Abstract

Four essays in, a value-content's whole history is on the table: which row of source it takes its standing from, through which place it became this person's, what happens structurally when the place is occupied, how it rises and falls in time. What is missing is what to do when two of them collide.

The object is value conflict: one person, two contents each already avowed, demanding incompatible actions in one concrete situation.

The whole essay has one line with different things on either side. On one side: constitution and standing — whether a row of source is present, whether a content has taken its standing in this person's own law, this person's standing as an end. Three things on that side, each its own, none interchangeable. On the other side: action — which content holds the centre of gravity now, whether new candidates can still surface on each row, whether contents are added or lost. The conflict is entirely on the second side, and so is the adjudication. And the action side does not settle across into the first: relational acts can seal the road to that side, and can make a reading that looks like constitution, and cannot perform constituting. If anything on the first side changed, this person did something else over there.

What most needs guarding against here is not saying too little. It is handing over a ruler. Conflict pushes the question of an order of action right up in front of you, and once an order gets its grounds written down the grounds get read as gradations: the reader lays the grounds out as a weighting table and asks which scores higher. The head proposition of this series is it has structure, and admits no ranking, and practical situations do not stop producing orders of action and outcomes on that account. Fail to cut the two apart and this essay reads either as in a conflict you may decline to choose, or as the series has finally admitted that values rank.

The line to hold was printed long ago: unranked in being does not mean practical situations produce no order of action. And only the order formed by the bearer's own law is what this essay calls adjudication. It is an order in action, not a ranking of value-standing.

1. One Afternoon

A man has two things he set for himself: a book he has been writing for years, and a craft he opened up on his own. Both come out of the 14DD row — one's own ends and their flourishing. This afternoon is enough for one of them.

That is the case this essay handles: under one bearer, two contents each already avowed, demanding incompatible actions in one concrete situation. Incompatible is said of the actions, not of the contents. Both contents are there, both are his, and only one can be done this afternoon.

Several situations look the same from outside. One: a man has stopped doing that thing the old way lately. It looks as if it collided with something, and in fact that content is changing on its own. The two cuts fall here — first, was there a first-person constituting act in this change; if not, it is a rise or fall in running; if so, has the original claiming terminated: not terminated is revision, terminated is withdrawal. In the revision cell there is only ever one content, and no two things holding against each other.

Another: today he suddenly wants very much to go home early, and the work on his desk is not finished. The line is not whether going home early looks like a preference. A preference can be a candidate content's first appearance, and it can equally be an established value-content expressing itself in present action — a man who has long cherished caring for his family therefore chooses to come home early today. Preference does not lock to one layer, and a present preference is not enough to establish that a content already is value-content, nor that it is not. So if wanting to go home early is only wanting it now, it is not this case; if it is the present expression of an avowed value, then two values really are colliding.

A third: two people each holding one thing, at odds. That is not a matter of two contents under one bearer; its structure is elsewhere, and the last sections take it up.

Two more things have to hold. The two contents must belong to one bearer. And that bearer's first-person ordering of action must already be able to run in this content-domain. Subjects-to-be, and people who have temporarily lost that running, fall on the boundary; not unfolding them here is not a judgment that they have no value.

Two contents belonging to one person does not mean no one else is in the situation. Belonging says whose each content is; it says nothing about who else is around this afternoon.

2. Standing Admits Only Holding or Not

That afternoon he will ask himself: which one matters more.

To say a content has standing is to ask one thing only: has it taken, in the bearer's own law, the standing avowal confers. First-person avowal is a constituting event by which a candidate content takes a first-person status of being invocable, restatable and revisable, and that place can be neither granted nor revoked from outside. There is no quantity in the definition. As regards the standing avowal confers, a content has either taken it or not yet; there is no third case, and the two here fall in the first. The predicate has no taken it a bit more or a bit less. Higher, lower, equal — comparisons of that kind are not in this predicate's domain of definition.

A person's identification with a value can be ambiguous, can waver, can take years to settle. Why insist it is only holding or not.

