It's Really Not Hard

The overarching theme of this blog is that two basic directions of metaphysical frameworks undergird all human thinking about any and every thing, and that those frameworks are well worth surfacing and getting a handle on. I'm all too aware the word "metaphysics" suggests the project will be boring, intimidatingly difficult, practically useless, hopelessly subjective, or all of the above. Alas, it's the only proper term available. "Metaphysics" is the Euro-Western domain label that covers how we think about what things, in the broadest possible sense, are, and what makes them real things. I hope my posts and reading roundups so far have at least begun to refute these assumptions about metaphysics always being boring or useless or untethered from empirical testability, but I want to take this one to emphasize how easy these core concepts of basic comparative metaphysics can be. We could teach them to children. And we absolutely should, if we want a reality-based and decent society that understands what's required to maintain regenerative coexistence on and as Earth—let alone off-planet (not happening but whatever).

I've described the two overarching directions at varying lengths in pretty much every post:

• things as separate essentialized substances, which is the rather abstracted "map-metaphysics" model that has largely dominated and structured Euro-Western culture; or,
• things as relational processes, which converging interdisciplinary and intercultural evidence solidly establishes as the true terrain.

Metaphysics does get more complicated (and less practically useful to most people) when you go down a few clicks in generality. Naturally, that's where most academic philosophy happens. What exactly is "essence," what exactly is "relation," what are the nuances of causality under such-and-such axioms, et cetera, et cetera. At maximum zoom-out, however, we can take advantage of the literally all-encompassing span of metaphysics' domain and go beyond philosophy proper. Physics at every scale and context, geology and biology at every scale and context, human psychological and social-political-economic sciences at every scale and context: they all study things, so they all illuminate the impacts of and evidence for conceiving of things in one overall way or the other. All those domains are obviously, bogglingly complex too. Crucially, though, the overall pattern they establish with regard to basic comparative metaphysics isn't. Quite simply, the process-relational direction gets things less wrong across the board. Everything really, factually, ontologically, is interconnected. Period.

A fun way to demonstrate the simplicity of these core concepts is to go overboard and run it through the Up-Goer 5 text editor. Back in 2012, Randall Munroe, author of the webcomic XKCD, undertook to explain the Saturn V rocket that powered NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon. His twist was using only drawing and "the ten hundred most used words" in English—which do not include thousand, let alone gas, or oxygen, or a whole lot else one might think necessary to explaining literal rocket science. It's astonishingly limiting. Yet he got pretty far. (Munroe expanded this approach in a book, Thing Explainer, in 2015. There was also a brief but lovely trend of people explaining their jobs in this way. Give it a try!) While I won't attempt to draw anything, running basic comparative metaphysics through this slightly absurd oversimplifying squeeze gives something like the following. The editor ignores words after Mr./Ms. or in quotes.

Here and now, most of us learn to think like this: here's one thing over here and there's another thing over there. This is this and that is that; they simply are what they are, this-or-that, by themselves, once and for all, and that is what makes them real. Doing comes only after this being. This way of cutting things a-part goes back at least twenty-five hundred years, and it can seem like a good or only way to be sure about things. (Mr. Plato thought so, and Mr. Descartes, though we shouldn't put it all on them.) Most of us learn that there is a fixed, hard line between our self, sort of in-here, and the rest of the world, sort of out-there; or between people-stuff and 'Nature'-stuff; or between true or not-true, us or them, he or she, and so on.

That kind of fixed line-drawing (or line-accepting) leads to a lot of problems. Of course we need lines between and around things, and kinds of things, to tell one from another and say what's what. But it also matters how the lines get there—and where, and how long they stay stuck, and why, and who is we.

There are other ways to think of things that share seeing what things are as tied to other things, never just off all by themselves, and almost always changing—and changing each other. In other words, yes, this thing here is different from that thing there, but how and why and when and so on matter. What a thing does matters to what it is, and some of what this thing here is might even be because of what that thing there does.

OK, it's not the most compelling Sesame Street script ever, but you get the gist. Allowing some slightly less-common words like, say, "map," "separate," or "process" makes things easier still. Examples, of course, even more so.

Things are never truly separate or unaffected by time and change. What things are comes from the complex history and present of their specifically situated relations with other things, not from some self-contained or idealized essence, whether we're talking about a particle, a table, a river, a cell, a person, a gender, a species, a country, a system, or an idea. When we think about things in isolation and in terms of frozen and idealized essences, more nouns than verbs, we're using abstracting mental representations. Those mental models are super-handy in lots of ways. Communication would be pretty dang hard without them, for example. However, like any representation, they fall short of the full, concrete, contextual reality. They have culturally specific history. And at least sometimes, it's important to keep the limitations of our minds in mind.

It might not the most familiar way to think, for many of us. It might not be emotionally easy for many people—especially for adults—to give up fantasies of absolute certainty or self-sufficiency, or the hyper-individualist and divisive domination/extraction relations those fantasies so often promote. It might not be politically easy to organize and wrest power from isolating and essentializing power structures, although process-relational and systems thinking provide additional tools to do so. It might not be socially easy for many people to slow down and consider the true interconnectedness of things when our society is built around the seeming shortcuts of separateness and abstracted legibility. But intellectually, it's not a heavy lift. We get things less wrong when we try to understand them as nested and entangled processes.

All models are wrong, but some models are useful. The map is not the territory and the territory is an event more than a place. Humility is warranted, and room for curiosity is infinite. It is that deep, but it's not that difficult.