(abstract)

Social bodies like the populations of cities must express their values constantly and publicly in order to become and remain aware of them. Only by such public display can values manifest and constitute themselves as belonging to the accepted heritage.

The above thesis responds to Ricoeur’s  idea of subject’s self-cognition by reading its textualized states, and with the cognitive law of making utterances as the only way to learn mind’s resources.

For the creation of patterns and control of behavior to be effective, coordinating techniques are needed. The best-known method was the clock-tower, which guaranteed the synchronicity of individuals’ clocks, and thence of actions within a city.

Beyond measuring time, the same method works for other cognitive domains and value systems. They all must communicate their inner states to one another and to their individual human participants in order to establish a functional harmony between and within systems. Under systems I understand firstly general cultural systems such as religion, the arts, politics, science, but they can also be defined on lower levels of the organized activity of societies.

At the level of individuals two problems arise: first, that of one’s conformity to each system separately, and second, that of coherence among different systems’ demands within one’s subjective integral identity. To explain this we can use the analogy of how to guarantee synchronicity of clocks (the three ways of “establishing harmony” as described by Leibniz, 1696).