After a belief in gods, which did carry surprising multiplicity, the
Greeks turned to more pure forms and substances. By the Seventeenth
Century the success of the European mappers of reality had managed to find
unequivocal meaning across a homogeneous landscape drained of spirits that
has resulted in what is often pejoratively called "flatland." For
this to happen the subjective had to be removed, and the result is often
referred to as Cartesian dualism, where, illogically, two universes--the
subjective and the objective--are completely separate but somehow,
some-unknown-how, are connected.
The attempted solution here to the
multiplicity/simplicity or dualism problem ties subjects and objects as
alliances of behavior formed by knowledge. As such the knower is a
multiplicity of alliances, a society of ties to the known ones (See Point
6). And similarly an object is tied in multiple connections to
various subjects where it can be said to "allow" various uses or
interpretations (See Point 5). But these possibilities of the object
are fundamental; thus the object is also a society of the alliances it
finds itself in and of its possibilities.
Reality as societies of mutual and
conflicting relationships is notably reminiscent of some interpretations
of quantum mechanics, but no such avenue of argument will be pursued here.
If a better interpretation of reality results in an easier task of
explaining quantum theory, so much the better.
Quotes
"It is probably by seeking to understand the simple in terms of the
complex rather than the complex in terms of the simple, that one can best
understand the true nature of our relationship with the world of living
things. Whitehead intimated this when he suggested that the concept
of organism should be extended downward to include the particle."
Goldsmith, Edward. The Way: An Ecological World-View.
University of Georgia Press. 1998. p. 25.
“Modern philosophy, in stressing the illusory nature of sensory
appearances, has congratulated itself on having fulfilled its duty to be
suspicious by distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities while
accepting unquestioningly the deeper illusion: the notion of instantaneous
bits of matter simply located in space.” Griffin, David Ray. Unsnarling
the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem.
University of California Press. 1998. p. 120.
"Though forming part of a single logical space, all facts are independent
of each other: any one of them may hold or fail to hold, without any other
being affected. They are not allowed to present themselves to us as parts
of indivisible package deals. This was the old practice, but is so no
longer. The republic of facts is Jacobin and centralist and tolerates no
permanent or institutionalized factions within itself. This atomization in
principle is not merely so to speak lateral - disconnecting each fact from
its spatial neighbours - but also, and to an equal degree, qualitative:
each trait conjoined in a fact can in thought be disconnected from its
fellows, and their conjunction depends on factual confirmation alone.
Nothing is necessarily connected with anything else. We must separate all
separables in thought, and then consult the fact to see whether the
separated elements are, contingently, joined together. That is one of the
fundamental principles of the rational investigation of nature.
"This picture has been challenged of late, and indeed the Jacobin
proscription of factions, of clustering for mutual protection, may not be
fully implemented even in science. A certain amount of package dealing, of
clannish cohesion amongst ideas and facts, does perhaps survive. But this
is a furtive, surreptitious practice surviving only in a shamefaced and
camouflaged form. When contrasting the rules and realities of our current
intellectual world with that of pre-scientific humanity, what is striking
is the degree to which the atomistic ideal of individual responsibility is
implemented. If a factual claim is false and persists in being falsified,
its favoured place in a kinship network of ideas will not in the end save
it, even if it does secure for it a reprieve and stay of execution. It is
not true that ideas face the bar of reality as corporate bodies: rather,
in the past, they evaded reality as corporate bodies. They are no longer
allowed to do so, or at any rate not for very long. Occasionally, they
succeed in doing so for a while. In the traditional world, the factional
gregariousness of ideas was allowed to become a stable structure,
sacralized, and to inhibit cognitive growth. Even if a bit of informal
temporary corporatism is still tolerated, it is no longer allowed to
become overt, sacred, rigid, meshed in with the social role structure, and
to thwart expansion.
"This is a single world, and the language which describes it also serves
but a single purpose - accurate description, explanation and prediction.