Wavering, strength, attention and the centre of gravity each have their own subject, and all are readings on the running side; standing is not the same thing. By degrees describes the process of entering that standing: some avowals occur in a moment, some take shape by degrees and settle only after years, and calling it a constituting event says what it completes structurally, not that it must fall on a single point in time. What is being weighed here is two contents whose claiming is already complete; and once the question is whether this content has become his value-content, the predicate takes only holding or not. Not one of the real ambiguities of experience has been deleted. They simply do not fall on standing.

3. Conflict Falls on Joint Realizability

Standing answers whether this one is his, and the answer is only holding or not. Whether the two things they demand right now can both be done is another question.

Conflict is that second question answered no: jointly unrealizable. And joint realizability is a property of demands for action, not a property of standing. This content is his, and that content is also his, and between those two sentences there is nothing that could get in the other's way, because holding and holding do not collide. What collides is that there is only one afternoon.

So conflict does not fall on the side of standing. The reason is not that there is no ruler over there. Even if there were, two gradations would not become incompatible by sitting on one table. The reason is that there is nothing over there that could be jointly realized.

And if no revision or withdrawal separately occurs, the two contents' existing standing yields no higher and lower, cannot declare either void, and certainly cannot compute out of both are my values which one to do this afternoon.

That book and that craft come out of the same 14DD row. Even for someone who still thinks the four rows rank, there are no two comparable items here: same row, same bearer, both avowed. And the conflict is real, and this afternoon is real, and the question of an order of action is still standing right in front of him.

The thing he is asking after does not exist in the place he is asking. He still has to sit down at two o'clock and do one of them.

4. The Sense of Higher and Lower

Sitting in that afternoon, it is hard not to wonder which one is more important. The thought does not come from nowhere. It really is reading something. What it reads is just not where it thinks it is.

The four rows do make more dimensions available as the DD levels rise. A bearer unfolded to 15DD does not have the same number of dimensions to hand as one unfolded only to 12DD. That layer is structural, and it falls on the history of construction and on available dimensions. Richness came with three limits attached, one of which is that there is no quantity on the value-standing side. More and fewer say what one can use, not what one is worth.

The direction of going up is real too as a condition. A person can stop at the rows of source he has and lose nothing by not taking up more; and what the structure now standing has not exhausted keeps giving a legitimate bridge that can be taken up. A bridge gives a condition on direction. It does not perform the uptake for the bearer. So the structure gives only the direction one may open toward. It does not adjudicate which of two existing rows is lighter.

There is one more asymmetry, and it appears only at sources later in the structural order. When such a source has conditions of application that have actually arisen, and the bearer actively closes that source's running, that does not count as neutral going-back. What is closed is the running, not the fact that the source-position was once gained. This asymmetry does not say the later one is worth more. It says the source's conditions of application are present now and the bearer shut it off. No direction-value attribution was assigned to that either.

One more thing gets read as ranking by structural order: the window for action. A book not written today can still be written tomorrow; a person not visited today may not be here tomorrow. What is being separated here is whether deferring closes off the same opportunity — not whether an action, once begun, can be taken back. Those are two questions. The window is something he really will look at. What is misread is the correlation between it and the structural order.

And the correlation reverses. For a man near starving, the demand on the lowest row has the tightest window of all, and the damage of missing it is the least reversible: the life ends and nothing else need be discussed. If an order of action really could be read straight off the structural order, this is the counter-example; and if one says instead that lower always takes priority, ordinary afternoons are the counter-example. Both readings turn a situation's window and damage into gradations of value-standing. That the correlation reverses is itself the proof that it is not structure.

So someone steps back and says: then the ranking of values varies with the situation. That step invites the ruler back in, with a parameter added. What varies with the situation is the order of action, not value-standing. The order of action was never a ranking of value in the first place, so its varying says nothing about anything changing over on the standing side. A man writes first yesterday and works the craft first today, and across those two days not one content's standing moved by a hair.

