The End of the Ancient Quarell
Mind and Language Dissolved Into Pan-Relational Existence
When I write a poem, I describe my world. It is language at the boundaries of life on Earth–linguistic behavior on the edge of understanding, pure and simple.
Each poem engenders a continuum of behavior, perhaps continuing for days and months before I commit my poem to the page. Thousands of utterly vague, interrelated images beat about my brain in half-conscious cacophonies, in a spiraling ideation comprising unbounded bits of memory and perception — infinitesimal apparitions casting waves of inferences, from the back of my mind to the tip of my tongue — rhythms, whims, rhymes, and sequences juxtaposing and bouncing throughout my imagination.
And then, perhaps, the cogitations congregate into tempestuous pictures. Inscrutable ideas congeal seamlessly into words, and I begin to write.
It is continuous, linguistic behavior also when I read my emerging poem silently to myself, or I conjure it out of memory, word for word, over and over, re-thinking and re-writing compulsively throughout the twisting threads of successive approximation (into the labyrinthian, descriptive reductions of an unfinishable integration).
And at last, if I should read my poem aloud to you, that is yet another practice of language along the ever-morphing paths of our shared, linguistic behavior.
Years later, if you should read my poem aloud to another or silently to yourself, or if you recite it from memory or keep thinking about it (or something like it), again and again, it is all still more linguistic behavior, and related inexorably to my first, vague imaginings.
A poet sees no difference in practice that follows a metaphysician’s distinction of mind and language.
Existence and the determinant
An assiduously creative person of our time, whether a poet, scientist, jurist, or educator, would chafe at a metaphysician’s insistence that “the mind” is one thing, and that “language” is another.
From amoebas to humans, from archaea to humpback whales, the intellect of living things congeals out of naturally induced continua of descriptive behavior. Organic understandings of every description, the substance of memory, comprise the adaptive uses of a pan-relational existence.
The intellect, in turn, is the determinant of living activity. It contours the earthly environment, and it manifests the meaning of all worlds.
Rationalism and pan-relationalism
In my recent articles, I contrasted the rationalist notion that truth is whatever corresponds to reality with the pragmatist notion that a true statement is a justified affirmation of belief. Pragmatism seeks to fashion a more trenchant “vocabulary” that might usefully serve the aspirations and needs of human self-realization and enculturation.
In this article, I contrast the rationalist notion of an objective reality with the “neopragmatist” notion of a pan-relational existence. The contrast underscores a continuing paradigm shift in philosophy. Pan-relationalism dissolves the metaphysical distinction between “the really real” and mere appearance. The strictures of “dualism” and the primacy of the “necessary” simply wither into dust.
In a pan-relational world, the traditional metaphysical distinctions will be regarded as so many ancient gods.
An impediment to logic
The dissolution of modern metaphysics has been brewing for more than two centuries. Also in this article, I claim that the continuing separation of the intellect into intrapersonal thinking and interpersonal language is a vestige of the bilemmic, rationalist era and the last of the metaphysical distinctions.
As we move further into a post-metaphysical, pan-relational world, the mind-language distinction will be exposed as an impediment to logic and irrelevant to the needs of the Third Millennium.
And finally, pan-relationalism is itself the basis of an implicit paradox, which will require more encompassing, fully integrative modes of logical description and valid understanding.
Metaphysical distinctions
The neo-Kantian and positivist philosophers of metaphysics (the “rationalists”) believe that the true world is already out there, “fully baked and cut at the joints,” and waiting to be discovered by means of stable, rational foundations, such as the eternal revelations of “reason,” the indubitable “intuitions” of the mind, or by an unfiltered, non-linguistic “experience” of the world.
However, faced with the inevitable imperfections of perception and the vagaries of language, yet in order to isolate the foundations of truth, rationalists have posited hierarchical, ontological distinctions within the fabric of existence. For example, in various permutations, rationalists have distinguished the really real from mere appearance, the indubitable mind from the dubious body, hard objectivity from squishy subjectivity, and the essential (the necessary) from the accidental (the contingent).
Endless disputations
But rationalists have never been able to agree among themselves, as to which distinction truly underpins the metaphysical truth. Rationalist theorizing is inherently unstable because it tends toward the circular. The hierarchical stratification of existence generally insinuates “rationalities regarding the rational.”
For example, realism gravitates around the claim that anything that exists independently of mind and language is thereby elevated to the status of “real,” and therefore, reality exists independently of mind and language.
