Preface
Every serious attempt to order human affairs eventually rests upon claims about the world.
Some are stated openly. Others lie beneath institutions so deeply that those who inherit them no longer notice that they are claims at all. A law presumes something about the person whom it governs. A school presumes something about formation. A household embodies judgments concerning dependence, authority, inheritance, and responsibility. Commerce assumes capacities and relationships that existed before the transaction began. Even rebellion against an inherited order proceeds from some understanding of the thing being resisted and of the person who resists it.
It is possible to begin with those judgments and build upward.
This work begins elsewhere.
Before asking what should be built, it asks what is there.
The distinction is more difficult to preserve than it first appears. Human beings rarely encounter the world without expectation. We name quickly. We explain before we have finished looking. Once a desired conclusion becomes visible, evidence that serves it acquires an attraction that contrary evidence does not. The danger is especially great where the subject concerns matters already charged with loyalty, injury, hope, tradition, or belief.
For that reason, the observations gathered here make deliberately modest claims.
They do not constitute a complete account of reality. They are not offered as metaphysical first principles, nor as propositions from which a political order may simply be deduced. They record recurring features of things encountered across sufficiently different circumstances that they warrant preservation for later inquiry.
Their proper movement is therefore:
Reality → Pattern → Observation
Only afterward may another work ask what axioms can responsibly be drawn from them, and only later still what institutions those axioms may warrant.
An observation should survive the purposes for which we might wish to use it. It should remain true when it inconveniences us. A counterexample cannot be dismissed because the proposition would be useful if the counterexample did not exist. Nor should an observation be enlarged merely because a broader sentence sounds more fundamental.
There will therefore be places in this book where the inquiry stops short of conclusions a reader may expect.
That restraint is intentional.
Where reality warrants a narrow claim, the narrow claim is enough.
THE INHERITED WORLD
No one begins at the beginning.
By the time a child first becomes aware that there is a world beyond himself, much of the world nearest him is already old. There are names for things. There are ways of speaking and ways of remaining silent. Food appears according to practices he did not devise. Other people approach him with expectations whose origins he cannot know. Some gestures bring approval; others bring correction. Certain rooms belong to certain purposes. Certain people are approached differently from others. There are objects he may touch and objects he may not.
Long before he can examine any of this, he is learning within it.
His first encounters with other human beings do more than place information before him. They enter into the development of capacities by which later information will be received. Language is the clearest example. The child does not first develop a complete private understanding of the world and afterward attach inherited words to it. He learns to distinguish and name within relations already underway.
The same is true beyond language.
He learns whether another person’s distress calls for attention or avoidance. He acquires habits of waiting or interruption, confidence or caution, concealment or disclosure. He learns what happens after error. He discovers whether promises are ordinarily kept, whether anger passes, whether affection survives disagreement, whether authority explains itself, whether weakness is protected or exploited.
None of these outcomes is inevitable. Children raised in the same household differ. Temperament matters. Illness matters. Accident, material conditions, biological inheritance, and encounters beyond the household matter. A formative relation does not write upon inert material.
The narrower fact survives:
Observation I Relationship forms the individual.
The observation says neither that relationship wholly creates the individual nor that every relationship forms him in the same degree. It does not establish that formation is permanent, beneficial, intentional, or legitimate. A person may later reject what was taught, recover capacities suppressed by an earlier relation, or discover that something he had taken to be natural was merely familiar.
Still, rejection itself begins after formation has begun.
The people nearest the child were themselves formed before he knew them. His mother had a mother. His teacher was taught. The craftsman from whom he learns entered a craft already old. Words spoken casually at the table may carry judgments whose origins no one present remembers. A family may preserve habits born under conditions that disappeared two generations earlier.
This inheritance does not reach the individual only through deliberate instruction. Much of the human world is already arranged before anyone undertakes to explain it to him.
