We live in two worlds. The outer “empirical” world, which we share with all the other living creatures of Planet Earth, including other humans; and the inner “psychological” world of our own impressions and imaginings. 

Human Technologies teaches that these personal impressions and imaginings are native to two distinct but interrelated domains: they reside either in our personal WorldH or in our stock of tacit knowledge. 

WorldH is the expressible realm of concept and language. Given that our concepts and our language are inherited from our culture, so our WorldH is dependent, substantially, on our upbringing, our social milieu, and our relationships. While we do not possess exclusive ownership of its tools, we can adapt them to our needs.

Our tacit knowledge we have been amassing since before we were born. It is inscribed not only in our brains but is present across our entire being. While unspoken - because unspeakable - it infuses, permeates, haunts our concepts and our language; it pervades our world-building, though we cannot pin it down. 

Dialectics is a fancy word for to-and-fro or give-and-take, a philosophical concept that examines the dynamic interplay between separate, perhaps opposing, ideas or forces. It emphasises that change and development occur through the interaction and resolution of this interplay. 

Humans, then, can explore via two dialectic entanglements. 

We can extend our empirical encounters with the external world, including the other people within it, thereby providing new material to place in dynamic relation with that we have already experienced and committed to conscious or unconscious memory. The aim is to remain alive to surprise and reconfiguration. 

Or, we can explore the degree of fit between our concepts and language, on the one hand, and our innermost, felt convictions, as sensed and intuited in the reservoirs of our tacit knowledge, on the other. The aim is to discover whether, on investigation, we feel compelled by what we say we know and believe. 

Combining these two dialectics in movement is the act of self-renewal, which is, perhaps, the ultimate exploration - and, if the stars align, an unceasing one.