TO THE EARLY READERS
 
Once the wheel of the Norm,
the new doctrine, the new paradigm,
has been set in motion,
there is then no way anymore
to stem the anabasis,
the advance of the neutral-inclusive movement.
It may go faster,
it may go slower sometimes,
but it will never return to its original position
of nonhaving, of nonbeing.

There is something remarkable about having a pen, paper and a table, having a hand with fingers, having a will and thoughts of your own, and having the intention to write down these particular thoughts.

By itself there is nothing peculiar in saying that you have an instrument for writing, like a pen, or that you have some paper, or a table. In theory you could have any kind of concrete thing in the sense of being close to it, in the sense of controlling, keeping or using it, or in the quite different sense of owning it. By itself there is nothing peculiar either in saying that you have a body, in saying that you have a hand, and in saying that you have a number of fingers. You could mention any other bodily part or organ you have, or your body has, that is, has as a component part or element. It is of some interest, however, that both you and your body seem to have that hand, and that you, your body and your hand or your body's hand all have the same fingers.

Yet, even by itself there is something noteworthy about saying that you have a will (of your own), or that you have certain thoughts and an intention to communicate them thru the medium of paper as it carries the implicit presupposition that wills, thoughts and intentions are entities which exist like a pen and paper. Of course, this does not prove the existence of abstract entities like wills, thoughts, intentions, or other attributes and relations, mental or not. It merely shows that in the language which is our present means of communication existence and being also cover abstract entities. If there were no freedom of the will, it is not because freedom is or would be something abstract. And if perfect harmony did not exist, it is not --again-- because perfect harmony is or would be an abstract entity. Another thing to bear in mind with respect to having a mental attribute or relation is that it is you who does have a will, a thought, or an intention, not your body. (Note the difference with having parts of the body.) Many attributes and relations belong to you and not to your body: it is not your body which is intelligent, middling or unintelligent, and it is not 'your body which is someone else's friend'.

What is especially remarkable about all aforementioned sorts of 'having' is that they are relations of quite dissimilar types. The first sort of having is a relation between a person or an object and another object which is usually extraneous to it, that is, neither a component part nor an attribute or relation of it. The second one is a relation between a person or an object and a component or 'proper' part it has as an element. If you mention your whole body, you are referring to the sole component part you have in a strict sense. The third and fourth relations of having apply between a person or an object and the attributes and relations this person or object has. In the language we communicate in at the moment every object in our environment, whether a human being or a house, a virus or a body cell, has both component parts and one or more attributes as elements, and as entities of which the existence is taken for granted. A table, for instance, may have a board and four legs, but this is never everything. It must also have one or more properties and relations, properties and relations which its parts do not necessarily have as well.

(As a matter of fact there is nothing remarkable about having a pen, having a hand and having thoughts. What is remarkable is something with regard to the expressions of what it is to have one or more of these things. This distinction, which is crucial, will always be indicated here by means of italics or angle brackets. In general "the ... < * >", or briefly "< * >", may be read as "the ... of what is * ". Thus good or <good> is usually the predicate, word or notion good. The predicate good is, then, the predicate of what is good, that is goodness; the word good, the word for everything that is good; and the notion good the notion of goodness. Unlike a change of font from regular to italic (or from italic to regular) or angle brackets apostrophes on both sides of an expression, like in <'having'>, can always be deleted without change of meaning. They may emphasize that there is something typical of the word or choice of words, for example because the term plays a special part in the context, or because it has different meanings, or because the whole expression has been used by others before.)

Once many people were taught (or, perhaps, many people are still taught) that 'the world' would consist of human beings, animals, plants and so-called 'things', that is, all the rest. This was a conception exclusively suited to the human, material environment. All people or persons were of necessity, human beings and vice versa, and these human beings were first of all separated from all other animal beings, and with them from 'the' other living beings, that is, plants. And as living beings the human beings were again separated from 'the things' (not from all other things). This, however, was by no means a universal conception independent of the position of the conceiving object, even not when exclusively considering the material world. To be universal both the material and the nonmaterial have to be included in one system (a system which must not assign an exclusive status to life on Earth and which must refrain from anthropocentrism or any other kind of speciesism). In a universal, conceptual structure we are all objects, whether independently moving and growing or not. What counts is that all these objects can be defined in two basically different ways:

1. by the parts they consist of, and
2. by the attributes and relations they have.

When defining objects by the parts they consist of, someone who would be unfamiliar with the culture of human beings on Earth might regard a house as merely a collection of construction materials skilfully attached to each other. Such a person would not be that wrong, for a house is indeed a whole of certain materials put together in a certain way. On the other hand those who have to live in such a house themselves may rather see it as a place with a conditioned microclimate, a place in which it is warm, dry, and also safe (or in which it is or can be made warmer, drier and safer than outside). They might also speak in vaguer terms, suggesting that a house has to provide shelter. Thus, instead of a house having certain materials (or rooms for that matter) of which it is composed, they would speak of its being warm, dry and safe, and of its providing shelter.

The structure and idiom of the language spoken should not confuse us when not to have is used, but to be or some specific (nonprimitive) verb like to provide. (Compare to have a thought / intention with to think / intend .) It may not be clear that there is a question of having an attribute or relation until the original sentence is replaced with a sentence of the same meaning in which the (primitive) verb to have is used. For example, the following sentences on the same line have the same, or nearly the same, meaning. (Some of them may be too formal, literary or technical to be used in ordinary language, yet all of them are fully intelligible for someone only speaking an everyday conversational variant of this language.)

Altho it may not be an example of colloquial language to say that your table has the property of heaviness, there is no reason why such a proposition would contradict the conceptualization implicit in the language we are using here: every table has a weight after all. Weight is something every table must have as an object or concrete thing, heaviness is something it may have.

The pattern (or lack thereof) exhibited in the above table of examples is not typical of the present language. It is a general pattern in many other languages as well, altho there may be variations to it. Thus, while the construction i have hunger may not be employed in this language, it is correct in other languages. (Compare i feel hunger.) The difference between the use of a specific verb or to be and the use of to have typifies a linguistic structure and must not be taken to reflect any analogous distinction in (nonpropositional) reality. We can always refer to the attributes or relations (and parts) a thing has instead of expressing ourselves in terms of specific verbs, or with the verb to be.