He learns a language whose grammar was not devised for his arrival. He walks roads laid according to decisions made before he could walk. Boundaries divide land; names distinguish places; tools embody solutions to old problems; calendars order time; customs govern ordinary encounters. Money, contracts, offices, schools, trades, ceremonies, records, and laws stand within the world he enters as facts of human life long before he understands how any of them came to be there.
They did not arise in the same manner.
A road is not formed as a language is formed. A statute does not come into existence as a custom does. A craft may preserve knowledge through apprenticeship that a registry preserves through writing. A family practice may survive without formal rule, while an office may depend upon precisely stated procedures. Some arrangements are deliberately established; others accumulate through acts whose participants never intended the eventual result.
Their differences should not be concealed merely because all belong to human life. What they disclose together is narrower.
The human being enters not only a natural world he did not make, but a human world he did not make.
That world is neither imaginary nor sovereign over the reality within which it exists. A boundary recorded in a deed can organize human conduct for centuries, but it does not alter the chemistry of the soil on either side. A community may misunderstand disease without making disease conform to its understanding. Human arrangements are real arrangements, and they remain answerable to realities that human arrangement cannot repeal.
Nor is everything in the human world the product of relationship alone. The resistance of material has shaped every serious craft. Weather has formed the practices of sailors and farmers. Disease has altered households and institutions. Geography has constrained settlement and movement. Human beings form their world while themselves encountering conditions they did not establish.
Within those bounds, something recurrent remains unmistakable. People acting with, against, beside, before, and after one another leave behind more than changes in the persons who participated. They alter practices, language, places, expectations, institutions, records, artifacts, and arrangements that other people subsequently encounter.
A generation can therefore enter circumstances partly formed through relationships in which none of its members participated.
Observation II The human world is formed through human relationships.
This does not confer legitimacy upon what has been inherited. A cruel custom is no less humanly formed because it ought to disappear, and a useful institution is no more true merely because generations have preserved it.
Formation and justification are different questions.
Some of what has been formed is deliberately carried forward. Families preserve stories because they still matter to them. Craftsmen teach methods whose value has been confirmed in work. Communities maintain practices because their purposes remain intelligible. Other things survive almost unnoticed: ways of handling money, expectations between husband and wife, attitudes toward strangers, subjects that are never discussed, ideas about what respectable people do or do not admit.
There are also inheritances that continue through refusal. A man harmed by his father’s violence may determine that his children will not know the same treatment. Nothing has been transmitted in the simple sense of reproducing the father’s conduct, yet the earlier conduct remains consequential in the household the son later creates. His father has helped form the kind of father he refuses to become.
The familiar image of inheritance as property passing from hand to hand eventually becomes misleading. Land, money, and tools can be transferred in that manner; the giver ceases to possess what the recipient receives. Much of what passes through human generations behaves otherwise. A master does not lose his craft when an apprentice acquires it. A mother retains a story after telling it. A language does not diminish because another child learns to speak.
An old carpenter can state much of what he knows. He can give measurements, describe sequences, name tools, explain the properties of materials, and identify common mistakes. Yet anyone who has learned serious work from an experienced practitioner knows that explicit instruction does not exhaust the matter. The master notices a line beginning to go wrong before the apprentice sees anything amiss. He feels a change in the tool. He distrusts material that looks sound. He has learned when an ordinary rule protects good work and when following it mechanically will spoil the piece.
The apprentice first obeys instructions whose reasons he only partly understands. He makes an error and is shown the error. After enough work he begins to recognize it without being told. In time he sees it coming and changes what he is doing before the mistake is made.
The result need not be an exact reproduction of the master. The apprentice may surpass him, adopt better tools, discard an inferior technique, or encounter problems unknown to the previous generation.
What was received has entered another life.
That life, however, does not receive it from nowhere.
Two brothers may remember the same household differently without either having invented his childhood. They occupied different places within it. The parents they knew at different ages were themselves changing people. Temperament altered what each noticed and feared. Events that marked the older child’s early years may have ended before the younger could remember them.