It is also notoriously a cold, morally indifferent world. Its icy
indifference to values, its failure to console and reassure, its total
inability either to validate norms and values or to offer any guarantee of
their eventual success, is in no way a consequence of any specific findings
within. It isn't that facts just happen to have turned out to be so
deplorably unsupportive socially. It is a consequence of the overall basic
and entrenched constitution of our thought, not of our accidental findings
within it." Gellner, Ernest. Plough, Sword and Book; The
Structure of Human History. University of Chicago Press. 1988. pp.
63-5.
"According to the meta-physical framework of contextual realism, reality
consists of seemingly inexhaustible levels of semi-autonomous (or 'real')
contexts exhibiting a myriad of forms, properties, structures, and
processes. Analogous to the innumerable cellular structures disclosed at
successive levels by various staining techniques as seen under different
optical resolutions through a microscope, the world resolves into endless
matrices of relatively stable contexts exhibiting phenomena subject to
varying descriptive predicates and explanatory principles. Although these
multifarious contexts with their various structures are not entirely
discontinuous (otherwise our knowledge of them would be much more
difficult than it already is), neither are they merely successive
dimensions of essentially the same complexes of elements, as was assumed
in the past. Though manifesting some analogous relations and properties,
still, the forms and processes of the macroscopic world are not
qualitatively similar to those of the atomic-molecular domain, and the
conjugate properties of the latter, according to quantum mechanics, are
not repeated on the subatomic level. Moreover, as one moves outward to
cosmic, as opposed to inner atomic dimensions, one finds that the
structural relations between space and time, force fields and mass, or
gravitational fields and the space-time continuum become radically
altered, as described in the general theory of relativity. Schlagel,
Richard H. Contextual Realism; A Meta-physical Framework for Modern
Science. Paragon. 1986. pp. 274-5
"So long as we think of ourselves as discrete, atomistic, autonomous
beings, we will be saddled with a politics of antagonism and clashing interests.
This is so because when we think of ourselves as discrete substances, we
will tend to think of our interests and tastes as fixed and exclusive.
Instead of looking for ways that our interests intersect, we will focus on
how they differ. Instead of seeing the polis–that is, our communities–as
constitutive of our being, we will see them as separate sites of
struggle.” McAfee, Noelle. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship. Cornell
University Press. 2000. p. 7.
“So long as humanism is constructed through contrast with the object that
has been abandoned to epistemology, neither the human nor the nonhuman can
be understood.” Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard
University Press. 1993. p. 136.
“It seems to me that only in the seventeenth century did both trends
converge into one world picture: namely, the Nominalists’ passion for
unequivocation with the Renaissance sense of the homogeneity of nature–one
nature with forces to replace the many Aristotelian static natures.”
Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination From the Middle
Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton University Press. 1986. p. 72.
“Before long the problem of human action which is the concern of tragedy
was to become a matter for intellectual cognition; Socrates insists on
solving the problem through knowledge of the good. That is the ultimate
abstraction of the real, its transformation into a teleological concept.
Where a divine world had endowed the human world with meaning, we now find
the universal determining the particular.” Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of
the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. Dover. 1982 (1953). p. 112.
There is no way to justify the assertion that anything posited is
purely objective or purely subjective. The world of human experience
consists of a fusion of both elements, or better said, a primordial
nonduality of those elements. Similarly, the ‘fact that a truth is toward
the ‘conventional’ end of the convention-fact continuum does not mean that
it is absolutely conventional–a truth by stipulation, free of every
element of fact.’ This assertion by no means implies that such dualistic
notions as subject and object are useless. On the contrary, they point out
a practical distinction that is of great importance; but this distinction
is only functional, not ontological as understood by the traditional
dualism of scientific materialism.” Wallace, B. Alan. The Taboo of
Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. Oxford
University Press. 2000. p. 64. [subquote is Hilary Putnam, Representation
and Reality. MIT Press. 1988. p. 113]
“The effulgence of the divine, he [Pindar]
feels, is reflected in the appearances of the world; his sensuous delight
in the multiplicity of things is not yet obscured by the knowledge that
the essence which really matters is located beyond the visible world, and
that it can be known only by reason.” Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the
Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, Dover. 1982 (1953). p. 86.
