Modern theory is deeply attached to explanation. To explain something is to say why it happens, what causes it, what mechanisms produce it, and how it might be predicted or controlled. Explanation promises mastery: if we know enough, we can fix, optimise, or intervene.
But explanation is not the only intellectual stance available to us. And in an increasing number of cases, it is not the most appropriate one.
There is another stance, older and quieter, that modern thought has largely forgotten how to recognise. It does not aim at control or repair. It does not ask why things happen. It asks instead: how should we stand in relation to what is happening?
That stance is orientation.
What explanation assumes
Explanation presupposes a world that already holds together.
Causes operate within it. Effects propagate through it. Entities persist long enough to be acted upon. Even when explanations are partial or provisional, they assume that there is a single space in which better and worse accounts can compete.
This assumption usually goes unnoticed, because in many domains it is warranted.
But when systems fail not by breakdown but by non-integrability, explanation begins to misfire. It keeps asking questions whose answers would require a world that is not there.
When explanation overreaches
Consider again the cases that have occupied us.
Escher’s constructions invite explanation: how does the illusion work? Where does perception go wrong? But no explanation ever quite satisfies, because nothing does go wrong. Each perceptual move is lawful. The impossibility arises only when we demand global coherence.
Cosmological anomalies invite explanation: what unseen entities account for the mismatch between equations and observation? The explanatory impulse produces dark matter and dark energy — not because the data require them locally, but because global closure is demanded.
AI systems invite explanation: why do they hallucinate? What cognitive defect produces false outputs? But explanation here anthropomorphises. It treats fluent continuation as failed reference, and in doing so obscures what the system is actually doing.
In each case, explanation assumes inhabitation where there is only local lawfulness.
What orientation offers instead
Orientation does not compete with explanation. It operates at a different level.
To orient oneself is not to explain a system, but to recognise its limits, its affordances, and its proper domain of use. Orientation asks questions like:
What kind of coherence does this system provide?
Where does it hold, and where does it necessarily fail?
What expectations are legitimate, and which are category errors?
These are not causal questions. They are relational ones.
Orientation does not tell us why something happens. It tells us how not to be surprised by it.
Diagnosis without prescription
One reason orientation is often resisted is that it appears inert. It does not immediately yield interventions, fixes, or improvements. It offers no lever to pull.
But this is precisely its virtue in situations where the urge to intervene is itself the source of artefacts.
Orientation allows us to diagnose limits without rushing to repair them. It makes visible the point at which further explanation would only deepen confusion.
In this sense, orientation is not passive. It is preventative.
Relearning a lost stance
Much of modern intellectual frustration arises from the attempt to explain systems that cannot, in principle, be totalised. The resulting explanations grow ever more elaborate, while the underlying misfit remains.
Orientation interrupts this escalation.
It does not deny the value of explanation where it applies. It simply refuses to apply it everywhere.
In doing so, it recovers a stance that is essential for living with systems that work perfectly and yet do not form worlds.
Standing, not solving
Explanation asks us to solve.
Orientation asks us to stand.
In a landscape increasingly populated by lawful but non-integrable systems, knowing where and how to stand may matter more than knowing why anything happens at all.
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