Difference of apprehension does not make the world a private construction. A storm does not become harmless because it is misunderstood, nor is injury undone by interpretation. Human conduct nevertheless proceeds partly through what a person takes to be the case, and that understanding can change after the event itself is beyond change.
A child may remember a refusal as cruelty and later discover the danger from which he was being protected. Another may spend years calling cruelty discipline because the authority he trusted supplied that name. An apprentice may resent a rule until experience shows him the failure it prevented. A son may mistake his father’s caution for cowardice until responsibility for others gives him grounds to reconsider it, or discover after years of admiration that the caution really was fear.
Later judgment carries no guarantee merely because it is later. Memory fails, pride supplies excuses, shame distorts, and people misunderstand themselves as readily as they misunderstand others. Even so, an event can be encountered again through changed understanding. What happened remains where it was; what the person can make of it need not remain fixed.
The individual who encounters the world does not arrive at each encounter without a history. Capacities have been developed, distinctions learned, expectations acquired, habits of attention established. These may bear upon what he notices, recognizes, understands, or takes an encountered thing to mean.
The rotten timber remains rotten whether the apprentice recognizes the defect or not. Danger does not cease because a man fails to perceive it. Nor does prior formation imprison the individual within one interpretation. The experienced man may be mistaken; the novice may see what the master overlooks. New evidence can correct old judgment, and later experience can disclose what earlier formation concealed.
Observation III Prior formation can affect how an individual apprehends what he encounters.
Formation does not determine apprehension. Not every difference between two observers can be attributed to their histories, and no unseen history may be invented merely because their judgments differ.
The individual receives formation before he can examine it, yet eventually some part of what formed him can become an object of his attention. He can ask where a belief came from, whether a fear still answers to present circumstances, why he reacts as he does, or whether a practice inherited from people he loves deserves to be carried farther.
He never asks from nowhere.
The language of the question is inherited, as are many of the standards by which he first attempts an answer.
Even within those conditions, the inheritor can become an examiner of the inheritance.
THE RELATIONAL WHOLE
Not every relationship becomes a thing that endures.
Two strangers may exchange directions on a street and never meet again. Buyers and sellers may complete a transaction whose entire significance ends with the exchange. Two travelers may share a compartment for an hour, alter one another’s day, and leave nothing between them requiring continuation.
Other relations acquire a history.
Promises remain after the moment of promising. Expectations accumulate. Responsibilities become differentiated. Property may be committed to a common undertaking. Earlier conduct changes what later conduct means. Roles develop that cannot be understood solely by describing the persons who presently occupy them.
A marriage is not adequately described by listing two individuals.
Neither is a working partnership, a household, an orchestra, a ship’s crew, a lodge, or an enduring association. The participants remain persons in their own right. They do not dissolve into the relation. Yet once the relation has acquired sufficient organization and continuity, describing each participant separately leaves something unexplained.
The same people considered apart do not contain the promises that bind them together, the division of responsibilities among them, the history by which one action has acquired meaning in relation to another, or the organized capacity through which they act together.
This is not true of every interaction.
Reciprocal influence alone is insufficient. Rivals may alter one another profoundly without becoming one integrated whole. Enemies may become bound into a long contest whose history shapes both of them, yet it does not follow merely from their mutual effect that a new whole has arisen.
The relevant phenomenon appears where the relationship itself acquires an enduring organization that cannot be exhausted by separately describing its participants.
Observation IV The establishment of an enduring relationship brings into existence a new whole that cannot be reduced to its participants alone.
The whole does not erase its members.
Nor does recognition of the whole require us to imagine a hidden substance floating above them. The relation has participants, arrangements, histories, dependencies, practices, and sometimes material embodiment. What cannot be reduced to the participants separately may nevertheless exist only through their organized relation.
Law sometimes recognizes this distinction by giving certain associations juridical personality. That recognition can be practically important, but law does not create the underlying observational phenomenon in every case. Some relational wholes exist without legal personality; some legally recognized entities may retain formal existence after much of the living relation that once animated them has disappeared.
Wholehood and legal recognition are not the same thing.
Once a relational whole exists, another question becomes possible.
What can it do?
A quartet can perform music no member can perform alone. A crew can sail a vessel whose operation exceeds the independent capacities of any sailor. A workshop may undertake work impossible for any one craftsman working separately. A household can maintain patterns of care, production, memory, and provision that no member possesses as an isolated capacity.
The whole-level capacity need not be mysterious.
Individual capacities remain necessary. The violinist must still play. The helmsman must still steer. The craftsman must still know his work. Yet the capacity of the organized whole is not found merely by adding a list of what each participant can do independently.
Organization matters.
The same participants can sometimes possess a capacity together under one arrangement and lose it under another. A crew whose coordination has broken down may retain every individual skill and yet lose the capacity to perform as the crew once did. An orchestra may contain excellent musicians and still be unable to perform as an orchestra if the relations necessary to coordinated performance fail.
Conversely, participants may be replaced while some whole-level capacities remain.
This does not make participants irrelevant. It shows only that the location of a capacity cannot always be identified by asking which individual possesses it independently.
Observation V An enduring relational whole can possess capacities not reducible to the capacities of its participants considered separately.
The distinction will matter whenever a capacity is attributed to a family, institution, enterprise, association, community, or other enduring relation. Some such attributions will prove empty. Others will describe capacities genuinely dependent upon organization at the level of the whole.
The observation itself decides neither case in advance.
It tells us where to look.
CONDITIONS
There are things we know only when they fail.
A household may live for years beside a well without thinking much about water. The bucket is lowered, the water rises, meals are prepared, clothes are washed, animals drink. Water belongs so completely to the ordinary course of the day that no one has occasion to describe what depends upon it.
Then the well goes dry.
Nothing new has been added to the household. Something formerly present is absent, and activities that had seemed complete in themselves can no longer continue in the same way. Water must be brought from elsewhere. Some work is postponed. Some is abandoned. The shape of the day changes.
The failure has disclosed a condition.
A fire dies when deprived of what sustains combustion. A workshop can possess tools, orders, and skilled hands yet stand idle for want of material. A ship may remain sound while losing the depth of water required to move. A capacity that appears to belong simply to a person may disappear under exhaustion and return after rest.
What depends, and what it depends upon, cannot be answered in the abstract.
The ship does not depend upon this particular tide if another depth of water will serve. The workshop does not depend upon one supplier if suitable material can be obtained elsewhere. A child may depend upon care without depending upon every particular person who has ever provided it.
A function can depend upon a condition without depending upon the present provider of that condition.
Because substitutes sometimes exist, it is tempting to imagine that nothing genuinely depends upon anything in particular. Substitution shows something else. If several fuels can sustain the fire, the fire may not depend upon one fuel; it still depends upon conditions under which combustion can continue.
So too with human arrangements. An office may survive the death of its holder because another can assume it. That does not show that the office requires no holder. A craft may survive the retirement of a master because others possess the relevant knowledge. That does not show that the craft can continue without persons or records capable of carrying it.
Dependency is always dependency of something, and the thing specified matters.
A man’s survival, his ability to walk, his capacity to work, his willingness to work, and his ability to perform one particular task are not the same state. Conditions required for one may not be required for another.
The same difficulty appears when the boundary of the thing under examination changes. A workshop considered alone may depend upon an external electrical supply. A larger system containing the workshop and its generator locates that condition differently. Nothing about the physical requirement has changed; only the boundary through which we describe it has moved.
Dependency Across substantially different concrete systems and processes, continuation of a specified state, function, or process can require identifiable supporting conditions whose absence, without adequate substitute, prevents that continuation.
A vessel accepts more water until it is full. A beam carries increasing weight until deformation begins. A person works longer until judgment, strength, or coordination deteriorates. A material is heated until its behavior changes. A channel carries increasing flow until another regime appears.
