We often speak of relations as though they were things that happen between things.
A tree stands beside a house. One person is taller than another. A planet orbits a star. A word refers to something. Two people are friends. In each case, it seems that we already have the things, and then we notice some connection between them.
This way of thinking is so familiar that it can seem almost unavoidable.
But there is another possibility.
What if some relations do not merely connect things that already exist? What if the relation is partly constitutive of what the things are?
The difference is subtle, but profound. A connection joins things. A constitutive relation helps determine what can count as a thing in the first place.
The history of philosophy contains repeated attempts to think this difference.
The problem of the thing
Greek philosophy inherited a world populated by things: bodies, animals, elements, persons, cities, gods. Yet almost immediately, philosophical inquiry began to make the identity of those things problematic.
Heraclitus is an obvious early example. His fragments are commonly associated with flux: everything changes, nothing remains simply what it was. But the deeper significance of Heraclitus may lie not in the claim that everything is constantly changing, but in the way he connects change with relation.
Things do not simply change in isolation. They become what they are through their relations with other things.
Day and night are intelligible together. Life and death belong to a relation of transformation. The tension between opposites is not merely an unfortunate feature of an otherwise stable world. Difference itself participates in the order of things.
The familiar image of the river captures something important here. The river remains a river while its waters change. Its identity cannot therefore be reduced to the persistence of the material that happens to occupy it at any moment.
But neither is the river simply an object that undergoes change from the outside.
Its identity depends upon an organised pattern of relations: water flowing, banks constraining that flow, gravity directing it, tributaries entering it, erosion altering its course. Remove enough of those relations and we no longer have the same river.
The river is not merely connected to its relations.
It is, in part, constituted by them.
Difference makes a difference
This raises a problem that would recur throughout philosophy.
If things are constituted partly through relations, where does their individuality come from?
It cannot simply come from their being isolated. Nothing is completely isolated. Nor can it come from their relations alone, if relations are always relations of something.
We seem to need both difference and relation.
A relation requires difference: there must be some distinction between what is related. But difference can itself depend upon relation. A parent is a parent in relation to a child. A creditor is a creditor in relation to a debtor. A species occupies an ecological niche in relation to other organisms and its environment. A word has its value partly through its differences from other words.
The relation does not erase the things.
It changes what it means for them to be distinct.
This is one reason the problem is deeper than the simple opposition between “things” and “relations.” A relational ontology need not say that things are unreal and only relations exist. It can instead ask how relatively stable things emerge within changing fields of relation.
That question would take centuries to develop.
Aristotle's achievement—and its limit
Aristotle provided one of the most powerful responses to this problem.
For Aristotle, substances have their own identities. A particular horse is not simply a bundle of relations. It is a living substance with its own form, capacities and characteristic activity.
Yet Aristotle did not therefore ignore relations. His categories include relation; his biology understands organisms through their organisation; his account of change connects what something is capable of becoming with what it actually is.
His achievement was to show how stability and change could coexist within an intelligible account of nature.
But his framework also establishes a powerful philosophical priority.
The substance comes first.
Relations are properties or determinations of substances. They tell us something about a thing, but they do not normally constitute its fundamental being.
That priority became enormously productive. It made possible sophisticated accounts of identity, causation, change and natural organisation.
But it also made another question harder to ask:
What if the relation is not something added to the thing, but part of what makes the thing the thing it is?
The question could not simply be answered by reversing the hierarchy and declaring relations fundamental. That would leave us with a new version of the same problem.
The more interesting possibility is that the distinction itself needs reconsideration.
From things between relations to things through relations
Consider an organism.
It is tempting to imagine an organism as an individual thing that subsequently enters into relations with its environment. But an organism is alive only through an extraordinary exchange with what is not itself. It takes in matter and energy, maintains boundaries, regulates internal processes, responds to other organisms, and changes through time.
Its apparent independence is therefore an achievement.
The organism is a relatively stable centre of activity within a larger field of relations.
This does not make the organism unreal. Quite the opposite. It gives us another way to understand its reality.
A boundary need not be a wall separating one thing absolutely from another. It can be an active relation through which an entity maintains its relative identity.
The same possibility appears at other levels.
A family is not merely a collection of individuals plus some connections between them. A language is not merely a collection of words plus rules connecting them. An ecosystem is not merely a collection of organisms plus interactions. A society is not merely a collection of individuals plus institutions.
In each case, the relations can alter the possibilities of the relata.
And once that happens, relation is no longer merely connection.
Heraclitus again
This helps us see why Heraclitus remains philosophically interesting.
His importance is not that he supplied an early slogan about everything flowing. It is that he challenged the assumption that stability must be understood independently of change.
If opposites belong together, if order emerges through tension, if what something is depends upon its place within a changing whole, then identity itself becomes relational.
A thing can remain recognisably itself not because nothing changes, but because a pattern of relations persists through change.
This is a very different conception of persistence.
A whirlpool persists while the water composing it changes. A living organism persists while matter passes through it. A musical pattern can remain recognisable through different performances. A species persists through generations of organisms that are not numerically identical.
The persistence belongs to a pattern of organisation, not necessarily to the persistence of its material constituents.
Here relation begins to approach structure.
But we should not move too quickly.
A relation can connect without constituting. A structure can constrain without determining. And a pattern can persist without being a thing in the traditional sense.
The conceptual distinctions will matter.
Relation as possibility
There is another consequence.
If relations help constitute things, then changing a relation can change what is possible for the things involved.
A change in the relation between predator and prey alters the possibilities of both. A change in the relation between organism and environment can alter what the organism can do. A change in the relation between two concepts can alter what can be inferred from them.
The significance of a relation therefore cannot always be described by asking what it connects.
We may instead have to ask:
What does this relation make possible?
That question moves us beyond a static ontology of objects and connections.
It also changes how we understand constraint.
A constraint is not necessarily something imposed upon an already existing thing from outside. The conditions that constitute a thing can simultaneously limit and enable its activity. The riverbanks constrain the water, but without that constraint there would be no river of that form. The boundaries of an organism constrain exchange, but without them there would be no organism capable of maintaining itself.
Constraint can therefore be generative.
And once constraint becomes generative, relation becomes inseparable from possibility.
A beginning, not a doctrine
None of this means that Heraclitus secretly possessed a modern relational ontology. Nor should we construct a smooth historical line from ancient Greek philosophy to our own concerns.
Philosophical history does not work that way.
Heraclitus opens some possibilities. Aristotle develops others, while closing or subordinating some of the possibilities that Heraclitus makes visible. Later philosophers reopen questions that earlier frameworks had stabilised. Still later thinkers encounter problems that require distinctions unavailable to their predecessors.
The point of looking backwards is therefore not to discover that our conclusions were already there.
It is to discover which questions had to become possible before our questions could be asked.
One of those questions is deceptively simple:
Are relations things have, or are relations partly what things are?
Once that question becomes possible, another follows.
If things are constituted through relations, then perhaps becoming cannot be understood as something that happens to already constituted things.
Perhaps things become what they are through the relations in which they participate.
And if that is so, then relation leads us naturally toward becoming.
That is where the next question begins:
What happens when being itself has to be understood as becoming?
No comments:
Post a Comment