interact with me! 2. As I become aware of these relations, these subsets acquire additional specific information: they have a relation to my being in the world. a. This information is what people call meaning. b. Meaning is a strong criterium for sorting out subsets of experience. i. i.e. I am more likely to pick up knowledge and concepts if they are more meaningful to me. e. And I express myself through my body. i. My expression is determined by intent. 1. Part of which is worldly, 2. And part of which is myself and my sense making. a. In this context you could say, my personality. b. Guiding how I act. ii. And my expression is determined by capacity. 1. Part of which again is worldly: I can only control my body, and I can only control it in a particular way. 2. And part of which is my self with its sense making. a. This contains my awareness of the functioning of my body: my competence. b. And my awareness of the functioning of the world: ethics. i. And this means that ethics refers to the alignment of human action to worldly organisation in the context of particular intent. ii. This ethics then applies to many different tasks. There is an ethos for eating (through your mouth) and for writing (clearly, if possible), etc.

B. Combination (&) We have the basic motions and places in place. Abstractly we can separate them, yet they take place simultaneously, all the time. For the sake of explanation we need to continue in discrete parts however. The bridge between A and B is formed by agency, the motion of ourselves into the world. It is the first consequence of our being in reality, and it is there that I start to consider the interplay of the motions; firstly what happens in the world when we apply ourselves to it. 4. I am part of the world: the world changes when I act. With the basic motions (cognition, perception and action) established, we see that a dynamic interplay emerges we become aware of time as a factor in the human experience. a. Everything I do changes reality; i. Even if its as little as my position in it. b. My inner world is a part of my actions. i. My actions are an outer world phenomenon. ii. Through my actions my inner world becomes an outer world phenomenon: 1. Through my actions I add myself to the world. c. And although I am a product of the world I am also different from it, by virtue of my derived inner world. i. Technically I am a subset of the world, based on the limited experience I have of the world, which I reflect back onto the world. ii. A subset intent on keeping itself a part of this world through its body, moreover, and thus with a particular interest in that which is meaningful to me. d. This gives rise to a story, emerging out of the place and moment I am born and the dynamics of my interaction with this. i. Its beginning is a world without me; ii. The journey my ongoing interaction with the world, from moment to changing moment; iii. The destination my answer to the question what the world looks like with me in it. iv. And the ending point the result of the above. e. Along the way I change the world, both for myself and others. i. Creating a new context, from moment to moment: the story is an iterative process of all of us applying ourselves to the world around us.

ii. What we put into the world is distinct from what is already there by virtue of being changed by us, distinct from the world; 1. In being touched it is inherently more meaningful for relating more directly to human life; 2. And in its expression of human logic; 3. A mirror of what we care about and how we work. iii. In this I can recognise myself and others. 5. Others are part of this world: and we create a shared thinking space. In the meeting of multiple minds, an interplay emerges. By necessity it takes place in the space where one can act and another can perceive, inevitably shaping (and limiting) this interplay but also creating content within the collective space. a. I am not the only person with an inner world roaming this world: others also roam this world. i. I recognise them, in their actions and their imprint on the world. ii. And as I recognise them I reach out to them and their (invisible) inner world. b. In the intent to reach out a shared space comes into being within which concentrated attention and intentional agency come together. i. This reaching out must take place in the world around me. 1. It takes place in a space where people can meet: 2. What fills this space must be both expressible and perceptible. a. Which may be unintentional but also intentional. b. This condition limits what can fill this space compared to the full extent of my our inner world; let alone to the full extent of the outer world of which my inner world is a copy. c. This space can be filled with acts that refer to specific parts of my inner world, but only if the act is paired with what it refers to in a created experience. i. Its operators are not inherently meaningful. 1. They must be connected to parts of our inner world. 2. This demands that things be outlined clearly, pointed at. 3. And skews them towards what is directly perceptible. ii. If these acts involve manipulating parts of the world around us intentionally, they can have a semi-permanent position in the