In each case there is positive evidence of a boundary. Something happens there.
Finite observation alone gives no such evidence. If a runner has never traveled farther than twenty miles, nothing follows about whether he can travel twenty-one. If a bridge has never carried more than ten tons, ten tons has not thereby been shown to be its limit. If an institution has survived for five centuries, five centuries is neither its maximum possible duration nor evidence that no maximum exists.
Ignorance beyond the observed range is not a boundary.
A boundary becomes visible when behavior changes: performance degrades, a state ceases to be maintainable, instability appears, saturation occurs, transition begins, failure happens, or some comparable change marks the range within which the earlier description held.
Limitation Some capacities, states, functions, and processes exhibit bounds under relevant conditions.
The conditions matter because limits are often conditional.
A man’s lifting capacity changes with training, injury, leverage, and fatigue. A material behaves differently with temperature. A channel carries different volumes after alteration. What was once a boundary may move.
This does not make the former boundary unreal. It means only that a limit observed under one set of conditions cannot be carried unchanged into another without evidence.
Dependency and limitation often appear together, which makes them easy to confuse.
A process may cease because something it requires is gone. Another may cease while all required supports remain because some relevant capacity has reached a bound. Sometimes both are present.
The distinction becomes important wherever human beings attempt to preserve, enlarge, or redesign a capacity. Some failures are answered by restoring what is missing. Others require changing the capacity, changing the conditions under which it operates, or accepting a boundary that cannot presently be moved.
A limit is not a moral command. A dependency is not a claim of rightful authority. The fact that a person requires something does not establish who must provide it. The fact that a capacity can be enlarged does not establish that it should be enlarged. The fact that an institution depends upon some condition does not establish that the institution deserves preservation.
Those judgments come later.
For now it is enough to notice that things which appear complete while functioning may disclose, under change, both what supports them and where their operation ceases to remain the same.
And change sometimes discloses something stranger still.
Restoring what was present before does not always restore what was there before.
AFTER CHANGE
A piece of metal is heated, worked, and cooled. A landscape burns and receives rain again. Tissue is injured and the conditions under which it once functioned return. A relationship survives betrayal and returns outwardly to routines that existed before.
In each case there is a temptation to imagine that if the surroundings can be put back, the earlier state should follow.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes recovery takes time.
Sometimes repair is possible.
And sometimes the thing that passed through the transition is now different in a way that makes restoration of the earlier surroundings insufficient.
A changed thing may remain changed simply because recovery takes time. Persistence alone therefore tells us little. The more revealing cases are those in which conditions associated with the earlier state return and the earlier state nevertheless does not return with them.
Transition Asymmetry Some transitions alter a system such that restoration of prior external conditions does not by itself restore the system’s prior state.
Nothing here says that return is impossible.
A broken bone may heal. A damaged machine may be rebuilt. Trust may sometimes be restored. An ecosystem may recover. A material may be treated again. The earlier state may become accessible through additional work, counteraction, reconstruction, repetition, or time.
Failure of simple restoration is not irreversibility.
Nor does the past exercise some mysterious power over the present merely because it happened.
If a burned field now responds differently to rain, the causal work must be sought in what the fire left presently instantiated: changed vegetation, altered soil, lost organisms, new exposures, or whatever else evidence establishes. If a person responds differently after injury, the explanation cannot consist merely in saying that the injury belongs to his history. Something about his present condition must carry the consequence.
History matters when history has become present condition.
Once we begin looking for such conditions, another pattern appears.
Some consequences do not merely remain after a process.
They return to meet it.
CONSEQUENCE RETURNED
A path across soft ground begins with footsteps.
The first walker encounters grass, soil, slope, and obstruction. His passage changes them only slightly. Another follows. Then another. Vegetation bends. Soil compacts. Water begins to take the shallow depression. The route becomes easier to see and perhaps easier to walk.
