Normative examples are very useful as as examples, so long as we don’t start mistaking them for the actual principle. It is their particular, individual way they express the principle behind them that makes them valuable. And in different circumstances, with different elements to make use of, you can build something quite unique and individual, but still show that it fulfills the same purpose, adheres to the same principle.

Clothes across many times and nations have varied immensely, according to fashion, available materials, prevailing body types, environmental differences, and practical and cultural needs. But we all recognize them for what they are, clothes. We understand the purpose, the principles behind them. And so even when we share few of the same conditions that produced or required such clothes, we are able to understand and appreciate those of another time and place and see the creative ways they adhere to and fulfill the idea and purposes of clothing.

Relative differences in clothing, far from disproving the existence of an absolute concept, in fact are what truly prove it, disabusing us of the notion that such things are a thing relative to us, defined only by the particulars of how we have done it. Ours is revealed to be but an instance of a greater, universal whole that all men and women share access to and comprehend. It is not a little thing that belong to us, nor is it nothing, something that has no meaning or purchase across time and space, no definition, no fixed character. Clothes change, fashion is eternal.

That may sound a bit too Platonic in conception, and I don’t want to lean too hard into the technical aspects of the theory. It’s enough to just consider it as a part of the fabric of psychological and experiential reality we all encounter. A materialist like Stephen Pinker would argue that such concepts have no abstract metaphysical existence but are simply fixed structural realities of how human thought and consciousness and the brain work. That doesn’t make them relative or insubstantial, for him, there is a fixed human nature according to which all are constructed but which is interpreted individually. But whatever level of your belief in such concepts and divisions of type and token, idea and instance, principle and product, whether you see them as observable biological or psychological or metaphysical realities, the point is that we observe them and are affected and confined and also freed by them. They are the rules that define the games and provide a structure for individual actions within the game. They are the individual actions and strategies and endeavors, victories and losses, that take place within the game over time.

When you watch an exciting game on the TV and the commentator reflects, “Now this is football!” we know how to interpret that. We know he doesn’t mean that this particular game is the entire extent of football. He ain’t expecting someone to come with him with a recording of another game being played somewhere else and have them say, “Look, here is a different game of football with different teams, therefore I have disproved that your game IS football.” No, it’s quite simple. He means that there is an idea of the game of football, a concept with specific purposes in mind that are being pursued (an intense competition for the sake of challenge and delight and entertainment, according to certain defined rules), and this game is an exceptional embodiment of the game. This is the meaning of the game brought alive in a particular instance. That doesn’t mean there can’t be other, different games that do the same. There will likely be dozens of such exceptional games all across the country every year. But they will all be great instances for the same reasons, because they all uniquely fulfill the same purposes and are confined by the same rules that define and limit and direct action according to those purposes. The purposes determine the rules, the rules confine action according to the purposes and make the game possible, individual action within the rules results in unique expressions of the game.

I use football as an example because it’s simple. The main difference between football and life is that it’s not clear that the rules of the games of life that we call society are as arbitrary and within the scope of our invention as the rules of football. But, to be honest, it’s not clear that the rules of football are as arbitrary and we imagine them to be. We have no rules against flying because humans are not a creature that is able to fly. We don’t have rules about how Buffalo should behave during the game because we know that they cannot grasp or play it. We take for granted all kinds of things about the nature and limitations of the game (no teleporting the ball or phasing indeterminately through other players who try to tackle you) because we understand the nature of the world and of humans, the physics, our physical makeup and capabilites, the way that balls and bodies will behave when acted upon, the human ability to think and follow rules, whistles, symbolic lines, all kinds of things. All of these things are given to us as part of the fixed nature of humans and the world. And there is good evidence that the world of the human mind and soul is not such an unformed and undifferentiated place as some postmodernism would have us believe. There seem to be genuine natures to both the world and to human minds and bodies. Scientific, psychological, and philosophical evidence accumulates all around us, discarded (after having been the collective conclusion reached based on the evidence and cogitation upon experience of the last 10,000-100,000 years of humankind) in favor of the denaturist thinking that was codified around the idea of the tabula rasa theory of mind

The action of philosophy (and also its children psychology and biology) is to help us sort through the many tokens and types and discover the beautiful and sort out the natures of each. It helps us test our own assumptions about our actions and whether they actually conform to our principles. It helps us challenge false examples and exaggerated and defied idols of particular examples and see where their limits are. It helps us discover new depths and riches and possibilities. It both clears away the dead wood and helps break up the ground so new growth can take root. It clears away the weeds that could choke the garden and stunt and deform its growth and trains and cultivates the plants so they grow according to the design and their fruitfulness.

We must be absolute at the level of absolutes and individual at the level of individuals. The two primary mistakes people make are either to absolutize the individual or individualize the absolutes. Absolutes are essential, relativity is essential. Both are part of the structure of reality and the human experience. But absolutism and relativism, that lay their structure upon one another to obscure and simplify the fabric of life, are both distortions of reality. Both will stunt the garden, both will undermine the game, both will steal fruit from our future for the sake of their freedom or dominance today.