Deepening Together

On the reciprocal path both sides enter the same reciprocal process. This does not mean being physically together, and does not mean sustained contact.

Deepening on this path is joint. It is not each side saying its own thing; it is re-examining my own construction in front of the other's frame of reference. If those two really get this far, what may happen is not that one of them is persuaded, but that each sees a place in his own law he had not previously said clearly.

A gain can form here, and it has to be written in the possible mood. Mutual chiselling can make both sides' law-making more active — established in Positive-Sum. What it may bring is not a division of something good, but the tracing itself activating each side's construction.

But the same event may bring other things: exhaustion, harm, and newly exposed incompatibility. After a genuine joint deepening, two people may be clearer than before about exactly where they do not fit.

So three limits follow. First, the gain does not mean harm disappears. Harm still occurs on this path, and the two parallel ledgers hold here too. One may not use this is positive-sum to deny that what was just said did hurt.

Second, a larger remainder is not automatically failure, and not automatically higher resolution. That two people see more difference after talking than before says neither that it went badly nor that it went well. What to look at is whether those new differences can be located, restated, and questioned, and whether the object stayed the same. If they can, it earns registration as a possible gain in resolution — and that registration can still be corrected later. If they cannot, it is simply one more patch of fog.

Third, the check on my own end can still only be done by me. Both entering the same reciprocal process does not turn my check into a joint check, and those three clues still may not be taken and applied to the other. And the jointly generated solution has its conditions only on this path, because it requires genuinely probing both sides' floors, and probing requires both to have entered.

Two Termini, Not Ranked

The termini on this path are of two kinds: consensus, or mutual acknowledgement of incommensurability. Consensus has two histories internally — arrangement consensus and revision consensus — treated later.

The two termini are not ranked. Neither which is better nor that they are equally good is written — because the second sentence is still two marks on one ruler, and has not removed the ruler.

This path may also not terminate. Both inside the reciprocal condition, both having gone the distance, and no consensus and no mutual acknowledgement obtained. That must be kept apart from switching paths. Not terminating is: the reciprocal condition is still available and no terminus was reached. Switching is: the reciprocal condition is currently no longer available — whether it never started, or started and broke off, or was available and then lapsed. The first stays on this path. The second moves to the other one.

A Different Scene

Someone has worked in one place for many years and has a long-unresolved disagreement with a person above him. He holds that a certain thing has its own reasons for being done a certain way. The person above him reads every disagreement as an attitude problem.

He has explained. What came back afterwards was I know it is not easy for you. He has given way, and the giving way was recorded as he finally came round. He has tried saying it harder, and after saying it harder the thing turned into an assessment of him as a person.

What is happening is not that he expresses himself badly. It is that in this relationship, whatever he says gets translated into another system. The reciprocal condition is currently unavailable in this domain. And he cannot leave — or rather, leaving would not settle the thing.

The unilateral path is not a synonym for cultivation. It also includes arrangements on one's own side, protecting boundaries, ceasing to apply force, pausing and removal — and none of those has changing the other's side as its object.

Only when I am still actively intervening on the other's side does the direction of that intervention, if it is to stay inside conflict-handling, become cultivation: providing potential conditions for the other to discover and develop his own law. Cultivation does not constitute a duty to intervene, and does not rewrite the unilateral path into a growth project run on somebody else.

Four Things About That Word

First, cultivation is not instruction, not reform, not turning the other into something. The path is not named after it precisely because the path of cultivation would immediately read as I have judged you lower, so I will cultivate you. The name governs the entrance; the content governs the practice. Two separate things.

Second, the first step is not making him see me. Economics P2 §4.1: a more unfolded position can only grow out of a stable one. So the first step is helping him stand more solidly on the things he himself cannot put down. Before that, efforts to make him consider my position are at high risk of being translated as a strategic signal to make him give way. Every time the man above explained, what the other heard was he is arguing.

Third, there is a structural condition, in advance, and it is checkable in the first person without judging the other's layer or inner life: the intervention may not compress the other's authority, channels or real ability to refuse, interrupt, revise, exit and restate himself.