Later walkers are no longer moving across quite the ground encountered by the first.
Their predecessors have helped make the path that now affects where they place their feet.
No path intended this.
A process generated a condition, the condition remained, and later occurrences of the process encountered what earlier occurrences had helped produce.
The same structure appears elsewhere.
Repeated use wears a mechanism in ways that alter later operation. Practice changes capacities that affect later practice. Commercial activity can alter prices or infrastructure in ways that influence subsequent activity. Repeated institutional decisions can produce procedures or expectations that later decision-makers encounter. Water cuts a channel whose new shape affects later flow.
Reciprocity alone is not enough. Two people may alter one another without either producing the condition later returned to him. Neither is ordinary depletion enough. A flame consuming its fuel may be adequately described through dependency; a vessel filling toward capacity through limitation.
The narrower structure is this:
Recursive Consequence Some processes generate conditions that remain present and subsequently alter the course of those processes.
It is not enough that one event precede another. The earlier process must have helped produce the condition later encountered, and that condition must in turn bear upon what follows.
Nothing in the structure implies purpose.
A generated consequence may amplify later activity or suppress it. It may stabilize, destabilize, redirect, accelerate, slow, regularize, or disorder what follows.
Human beings live amid such structures and participate in them constantly. Habits alter the circumstances of later action. Practices reshape environments. Institutions accumulate consequences that later officeholders inherit. Families develop expectations in response to conduct and then act within those expectations. Markets, roads, crafts, and languages bear marks of earlier use that become conditions of later use.
But not every historical consequence returns to alter the process that generated it.
The distinction is what gives the observation content.
It also brings us back to the individual.
A person is formed before he can choose much of what forms him. He later encounters the world through capacities and dispositions partly shaped by what came before.
Yet among the things he can sometimes encounter is something nearer still.
He can notice himself.
THE INDIVIDUAL TURNED TOWARD HIMSELF
A man hears himself speak to his child and recognizes his father’s manner in his own voice.
For a moment nothing outward need change. The child remains before him. The words have already been spoken. What has changed is the field of his attention.
Something that had been operating through him has become available for examination by him.
A craftsman notices that fatigue is making him careless and puts down the tool. A speaker hears himself avoiding the question he was asked. A student recognizes that he is no longer reading to understand but merely moving his eyes across the page. A frightened man notices his own fear and considers whether the danger before him warrants it.
The capacity is neither constant nor infallible.
People miss obvious features of themselves. They invent motives after acting. They excuse habits they condemn in others. They can be trained to notice distinctions they once missed and can lose sensitivities they once possessed. What is available to attention in one condition may be inaccessible in another.
There is no transparent self hidden in these examples.
There is only the recurring fact that something belonging to the individual’s own condition can enter the field of his operation.
Reflexive Self-Relation Aspects of an individual’s own condition or operation can become targets of that individual’s attention, discrimination, evaluation, or action.
The observation does not require attention, discrimination, evaluation, and action to be manifestations of one unified faculty. Nor does it settle what constitutes personal identity through time. A person does not know himself accurately merely because he can direct attention toward himself.
Most importantly, reflexivity does not erase formation.
The man who examines an inherited belief uses capacities that were themselves formed. He asks his question in a language he received. His standards of evidence have histories. His emotional reactions, habits of attention, loyalties, and fears did not begin when he first became conscious of them.
To become capable of examining formation is not to become unformed.
Nor is the ability to evaluate one’s condition identical with the ability to change it. A man may recognize an addiction and remain unable to master it. He may understand a fear and continue to feel it. He may identify a habit only after it has already governed years of conduct.
Recognition is not sovereignty.
Yet neither is prior formation the whole account of what can happen afterward.
Once some aspect of the individual’s condition becomes available to his own attention or judgment, it may become relevant to what he subsequently does. He may seek instruction, change a practice, leave a relationship, return to one, establish a discipline, ask another person for correction, alter his environment, or repeatedly act against a disposition he no longer wishes to strengthen.
Where such action changes later formation, the individual has participated in forming what he later becomes.
He did not create the capacities by which such participation became possible. He did not choose the whole field in which his choices became possible. He cannot guarantee the effects of his attempts at change. Other people and material conditions remain involved. Some inherited conditions are alterable only slightly; others not at all.
Nevertheless, the recipient of formation need not remain only its passive recipient.
What that means for responsibility, education, discipline, freedom, or self-government cannot be decided merely from the fact that reflexivity exists.
Those questions remain ahead.
CONTINUITY AND THE THINGS THAT CONTINUE
The observations gathered here leave one further temptation difficult to avoid.
If individuals are formed, if the human world is formed, if relational wholes arise, if capacities can belong to those wholes, and if processes leave consequences that alter what follows, it is natural to say that something is transmitted through time.
Often something is.
The difficulty lies in saying what.
A family may occupy the same land for generations while its practices disappear. A craft may preserve its techniques while every practitioner who knew its founder is dead. An institution may retain its name while losing the capacity for which it was established. Another may change its name, membership, and outward form while continuing an identifiable undertaking.
Historical connection is one kind of continuity.
Identity is another.
Capacity is another.
Function, form, organization, memory, possession, and practice supply still others.
They do not always travel together.
A successor can perform the same function without being historically continuous with his predecessor. A replica can resemble an original without sharing its history. An institution can preserve historical continuity while losing a capacity. A capacity can be restored after interruption. Participants can remain while the organization that once joined them disappears. Organization can persist while participants are replaced.
Succession is therefore not continuity merely because one thing follows another.
Replacement is not continuity merely because the replacement performs the same task.
Similarity is not continuity merely because two forms resemble one another.
Transmission is not continuity merely because something later possesses what something earlier possessed.
Even the phrase the same thing conceals several questions.
The caution is especially necessary in human inheritance. A father teaches a son a craft. Something plainly passes forward. But what? Information? Skill? Standards of judgment? A role? A practice? A relationship to the work?
Some combination may pass. Some may not.
And which of these must remain for us to say that the craft continued?
Observation has not supplied one universal answer.
The desire for continuity easily outruns the evidence for it. Families care about succession, institutions about preservation, traditions about fidelity, and civilizations about inheritance. Each concern encourages the same mistake: to treat whatever survives as though its manner of survival were already understood.
Historical continuity, identity continuity, capacity continuity, succession, replacement, transmission, and similarity remain distinguishable phenomena. Particular cases may unite several of them. None may be substituted for another merely because the distinction is inconvenient.
This leaves the inquiry unfinished.
It should.
The individual enters a world already underway.
He did not choose his first language, his first household, his first dependencies, or the earliest relations through which he learned what other people were. Much of the human world was old before he arrived. He received capacities he did not invent and injuries he did not request. He inherited judgments before he could judge them.
Yet what is received does not simply remain where it entered.
Relationship forms the individual. Human relationships form the human world. Prior formation can bear upon what the individual later apprehends. Enduring relationships can become wholes possessing capacities unavailable to their participants separately. States and processes disclose dependencies and bounds. Change can leave a thing altered after earlier surroundings return. Processes can produce conditions that meet them again farther on. The individual himself can sometimes become an object of his own attention and judgment.
None of this tells us what ought to be done.
Nor does it tell us that what has been formed deserves to endure.
It tells us something prior to either question.
The person who judges has been formed. The world in which he judges bears the work of others. The relationships he enters may become more than a succession of encounters. The capacities upon which he relies have conditions and bounds. What has happened may remain present in what now exists. What he does may alter the conditions under which he acts again. Even his attempt to examine these things begins from within a life already underway.
There is no vantage outside reality from which the inquiry can be completed in advance.
We begin where we find ourselves: among things already existing, already changing, already bearing consequences.
We distinguish what can be distinguished.
We test what appears to recur.
And where the evidence ends, we stop.