The Few Seats Worth Choosing

There’s a question that sounds practical and turns out, on inspection, to be the wrong shape. The face it wears is: given that none of us see the world from nowhere, given that every view I hold is a view from somewhere — how do I choose where to stand well? That question pulls a particular kind of person toward elaborate frameworks promising to specify what well means. The frameworks get longer over time. They generate vocabulary. And eventually a different kind of person looks at them and asks, reasonably enough, whether the whole apparatus isn’t just another sophisticated way to avoid actually living. Both reactions miss something, and what they miss is not what either side thinks. The question hasn’t been examined for what it quietly assumes. It assumes the chooser is the locus of difficulty — that with enough discipline or enough method, a sufficiently careful person could choose their seats well. The first move this essay has to make is to give up on that assumption, because…