User:Robbie/NoNav

Truth and reason are common to everyone and are no more his who spoke them first than his who speaks them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me since both he and I equally see and understand it in the same manner. Bees pillage the flowers here and there, but they then make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme and marjoram; so the fragments borrowed from others he will transform and blend together to make a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment. His education, labor, and study aim only at forming that.

We find ourselves in a world: to live, we must act, and we must act as best we can, according to our judgment. Consequences prove whether our judgment was foolish or wise. To act according to our judgment, to suffer or enjoy the consequences, to judge anew, to act again, and ever on, that is the human condition, the imperative of judgment.

In life, nothing with respect to judgment is given, except its necessity. Where life lives, judgment takes place——discrimination, decisions that culminate in action, in actuality. But judgment does not stop at the border where action begins; judgment pervades action—all living, vital action in which there is an element of responsive control, choices informed by perceptions of the unfolding situation as activity progresses. This perception of the situation, this effort at control, is also judgment—a most crucial form of judgment.

Within us, each cell has its awareness, a purposeful homeostasis with its environment. Each cell exercises certain capacities to make use of resources surrounding it to maintain itself and to perform its intended functions. If, for some reason, the cell errs in its judgments, or if the environment and situation in which it finds itself are so extreme that they overwhelm its capacities for discrimination and control, the cell will atrophy and eventually die.

So too, the larger organism must live continuously by making judgments, judgments about its capacities and purposes as it acts on, with, and against its environment and internal situation. Cellular judgment occurs within powerful preprogrammed limits, but as with all deterministic causalities, the programming establishes, not actualities but valencies and probabilities. When the exception occurs, its actuality takes the place of the preprogrammed norm, and the place becomes rich with the advent of natality.

A dichotomy between nature and nurture does not exist;**** its discriminations are built into the cell through genes, which produce a definite physico-chemical structure for the cell. This process of genetic structuring should be understood not as determining, but as limiting. The physico-chemical structure puts limits on the capacities of the cell for action, limits on the environments the cell can tolerate, limits on the situations to which it can respond, and limits on the purposes it can entertain. But these limits do not themselves dictate a determinate life. They are real limits, but within the limits, the determinate life unfolds as the cell, so long as it can, brings the capacities, environments, situations, and purposes into mesh, a mesh that permits its maintenance and reproduction. Through its life, the cell imbues matter with judgment; it makes decisions, however preprogrammed, and lives or dies accordingly. The limits are merely limits, and within those, the drama of life unfolds.