Alina asks “what is that?” expecting a name — Northern Cardinal. I usually give her the name and then more: people call it a Northern Cardinal, but this particular cardinal’s left leg is a little longer than the right, and there is no name for that. Thich Nhat Hanh, asked by a child what color a tree was, answered “the color you see.” He didn’t want to replace the child’s tree with a word. The bird in your yard is not a Northern Cardinal. It is the bird you see.

Now: identity is important for logical reasoning. The laws have to be about something. So they are taught to us as if the something comes first and the law follows — here is the object, here is the law, apply the law to the object. The Law of Excluded Middle (either p or not p) is about a proposition; the proposition is about an object; the object is given.

Strangely, the laws themselves create the identities the laws are to be about. Not the other way around.

Take male/female under LEM. Either a human is male or not male. For this to be a usable proposition, “male” has to be the kind of predicate LEM can take — sharp, exhaustive, with a clean boundary. But humans are not delivered to logic that way. The sharpness is a demand the law makes on us. It is not a feature it finds. The category is constituted by the requirement that a category exist for the law to apply to. We did not go out and ask people what they were; we asked the law what it needed, and we called the answer “what people are.”

The same move runs through mathematics. The real number system was painstakingly built so that any point on the line could be named — if not by “1/3” or “0.2145…” then by some other body noise, some other designation. The axiom of completeness, Dedekind cuts, Cauchy sequences — all of this is the demand that the line behave like a set of objects, each available to a name. See Many Roads from the Axiom of Completeness for how the demand fails. But the demand persists, because the laws need it.

This is the inversion. Logic presents itself as descriptive — these are the laws, this is how things must be reasoned about. But the laws are first prescriptive. They say: let there be objects of this form. What we then call “objects” are what survives the prescription. The cost is everything that doesn’t survive. The bird’s slightly longer left leg. The person who doesn’t fit a binary. The point on the line that no Cauchy sequence converges to. These are not exceptions to the laws. They are what the laws had to push out of view to be laws at all.

What the philosopher calls identity, then, is the residue of a procedure. We treat it as a starting point because the procedure has already happened by the time we arrive at the proposition. By the time we are asked “is this human male?”, the work of constitution is done, and we are asked only to confirm it.

The identities are tools, not findings. To mistake them for findings is to take the shadow of the procedure for its object — and to inherit, along with the mistake, every cost the procedure had to extract. This investigation has freedom in it. Do we need the name Northern Cardinal before we notice the variations the name cannot hold? Or can we experience a bird and its leg with no names in mind? Like Bertrand and his peach: he thinks he is enjoying the peach more because he knows things about the peach.

The world we inherit is made very much of previous alterations using minds and words, and we need those names to recognize a bird, or a cardinal, or ourselves. But the ungoverned experience of the cardinal after all the names we treasure is just like where we were from the beginning. The same freedom is on both ends of our time together. This makes things cyclical. It makes science a mere entertainment while we are here — before the wave breaks free, and before it returns to the ocean.

Shrine