world; initially through memory, but also through e.g. painting or writing. d. Within this space and under its conditions an external representation of inner worlds takes shape. i. One that is discussed and negotiated. ii. One that is shared. iii. One that is shaped by common denominators. iv. One could call the content of this space culture: that which is grown or cultivated by people. e. This language can in turn affect the inner organisation of myself and others by providing new lines of distinction, aiding the listener in recognising new concepts. i. This language would take no hold in my inner world if it did not refer to a structure already present there. ii. In other words, I learn language by recognising what it refers to. iii. Some concepts or acts I thus experience may fit with so many parts of my inner world that I experience the consistency more strongly. 1. The less points of flaw I can identify, the more I experience a sense of beauty. 2. Which is then the cognitive recognition of an organisation present in the world, the cognitive awareness of an organisation in the world beyond me that makes sense. 3. Since this recognition implies a full or very thorough alignment between in and out, I tend to recognise beauty in subsets of experience rather than in experience as a whole. This may mislead into imagining a higher reality than the one I derive the sense of beauty from, a less complicated one, a heaven of ideas. This is merely the case because I do not grasp fully the organisation of the world around me. The experience of beauty is the full recognition of a subset of reality as fitting in the whole of our idea of reality (which makes it no less beautiful). f. Based on language the attention of myself and others can be intentionally pointed at specific subsets of our experience. i. As such agency can be coordinated among and between people.

1. So that, among other things, we negotiate and establish codes of law from which societal structures emanate. 2. And distribute particular knowledge to new participants to this society so that they may play a role in its continuation and propagation. 3. And society emerges as a regulated and regulating body in the external world. 6. I compare versions of experience (inwards, relating, comparing) The collective space, when it exists, becomes a major part of my experience and alters the way we relate to reality so significantly that it gives rise to a distinct part of our experience. a. Based on language and what else fills this shared space a collective vantage point arises, separate from any one person and filled with the thoughts of many, outstretching what any one person can ever hope to know. b. I internalise and develop a relationship to this collective vantage point. c. This collective vantage point aligns with my sense-making but transcends my own, so that as I learn about it I tend to acknowledge its authority. i. I could even go so far as to outsource my sense-making to this collective process, developing a new way of dealing with the world around me mediated by this external knowledge. ii. This creates a duality in my way of sense-making, one that pertains to my personal life and personal choices, another that pertains to collective life and worldly choices. 1. It thus seems as though there is a higher purer reality embodied by collective knowledge, contrasting with the muddy and complicated reality of my personal life. 2. This amounts to a split sense-making, but therefore also a split reality where one reality is the personal and concrete, while the other is abstract, impersonal and timeless. a. The acquisition of this collective understanding is nowhere more clear than in the transition from childhood to adulthood. d. For those tasks that apply to collective and worldly life I can apply a judgment that emanates from this collective: a mediated judgment that does not involve my personal sense-making so much as it does

comparing collective ideal with the reality before me, and adjusting the reality before me to the collective ideal. i. This is what we collectively acknowledge as value-creation, which may be a subset of everything that actually contributes to our answer of the question what the world looks like with us in it. ii. This amounts to a paradoxical shift: the knowledge that derives from personal sense-making, which in turn derives from daily reality, becomes elevated above daily reality as the actual reality. 1. To put it more sharply: we come to hold the derivate of the derivate as a higher reality than reality itself. 2. And this gives us the self-professed right to proclaim judgment over the shape of things. e. This amounts to a dual sense-making within me, which in turn results in a constant tension that is never more strongly felt than in moments of idleness. i. That is, I experience the tension very succinctly when the judging, collective point of view insists that the world is not as it ought to be while I am doing nothing. This is the nagging feeling that boredom gives me. ii. This judging collective point of view also turns on the whole of my self and professes it is not perfect, a perfection that is impossible to attain because the idea of perfection is one of reduced complexity compared to the reality of myself. To hold this ideal version for more real is to look away from real aspects of myself that will be a part of my sense and decision making whether I appreciate it or not. To aspire to its realisation is the unachievable dream to impose the skew present in our idea of the world unto the world. 1. This leads to all sorts of circumspect behaviour, such as constantly asking the other to affirm me, as representative of the collective perspective; escaping through physical activities or other activities that leave less room for abstract judgment; or (temporarily) leaving my regular environment, to a group or place where the collective point of view I am familiar with is less present.

