​Chapter 4

The subject enters the world through delegation. A child does not arrive at the first level of differentiation on its own — it is taught. And what it is taught is not just facts but the very apparatus of perception. Piaget showed that the child's world is constructed stage by stage, and at each stage the construction is handed down. Hot is dangerous, animals have names, certain things are food and others are not. The medium of discursion arrives pre-formed, installed by parents and environment. The child builds schemas, mental structures that organize experience. The concept of object permanence emerges gradually, as the child differentiates hidden objects from absent ones through sensorimotor actions. The inherited metric includes the very way of seeing: space, time, causality are assembled stage by stage, shaped by the culture's guidance. Kant called them a priori forms of intuition and categories of the understanding — structures the mind brings to life in advance. He was right that they precede experience, but some are biological, some are cultural, and none are chosen by the subject.

Development begins at the moment when the child starts asking questions, applying differentiation to the received material. "Why?" is the first act of the meta-position. But even this act is channeled: school provides answers, university gives frameworks. Each stage replaces one set of received constructs with a more elaborate one. The chain runs: external authority → my principles → my decisions. It looks like mine, but the origin is borrowed. Science said so — therefore true. The nation said so — therefore enemy. The subject is a transmitter: the signal passes through.

Delegation is comfortable: it relieves the will of deciding. Each citation — "studies have shown," "everyone knows" — is a transfer of the volitional impulse upward along a chain whose origin the subject did not set. The will is active, but active in the service of patterns it received.

Faith is an ultimate delegation: the will aimed at its own cancellation. The evidence is insufficient, and the subject uses freedom to relinquish freedom itself. Faith outranks knowledge and obedience: it is an act of self-cancellation.

Now apply differentiation to the one who differentiates. Any reflective subject can turn the act upon himself, questioning his beliefs, values, and identity. In reality, almost no one carries this process to completion. It is usually interrupted: at the first level by comfort — the belief still works, why question it; at the second by fear — if this value is merely a construct, what then holds me together; at the third by authority — someone wiser has already settled the question. Each interruption is a delegation, preserving a link of external causation inside what could have become fully self-grounded.

The subject examines itself and discovers — what? A psyche: moods, temperament, patterns of reaction. Desires: bodily, learned, impossible to trace to any single source. Values: absorbed from family, culture, religion, reshaped by experience, rarely examined. Knowledge: a vast architecture of concepts, most of them received, very few produced. Habits of thought: logical patterns, preferred styles of reasoning, aesthetic preferences, automatic judgments. Each of these presents itself as "me," the substance of the subject. Each, under examination, turns out to be a construct.

The term "construct" comes from radical constructivism (Glasersfeld, Watzlawick, von Foerster): the subject builds knowledge, cognition organizes experience rather than reflecting an ontological world. Truth therefore gives way to viability. A construct stands as long as it remains workable. Yet one question remains outside the constructivist frame: what holds the construct in place? If the subject builds it, then the subject’s will is the force that sustains it. Withdraw that force, and the construct gives way.

The deeper the differentiation goes, the less solid it becomes. The values I would die for — where did they come from? I can trace: this one from my mother, this one from an experience that could have gone differently. The knowledge I rely on — most of it taken on trust from authorities I have never verified. The desires I call my own are shaped by culture, advertising, biology, and accident. The personality I present to the world is a configuration of received traits, none of which I chose.

What holds these constructs in place? The ideal is acausal, anything can be connected to anything, anything can be justified. "Hard work leads to success" stands despite the millions who work hard and remain poor. "People are equal" stands despite the obvious difference between any two humans. These are declarations against the data. They hold because the subject holds them with will and commitment. "I am a good person" is a postulate maintained continuously, fed by the will of the one who maintains it.

Think of an open field. A wall eliminates directions; four walls make a room. A law or opinion is a wall. The room is smaller than the field, but it is comfortable. The walls are maintained by the one who lives inside.

Dismantling these walls is a withdrawal of commitment. (To remove or dismantle here does not mean to abolish it altogether. It means to cease taking it as law and to rise to the meta-position above it.)  Remove science as a source of truth and it remains as an instrument, but the authority is revoked. Discard morality as an external system. Ignore nation, tradition, common sense. Each wall removed is a direction reopened, a path to the meta-position that the wall was blocking. The subject who has dismantled enough walls stands in open space, able to see the remaining ones for what they are, able to reshape them.

An objection: if morality, science, philosophy, nation, religion, and common sense are all treated as constructs, then the human who dismantles them is no longer defined by anything. He is not a nationalist, not a believer, not a moral subject in the ordinary sense — not a bearer of any worldview. In that case, how does he differ from Tarzan? Tarzan too stands outside these forms. He has no philosophy, no morality and so on. If dismantling means revoking law status, then what remains seems less than a person, not more.

However, Tarzan never acquired these forms, he stands below them. The one who dismantles constructs acquired and revoked their authority. He stands above. He can still use constructs, philosophize, judge, and speak through them, yet he no longer grants them the status of law. His will is no longer determined.

Buddhism arrived here twenty-five centuries ago. Strip away the aggregates: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness, and no self is found beneath. Anatta: there is no permanent subject, only a process mistaken for a person. The diagnosis is correct, the conclusion is where our path diverges. Buddhism sees the void and calls it a final goal. What follows here is different.

What remains after dismantling? Who is left? The honest answer: Ain, the Kabbalistic nothingness — and beneath it, pure will. But the answer holds only if the dismantling is complete. A single unexamined construct, one value kept because it was never questioned, and the subject still stands on something borrowed. Only when nothing remains does the will face itself without mediation. Hegel’s Being is indistinguishable from Nothing, and only from the act of positing (Becoming) can the Determinate Being be born.

The constructs are gone, and with them everything that was "me": values, knowledge, habits of thought, personality. The will, the capacity for differentiation, can turn on anything including itself. And one capacity above all others: self-determination. The will can close on itself, and in closing, generate the one who performs it. This is absolute self-closure: the act that produces the actor.