Abstract

Five essays in, a value-content's whole history is on the table, and so is what happens when two of them collide. All five were about one person's own side.

One spine runs through this one, and it is two sentences. The other's value is not my value. That the other can have values of his own, and that this is not mine to give, is my value. They are not two things side by side: the second takes the first as its object. What I avow is precisely the thing the first sentence states. Can have says he can have them without waiting on me. I do not permit him to have them, and I have no place from which to permit it. This is a first-person sentence, said by a bearer who has already avowed it; this essay does not assert that every bearer says it.

Around the spine are three limits. For one particular other, third-person evidence does not close into a reading guaranteed to be complete. Between two bearers, their contents' value-standings take no common external ruler. Among many, relational crossing, resonance, joint decision and joint arrangement are not by themselves enough to merge existing sources into one.

What most needs guarding against is not saying too little. It is reading the three limits into one sentence: then everyone lives their own life. Written short — cannot be read through, cannot be compared, cannot be merged — a reader will draw that on his own. The inference fails, and the reason is not that the reader missed something. It is that the limits do not entail it. A limit says which operations I do not have on another's values. It does not say there is no relation between him and me.

1. The Friend Who Fixed the Window

A man has a friend he has known for years. He knows some of what the friend cares about: getting the window of the old house fixed, going once a year to that river, not letting anyone else take over the work in his hands. He can see all of it, and none of it is his doing. If some day the friend sets one of them down, that is the friend setting it down.

That the friend cares about them mostly has a provenance. His father taught him; something happened one year that changed his mind; he read a certain book early. Those provenances are all there, and none of them is the friend's own making. What makes fixing the window the thing he cherishes is his claiming of it. Cultivation loosening a grid, occupation seizing the site of occurrence — both are on the side of conditions. They can move what he is able to come across. They cannot move that claiming. Constitution is not made on the side of conditions.

So there are two things, and the order cannot be reversed. First, a fact: this particular friend is also an end, and that holds before I acknowledge it. Second, a response: acknowledging and taking up that fact from the first-person place. What acknowledgment does is acknowledge the fact and take it up. It does not make the fact.

A bearer unfolded to 15DD has, in its own law, an outward-facing content: acknowledging a particular other as an end. That was established earlier, along with the note that this content of the law and that row of source are two faces of one place — not a layer added on top of the source — and that no lateral obligation follows from it.

What this essay picks up is a further step. Inside that outward content there is one specific thing: the other can have values of his own, and this is not mine to give. When does it stop being merely a content of the law at that layer and become an avowed value-content under this bearer's name? The line is exactly that claiming.

2. When It Becomes Mine

It holds in three parts. That the other can have values of his own and that this is not mine to give is a fact prior to me. Whether I avow it is a first-person occurrence on my side. Not avowing does not change the first sentence, and avowing does not create it. So it is not something every bearer has by nature — and someone who has not avowed it does not thereby make the fact untrue.

It is inferred, in this order. The other is an end — that is the premise. I am an end, and the first-person source of value is here in me. The other falls in the same place of being an end, so that source is likewise in him, and he can likewise have values of his own. Likewise in the place, not likewise in the content: he has his own share, not a share the same as mine.

There is no observation on this chain. Even if I can read nothing at all of what that friend cares about, the conclusion stands. The converse does not: one may not say because I see he has values of his own, he is an end. A place where something bears is not a place where it is grounded.

A baby who cannot yet say what he wants has a source of value likewise not mine to give. In that sentence he counts as the other. As the party doing the avowing he does not yet count; the 15DD row is not yet actually running inside him.

The 15DD value-source is the irreplaceability of the other as an end. That is a noun — the shape in which this row can yield candidates. What this section speaks of is an avowed content on that row, the thing that fits into the shape. The shape is not the content.

Once avowed, this content takes the same value-standing as any other avowed content under that person's name. It is not on another layer, and it is not a value about values. In a concrete situation it can organize demands for action, and it can collide with another content, and then it settles by the adjudication established in the previous essay. What it actually demands is given by each bearer out of his own law.

What the next sections establish is what related judgments and actions cannot acquire in the way of structural standing. That is not to say this content makes no other demands. A man can work hard to understand his friend more fully, and that does not offend against what he avowed. What offends is announcing that his own picture is finished, and using it to settle for the friend what the friend truly avows. And offending against it does not mean it will not happen.