C. Identity (=) Our actions in the outer world let us roam it and set the stage for our development. The outer world is not the only thing that changes in the interaction between self and the world: the inner world also changes, albeit less visibly. When we bring everything together we can consider the inner aspects of our experience. This section deals with the inner world as a whole in itself. 7. Whoever I am and whatever I feel, I always relate from the whole of my inner world. The inner world is a distinct and whole part in the world and my only basis to interact with the world. It is my self, which although not directly perceptible can be experienced through relating to the world. By letting the outer world into the inner world I develop and become better acquainted with it. a. By investigating how I relate to something I get to know both the thing beyond myself as well as myself. i. A relation after all exists between two things. Therefore how I relate to things is useful information to explore the otherwise imperceptible world within me. b. When I investigate myself I find all my past experiences. i. This sheds light on all those parts of me that play a role in my decisions even aside from my collective vantage point: (unformulated) knowledge. 1. It may be apparent by now that these aspects to my decisions do not stem from uninformed irrationality but from informed intuitive understanding. c. Experience thus shapes self. I am not just the train racing through experience but also the tracks behind me, affecting how I relate to the next experience. i. Through experience the world beyond me becomes a part of the world within me. ii. This also explains why I am a trial-and-error creature. I need to experience something before it becomes a part of me. d. My intuition is another word for this relation, and stems from how my past experience (as it is etches into my mind) relates to my present experience, combined with my awareness of change. i. In other words, my intuition is the unexpressed relation between my past and present experience. It is not infallible, it is based on what I have experienced and gets better as I experience more in a particular area. You get good at what you do.

e. I may be as unacquainted with my intuition as I am with myself, and it is by gauging my intuitive response and acting on it that I calibrate it and learn to use it. i. E.g. get acquainted with when I have too little information available, when I have enough, when I am genuinely frightened or when I only fear something because it is unknown. f. These are the processes already present within me continually taking place in my interaction with the world around me, with or without formulated knowledge. 8. I can direct my actions using not just individual bits of knowledge, but also the whole of my inner world. Through action and through relying on the whole of my inner world I can act into the world. It is how I actually put myself into the world as an entity distinct from it, and it is how I channel reality into the collective space. It is the basis for actual human creation (i.e. contribution to the collective human journey). a. I am essentially free in choosing what I want to do, only bound by the ethics of my body. i. And thus the ethics of the world, which will respond to me when I act. b. I can use any and all information available to me to make my choices. i. I can base my actions on knowledge, and reiterate my actions in the same way as is done before. ii. But I can also base my actions on my intuition and how I relate to my surroundings. c. Since the world responds to my actions, I get feedback on how my actions relate to the world. i. If I base my actions on formulated knowledge, I infer this feedback to be on the knowledge. ii. If I base my actions on my intuition, I infer this feedback to be on my self and my intuition. d. This feedback is a relation, but emanating not from myself but from the world around me. You could say its how the world relates to me. i. When I get this feedback on myself rather than on the impersonal knowledge I use, it has a direct emotional impact on me. 1. When this feedback is negative it implies personal incompetence, a painful experience. This feedback is

