The One This Is Written For

This series is written for someone standing before a decision. A thing is in front of him. Nobody is deciding it for him. No ready-made rule is deciding it for him either. And he does not want to hand himself over.

That last clause is the whole of it. Plenty of people stand before decisions and are glad to hand themselves over — to a manager, a custom, a formula, a crowd. That is not a failing this series condemns; it is simply not whom it is talking to. It is talking to the person who has noticed that there is a self to hand over, and would rather not.

What it writes about is how such a person lives by his own law. Law, here, means the one a person gives himself and that governs only him. Another person’s law may have exactly the same content, and it is still something that person arrived at, not something handed over by me.

And the whole series runs on a single line, which the second essay takes apart. Hold to anti-colonization inwardly; strive for cultivation outwardly. Inwardly, do not let anyone else’s purposes stand in for your own law. Outwardly, help another person’s own law grow, without putting yours in its place. Those two halves turn out to be one thing seen from two sides.

This opening piece was written last. It could only check its accounts once the nine were finished. So it does four plain things: says what the series is not, and what it will not do for the reader; says what it does give, and to whom; settles the accounts other series left for it; and lists the essays, one line each.

Four Things It Is Not

It is not a technique for success. It is not a way of reaching an already-fixed goal at maximum efficiency. There is no method in it for getting things done. It is about how a person draws a line on some matter — and once the line is drawn, whether things come off is often not in his hands.

It is not a checklist of correct behaviour that fits everyone. There is no list anywhere in it telling a person what to do in which situation. Where it describes several possible ways of acting, it says in the same breath that they are not a list to follow.

It is not history’s mobilisation order to the individual. The ninth essay writes about a shared phase transition — a direction many people can face toward together. It is not a higher end with the right to requisition anyone. And the small things in the earlier essays — not writing a colleague’s name on a list, shielding one person, doing a piece of woodwork on a balcony — do not count only because they are useful to some larger picture.

And it is not a proof that a good heart excuses you from looking at what you actually do to people. Having acknowledged in your heart that people are ends is not the same as actually treating a person as an end in this matter. The series keeps returning to what was actually done. The framework’s foundations put the minimum bluntly: do not lie — say what you did, and say for whom.

Four Things It Will Not Do for You

It will not choose your action. Someone stands in front of a thing in these essays; what gets written is what that position is like, not what he should pick. Nor what you should pick.

It will not hand you rules. Rules can enter a judgment. Applying a rule to this particular thing is not something another rule can do; the first essay establishes that.

It will not give you a criterion guaranteed to close. There is no test such that applying it always yields a verdict, and always the right one.

It will not judge whether your particular act was right. It talks about structure. It will point out where a claim cannot be squared with the premises it says it stands on, and where a description is not true. But whether a person did right in that one matter, the series does not pronounce.

Why decline all four? The framework’s foundations establish exactly one lemma: cannot-not only legislates for oneself. They decline to add a second, and give the reason beside it: any second one derived from the first would be pushed onto the reader from outside, and would break the first. Doing any of these four would put the series on the outside of the reader’s own law.

Three Things It Does Give

First, a way of thinking: negation and remainder, turned on action. When a person decides, what he does is negate. After a judgment, some things are left over. How that unfolds begins in the first essay.

Second, the author’s own stance — offered as a demonstration, and replaceable. The moral-law series said the same of its own: it is one way of standing that the author gave from inside his own situation; not a norm, not a commandment; the reader is his own legislator and is welcome to stand his own way. The stances written into this series are like that too.

Third, a set of cannot-nots, each hanging on conditions. Whenever the series says something is a cannot-not, it means: standing in a certain position, this cannot be cancelled. It is not a command. What the position is comes next; how a cannot-not hangs on conditions, the first essay says.

One point of house style belongs here, because it amounts to a promise. The series upstream kept writing the same routing line: wherever an ought comes up, it goes to moral law, rights theory and the theory of action. Whatever part of that was routed here, this series pays out only in cannot-not and in open-either-way. It never writes ought. Why, the first essay explains.

One Premise, Said Once

The series has one premise: oneself is an end, and other people are ends too. That is its domain. It is said here once; later essays point back with a single sentence.

It is declared, not proved. That others can have value of their own, not supplied by anyone else, is something upstream established as an item each person has to own for himself. This series does not re-establish it. For someone who does not stand on this premise, the series does not hold — and it does not try to talk him onto it.

Nor does the premise guarantee that a person actually treats people as ends in every matter. Whether he does, in this one, is what is actually going on in this one. The series never lets its domain stand in for that step.

A position is not a qualification. Standing here does not make anyone higher than anyone else, and it is not a certificate. The series names people by what they do, never by pinning a level on them.

The Accounts, and the Contents

Series upstream wrote down, in so many words, a number of things they were handing to the theory of action: twenty-nine lines in all, from value theory, meaning theory and conflict theory. The prequel settles them in public, by the rule value theory set for itself: a forward reference is a debt, and it is either paid, or publicly reassigned with a reason, or publicly withdrawn with a reason. Only the public text counts; internal working notes do not. Twenty-eight lines are settled across the nine essays. One — the conversation with the ethics of care — is left with a fixed address in the closing interface essay, and is paid there.

It also says one sentence about what comes after. This series first says action through fully; the second and third critiques will come back and examine it. It does not rehearse them, and it does not say less now for fear of being examined later.

A word on the examples. Essays one to six follow one man who prepares reports — an invented, ordinary story, there to put the theory itself on the table. Essays seven to nine add real events from history, all before 2000: individual deeds, not statues.

The nine, one line each. One: when a person decides, what he does is negate, and a rule cannot judge for him. Two: how a person walks out of other people’s rules — first by not doing, then by seeing clearly his own cannot-not, then by recognising that another’s can only be set by that other. Three: what outside things can and cannot do, what to do when you cannot yet tell, how to look back, and saying what you did. Four: how body, feeling, ability, habit and hesitation come in; how an action starts, holds, breaks off, changes; the time you could not carry it; and the final cannot.

Five: how a person’s own value unfolds in time without having to prove itself useful. Six: not colonising; cultivation as a direction that must also leave a blank; what others get from you is theirs. Seven: in three kinds of situation — germination, inversion, establishment — compromise, invisibility, exit, protection and resistance. Eight: finding another person who lives by his own law; consensus that is not sameness; doing things together without becoming one subject. Nine: a shared phase transition as a direction to face together, not a requisition; guarding, so that people are not reduced to means again; and the close. After the nine comes one more, standing outside them, putting the series into conversation with the traditions it borders on.