There’s a subtle understructure in human languages, and it’s uniquely instanced in each. In English, for example, we have words such as reward and decision. To re-ward is to re-protect, to set wards against harm or misfortune. To make a decision is a kind of incision, a cut. In fact, concepts and words depend upon cutting, making an incision, which results in both a dividing from and a newly available unity.

Long ago, these things were known viscerally. Some cultures preserved specialized arts related to them. Over time, they were forgotten, and became the haunts of academics and eccentrics, but originally, our languages … like our numbers… had somatic origins and referents.

Numerism began not with cuts, but the recognition of sets. Only when we forgot the felt sense of unifications that is native to our experience of unities and sets, did the ‘logical’ form of numerism arise, an abstract numerism, where ‘1’ could stand in consciousness underived from a union from which it was necessarily (read: purposefully!) divided.

Perhaps, in time, we shall recurse upon these origins in ways that restore the nature and promise of our human intelligence. For it can neither arise nor dwell in abstraction. It’s origins and natures are, like us, embodied, alive, and best known in relation rather than void of derivation.