Offering reasons may change whether he is willing to refuse; it may not lower whether he is able to. That distinction matters: without it, the very act of setting out grounds gets judged as colonisation. An intervention that compresses the other's authority, channel or real ability to say no is not cultivating intervention, however much it looks like help.

Fourth, there are signs afterwards, and they are only supporting. That he can explain himself better, that he can refuse me better — these can support the judgement that cultivation happened here. They are not necessary and sufficient criteria, still less my certificate of his growth.

From this, dependence becomes sayable. The kind manufactured and locked in by the intervention, such that the other cannot say no to the intervener, is the gentle form of colonisation. But not all dependence is colonisation. People depend on one another as a matter of course: a child on care, a patient on treatment, an apprentice on a teacher. Only that one kind is judged colonisation: it was made, and it locks the channel of refusal. Two last sentences: cultivation does not presuppose success, and it does not predict that the other will change. The reason for doing these things is not in the prediction.

Four Positions Facing the Other

The War Treatise §5 set out five names as the handling spectrum outside war, without unfolding them. The last of the five says the thing never formed into a situation needing handling at all; that belongs before the conflict. The other four unfold here at personal scale. The first three are operations of intervention; the fourth is the posture of not intervening. And these four are not an exhaustive classification of everything one does on this path: arrangements on one's own side, protecting boundaries, pausing and removal are none of them.

Attacking the design: change the situation so the incompatible step need not happen. The man above could turn what had to be argued face to face into something written; turn a two-person matter into one with a third person present; turn what was decided ad hoc each time into something settled in advance. Attacking by argument: set out the grounds of my side, without requiring him to accept the conclusion. Attacking the thought: ask only that the question stand up over there, in him. Not attacking: no longer applying force, only maintaining conditions.

These four are different positions, not a ladder from low to high. There is a reading on which the force applied decreases along the sequence, but no common dimension supports it: changing the situation is sometimes far more forceful than setting out reasons, because it draws on resources, space, time and the structure of third parties. What is claimed here is that the four differ. It is not claimed that they diminish.

The line between argument and thought has to be written on the argument side, not only on the thought side. Argument sets out the grounds; thought asks only that the question stand up in him. Neither requires him to accept the conclusion. Written only on the thought side, argument becomes identical in form to the art of persuasion — and the art of persuasion is exactly what this whole path avoids.

Thought has a further limit, because it degrades most easily. The question must remain refusable, rewritable, interruptible. A question the other cannot refuse is not attacking the thought; it is argument in disguise, or it has already turned into pressure and a power operation. Planting a question in someone so that he cannot shake it off is not making a question stand up. That is something else.

Design has a limit too. Changing the situation changes the conditions under which the incompatible step occurs — not the other's schedule, relationships or choices. One may not, merely on the ground that I am handling a conflict or I am cultivating you, acquire the authority to arrange another person's life unilaterally. Role authority, legal authority or procedural authority settle on their own terms and have nothing to do with this path. And once the current object has gone dormant, force added beyond that is no longer the handling of this conflict. If it still happens, it moves to the ledger of power, harm, or some other action. That is not forbearance. That force is simply no longer pointed at anything being handled.

What Understanding Does Not Settle

On this path there is no joint deepening sufficient to form a joint reading. The other may still take part at certain points, but that does not constitute a joint reading.

Hence the sentence that matters most on this path: my having understood why he does this is not his having agreed to my understanding, still less this thing being settled.

Taking a one-sided understanding for a shared consensus is legislating for the other. And this is the version most easily waved through as consideration: I am being so thoughtful about him, how could that be colonisation? If the man above works out, in his own head, a complete explanation of the other's behaviour, and then arranges everything that follows according to that explanation — that is what he is doing.

One-sided understanding also does not count as evidence that I have done all I could. I have understood him completely — what more do you want from me? — that sentence has the shape of the fourth way of closing the channel. Understanding produces no exemption.