3. Twenty Years Does Not Finish the Picture

That man knows his friend better than most. Over twenty years he has seen how the friend chose in several matters, heard what he said, watched the year he changed his mind. He has, in consequence, a fairly fine picture.

The picture may be accurate. It may even be right in every particular. It cannot acquire the verdict finished. And that is not insufficiently fine observation, and not a shortage of material.

What is on the picture falls in two classes, each stopped by something different. One class is whether some content under the friend's name has in fact become his value-content. What would have to be read is first-person avowal, the only place that makes content into value-content — and the outside cannot get into that place. Two candidate signatures were already ruled out: verbal declaration is not necessary, because many value-contents are embodied and tacit; a durable preference is not sufficient, because a liking can hold thirty years and never be claimed.

The other class is readings on the running side: which of his rows can still throw up new candidates in this domain, whether some content is in the candidate field right now, what the organization of this action actually draws on. Reachability is read per row, contents per content, the centre of gravity per action — three subjects, kept apart. And all of those readings are underdetermined before the third person: one and the same visible performance corresponds structurally to several readings that behaviour alone cannot separate.

Both classes were established upstream. The first gives: external evidence does not close into a final criterion. The second gives: underdetermination. Neither reaches a final verdict. A complete picture of him would have to close both. One of them does not close, and the whole picture fails to acquire the verdict complete. Twenty years of attention buys a more accurate picture. It does not buy finished.

What is denied is that verdict, not accuracy. That man may have got it exactly right. He has no way, on third-person evidence, to prove that he got it right, and no way, on that evidence, to prove whether there is something he has not read.

One thing does not go on this list. Whether a row of source is present speaks of a gained source-position, which by definition does not move; the rise and fall of concrete contents speaks of whether they enter the candidate field. Present means different things in the two places, and underdetermination concerns the second. The complete picture spoken of here is limited to concrete contents and readings of running. Which source-positions a bearer has in fact gained belongs to another, structural picture; whether that picture is legible to the third person, this essay does not judge, and the conclusion above does not rest on it.

4. What Can Be Jointly Checked

Beside the things that reach no final verdict, a set of relational conditions can enter joint checking. If there are candidates generated by his own sources, has the relational channel by which they reach expression and discussion been blocked in advance. Can a denial of his be registered as a denial, or is it taken as one more piece of evidence for agreement. Are the roads of refusal, restatement, revision and withdrawal open. All three are facts about the relational structure.

And reading them is not the same as being able to determine. A road being open does not mean he walked it; a road being sealed does not mean there was nothing on his side wanting to come out.

One thing looks similar in form and is not the same. A person's own adjudication takes his existing avowals as its premise and therefore cannot turn round and certify them. That is the first person on himself. The constituting place belongs throughout on his first-person side and never migrates outward; whether it is operable for him at a given moment settles separately, and what can be sealed is the road to it, not the place itself. What he lacks is a tool — taking adjudication to certify avowal is using the wrong thing. Here, in the third person on another, what is lacking is not a tool. It is a place.

Reading through and inferring are also two things. Even if that picture really were finished, one still may not turn it round and say: because I see he has values of his own, he is an end. The rule about the order of inference governs the order; it says nothing about the capacity to read.

None of this depends on anyone having avowed the content of the first two sections. For someone who has avowed it, there is a further layer. However fine the representation, it cannot stand in for the friend's first-person avowal; knowing and constituting were always two things. Treating a fine picture as finished is what this section blocks head-on, and that holds for any third person whatever. What offends against what he avowed is the further step: announcing that the picture is finished, and using it to settle for the friend what he truly avows, so that his later denials and restatements lose all room to rebut. The problem is standing, not accuracy.

5. Which One Matters More

That man has a thing of his own he has worked at for years. Sometimes he wonders: the friend fixing that window, and this thing in my hands — which matters more.

The question has no answer, and the reason is not that the two are too close in weight. To rank the value-standings of two avowed contents under two people, you would need a ruler that does two things at once: stand outside both laws, and convert two first-person standings into one quantity. Neither can be done. Once a thing is the bearer's own and issues from its own law, there is no coordinate system outside that law that could pass a cross-subject verdict of value upon it — and that covers the cross-bearer case. And a content's value-standing takes only holding or not, no quantity. The two layers close here.

