Polarity so easily gets collapsed into moralization. We attach value to one side or the other, identify ourselves or others with a pole, and before long a field that began as THIS and THAT becomes good and bad, right and wrong, me and not-me.
But ultimately, I believe polarity describes two edges of a field.
Think about the Earth. We have a North Pole and a South Pole, with an entire sphere between them. I don’t think anyone would argue that the poles are the only places that exist on Earth. They give us a way to orient within it. We can talk about northern and southern hemispheres, locate ourselves somewhere between the poles, and use entirely different sets of coordinates to describe the same globe.
North and South are one way of making the field legible.
So I understand polarity as the condition that makes differentiation perceptible:
A THIS and a THAT through which a field can be distinguished.
Polarity does not inherently mean conflict, opposition, hierarchy, or judgment. It gives us enough contrast to perceive difference.
And yet, especially in spaces where we talk about things like “unity consciousness,” I notice how quickly I can move from perceiving difference to deciding what that difference means.
That’s what I want to pull apart here.
This article is an attempt to make some of those operations atomic enough that I can examine them without automatically conflating where something is, what I think it is, and what I think about it.
Much like the popularized Jung quote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” I believe greater awareness gives me greater choice in how I orient because I can better locate what is already orienting me.
Circling around this part of my framework has been tricky because I keep interrogating my conclusions with the framework I’m using to build them. So there will be some recursion here. The three concepts I keep moving between are Location, Identification, and Evaluation. Moralization keeps finding its way into the conversation too, although I’m not yet convinced it has a distinct enough job to give it equal footing in the model.
At its simplest, polarity requires perceivable difference. Without some way to distinguish THIS from THAT, there is no me/other, here/there, inside/outside. And without distinguishable things, relationship itself starts to lose meaning. Something has to be capable of standing in relation to something else.
Which means there is already a complication hiding here:
Some degree of identification is necessary for polarity itself.
Something must be recognizable enough as itself for me to locate it in relation to THIS and THAT.
That’s where this gets tricky.
In introspective and spiritual spaces, how often do we hear about dissolving the ego? Don’t attach to identity. Let go of who you think you are.
What if I don’t need to eliminate either distinction or identification?
What if I can instead ask:
What is this identification doing here?
What does it allow me to perceive and what might it collapse?
Table of Contents
- Working Terms Overview
- Location
- Evaluation
- Identification
- Location and movement/change
- Toggles
- The practice of Locating context
- Why this matters when listening to other people
- Back to the field
Working Terms Overview
Polarity
A THIS and a THAT through which a field becomes perceptibly differentiated.
Location
Where something is within that field. X is HERE in relation to THIS and THAT.
Evaluation
A preference or value relationship between THIS and THAT: THIS is preferable to THAT.
Identification
The continuity by which something is recognizable as itself, including when a Location or attribute begins participating in what we say the thing is.
Moralization
The relationship of THIS and THAT to concepts of good/bad, right/wrong, virtue/fault, etc.
Location
I’ve done a lot of work on location itself (see 36 Expressions of HERE).
Within HERE, Location is coordinate. I want to call it the context, but the context is what is around it, the things around the thing. Location is the spot on the map.
Location asks:
Where is this within the field?
It attempts to describe the differentiation before deciding what that differentiation means. I keep thinking of it as a really neutral place to come back to. But if I’m honest, it doesn’t necessarily neutralize my thinking. It makes more of the field available for examination.
Location lets me put the context back around the thing I’m looking at.
It can’t just be a “View from Nowhere” – a person locating something still already has a standing, perspective, history, assumptions, values, purposes, etc.
In other words, I am attempting to distinguish what I am locating from what I am bringing with me as I locate it.
Here is where I start to get recursive. I have found that preference to be part of Evaluation, which I will go into in the next section. It’s recursive because I want to Locate the Evaluation (proper nouns to reflect that they mean a specific thing within the context of this article).
I have to catch myself applying a universal truth that Location is universally the best or most enlightened aspect of polarity.
So a more honest stance is: given the purpose of perceiving as much of the field as I can, I prefer reviewing Location because I find that an unexamined preference toward one pole can filter what I am able to perceive about the other.
Preference is a filter.
The useful question is not necessarily Can I eliminate all filters? but:
Do I know which filters are participating in what I can see?