much less strongly available when the feedback is on impersonal knowledge. a. This makes it tempting to shift to a knowledgebased approach. That however precludes the development of a better use of intuition. 2. When it is positive feedback it affirms my competence: it affirms that I, personally, have successfully learned how the world works in this particular instance. It implies an alignment between my inner world and outer world. a. The emotional experience is one of the world acknowledging you. You deserve to be here based on who you are. b. The more I get this experience, the more I learn to rely on my process of intuition. This reliance based on personal (felt) rather than formulated (worded) knowledge is the actual sense of trust (rather than a mere act of trust). i. This is self-reliance. ii. In the experience of mutual relating I encounter the discrepancies and overlap between myself and the world. I encounter the vastness of the world beyond me and the smallness of myself; but also my personal competence, the world that resides within me. iii. This is a reiteration of why we are in our very essence trial-anderror creatures. 1. And should be: it is the only way we can effectively take in the world and establish a personal relationship with it. 2. And only based on this personal relationship can we have the feeling of acknowledgement from the world that puts us philosophically and existentially at ease (we can only derive this from existence itself; to derive it from something that emanates from us is still intellectually solipsistic). 3. And only based on this personal relationship can we do good in a holistic way; in the best possible alignment with the world around us.

9. I can relate from the whole of myself and recognise the overlap between myself and parts of the world around me, and as I self-identify with parts of the world around me the boundary between in and out fades. The final part of my experience closes the circle that starts with distinction, not in the last place the distinction of the self. We end with the other act of cognition that is to say identification: not by comparing parts of our experience but by comparing the whole of the self to (parts of) experience as a whole. a. This feeling is stronger the more I am my own person: if I have learned to relate from myself and identify with myself, which can only derive from the experience of acting from myself. i. It derives from worldly knowledge, not from wordly knowledge; it cannot be cheated merely by grasping the concept and derives exclusively from my whole inner world. ii. If this is what you call love then love, indeed, is what gives meaning to our life itself. But many people experience the same things with different words, and many experience different things with this one. b. That is why it is necessary to experience for myself: to go through the pains and joys of life, myself. The more I have experienced based on this the more strongly my inner world is defined, and the more I can relate from it; and the more meaning it has. The need for adventure is existential. c. That is sometimes scary, but it both inherent to life and necessary. It is vital in every sense of the word. i. For myself, but also for the society I am a part of. Society in itself is just a physical and organisational infrastructure that does not make choices. The better I relate to the world from myself, the better I am an operator of this infrastructure. Personal judgment is necessary and inevitable, and society benefits from more sound and holistic personal judgment. Societal comment, potentially later. ii. The denial that it should be so, the escape from the necessity of adventure, our greatest threat; an escape into abstraction, the Platonic cave in our head; relinquishing the interaction with the world around us. Society cannot interact with its surroundings without us, and we cannot interact with the world for each other. iii. We do not live without engaging with the world, involving risk and pain but also joy and love.

iv. Society, moreover, does not progress without us living and choosing. We cannot consolidate life into a steady safe framework. d. Moreover, this is the only way I can give meaning to my life; for the meaning of my life is the sum of my relations to the world around me. e. And so we return to the distinction between I and the world, but where we begin by recognising and emphasising it, in the contact with the world it fades and we can learn to de-emphasise it. f. That is the vital adventure that is life. 0. There is experience.

Geometry of the theoretical model (process-based)

Division

Triangle

Combination

Square

Alignment/identification

Circle

The theory that provides structure to my manifesto is, as mentioned earlier, based on the distinction between my self and the world around me. The whole of this manifesto is divided in three parts, which in turn are also divided in three parts. There is overlap between these two sets of three, processes that correspond with places. First the processes: cognition takes place within our inner world; perception takes place from the outside world to the inner; and agency takes place from the inner to the outer world. All three processes are aspects of the human experience, and they combine in many ways to amount to the complexity of our experience. Put differently who we are cannot be concretely outlined but emerges out of these processes that can be outlined. I have further elucidated the distinction by separating these processes into an abstract, generalised component; a component that takes place in the world beyond us, and a component that takes place within us. These three sets are parts A, B and C. Note that the first process of a set corresponds with the general quality of the set (conceptual with cognition, outward with agency, inward with perception) and that the last process of one part aligns with the first process of the next. Abstractly speaking all components might be discussed and treated separately and in whichever order; and they are all a part of us, our life, our experience simultaneously; but the sequential structure of the points is necessary to clearly outline them to us, humans, based on the way we accumulate experience and acquire new information. We are innately chronological beings after all. Sequence helps us to adequately construct sense for our from-the-ground-up sense making brain. For example, the distinction between an inner and an outer world cannot be made without first establishing one of the two; the interaction between the processes cannot be made clear without first mentioning the processes; and finally, the inner least visible dimension of the whole is very difficult to outline without the distinctions made in the first two parts. Beyond stating that sequence matters I dont know whether I can justify my exact choice of sequence, except to say that this is what makes the most sense to me. I wrote it intuitively, and it still seems to me that no other sequence fits better. Graphically:

This gives a neat symmetry to the whole, from which further organisation becomes apparent. Cognition is diametrically aligned along the 9/1& 5 axis, perception along the 2 & 6/7 axis and agency along the 3/4 & 8 axis. Further investigation leaves room for the interpretation that 2 (reality) represents the true, 5 (cognition) is where we realise the organisation of the true in the beautiful/ideal, and 8 is where our agency aligns with the true into the good. Thus the distinction between cognition, perception and agency overlaps with the philosophical distinction between ideal, true and good, implying that they are all the same thing (i.e. God) but that the distinction emanates from us and the way we work in the world. Note also that the ideal, the true and the good seem to oppose the midpoint between the other two, that is to say e.g. 5 and the joining of e.g. 9 and 1. It seems to me that this is worth investigating in connection to the material/spiritual distinction in a dualistic worldview; where 1 and 9 represent opposing sides of the dualistic distinction and 5 is the synthesis into a monistic point of view. Here too I

believe the distinction emanates from the self being in the world, and the only way to adequately deal with it philosophically is to embrace the paradox as being brought into the world by our being in it. These symmetries allow for further and more elaborate investigation of the abstract model; although I must admit that in this respect even I do fully not grasp the model.

Afterword (societal critique)

What we call knowledge is in fact formulated knowledge, and it is not just a subset of reality but a subset of all the knowledge available to us. We have spent a good amount of time consolidating knowledge into data and organisational frameworks e.g. laws and contracts, but we cannot function based only on formulated knowledge. Overreliance on formulated knowledge is a major aspect of most problems facing us personally as well as collectively. Not only does unformulated knowledge help us find the confluence of what is possible and what is needed, we also rely on it in the everyday choices through which we all affect and change the world. The personal reality each of us carries with us may be flawed when we compare it with the whole set of formulated knowledge available to us as society, but it is not a simple matter of one is better than the other. We need both. That is why we need organisational structures that leaves room for both. We need a new ideology that legitimises a bottom-up approach, as well as organisational structures that are based on such an ideology (and facilitate our personal workings). The formulation of these structures is one of the most urgent (and exciting!) issues of our era, especially since top-down organisations are falling apart (together with their credibility) in the wake of the collapse of ideologies that warranted them. The large-scale organisations that will persist are those that leave room for what emerges from the ground up, and they will continue to exist to the extent to which they facilitate smaller-scale processes. To not do so is to give in to increasing abstraction away from reality and to cease to respond to the feedbacks the world keeps giving us; it is to withdraw into the ideal realm outlined in part five. As a consequence of such withdrawal organisations and ultimately humanity as a whole will become slow: too slow to keep up with the world but especially with their (our) own effect on it.