There is a polite-sounding move: don't say whose matters more — say both matter equally. It does not hold. Equally is still two gradations on one ruler. It has not removed the ruler; it has only put two readings at the same spot.

What can be said between the two positions 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. Same type says one thing only: each content has taken first-person value-standing in its own bearer. It does not say the two come from the same row of source, does not say they do the same work in their respective days, and certainly does not say they weigh the same.

6. The Ladder in the Yard

What is incomparable is value-standing. Between two people there is no shortage of things that can be looked at together, said together, checked together — including the conditions that matter most for the actual arrangement.

One afternoon two jobs land in one place: whose work has the yard, there is only one ladder, how many days of good weather are left. These are facts in the world, checkable by both sides, and the relevant records can be laid side by side. Where two orders of action meet, what can be arranged is each side's actions — how resources are staggered, who moves the thing that is in the way; and the outside can supply supporting conditions: time, materials, a steadier situation. Doing all that takes rulers, and what they measure is loss, days, one ladder. Those rulers reach the yard. They do not reach standing.

There is a step here that anyone will take without noticing. This plan loses less than that one, therefore the value that argues for this plan matters more than the other. It has to be refuted, because it looks most like common sense.

Its error is not that it is too wide. It is that it switched axes. Consequences say what came out of this one arrangement; value-standing asks whether that content holds in its own bearer's law. Output and position are two independent axes, and the shape is the same one as before: taking something visible in place of something invisible in principle. Substituting the easy for the hard usually works elsewhere; it does not work here, because the reading substituted in does not prove the thing to be proved.

And the standing side does not accept quantity at all. A reading that can be compared for size cannot flow back into a position that takes no quantity.

So two things run at once between two people. On the conditions and consequences in the world, they can look together, check together, and each adjust his arrangement — whether heterogeneous consequences can be converted into one quantity is a further question this essay does not judge. On value-standing they need no ruler and have none, and that is not because they are deferring to each other.

7. “This River Is Ours”

A good many people live by that river. One goes often because he learned to swim there as a child; one makes his living off it; one keeps an old temple on its bank. Over the years they have done several things together: dredged it, stopped a sand-mining operation, pooled money to repair a stretch of embankment. Afterwards they often say: this river is ours in common.

The sentence is right, and it is also blurred. Right, because those things really were done together, following one common arrangement. Blurred, because of where in common lands. Landing on those few undertakings, it says the arrangement of action landed in one place. Landing on the sources, it says these people's value-sources have merged into one.

The second landing does not follow, for three reasons. Each person's source of value is anchored in his standing as an end not being externally placed; for a person running his own law, the running of his sources is anchored in his own law's autonomous reflexive operation. Where it is anchored is a structural fact on his side. Before the day of the dredging, the source of the man who lives off the river was there; after that day it is still there, still in him. Several things done together change nothing on this point.

On the 15DD row, several people's sources can point at each other and cross very densely. Each bearer's 15DD source is still anchored in itself; many sources' pointings crossing does not mean the sources merged into one. Pointing says where toward. It does not say where from.

Dredging together really happened, and the common arrangement is real too. But a relational event is not, by itself, the kind of thing by which any party gains a source-position. Source-positions are given with a bearer's structure. Those joint undertakings do not by themselves change the anchoring of existing sources, and are not enough to show that a new source-position has been gained. Whether a relation can become a condition in some subject's growth is a further question this essay does not judge.

One thing a common relation definitely cannot do has to be said on its own. What those people decided together cannot stand in for any one of them's own avowal. First-person avowal cannot be granted or revoked from outside, and that rule governs exactly this. It governs the content side; where the source is, is another question.

When people say the river is ours, they often also mean something else: protecting this river is a thing each of them has claimed for himself. That layer holds entirely, and is common. Several people each avowing the same thing on his own row is several contents, not one. Same in content, each with its own provenance.

A common content does not become an external ruler by being common. It becomes one at the moment it is taken up to rank people's value-standings, or to declare that someone's value-standing ought to be overridden or revoked. Things done together, rules made together, things kept together are not wrong by virtue of being common.

And if the sources really were merged into one, the first sentence of the spine is gone. His source of value is not mine to give says that source is in him. After merging, the source is in us, and no one can say whose it still is. And what that man avowed takes the first sentence as its object. So merging is not making the relation thicker. It is dismantling that item on his own side. This speaks of a total source taking existing individual sources under it and replacing them; a case that holds separately and coexists with individual sources is not touched by this reductio.

