Imagine trying to explain to someone who’s never heard of them which is the left hand and which is right without pointing or touching.
The human body is (on the surface at least) symmetrical, and as such there is no way to define left and right.
Yet left and right are objective.
And they are also relative.
In order to communicate left and right, unless you are facing the same direction, you can’t appeal only to your own orientation, but have to put yourself into the eyes of the other person and indicate whether you mean their left or yours.
An indefinable concept which is both objective and relative sounds very problematic, likely to be the cause of much debate and confusion. But quite the opposite is true. There is no disagreement about left and right, everyone uses them every day, and the ability to coordinate around them is relied on for everything from open heart surgery to highway driving.
We educated types tend to think that anything important must be defined, and that to have harmony in the world, definitions must be agreed upon in conscious, explicit ways. Like all the things that matter should be written down in precise language and everyone sign their name next to it indicating they agree.
“If we can’t even agree on what things mean, and we can’t even define them, how can we ever have peace?”
Yet all around us, most of the things that maintain peace, order, cooperation, and value creation between humans are happening without definition or thought.
We all orient ourselves and others with left and right in low and high stakes situations, and no philosophers are needed to stop and ask for a definition, or demand we prove we know for sure which one is which.
Maybe we could use less argumentation and more interaction. Perhaps games, commerce, music, art, and worship with our fellow humans are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to societal harmony and efforts to come to agreement about terms, concepts, and definitions is doing the opposite.