5. Yielding Is Not Withdrawal

That afternoon he did one and not the other. Where the undone one stands in his own law depends only on whether a revision or withdrawal separately occurred. Not on the not-doing.

An order of action, the results of carrying it out, and what others do to him cannot by themselves rewrite a content's value-standing. Claiming, revision and withdrawal are structurally permanent: relational things can seal the road to them and cannot take them away. The most constitution-like thing the outside can produce is still only a reading — attribution belongs on the side of social recognition, which has no constituting power, so nothing is constituted there, only a reading taken as constitution. And a bearer's own closing of a source later in the structural order changes that row's reachability, not its presence; the history of construction cannot be erased, and what is shut off is the running.

So yielding is not withdrawal. Not because he restrained himself from withdrawing, but because the act of yielding simply cannot do what withdrawal does. Yielding is on the side of the order of action; withdrawal is on the side of constitution. They are not on the same side. He did not write the book today, and that fact by itself cannot move where the book stands in his own law.

If a content's standing really did change, then another first-person revision or withdrawal occurred. The change comes from that constituting act, not from the yielding.

That governs the act of yielding itself. What becomes of the yielded content afterwards has to be asked separately, and there are four different questions with four different subjects. Their answers can differ pairwise: the content is still avowed while today's demand no longer holds; the window has closed while that row still throws up new candidates. Rolling them into one state and asking how is the yielded one doing now asks after nothing real.

6. Adjudication Is Judged Apart from Constitution

An adjudication is itself an arrangement on the order of action. Whether a constituting act also occurred during a conflict is not answered by whether the thing was an adjudication. It is answered by the two cuts: was there a first-person constituting act, and has the original claiming terminated.

A person really can settle a conflict by way of revision or withdrawal. He worked it out that afternoon: the craft he no longer holds as his own thing, and takes it up from now on only as a pastime. That is a withdrawal, and it is real — and it was not accomplished by the adjudication. Both can happen inside one stretch of deciding, and each still settles by its own subject.

And when two avowed contents collide, what actually gets done can still be organized by something else. Someone was on the phone pressing him and he went; his hand moved first and habit chose for him; he was too tired and picked one at random; or he followed a set of practices picked up elsewhere that has never taken standing in his own law. All of these can close this afternoon's window, and none of them is what this essay calls adjudication.

What enters first-person practical adjudication is an order of action formed by the bearer's own law, with two avowed contents as the two ends of the conflict. This is the same restriction the centre of gravity carries, and it holds down the other end at the same time: no reading does not mean low value, and does not mean the action does not count.

The concrete relations, the boundaries, what damage would be done, which one can be deferred — all of these can enter as grounds of adjudication, and none of them has first to become a value-content of his. That the child is now unattended is a fact about a relation; that this damage cannot be made up afterwards is a judgment about consequences. Both can change how he orders this afternoon, and neither needs to have been avowed as a value first.

Since adjudication has to hold within his own law, does his final choice therefore reveal which one really belongs to him? The inference fails, and the reason is structural: adjudication takes the existing avowals as its premise, and therefore cannot turn round and certify them.

At most it shows which avowed contents actually organized the order in that one action. It cannot prove those avowals were not colonized, and it cannot say which of them is more truly his own. That layer was sealed when self-colonization was raised: audit reads only whether the places are open or shut and does not judge what the bearer really avows; an audit that reaches past those three generates, structurally, exactly the relation introjection requires. And what is missing there was never permission at the level of type — it is discovery. Nor can that judgment be contemporaneous: taken as contains within it that one has not, at this moment, seen it to be external, and a man who sees in the moment that this is not from under his own sources dissolves the taking-as on the spot.

So what that afternoon leaves is material he can look back on later. Not a procedure that determines anything on the spot.

7. The Conflict Takes No Direction-Reading of Itself

Direction-value appraises a transformation, and both its directions require two subjects: an enactment loosening the other's grid and opening new dimensions, or sealing the other's grid and cutting available dimensions away. Two contents under one person holding against each other have, as the two ends of that holding, not two subjects. So the conflict itself takes no direction-reading. It is neither benign nor malign; that column is undefined for it.

The concrete action the conflict produces is another matter. He fired the kiln this afternoon and it burned all night, and the neighbour did not sleep. That action landed on someone else, and whether it cut anything away is read by the power-theory criterion; this essay does not read it for them. The conflict takes no direction-reading and the action the conflict produces takes no direction-reading are two sentences, and only the first holds.

After that afternoon is over, do not roll several things into one question. Adjudication gives only the present order of action. Whether new candidates surface on each row afterwards, whether contents are added or lost, does not settle out of the adjudication itself; to change, it has to be traced separately to which thing he actually did, how he did it, what happened in the world afterwards, or to some later running event.

If no revision or withdrawal separately occurred, nothing on the side of constitution and standing moved because of this afternoon: the rows of source he has gained are still present, the book and the craft stand where they stood in his own law, and his standing as an end has nothing to do with this afternoon.

The adjudication, the thing he actually chose, his carrying it through, and the consequences it left in the world are four things. Each has its own time, its own subject, its own settling. Rolling them together as what the adjudication changed presses four things into one.

8. Five Grounds, and the Gap

The two contents' existing standing does not yield which one to do this afternoon. He does not therefore sit there doing nothing. He is looking at other things.

He looks at who is present in this afternoon and what relations he stands in with them. He looks at what this next move touches in whom, and where that boundary gets brushed — and how that boundary is contested, and by what procedure disputes over it are handled, belongs to rights theory. He looks at what damage cannot be made up afterwards: the subject here is the damage, not his decision and not whether he can change his mind later. He looks at whether going ahead can still be taken back — that is revocability, whose subject is the action. And he looks at what becomes of the one he yields, which is the four questions above, each running by its own domain of definition and not rolled into one.

The window sits inside those four questions, and it is not the same question as revocability: a thing can be done in a way that stays changeable throughout, while the window is only today.

These five share no common scale, carry no weights, and cannot be laid out as one table. Each asks a different thing, and what each turns up cannot be converted into the others.

They do have local priorities of domain — not a chain running end to end. You have to know who is present, and what this move touches in whom, before the corresponding relations and boundaries can be unfolded, and before it can be read whose the damage is. Whether it can be taken back is judged by the action itself, and does not need to wait on who is present. The yielded one is the same: where it stands in his own law depends only on whether a revision or withdrawal separately occurred; that row's reachability is a reading of his own working; whether the demand still holds and whether the window is still open each follow their own situation.

There is a structure of diagnosis. There is no procedure that walks from the first to the fifth, and there is certainly no algorithm of adjudication.

9. No Rule Closes the Gap

He will think: perhaps I should set myself a rule — when in doubt, take the one that can still be undone.

Theory can of course propose such candidates. It cannot exempt that rule from the step its application to this one afternoon requires. Set up a condition for applying the conditions, and that one has itself to be applied to the case; the gap has only moved to the next line of the list, and a list does not close by getting longer. Whether the rule is one of his own law is a separate question. The gap is not there waiting for a stronger cause to fill it. It is where this structure is simply open. The bearer stands there.

Where a rule comes from, and by what it binds him, are two questions. A rule's content can come from a teacher, from a tradition, from a book; provenance does not judge whether it is an alien ruler — provenance was taken out of the judgment when colonization was raised. Whether it is a line of his own law settles separately.

Those five are themselves conditions. Complete, they still do not entail which one he does this afternoon.

As for irreversibility, it does not get a line of its own, because it has no single subject. Damage may not be made up; an action may not be taken back; the yielded one may meet a window that never reopens. The three stay in the third, fourth and fifth grounds respectively, each asking its own can this be recovered, and they do not combine into one aggregate weight of irreversibility. By the two-axes rule, it does not read back into value-standing either.

What prudence there is to be had about this afternoon's action belongs to the theory of action. Whether these things ought to be so belongs to the second critique.

