No.557
At the end of the 19th and early 20th century there was a small philosophical debate between some philosophers regarding two exclusive philosophical doctrines concerning the status of objects and relations. The two doctrines are:
1) that the relationships of an object to other objects are to be considered as constituting said object as well (internal relations)
2) that relations are between independent objects and were not to be thought of as anything essential to the object (external relations)
This argument was important not because it was ever resolved, but because it had implications for one’s ontology. If relations were internal then monism of some sort was necessarily true, and if external then pluralism was necessarily true.
The doctrine of internal relations basically states: Any object that we can conceive of empirically rests in a net of historical relations in this world which themselves rest in a historical net into spatial and temporal infinity. Because the empirical reality of any object we know is historical, ahistorical definitions of concepts are inadequate. A proper concept of any object must include its entire relationship web since its existence is impossible in the real world without it, e.g. In order to bake an apple pie you must first create the universe (based Sagan). Because all objects are composed as arbitrary nodes in a web of relations and are relations themselves sustaining and resting upon other relations ad infinitum, the very concept of objects becomes useless and one ends with an immaterial relational processism in which the monad is what I can only call in chan terms “The Happening”.
Ex: A fridge can be defined as a box that cools things within it and keeps them cool. The empirical reality of what a fridge is, however, is more complex. Fridges are made by a particular species, in a particular place, at a particular point in history. The proper concept of a fridge then would not only be its simple function and structure, but would also include that it is made by humans in a certain epoch in a certain universe.
This concept also carries a rather strange concept of truth with it. The truth of any single portion of reality, since the concept must logically contain the entire relational structure of reality, is the entire Happening and is only True as The Happening. Any concept containing less than a full identity with The Happening isn’t necessarily false, only not fully True. As such, if we knew the Truth of any object we would know everything about its universe. If some alien in the far future found a fridge that survived a human extinction event, if it knew the Truth it would know that if fridge, therefore humans; likewise, if humans, therefore fridges.
If any of you have ever delved into eastern philosophies, the Buddhist concept of dependent origination is basically the same thing stated differently. Hegel’s own metaphysics can be said to assume internal relations even though he never mentioned such a doctrine.
I may have rambled too much. Pic is GOAT