And for that, I find Location useful in finding (in other words locating) those filters.
Now, I’m more comfortable with the Evaluation because I’ve Located it. I can examine what is participating in the preference and decide whether I still want to orient by it.
Evaluation
Evaluation introduces preference into the polarity.
At its most compressed:
THIS is better than THAT.
But better is incomplete information.
- Better for whom?
- Better for what?
- Under what conditions?
- According to what values?
- Toward what purpose?
- With what consequences?
An evaluation that presents itself as absolute can be located by putting its context back around it:
Given these agents, conditions, values, consequences, and purposes, THIS is preferable to THAT.
The Evaluation hasn’t disappeared. I haven’t neutralized it. I’ve made its Location visible by putting the context back around it.
No universally preferable pole ≠ no preference
I tend to be suspicious of universal claims, including the idea that one pole is inherently preferable to the other. But that doesn’t mean preference itself has no utility.
I’m allowing these claims to coexist:
There is no universally preferable pole.
and:
Given these agents, conditions, values, consequences, and purposes, I strongly prefer THIS.
This is particularly important to my own amoral philosophical position.
Rejecting an objective universal GOOD/BAD does not require me to abandon preference, consequence, value, responsibility, agency, or choice.
It means that a claim of:
THIS is better than THAT requires a scope constraint.
This is where Evaluation becomes particularly interesting to me beyond my own framework.
Preference is a filter. Once I have decided that THIS is preferable to THAT, that Evaluation can begin participating in how I perceive the field itself. What information do I notice? What do I dismiss? What assumptions do I stop interrogating? What becomes obvious, absurd, threatening, or not even worth considering?
This makes locating Evaluation useful to me as a practice of critical thinking, deconstruction, and metacognition. I’m not necessarily trying to eliminate the preference or argue myself out of it. I want to make the Evaluation available for examination so I can ask what it is doing to what I can see.
What becomes harder for me to perceive when I’m already looking at the field through a preference for THIS over THAT?
Located:
Under these conditions, for this purpose, I prefer THIS to THAT.
Compressed:
I prefer THIS.
Further compressed:
THIS is better.
At full compression, the Evaluation can stop sounding like information about my relationship to THIS and THAT and start sounding like information about THIS itself.
“I prefer THIS” becomes “THIS is better.”
My relationship to the field has begun presenting itself as a property of the field.
So, at some point, the filter may begin to substitute preference for perception.
Instead of perceiving THIS and THAT and recognizing my preference within the field, I may begin perceiving the preferred quality as though superiority were an intrinsic property of THIS.
And now I’ve Located the Evaluation. I’ve given it context. That matters because otherwise I can very easily prefer Location to Evaluation and accidentally reproduce the exact operation I’m examining: Location is better. Evaluation is worse.
Evaluation isn’t inherently bad. It’s useful for preference, prioritization, protection, orientation, agency, and intentional movement.
So rather than asking how to eliminate Evaluation, I can ask:
What am I preferring, under what conditions, and toward what purpose?
And then:
What does that preference make easier for me to see (and what might it filter out)?
Identification
Identification turned out to contain an important distinction.
At its most basic, Identification provides enough continuity for something to be recognizable as itself.
This is X, rather than not-X.
But within a polarity, Identification can do something additional. If THIS and THAT describe the edges of a field, I can move from:
X is located here in relation to THIS and THAT
to:
X is THIS, not THAT.
That move can compress a gradient into an identity.
Identification-as-distinction
Some identification is necessary for differentiation at all.
This is THIS rather than THAT.
There must be enough boundary and continuity for something to be apprehensible as itself.
Without this, polarity collapses into undifferentiated unity.
Identification-as-continuity
Identification can also extend beyond immediate distinction:
This is what this thing IS.
A pattern observed within a configuration becomes continuous with the identity of the thing itself. This isn’t inherently a problem either.
Continuity has enormous utility. Names require continuity. Relationships require continuity. Responsibility requires continuity. A sandcastle must remain sufficiently identifiable as a sandcastle for there to meaningfully be a sandcastle.
The interesting question is how much continuity the identification claims.
I’m going to continue the sandcastle analogy because it is useful especially in comparison to how we tend to think of “not being separate” or being “the divine in a human body.”