10. The Man Next Door

The neighbour comes over. He also has a thing of his own that he has been at for years, and it needs him up before dawn — and once the kiln is lit it burns all night. Two people, each with something he set for himself, and only one of them can happen tonight.

The two of them can sit down and settle something: the kiln moves to those few days mid-month, and on those days he gets up late. That decision is real, and it really does bind both sides.

It has not thereby produced a third party ranking each man's values for him. Why he is bound by that decision settles separately — by consent, by promise, by the moral law, by rights and institutions — and those settlings are not this essay's business. What is denied here is one thing only: two people settling something does not mean two sets of values have been merged into one common table, and does not mean a place has appeared from which either side's order can be set.

Settling something did not generate that place, and saying so does not require first exhausting every possible place. What the decision binds here is the arrangement of action the two agreed on and the responsibilities that follow. It has not thereby acquired authority to rank either side's value-standing. If some collective subject can be established, it has to prove that by its own conditions of constitution, and cannot be inferred from this one joint decision.

What the two of them settled is this: each one's value-belongings unchanged, and the arrangement of action landing in one place.

11. A Settlement Cannot Complete Anyone's Withdrawal

Suppose the neighbour's condition is: from now on, stop holding that craft as your own thing.

The demand can be made, and it may genuinely make a person think it over again. But whether a claiming has terminated can be completed only by that person's own withdrawal. First-person avowal cannot be granted by another and cannot be revoked by another. The outside can do a great deal — it can suppress expression, block reachability, make life unliveable — and not one of those completes a revocation in the modality of avowal.

The judgment here goes in three steps. Is this only an external requirement? Has it sealed his revision and expression, blocked the road to those places? Has it gone further and registered an external end as his own value? Only with the third does it settle under colonization. If the first is only a requirement, it stays only a requirement. If the second has further sealed the road to revision, expression or running, that falls to coercion, to a violation of rights, to a blocking in running — rights theory and power theory. Only the third reaches the colonization of value.

A settlement can produce severe suppression or a violation of rights and still not be the colonization of value. The two do not combine into one.

Two orders of action, each formed on its own, meeting in this one night is not a joint adjudication ranking both sides' value-standing. It is two orders landing in one arrangement. What can be arranged where they meet is each side's actions — how resources are staggered, who moves the thing that is in the way. The outside can also supply supporting conditions: time, materials, a steadier situation. It cannot arrange what candidates will surface on the other's rows of source; that is sustained by his own working, and still less can it stand in for his constituting.

The other is an end, and from this it follows that he too has his own ends and values was established long ago. Tonight it has a place where it actually bears — and a place where it bears is not a place where it is grounded: one may not turn it round and say because I see he has values of his own, he is an end.

Nor can one say the two sides' values are equally important. Equally is still two gradations on one ruler. What has to be said is something else: the place that thing occupies in him, and the place this thing occupies in me, are positions of the same type in their respective structures — and they do not constitute a common quantity.

12. What Remains

Conflict falls on whether two demands for action can both be met, not on the two contents' standing. Adjudication arranges only this afternoon's order of action; later changes in reachability and in contents do not settle out of the adjudication itself, and have to be traced separately to what he chose, to the carrying out, to the consequences, or to later running events — and none of those reads back into value-standing.

Yielding is not withdrawal, because the act of yielding cannot do what withdrawal does. If a standing really changed, another first-person revision or withdrawal occurred. A joint decision does not thereby generate a third place of value adjudication; what two people settle is that each one's value-belongings are unchanged and the arrangement of action lands in one place.

How the one still his, and yielded this afternoon, goes on being borne by the same life belongs to the theory of meaning.

How an order of action is formed, carried out, and looked back on, and how judgment, habit, hesitation and capacity enter it, belongs entirely to the theory of action. This essay does not use them and passes no verdict on them.

Why another's value cannot be exhaustively read, cannot be compared by a common outside ruler, cannot be unified into one set, and how resonance between two bearers happens, belongs to the essay on the other.