Over the centuries, rationalism has led to various, self-referential dead ends.
It is akin to the Kantian regret that the “thing-in-itself” is necessarily unknowable because, by definition, it is unknowable. (Rorty, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, p. 93.)
Pragmatists believe that anything posited to be absolutely and necessarily unknowable is, at best, a theoretical gap-filler. No non-theoretical difference in practice could possibly result from an unknowable thing-in-itself (or similar fiction), and so for pragmatists, it holds no philosophical interest.
Intellectual “epicycles”
In light of the theoretical instability, and especially since the days of Kant, rationalists have compounded ever more refined ontological distinctions. Previous permutations have been displaced by increasingly incisive “intensions” of the mind that nevertheless have consistently failed to penetrate the “veils” of an increasingly analyzed language.
Like the old astronomers who kept layering tighter, ever more complex epicycles upon the cosmos, rationalism has devolved into a morass of ever more esoteric, impractical distinctions.
Pan-relationalism is to philosophy what heliocentrism was to astronomy.
What is Pan-Relationalism?
Pan-relationalism is the doctrine that each and every knowable thing in the universe (every table, atom, galaxy, neurosynapse, sentience, etc.) is “predicated” (structured descriptively) as a fluxing set of infinite relations, while each and every such relation is also a predication of infinite other relations, ad infinitum.
For example, orangutans are related to largeness, orangeness, hairiness, long arms, etc.
The infinite relations, predicates, and properties of orangutans and of infinite other things fan out infinitely in infinite directions. For another example, a basketball is round, etc. And roundness relates to pi, pi is mathematical, so is poker, Fred plays poker, Fred is large and hairy, etc.
Pan-relationalism holds that nothing is knowable about an existing thing, “except as an infinitely large and forever expansible, web of relations… [which goes] all the way down and all the way out in every direction; you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations” (Pragmatism As Anti-Authoritarianism, pp. 88 [emphasis original]).
Hubs and spokes
A knowable thing is a set of predicating and predicated, pan-relational points. Each point is an infinitely connected hub, and each point is an infinitely connecting spoke. Every thing in the universe is a universe of things. Like the calculus of integration, every infinite set of definite (useful) interrelating relations approximates a specific thing.
All the things of our world comprise the enmeshed, approximating, and probabilistic continua of infinite predication.
For a pan-relationalist, no bit of the universe is any more “essential” or “necessary” to existence than any other bit.
Pan-relationalists do not believe that common sense reality has been pre-formed by some external force, nor that it arrived with a convenient, rational basis for itself. They do not believe in the truth of a monolithic, objective universe, but rather they recognize infinite webs of relations, forming and dissolving as infinitudes of things that infinitely approximate a dimensionless (we may plausibly suppose) cosmos.
Pan-rationalism and pragmatism are joined at the hip
Pan-relationalist philosophers are anti-rationalist, anti-foundationalist, and anti-essentialist. That is, they are pragmatists. They see no point in positing a knowledge of something real, except to assuage an immediate need for specific, useful action.
In a pan-relational world, the truth is whatever webs of relations are useful to our understanding of existence and justifiable with reference to cohesive, other webs of relations.
For pragmatists, it makes no difference to the practice of science, art, or life, whether or not our true beliefs are based upon timeless, indubitable foundations and irreducible essences.
Pragmatists do not find the traditional distinctions of metaphysics to be false, but they do regard them as very questionable premises, if not useless in practice, and therefore thoroughly, philosophically uninteresting.
Examples of pan-relational objects
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) is the evangelist of pan-relationalism. He uses whole numbers as an uncontroversial example of pan-relational existence. The number 17 clearly has infinite properties: it is the square root of 289, the difference between 1,021 and 1,004, less than 23, etc.
Of course, some of the infinite relations of 17 may be more familiar than others: By definition, the whole number that is “17” may be expressed as a single term. 17 is also the whole number between 16 and 18, and it is the sum of seventeen 1s. But there is no intrinsically “seventeenish” thing out there, that is, no essential seventeen-ness behind the infinite mathematical expressions of 17.
As another example, my table is small, brown, ugly, made of wood, it has a flat top, etc. These relations exist. But for a pan-relationalist, an intrinsic, essential “tableness” does not exist. There is no nonlinguistic “thing-in-itself” out there that allows me to know non-descriptively that I’m sitting at a table, and that in this instance, the table comes with a lot of extra “accidents,” i.e. it is brown, ugly, hard on top, made from atoms…
The struggles of a “strong poet,” described at the beginning of this article, is a study of the pan-relational attitude.
