Lord of the Rings & Things

I apologize in advance for the woo-wooliness of this post, which is either in the nature of the subject or the nature of the author.

Let's get back to the subject of emergence per se. The term

applies in those cases where the distinctive quality that emerges is not the mere sum of separate elements, but instead embodies a new kind of relation (by definition relations cannot be present in the relata as the relations are not yet in being at the lower level).

That's a subtle point, because we naturally think of the world as consisting or "things," i.e., objects, stuff...

I was trying to think of more synonyms, but there really aren't any, because what's more general than a thing? Things exist, and existence consists of things. And knowledge consists of finding out what these things are. 

A few posts back we mentioned a passage by Schuon going to what we see when we look at the world:

First, existence; second, differences; third, movements, modifications, transformations; fourth, disappearances.

Objects fall under the heading of differences, in that we see one thing only because it is distinct from another. Each thing exists in its own right, but is subsumed under the even more general category of Being, which includes potential existence, so it's a larger concept. 

Potential existence doesn't yet exist, but nor is it nothing. Here we see the importance of time, which, from our perspective, is thoroughly entangled with the movements, modifications, transformations, and disappearances alluded to above. Time is change, and to say change is to say cause-and-effect.  

Now, as Garrigou-Lagrange reminds us, the soul of every judgment is the verb "to be." This may sound esoteric, but it really just means determining whether or not the thing in question actually exists, whether in the domain of religion, science, or everyday life. 

If you think about it, every argument comes down to the question of is. In fact, even ought questions may be reduced to is -- for example, ought we abort the baby? It depends on what the baby is. 

But where things have clear existential outlines, relations are more ambiguous. Marriage, for example, is a relation. I know I'm married, but does my dog know? No, but does that make the relation less real? 

Conversely, two homosexuals say they are married, and they even enlist the violence of the state to enforce the claim, but does this make the relation real? If I say I am married to my toaster, am I? 

Beyond nominal definitions is the ontological status of relations, something with which science as such has a great deal of difficulty, since a relation isn't observable. Now, what if this is fundamentally a relational universe? 

Well, it is. It is only up to us to figure out how and why, and what to do about it.

This question of relationality is precisely one of the characteristics that distinguishes Christianity from other religions, philosophies, and belief systems. One might say that the soul of Christianity comes down to the real existence of two principles: Trinity and Incarnation, the rest consisting of entailments, commentary, and assimilation (or vertical metabolism).

The important point -- our First Principle of Isness -- is that ultimate reality is a relation of Persons, or as Norris Clarke puts it, an irreducible substance-in-relation. 

Can anyone point to a relation? No, not exactly. We can elucidate a relation, but it's not actually something we can perceive with the senses. 

This blog, for example, is all about relations of various kinds, e.g., the relationship between science and religion, or religion and politics, or man and God, or metaphysics and theology, or leftism and mental illness, etc. 

My hobby, as it were, is writing about relations of various kinds, especially vertical relations. But the deeper question always comes down to ontology: does or does not the relation actually exist; for if the soul of every judgment is to be, the soul of all being is to relate.

But that is not all, for relations can only exist in the context of time. However, it appears that our experience of time isn't all there is to it. In our four-dimensional world we have direct access only to the irreversible flow of time from past to present to future. And again, this flow is precisely what reveals cause-and-effect.

But we can also discern another type of cause-and-effect at play in the cosmos: vertical, or top-down causation. For example, back in the day, a fellow named Thomas à Kempis wrote a book called The Imitation of Christ, which is all about a vertical causation that is not so much out of time as involving another kind of time. 

You could say that this form of time is a measure of the distance between image and likeness: the standard equipment of the human person has a blueprint of the image, but actualizing this implicit potential into the actual likeness takes time. It reminds me of something Schuon says:

There are basically but three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself, like a ring which in reality has never parted from the Infinite.

It seems that vertical time is an ascending or descending spiroidal movement around -- or away from -- a tri-spiroidal Center. 

To be continued....