There is a rule of similar shape in the previous essay: a joint decision does not generate a third place of value adjudication. That one says two people settling something does not merge two sets of values into one table and does not produce a place from which either side's order can be set. It falls on the action side and asks whether an adjudicating place has appeared. This section falls on the constituting side and asks where the source is. Similar in shape does not mean one can replace the other.

8. The Window Got Fixed

The window did get fixed. The friend called him over to look, pointed at a few places and said a few words, not many. He stood there and saw more than a repaired window. He saw that this thing is the friend's, that it came out of the friend's own side, and that it was not his to give.

In this example both sides recognized the other. He recognized that the window-fixing is the friend's, out of the friend's side; and the friend recognized that the thing he himself has kept for years is his, out of his side. That layer is given by the example directly — it cannot be read off from who called whom or how much was said, as the earlier section showed. Resonance is mutual recognition, and mutual recognition has two ends.

Resonance happening, and someone judging that it happened, are not the same thing. It can happen and never be named; someone can take a wave of his own feeling for resonance. Descriptions of it can be wrong and can be corrected, and none of that turns round and constitutes it.

The two ends of the recognizing are people, not values. Values do not recognize anything; only bearers can recognize something.

What resonates is each side's values. On the friend's side, what resonates is the window-fixing; which row of source it comes out of is not asked here, and need not be. A concrete content is the occasion on which the recognizing happens, not the object of what is recognized. It is the values each gives that can resonate, with no restriction to a row. Two people can recognize each other over a craft, over a stretch of caring, over a long wait, over a preference whose provenance neither can name.

What is recognized is always the same thing: that is his, out of his side, not mine to give. Not that the contents are the same. Sameness of structure gives the possibility of recognizing; it does not guarantee sameness of content. Two people can care about very different things and still recognize each other in the ownness on each side.

The possibility comes from sameness of structure. Every subject's law is laid down by itself. Neither can take, from an external position, a final exhaustive verdict on the other's law, and neither can write the other's law by proxy — and yet the two laws are formally the same in structure: the same inner double negation recurs in every self-legislating subject. Value and law share that structure. Sameness of structure gives a structure that can be recognized; the recognizing is still performed by a bearer. It is precisely because the same structure recurs between subject and subject that the values each gives can resonate at all. No ruler is at work here. A ruler ranks; resonance recognizes.

9. “Can Have” and “Has”

The spine says he can have values of his own. This section says he has. The one word's difference is real. Can have does not wait on his actually giving anything — a baby who cannot yet say what he wants is inside that sentence too. Resonance requires that he really gave something, for me to recognize. Acknowledgment can be directed at an other not yet present; resonance cannot. It needs something given and seen.

So can have reaches further than has. There are people between whom and me no expression, work or relational trace will ever pass; resonance will not happen there, and every one of them is inside the spine's sentence. Resonance is what the spine looks like when it is cashed out at a meeting. It is not the whole of the spine.

Whether it resonates also depends on expression, on the relation, and on first-person uptake. Sameness of structure gives only the possibility. If the friend that day had not given that thing in any form that could be received, or had given it and the other had not recognized it, or if something else already stood between them, that moment would not have come.

Nor is it anyone's demand for action. One party's request or command cannot constitute resonance, and cannot make it happen one-sidedly. What one party can do is give or keep the conditions: give time, give materials, give a steadier situation, move the thing that is in the way. All of that can be done, and doing it does not guarantee the moment comes.

A value no one resonates with is not thereby demoted. What resonates is already complete in a solitary subject. That window was the friend's, all through the years when no one came to look at it.

The moment is a real event; it is between two people and has a place of its own. And it does not enter the source-figure. It makes no third value, no third source, and no third bearer. The recognizing happens between two people already present and their values already present. The pearl was there before the resonance.

10. Joint Audit

Resonance cannot be brought off by one party alone. There is something else two people can do together, and do with real purchase: joint audit.

The earlier section put the two sides apart: the other's internal state of avowal and his readings of running reach no final verdict; the opening and closing of certain relational channels can enter joint checking. Joint audit works only on the second side.

It has three parts. Each party can speak only for his own side, from the first-person place, and answers only for his own side. That statement cannot be written by anyone else, and entering a joint setting does not give it a guarantee. A person does not necessarily know on the spot where one of his contents came from; and a person's own adjudication cannot turn round and certify his existing avowals. Joint audit gives no guarantee at that layer.

What the two check together is the opening and closing of relational channels. If there are candidates, is the channel by which they reach expression and discussion open; can a denial be registered as a denial; are the roads of refusal, restatement, revision and withdrawal open. Those three can be checked by both sides, and the records can be laid side by side. His internal state of avowal is not checked, and actual reachability is not checked either.

What comes out is two first-person statements each party answers for, plus one jointly checked record of relational conditions. Where the two sides do not match, register only that they do not match. Do not first judge which side is wrong, and do not first judge that some road is sealed. A mismatch can come from the two seeing different things, from one not having put it accurately this time, from the two standing in structurally asymmetric places in this relation — and it can come from the road really being sealed. To judge that a road is sealed in running, further relational evidence is required. With the evidence in, the conclusion still takes the form of places and channels: this road is still open, that road is sealed in running, or the three are not yet complete. Cannot-determine is itself a legitimate conclusion.

When one says a road is sealed, what is sealed is the road to that place, not the place itself. Claiming, revision and withdrawal are structurally permanent, and colonization acts on reachability, not on presence.

This upper bound is not added here. An audit that reaches past those three to read the first person generates, structurally, exactly the relation introjection requires. Joint audit runs below that line.

Each party can also state, from the first-person place, and answer for, whether the recognizing on his own side is complete. For the other side, what he gets is a relational reading, fallible and revisable. Two people can also say together that resonance happened here — a sentence that may hold and may be a misjudgment. Neither party nor any joint procedure can raise it into a final verdict. This essay gives no procedure for determining whether resonance occurred, and that is not to say no one can answer the question.

11. The Other Who Has Not Yet Appeared

One case needs no one present. A person can work toward an other who has not appeared — write a book, leave a craft behind, cut a road through. A solitary subject keeps that formal other-place reserved for any bearer of ends that may come; what it avows is a content of the same form as the spine: any bearer, should he appear, can have values of his own, and this is not mine to give. That item is real, and the person writing the book is writing by it.

And the sentence about one particular actual other has not yet held. That is an anticipatory enactment toward the formal other-place; it does not fill the fact-place. Only an actually existing particular other within the domain of bearers can fill the fact-place of an actual other is also an end. The first subject in a universe, if it has already avowed that conditional from the 15DD place, has a real content of its own, and the actual-other place is still empty; when a second subject appears, that only lands the fact-place on a particular person. Whether the first subject avows that fact as its own item still requires a further first-person response.

This has to be kept apart from the baby. A bearer who does not yet exist can only enter as a conditional: if he appears, he can have values of his own, and this is not mine to give. The baby is not that case. He already fills the fact-place of an actual other. How far the concrete value-contents under his name have got is not judged by whether he can speak — speech was never a necessary signature of avowal. That he cannot yet be the first-person avowing party of this item does not mean that of him only can have may be said.

12. What Remains

The other's value is not my value; that the other can have values of his own, and that this is not mine to give, is my value. The second takes the first as its object. What the first states held before my avowing it; whether I avow it is a first-person occurrence on my side, and not avowing does not make the thing untrue.

The three limits are one thing read at three ranges, and each stands on its own grounds; none follows from another.

Written short — cannot be read through, cannot be compared, cannot be merged — the three still do not entail everyone lives their own life. A limit says which operations I do not have on another's values. It does not say there is no relation between him and me. Recognition happens exactly inside these three, and is not generated by them. Its two ends are given by two bearers and their respective values; the three block one party from settling the other's account with his own representation, block an external ruler from passing verdict on both sides' standing, and block the kind of merging that takes existing individual sources under it and replaces them, erasing the source-end. The three say what resonance cannot be written as. They do not guarantee that resonance will come.

Two relational forms remain, and they do not do the same work. Resonance can happen: a request or a command cannot constitute it and cannot make it happen one-sidedly; what one party can do is give or keep the conditions. Joint audit can be done: it runs on the relational-channel side, does not reach either party's internal state of avowal, and gives neither party a guarantee he issues to himself.

How the other can have values of his own and this is not mine to give goes on being borne by one and the same life belongs to the theory of meaning.