Pan-relationalists “brush aside” the useless, metaphysical questions of whether the hardness of a table top is more intrinsic to its tableness than its molecular structure, or where the necessary nature of its tableness stops and its merely accidental properties (especially its ugliness) start. (Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, pp. 84–103.)
How pan-relational webs “hang together”
Pan-relationalism is Rorty’s continuation of the “psychological nominalism” of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989). Psychological nominalism is the doctrine that there is nothing to be known about any thing, except for what may be stated in sentences (subjects and predicates) describing it.
The thing might be a hard table top or a hopeless hallucination, but in all cases, the thing consists of infinite sets of infinitely relating and relatable, linguistic predicates, which get hypostatized (get “realized”) into various relating and relatable properties.
Predication is the intelligible means by which each knowable thing is related within and throughout infinite webs of pan-relational things. The webs of predication hypostatize into the infinitely integrating properties of each approximately existing thing, and each thing concomitantly provides an infinitude of predicates comprised of and comprising existing (knowable) things.
Each thing is a set of things, and so each thing is a set of sets. Is the universe also a thing? The set of all sets?
In a pan-relational universe, is each thing a member of its own set of relations, or is it not? Is it neither, or both? (In light of Russell’s Paradox, the logical implications of pan-relationalism will be discussed briefly below.)
“Whether you think of those relationships realistically, as somehow there before the inventions of the predicates, or whether you think of them anti-realistically, as coming into existence along with such inventions, is a matter of complete indifference” (Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, p. 86).
Objections to pan-relationalism
Like any other earth-shattering idea, from the beatitudes to heliocentrism, pan-relationalism flies in the face of common sense realism. The realist objects, first and foremost, that you cannot have any relations at all, without there first being something hard and substantial out there that is being related.
A pragmatist would not question the logical structure of this argument, but he or she would find very dubious the proposition, inherent in the premise, that there must be a distinction made between hard objects and descriptive existence, or between reality and mere appearance. For a pragmatist, all that is knowable about the existence of a hard table top is that infinitely integrating properties (qua hypostatized predicates) are true about it. Whether or not there is a further reality behind this “mere description” makes no difference in practice. (I’m still going to put my coffee mug on top of this flat, ugly thing.) For a pragmatist, a distinction without a difference is like an unknowable concept–it is devoid of philosophical interest. (Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, pp. 85–86, 89–91.)
The realist distinction between the thing being related and its relations is merely another way of distinguishing what we are talking about from what we say about it.
The hand slaps the table
A realist calls this “linguisticism” and “subjectivism,” and insists upon the primacy of objective reality over the fuzziness of a “linguistic construct.” So, in order to prove the existence of non-linguistic knowledge, the realist John Searle (1932– ) famously slaps his hand on the table, experiences the “raw feel,” and claims that he has thereby become better acquainted with reality itself, with the very “essence of table-ness,” with its “thereness,” and without the mediation of mere language.
The pan-relationalist, anti-essentialist reply is that if you want to know what a table intrinsically “is,” then the most efficient answer you’ll ever get are the infinite, hypostatizing, and integrating relations that are true about it. It’s brown and ugly, it has a hard top, it’s made of atoms, it belongs to nobody, it was here an hour ago, it’s still here now, etc. And it’s painful to slap your hand on it.
Pain, representation, and the causal power
For Rorty, the realist’s pain “is on all fours” with the table’s brownness, ugliness, etc.
“Just as you do not get on more intimate terms with the number 17 by discovering its square root, you do not get on more intimate terms with the table, closer to its intrinsic nature, by hitting it than by looking at it or talking about it. All that hitting it (…) does is to enable you to relate it to a few more things. It does not take you out of language into fact, or out of appearance into reality (…).” (Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, p. 91).
Realists often charge pan-relationalists with “idealism” and “losing touch with the world.” But any poet or philosopher worth his or her salt will surely know what a hard rock feels like, and how an absolutely stunning view can permanently bend the soul.
True reality is not a matter of representing nature, but the knowledge of existence is a matter that is caused by nature. And the inference of causation is the engine of understanding:
“(…) once we cease to describe knowing about something as representing its intrinsic nature accurately, and thereby break representational links to the world, we still have causal links. Anybody who grants that the world has causal power to change our descriptions of it (…) should be immune from accusations of subjectivism and relativism.” (Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, p. 86 [emphasis added]).
