TO CHALLENGE A CALL

Hegel: "The sickness of the animal is the becoming of spirit."

​Things are what they are. Facts are facts. We all know this. But when a question arises about whether something is what it is we get a hint that there is something deeper at work. With animals we find it easy to rarely question their identity. Dog is dog. Lion is lion. Crow is crow. But with man, we constantly scrutinize whether each one is human or inhuman, friend or foe, divine or infernal. Yes, we agree, stones are stones, yet, beyond man, we have no problem questioning whether music is music, or art is art, or beauty is beauty. We’d consider that our “subjective” opinion. This capacity to recognize the split in identity as the inherent quality of the “subject,” that something isn’t fully what it claims to be, provides the secret of life: that to be a subject is to be divided. It is this contradictory force which drives all existence. Things actually aren’t what they are. Modern science has only supported this fact for all substances, even beyond the subject. As we dive deep into the materiality of existence, we find even stones yielding to the effects of quantum indeterminacy, whereby their particles can exist in multiple different states simultaneously. But we don’t need to go as deep as the quantum level of existence to know that I am me, only because I’m contradicted from who I am, and this contradiction is why I change. For example, if my body were to stay the same and be the exact version at 20 and 80 years old, then no one would believe I was me. At an even more fundamental level, I’m also not fully my body. We find this easily when we describe ourselves, saying “my leg” or “my arm.” If I have to say something is mine, then it’s obviously not me. There is a split that is required. We find this need for basic contradiction in every aspect of life, from a democratic government fueled by the split of ideas to enhance the synthesis of outcomes, to an evolutionary theory of biology, in which a perpetual dialectic unfolding of antagonisms in the environment is the primary power at play. So, when a coach challenges a call, know they are tapping into the most fundamental quality of existence: our contradiction.