We have been treating the material world as something almost impossibly obvious.
A stone does not become a stone because we call it one.
The world pushes back.
But this has left us with a deeper question.
What makes materiality possible as a way of construing the world?
We have already seen that an object depends upon distinctions that allow it to remain an object. It needs enough stability to persist, enough separation to be distinguished, and enough interaction to make its material presence consequential.
Materiality therefore depends upon relations.
Not relations added to matter afterwards, but relations through which matter becomes available as the kind of reality we call material.
This gives the material world a horizon.
At that horizon, it is not necessarily that matter disappears.
Rather, the conditions under which we can construe something as a material object may cease to hold.
A boundary may no longer separate one thing from another in the familiar way.
Persistence may no longer be distinguishable from transformation.
Location may cease to function as a simple relation between object and space.
Even the distinction between object and surrounding field may become unstable.
We should be careful here.
The failure of material construal does not establish that there is no reality beyond it.
Nor does it establish that reality is somehow immaterial.
It tells us something more modest—and perhaps more profound.
Materiality is itself a way in which reality becomes intelligible.
A remarkably powerful one.
It gives us a world of things that can remain, collide, move, resist, combine and separate. It allows us to build instruments, conduct experiments, inhabit environments and intervene in processes.
Its success is precisely what makes its conditions easy to forget.
But when those conditions fail, the material world begins to show its horizon.
The interesting question is therefore not:
What is matter really made of beyond the material world?
That question may already carry the old construal beyond the point where it can safely operate.
The better question may be:
What has to be true of reality for materiality to be a possible way of construing it?
And perhaps, at the horizon of the material world, we discover something unexpected.
The material world was never merely the world made of matter.
It was a world in which material distinctions could become stable, consequential and intelligible.
The horizon does not take that world away.
It shows us what had to be possible for us to have one at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment