Meditation II

Usually when I feel metaphysically, that's because my brain is running in a hamster wheel, in Ixion's hamster wheel. For some time the hamster wheel was the concept of a point, later that was superseded by that of the number zero. Quite lately another hamster wheel has cropped up: the relation. Other people might be obsessed with time, or death, bot not I. With the point the problem I laboured with until it somehow percolated away to the unconscious was the number of dimensions of a point. Now, somehow my brain has decided to worry about how a relation can reach its relatum.

I think it began with the picture of a cord, spun between a and b, lets say the branches of a tree, a washing line, the cord playing the role of a spatial metaphor for the concept of relation. It seems straightforward, the cord is fixed to a and b by means of a knot, and that should settle the matter, ... but not for me.

Many things are wrong now! First, there's now a new thing, a knot, which has a relation with the cord and the branch, and without this extra object, it seems the cord can't reach the branch. But isn't the knot just a part of the cord, and thus it's the cord after all that really reaches the branch? The answer is: no. The knot is not just a part of the cord, it is the form the cord has where it is fixed to the branch, and without the knot, the cord would just drop to the ground. If we look at a much simpler relation, say greater than that holds between the numbers 1 and 2, we now must wonder where or what the knot is in that relation.

Furthermore, even with the knot the cord can't really reach the branch, it only goes around it, they both don't merge at any point, they touch, but remain two distinct things. That means that there is something between branch and cord that separates them, a border, and even if we make this border as thin as we will, it will never disappear. So, like in Zeno's paradoxes, even though the cord gets pretty close to the branch, it never can reach it. This is even physically true, because the atoms, or the parts of the atoms of the chord and those of the branch never touch or reach each other, but repel each other with certain electric loads. And if they didn't, if the cord and the branch would somehow merge, it would even be wilder, since then the cord would partly be a branch and the branch partly a chord, and the question then arises what the cord connects, or what the branches are connected by. Is it a branchcord spun between two cordbranches, or is it the cordness of the branches that holds our laundry up above the ground. Not likely so. With regard to the greater than relation the question is: not being a number the relation is certainly different from the numbers, so how can it reach down to them to relate them, won't there always be a logical vacuum between relation and relata?

Now, a sane person might say: my friend, you are just hallucinating, relations don't reach down, that's just not what they do, we understand what a relation means intuitively. In fact the concept of a relation is given to us a priori, and we can't think about it at all. It's the most basic building stone of our metaphysics and thus our world. Just as time and space, are, according to Kant, preconditions for experience, and not part of this experience, and can not in any way be studied, or be better understood through experience, so relations are preconditions of our thinking, and can not by studied or better understood by thinking about them. In the end, if you worry about relations you couldn't say anything at all, you couldn't even express your worries.

In opposition to this we might want to say that time and space are relations, too, and thus relations must be even antepriori, prior to the a priori space and time, and hence more foundational (such an apparent nonsense-comparative is not necessarily nonsense in metahpysics) . So how can they be relegated to thinking, or to something given to us (a dark moldy metaphor anyway)? If there is a reality, they surley must be part of it, must live deeper down even than space and time, at the bottom of the sea of beeing. And even if we accepted the critique about our being unreasonable, or in a sense mad, as a knight on his queste for the holy grail, there remains an unsatisfying uneasiness with it, an aftertaste. We remain puzzled, because we still have three things, a, b, and the relation between them swirling around in our universe as three different objects, in the same neighbourhood maybe, but other than that, unrelated. And so, why does the universe not fall apart? Certainly it cannot be only a condition, even if it is a pre-condition, that holds the whole thing together!

Another, sane person might think, heck (P. Unger), or, if she was Dutch, goh, lets get on to some real questions, I've never heard anyone worry about relations. If it was a real problem, surely lots of philosophers would have thought about this, solved the problem, and we would know about it, just like we know that science can be founded on the the principle of falsification or that Occam's razor can help us find the best theory. Well, in fact philosophers have done quite some thinking about relations, but because what they say is complicated, it's not part of the popular philosophical canon. On the other hand, it might be much more valuable, since the two ideas mentioned above, viz. falsification and Occam's razor, are, really, flawed or at least highly problematic, difficult notions, so we shouldn't trust the popular canon too much in choosing our questions, or better, not at all.