Where somehow in spiritual places, we can have a tendency to reject what is actually physically here because it is really part of something greater at a different configuration. I have strong aversion to thinking of our experiential reality as somehow a simulation or a “matrix” distortion that we have to escape.
The distortion isn’t calling it a sandcastle.
This is a sandcastle.
That is a useful and real identification of a configuration.
The potential problem arises when I forget that sandcastle describes a configuration of sand and begin treating Sandcastle as an eternal essence the sand possesses.
Identity can therefore be located:
- At what scale?
- In what configuration?
- Across what span?
- For what purpose is X a useful distinction?
Or:
What is this, at this scale, under these conditions, for purposes of this differentiation?
This leads to an important principle:
Identity does not have to be eternal to be real.
X really is this configuration HERE. And this configuration need not exhaust what X is across every configuration in which X can participate.
This is the process of Locating Identity.
Identity and mutability
My current preference is for identities that remain revisable because I understand configuration itself as mutable.
That is itself an Evaluation, and I’m trying to keep its Location visible rather than presenting revisability as universally preferable.
Attachment to identity becomes undesirable for this purpose when:
The label is being expected to stay the same longer than the thing itself actually stays the same.
Say I identify someone as “a shy person.”
At one point, that identity describes a real pattern. They reliably behave shyly. Great.
But then they change. They become comfortable in more situations. They initiate conversations. They speak publicly.
If I insist:
No, she’s shy. That’s who she is.
then the identity is demanding more sameness than the actual person is displaying.
I don’t want to demand immortality from a temporary configuration.
For me, leaving identity revisable preserves room for growth: for myself, for other people, and for the societies we create together. Life would be pretty boring if everything had to remain what it has been.
And given how much I care about agency, autonomy, and authorship, why would I construct an identity that requires permanence from me? And then, what gives me the authority to require that permanence from someone else?
But insufficient continuity creates its own problem.
If nothing remains recognizable enough as itself from one moment to the next, identity stops being particularly useful. I lose the ability to recognize a pattern, refer back to it, relate to it, or say meaningfully that this is the same thing I was talking about before.
So maybe it is not an ongoing quest to maximally detach from identity. Perhaps I can ask:
How much continuity does this identity need to do the job I’m asking it to do?
Too little, and the identity can’t hold a recognizable pattern. Too much, and the identity begins constraining the mutability of the thing it describes.
This suggests right-fitting rather than maximization or minimization: a Goldilocks configuration fitted to purpose.
Location and movement/change
This brings Location back to the larger HERE framework.
I am HERE. I want to be THERE.
Evaluation may participate:
I prefer THERE to HERE.
But Evaluation alone cannot produce a navigable path.
To map navigation, I need coordinates for both HERE and THERE.
If I know THERE but cannot locate HERE, I have a destination without a starting coordinate. If I know HERE but cannot locate THERE, I have a position without a destination. If either is inaccurately located, the path I construct may not correspond to the relationship between them.
And sometimes the process of locating HERE and THERE can reveal something I wasn’t even expecting:
Perhaps:
- I am already THERE.
- Maybe the process was the path.
- Maybe HERE and THERE differ, but not along the axis I assumed.
- Maybe the Configuration doesn’t need to change at all. Maybe Perspective does.
- Maybe THERE is no longer somewhere I want to go.
The relationship between HERE and THERE can change without the thing I originally intended to move being what changes.
I couldn’t help noticing this little linguistic trick hiding in HERE and THERE:
T + HERE = THERE
If I let T act as a variable, it can represent whatever distinguishes THERE from HERE in a particular navigation.
What would have to change for HERE to become THERE?
Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s distance. Maybe it’s the configuration itself. Maybe it’s Perspective, conditions, relationship, or something I haven’t located yet.
I don’t actually need to decide what T is in advance. In fact, doing so would undermine the point.
Part of locating HERE and THERE is discovering what the difference between them actually is.
So T becomes a kind of liminal variable: whatever must be traversed, changed, reoriented, or simply recognized between one HERE and another.
Because THERE only exists in relationship to HERE. From HERE, I can point toward THERE. But once I arrive THERE, my standing has changed.
THERE becomes HERE.
And then, if I choose, I can locate myself again.
Toggles
The original observation began roughly as an implicit hierarchy:
- Location
- Evaluation
- Identification
- Moralization
Despite my best efforts, I was still holding a pretty strong Moralization within the structure itself. I had Moralization sitting at the bottom as the “least enlightened” way of relating to polarity (which, inconveniently, is itself a Moralization).
At first, I thought perhaps these were stages in some kind of process. Maybe we Locate, then Evaluate, then Identify, and, when those processes aren’t available for examination, eventually arrive at Moralization.
Except I had already decided that Moralization was the big bad, while simultaneously identifying myself as an amoral person.
Do you see what happened there?
I had Moralized Moralization, while also attaching Identification to not being someone who moralizes. And, somewhat hilariously, I had put both of those operations at the bottom of my hierarchy.
My own framework ratting me out!
Okay, self, if you highly value Location and Evaluation – use them.
So I started using Location and Evaluation to interrogate the hierarchy itself. What was I actually doing? Why did I prefer Location? What did I think Identification and Moralization were doing that made me want distance from them?
That process has allowed me to integrate Identification much more fully. I’m not entirely there yet with Moralization (and, for now, I’m okay leaving that part open).
I’m currently finding it more useful to think of these as toggles rather than stages:
Location
Where is this within the field?
Evaluation
Which pole or configuration is preferable, and under what scope?
Identification
What is being treated as sufficiently continuous to be what this is?
Moralization
How is the polarity being related to goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness, virtue, obligation, etc.?
Any combination of these may be operating at once.
They can influence one another, one may conceal another, and one may supply assumptions that another then treats as given. I don’t currently see a reason to assume they must occur in any particular order.
Moralization, for example, doesn’t necessarily appear at the end. I could begin with THIS is wrong, which influences what I prefer, how I identify myself or others, and even how I perceive Location. Identification could influence Evaluation (I am THIS, therefore I prefer THIS), or Evaluation could influence what I perceive about Location (I prefer THIS, therefore I more readily notice evidence of THIS).
So rather than asking which stage I’m in, the more useful question may simply be:
What am I (or someone else) doing with this polarity right now?
The practice of Locating context
Locate an Evaluation
When you find yourself saying:
THIS is better than THAT.
Ask:
- Better for whom?
- Better for what?
- Under what conditions?
- According to what values?
- Toward what purpose?
- With what consequences?
Put the context back around better.
Locate an Identification
When you find yourself saying:
This IS X.
Ask:
- At what scale?
- In what configuration?
- Across what span?
- For what purpose is X a useful distinction?
Put the context back around is.
Locate a Moralization
When you find yourself saying:
THIS is good. THAT is bad.
Ask:
- Good or bad according to what moral framework?
- What values or obligations are being invoked?
- Who or what is granted moral standing?
- What action, intention, consequence, character, or relationship is being judged?
- What does good/bad require, permit, prohibit, or obligate?
Put the context back around good/bad.
Why this matters when listening to other people
This may be the original practical purpose of the entire distinction.
When people speak through binaries, the spoken claim often arrives as a bundle.
Location, Evaluation, Identification, and Moralization may be traveling together. See my article on co-travelers.
If I accept or reject the bundle as a whole, I may close part of the field before examining what information it contains.
The toggles offer another possibility:
What layer/operation is this person operating on?
I may discover:
- I agree with the Location.
- I understand the Evaluation but don’t share its scope or values.
- I question the Identification because it claims more continuity than the evidence supports.
- I reject the Moralization.
Those are four very different responses to something that initially sounded like one claim.
This matters because disagreement with one operation can otherwise cause me to discount information contained within another.
I am continuously trying to find ways to keep from accepting or rejecting a whole claim before I’ve had a chance to pull apart what it’s actually doing or saying. I find that I understand the world better when I can say, “I agree with this part, I reject this part, I’m not sure about this assumption, and this other piece is giving me useful information,” rather than requiring the whole claim to be either right or wrong.
Back to the field
Listening to other people is only one place this becomes useful. I’m doing these things with difference all the time, including inside my own thinking.
I Locate. I Evaluate. I Identify. I Moralize. Sometimes I do several at once. Sometimes one is hiding inside another. And, as this article has repeatedly demonstrated, I can use one operation to examine another.
I’m not trying to find a final position outside all of these operations. I’m trying to make more of what I’m doing available for examination.
Polarity gives me a THIS and a THAT through which a field becomes perceptible.
What happens next is where I come in.
What am I doing with the difference I perceive?
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