"Kant's penetrating critique had
effectively pulled the rug out from under the human mind's pretensions to
certain knowledge of things in themselves, eliminating in principle any
human cognition of the ground of the world....
"From Hume and Kant through Darwin, Marx, Freud and beyond, an unsettling
conclusion was becoming inescapable: Human thought was determined,
structured, and very probably distorted by a multitude of overlapping
factors--innate but nonabsolute mental categories, habit, history,
culture, social class, biology, language, imagination, emotion, the
personal unconscious, the collective unconscious. In the end, the human
mind could not be relied upon as an accurate judge of reality. The
original Cartesian certainty, that which served as foundation for the
modern confidence in human reason, was no longer defensible.
"Henceforth, philosophy concerned itself largely with the clarification of
epistemological problems, with the analysis of language, with the
philosophy of science, or with phenomenological and existentialist
analyses of human experience. Despite the incongruence of aims and
pre-dispositions among the various schools of twentieth-century
philosophy, there was general agreement on one crucial point: the
impossibility of apprehending an objective cosmic order with the human
intelligence." The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas, Harmony,
New York, 1991, pp. 340-353.
“In Bellah’s account, ‘society’ is, for Durkheim, an immensely
complicated, multilayered reality. Sometimes ‘society’ refers to specific
social groups, but other times it is, in Durkheim’s words, ‘a composition
of ideas, beliefs, and sentiments of all sorts which realize themselves
through individuals. Foremost of these ideas is the moral ideal which is
its principal raison d’etre.’ In Bellah’s words, ‘Not only is society not
identical with an external ‘material entity,’ it is something deeply
inner, since for Durkheim it is the source of morality, personality, and
life itself at the human level.... Durkheim uses the word ‘society’ in
ways closer to classical theology than empirical science.’
“Bellah uses the idea of society in a similarly wide and deep range of
senses. He tends not to focus on specific social groups but, rather, seeks
to explicate the moral sinews at the base of social relations. In Bellah’s
work (and work deeply influenced by him)–unlike work more centrally
influenced by Marxist and Weberian traditions–one seldom sees interest
groups in zero-sum conflict. Instead, there are persons misunderstanding
or failing to understand (in part, because they hold more or less wealth
or power but also because they simply do not have a requisite conceptual
vocabulary) their fundamental interdependence. Like Durkheim, Bellah’s aim
is to deepen this common understanding of interdependence and to awaken
the sense of mutual responsibility that this entails.” Madsen, Richard.
“Comparative Cosmopolis: Discovering Different Paths to Moral Integration
in the Modern Ecumene.” pp. 105-123. Madsen, Richard & William Sullivan,
Ann Swidler, Steven Tipton. Meaning and Modernity: Religion Polity and
Self. University of California Press. 2002. p. 107.
Examples
Of course, according to the Point itself everything even if appears as a
singular and a unique is a multiplicity, a society. Illustrative
examples could list a conversation, the niche of a salmon, the internal
chemistry of a cell, the words in this sentence, Scottish culture, the
personality of Madonna, Wal-Mart shopping, the structures of a polypeptide
and the meanings of “rock and roll” in my brain. As examples, pick
anything and examine how many possibilities it has for you, how many lines
of advance it has in its own environment (if it is a living thing), how
many uses or contingencies it was given by its designer (if it is a
constructed thing), how many possibilities it has for other people, and
you will have something as "society."
It is the problematical things in
life that more profitably afford examples of objects as societies.
The Sinking of the Titanic and the Big Dig, a large construction project
in Boston, will never end. Their "nature" is impossibly spread
through many clues and many interpretations.
Statement of Point
Reality is better understood as a society composed of many societies
including the society of subject and object. By “society” is meant not
only the usual human societies but any thing, being or collection of
these.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations