2.62
‘It almost seems as though, elsewhere in this text and despite your saying just now that we’re beings who universalize and generalize, you deny the existence of universals. But, surely, this can’t be right. For example, kinaesthetic structure applies to people across cultures. Human bodies can only do so much: they have a range of motion. Sure, there may be exceptions, but the point is that there’s a general range within which possibilities are housed: this range is universal. So, if you’re adverse to universals as necessary and sufficient conditions, why not think of them as describing ranges of possibilities?’
Let’s discuss bodily activity through considering tai chi. It may be said that tai chi, as a practice, can apply universally to all human bodies. In response, I claim that what we call ‘the universal’ rides the wave of what is common (in this case, between human bodies — but, of course, not all human bodies). To get to this ‘universal,’ a particular person must express and figure it out for themselves in accordance with tai chi principles. — And yet, the ‘universal’ cannot ever really be said.
‘Are you suggesting there’s some kind of an enactive universalism that cannot be expressed? Is language the problem?’
— No. It’s not language. Rather, the ‘problem’ (not a problem at all, really) has to do with the disclosure we inhabit, which is always a particular disclosure. Universals are rooted within particular disclosures, thus a particular relational web and a particular metaphysics. Universals gain their sense from this metaphysical, relational, differential context. Therefore, universals are universally true within particular disclosures.
‘But that’s gibberish! It’s universally true that all humans have hearts.’
Let’s suppose it is (– maybe we should say all humans have heart-like organs or supplements? — but the thrust of my point isn’t that universal statements admit of exceptions). There’s nothing necessitating that we think in these terms: ‘human,’ ‘heart.’
‘So, is your qualm with delineations? That we could think of humans as not restricted to skin, for instance, i.e., the border problem?’
No. It’s not that simple.
It helps to see that concepts aren’t just things in our heads that we lay over top of things. They’re enactive: ‘out there,’ real, enmeshed with things (§2.44). – Thus, we’re always in part also responding to concepts.
‘But if you bring me a cadaver, set it down, I can cut it open and show you that there’s a heart inside. I can repeat this with several different bodies. We’ll all agree that all humans have hearts!’
Just because something is easy to agree with doesn’t make it universally true; neither truth nor universals are determined solely by intersubjective agreement. Some statements may very well be easier to reach agreement on, and they may very well be true. But communication—reaching out across a gap—is never guaranteed and is never the conveyance of a nugget or some kind of core: for every truth, statement, aspect, or thing can and will be placed in different contexts and undergo particular shifts and changes, inextricably.
‘Nonetheless, there’s a thing (e.g., a human) there, right? There’s an X that I don’t create and that others can encounter.’
Yes. But this ‘X’ almost cannot be said. For any articulation we give, any perception we have, is contextual, relational, and differential. (Any pre– or non-articulation is also contextual and conceptual: in fact, concepts are ‘pre-conceptual,’ in the sense that they’re implicit in our perception and experience.) ‘But there is a thing here.’ – A thing here? But we needn’t think in terms of things in this way.
‘There’s an X here’ — you’re already conceptualizing: you cannot help but do so. ‘But there’s something there!’ — Yes.
‘So, all humans have hearts?’ Yes. But look at the grammar. (Look at grammar as though it were a symptom: not in the sense that it grounds a real condition, but in that it’s linked with a gathering of being.) ‘All humans have hearts.’ – Why these delimitations? Why this grammatical structure? Why ‘have’? Why these concepts and why this way of looking at things? — Or, rather, why take this way as indicative of the way?
This addresses the second point: why we shouldn’t think of universals as connected with ranges of possibilities. – A range, or fuzziness, doesn’t change the fact that such a universal is universal within a given context, within a given disclosure.
We’re beings who universalize and generalize. — This means that we ‘universalize,’ or generalize, always within particular contexts. – Universalizing in this sense takes on different colourations, where any universals ride the wave of what is common between particularities. For example, the concept of the colour red is a particular concept that’s housed within particular disclosures, wrapped up in relationally differential, metaphysical webs (e.g., what’s a colour, what’s delineation, how does colour interact with things, etc.); it’s also a particular concept for each person who thinks it, for it’s derived from a finite engagement with experiences of red.
Our world makes particular expressions of universalizing and generalizing possible: we’re beings who see what is common between particularities and contexts; it’s in our world that these cohere into a particular gathering of the whole. Generalization is open to different degrees of reductionism.
There are no claims that are true everywhere. Not only because of changing conditions, borderline cases, and so on, but because of the different (and changing) worlds within which they appear.
‘But — why are there different disclosures?’
This is an interesting question. Perhaps there are different disclosures because we have different interactions with different kinds of beings from different points of view with our respective and responsive bodily being. — To encounter an other—to encounter any thing at all—there must already be this difference. — But, then again, why shouldn’t we think there’d be different disclosures? Why start from the assumption of sameness?
Does this mean that phenomena such as globalization (technologization, capitalism, the dominance of a small number of languages, etc.) indicate we’re approaching a homogenization point of contexts, human groups, and hence disclosures? – No. While we’re approaching homogenizations, contexts are always divergent and particular. – Let’s not fall prey to hypostatization.