The natural environment causes our hypostatizing, pan-relational predication that congeals into descriptions of a knowable existence.
A pan-relationalist is not “anti-reality.” He or she is simply a pragmatist who has stopped taking the realist vs. anti-realist debate seriously.
Pan-relationalism obviates metaphysical distinctions
I have touched upon the dissolution of metaphysical distinctions throughout this article. A panoply of “modal distinctions” becomes fully immaterial in a pan-relational world. Pan-relationalists work to replace a world-picture made from various metaphysical distinctions, dualisms, and hierarchies of reality, with an alternative world-picture of the continually changing flux of a pan-relational existence.
In particular, pan-relationalism denies any privileged, ontological status for “the real.” Pan-relationalism “shakes off” the persistent inertia of Plato’s appearance-reality distinction. When the knowledge of a thing’s existence (its “thereness”) comprises a pan-relational web of descriptions, no description of it embraces a “real thing” as opposed to an “apparent thing.”
Everything is pan-relational, and so pan-relationalism obviates the need to distinguish between non-relational properties (deemed intrinsic, necessary, essential, etc.) from relational properties (deemed extrinsic, conditional, accidental, etc.). Accordingly, there is no longer any point in drawing a line between the “conditions of possibility” and the “conditions of actuality” (Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, p. 85).
When knowledge merely utilizes a seamless web of relations, there is no theoretical distinction to be made between the elements of knowledge contributed by a person and the elements contributed by the world. The distinction between subject and object (in particular, the elevated status of “the objective”) is dissolved by pan-relationalism.
And finally, there is nothing metaphysically privileged about either the interpersonal relations of language nor the intrapersonal relations of the mind. Anti-representationalism, taken at face value, is the end of the mind-language distinction. Life on Earth is a continuum of intellect (rather than a dualism of representation), which adapts to the webs of pan-relational effects in an infinitude of worlds.
It’s a story 3 billion years in the making–of a thoroughly linguistified, pan-relational existence–that surely does not start nor stop with us.
And if there is no mind-language distinction, then no knowledge-existence distinction of any sort may be entertained. In other words, without some “representation” of “reality,” the epistemological-ontological mode of inquiry (the structure of metaphysics) can only dry up and blow away.
Pan-Relational Logic
Metaphysics is dissolving. Plato and Aristotle are fading. The Gordian Knot of philosophy is unraveling. But another epic knot may be cinching up to take its place.
How do we understand pan-relational existence cosmically? Does it make sense anymore to speak of a “universe?” Every approximating, pan-relational thing is as non-singular as any other, forever expansible and forever reducible. Perhaps, in a pan-relational existence, there is no “set of all sets,” the universe is not “One,” and nothing is.
Maybe Parmenides should get kicked out of the Pantheon, also.
And the soup just keeps getting thicker…
For an anti-essentialist psychological nominalist like Sellars, nothing can be a set of descriptions that is also describing itself–that is, there can be no description that attains its own essence. Nothing is a member of its own set.
But for mathematicians, 17 is the set of all of the formulations of 17. (Every point on a number line is another “line,” another set in another dimension.) And so, each pan-relational, mathematical formulation, including 17 (and by implication, everything that is numerated) is a member of its own set.
Or perhaps not. And what of the “universe?” Is this putative “set of all sets” a pan-relational member of itself, or is it not? Is it both, is it neither? Pan-Relationalism implies a jarring instantiation of Russell’s Paradox. It implies a logical tetralemma of far-reaching consequence, which I will explore in future articles.
Russell’s Paradox may have been the pivot, all along, to the new Gordian Knot of pan-relationalism. Perhaps Rorty’s turn to a pan-relational existence may be better understood by means of a non-bilemmic theory of causation and tetralemmic logic. Perhaps the knowable, pan-relational “universe” is merely a dimensional manifestation–an infinite approximation–suspended in a dimensionless, unknowable, and philosophically irrelevant cosmos. (Priest, Logic (2d ed.) pp. 30–36.)
I’m a poet who reads philosophy. If you’re reading this, you might really like my recently published literary philosophy (an “apomary”), Creative Obsession. (It’s highly accessible and unapologetically entertaining.)
More is coming.
Bibliography
- Graham Priest, Logic (2d ed.), (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017)
- Richard Rorty, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism (Harvard Univ. Press, 2021)