When we speak of the issues of sustainability, the individual needs to re-assert their own reality. We tend to outsource our responsibility to act to the larger structures we are a part of, but these structures cannot rely on all the information we have available personally. If we outsource our judgment entirely to these institutions, we have to wait for knowledge to become formulated and integrated into a collective worldview before it becomes incorporated into human agency. Usually this means it takes a collective experience (read: catastrophe) before a different course of action can be legitimised. Sustainability relies on personal responsibility and personal action. Fortunately there is a large upside to taking such responsibility: for it is also to align ourselves with our personal understanding of the world, giving us peace of mind and happiness even if we do not manage to save the world. We dont need to save the world, we merely need to play our own part. Our collective answers emerge from what we do personally. Not the other way around. People are always present in things people do. This may sound tautological, but it means that personal realities are present in everything people do. Of course we can understand problems from a theoretical perspective, but reality is more messy than our idea of it. Your ideas should change your actions, and the development of the world does not depend on developing new societal frameworks (alone) but on developing people (we cannot judge a world without people as imperfect; there is nothing to perfect except ourselves). People are the operators of society with every choice they make. As our societies become larger and more capable of affecting the world around us, the responsibility to effect sound judgment becomes increasingly important. This judgment arises only in the second place from in the knowledge and societal structures around us and in the first place as a product of our personal inner worlds. An organisation will at some point collapse without well-developed people who can and dare to exercise personal judgment, just as a plane cannot fly without a capable pilot. Perhaps most importantly history has taught us caution by showing us our imperfections. There is a paradox inherent in this caution, for it tells us that we are both capable of making mistakes as well as desirous to learn from them. We can and we must do so, and then still our future is inevitably strewn with unknowns. We are trial-and-error beings and we must build our proper understanding of things from the ground up. Theory helps us to some extent, but we cannot formulate theory without experience. The possibility of mistakes, even the most

horrible ones, should not keep us from stepping into an unknown future. Doing that would be just another mistake, one that (like any other mistake) gets worse the longer we refuse to learn from it. Whichever way we turn, we need a credible philosophical basis for moving forward. I opt for starting with what is self-evident. Experience can show us where to go from there, time and again. Crisis is a good moment to reinvent yourself. If youve expanded too far, build up from the basis and see where you can go. If this is an intellectual challenge, Id say we have the time and the manpower for it, infused with the desire of a generation that wants to be part of something meaningful. It is the collective translation of the personal adventure none of us can escape except by death, an inevitable adventure that keeps on acquiring meaning as we keep on living it.

A final note
To translate a matter of experience into words is always a matter of interpretation. What I wrote here I find overlapping with the thoughts of so many before me, phrased in different ways. Reality does not seem to change fundamentally based on how we see it although we do, and thereby our actions do too. If I spend another year reflecting on that which these words refer to I will find yet another way of saying it, one that belongs to who I am then. My interpretation will probably keep changing as I change. This fact of change is something I cannot and do not want to change. I enjoy both learning and knowing that there is still much to learn. Now that these words have found their way to the paper however, I find them settling in. Small details change, the major lines stay similar enough for me to consider this work as finished as it gets and ready to find its way into the conversation of humanity. Consider, finally, this work as the expression of how I relate to the underlying organisation of my life; and understand that you will never escape having to relate what you read to your own experience of reality. I hope that the careful reader will attempt to find the essence of what I wrote here only by holding them to the light of their own experience. Only then they may be meaningfully projected back into the mind. These words may have a reality of their own, but there is truth only in what they refer to. A word of thanks Although this is a personal work it is written in a life that takes place in the living world. Many have influenced and affected me and thereby helped shape this work into what it is, but some have directly affected the circumstances of its writing. That is why I must thank Manfred van Doorn, Emily Basa Besa and John Jack Gallagher for directly or indirectly encouraging me to start writing; Dave de Bakker and Suzanne Oudshoorn for moral and emotional support in the tough and exhausting process of creation; and most of all, my mother Jeannine de Jong, for the unconditional understanding and love and for providing the sine qua non of almost unconditional space to develop and create what I believe and believed necessary to develop and create.