Philosophical Plumbing and Practical Examples

One of the main claims of this blog is that we are all, always, already, bringing metaphysical frameworks to bear on our thought and action in a very practical way. It's impossible not to. We have to draw lines somewhere around what is real, what makes a thing a thing, and so on. We're just doing so mostly unconsciously on the basis of what we've picked up from our culture and experiences. And why would we be totally confident our frameworks are the correct ones when, it turns out, they vary so widely?

Getting those fundamental frameworks and core metaphors less wrong requires at least some of us to surface these ever-present foundations into conscious awareness, examine them from multiple perspectives, apply evidence and reason to them, and share out better ones so they can be used. Better foundational frameworks and metaphors for things in general can make a huge difference for the quality of decisions we make about things in particular, and for the kind of world we believe in and build. There's converging evidence (I've touched on physics, general biology, and cognitive science so far) that it's less wrong to think of things as relational processes than as separate, basically static, essentialized substances; that things are more like waves than billiard-ball-like particles, verbs than nouns, emergent entanglements than reductive algorithms. Even if you're not fully convinced of that yet, though, it's still worth being aware of the metaphysical assumptions underpinning how we think about things, and of some of the possible alternatives that are out there.

In a 2016 New Yorker book review of a popular history of Western philosophy, Anthony Gottlieb's "The Dream of Enlightenment," poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch wrote:

What does it mean for something to be? Why does anything exist in the first place? Such metaphysical questions are what, from the very beginning, gave philosophy a bad name, because to practical-minded people they appear useless. … Not caring about things like being and meaning, however, is impossible, because they are the fundamental concepts that structure our very experience of the world. People who say they don’t care about metaphysics really mean that their received ideas on such matters are so fixed that they have disappeared from consciousness, in the same way that you don’t usually notice your heartbeat.

I recently came upon an even more vivid explanation of why philosophy is necessary, by the philosopher Mary Midgley, of whom I'm a huge fan. In a piece excerpted in The Essential Mary Midgley, she draws out an analogy to plumbing.

Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences. Each system supplies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole. There have been many ambitious attempts to reshape both of them, but existing complications are usually too widespread to allow a completely new start. ...

...When the concepts we are living by function badly, they do not usually drip audibly through the ceiling or swamp the kitchen floor. They just quietly distort and obstruct our thinking.

We often do not consciously notice this obscure discomfort and malfunction, any more than we consciously notice the discomfort of an unvarying bad smell or of a cold that creeps on gradually. We may indeed complain that life is going badly—that our actions and relationships are not turning out as we intend. But it can be very hard to see why this is happening, or what to do about it. This is because we find it much easier to look for trouble outside ourselves than within. It is notoriously hard to see faults in our own motivation, in the structure of our feelings. But it is in some ways even harder—even less natural—to turn our attention to what might be wrong in our ideas, in the structure of our thought. Attention naturally flows outwards to what is wrong in the world around us. To bend thought round so that it looks critically at itself is quite hard. ...

When things go wrong, however, we do have to do this. We must then somehow readjust our underlying concepts; we must shift the set of assumptions that we have inherited and have been brought up with. We must restate those existing assumptions—which are normally muddled and inarticulate—so as to get our fingers on the source of trouble. And this new statement must somehow be put in a usable form, a form which makes the necessary changes look possible.

Later in that piece, Midgley writes: "The alternative to getting a proper philosophy is continuing to use a bad one. It is not avoiding philosophy altogether, because that is impossible."

All that said, it can be hard to really believe that our everyday experience is shaped by metaphysical assumptions unless we have concrete, relatable illustrations. One of my favorite articles at the intersection of this blog project and my day job, "Empirical examples demonstrate how relational thinking might enrich science and practice," by transdisciplinary climate scientist Harold N. Eyster et al. in People and Nature, runs through an interesting array including moral foundations theory in political psychology; whales' functional traits; avocado seeds; trout conservation; savannah restoration; and COVID-19. In each instance, reworking map-metaphysics frameworks into process-relational ones helps explain the previously unexplainable and improve research design and interpretation. The moral foundations theory and COVID-19 bits are especially interesting, and I'd like to do future posts on both.

I'll give a more close-to-home example for now and stick with the plumbing theme. Why not? For an extra challenge, I'll pick a solid, manufactured object; one that seems, on our most familiar temporal and spatial scales, to be quite sufficiently defined by separateness, stasis, sameness, universal purpose, and ideal specifications. If you can think of something like a showerhead as a relational process, you should be able to think of just about anything that way.

Take the one in your own shower as an example. It seems that you can see and touch precisely where it starts and where it stops. It seems adequately defined by a shape and function from which it can't deviate too much. It seems unchanging over years or decades, perhaps even longer. It seems pretty simple.

Zoom out, though, and every showerhead has its own unique material trajectory through time: from its raw planetary materials, to its supply chain, to its manufacturing process, to Home Depot, to its installation in your bathroom, to its eventual fate to transform into something else, some other form of planetary materials—whether through recycling, or more slowly in a landfill. The showerhead's contingent and intertwined technological, aesthetic, and legal/regulatory history also shape what it is, including the history of plumbing and of water conservation. We can see the showerhead's existence as a temporarily stabilized coming-together of material components in a certain cohesive arrangement, shaped by all these factors, emerging from and ultimately dispersing back into the world's matter and energy.

Each showerhead is, moreover, causally embedded in a complex, ongoing relational context of other things and people. From the upstream metal miners, to Home Depot shareholders, to the plumbing contractor, to you, to a certain orange criminal obsessed with deregulating bathroom fixtures... the showerhead has different meanings from each standpoint. It even, in a sense, has its own standpoint, its own "story" in which it encounters other things, reacts to them, affects and is affected by them. Not in an anthropomorphizing sort of sense. Just in the sense that any thing, in a process-relational reality, has to do and be done to if it can be said to exist. It's not truly isolatable or freezable in time.

You can zoom out even further. Your showerhead is embedded in and marginally affects the entire water system, economy, geopolitics, atmosphere, and so on. You could theoretically trace the history of each of its atoms back to the Big Bang. You can also zoom in to the molecular level, where the boundaries between object and environment are blurry even for solid objects and there's a constant flux of subatomic particle-waves. Human agency has to draw the relevance line somewhere, deciding for some context what we're going to include in our consideration of any thing. That doesn't reduce the realness of the thing at all. It doesn't mean we "create" the showerhead with our consciousness.* It just means each thing is defined by processual coherence rather than outline or essence, and we can't remove ourselves from our own observations or other interactions with it. It's a process-relational thing that we, and every other relational process, relate to contextually.

It's totally possible to treat the showerhead as just an isolated, essentialized object, with no history or future or relational context that matters. In other words, we can draw a sharp relevance line at the simplest possible boundary in space and time for this particular thing. That's the easiest and often the most useful way to draw it. We just need to remember sometimes that the full, true reality of the showerhead extends beyond that conveniently simplified mental map. It's a process, and what matters is partly relative to perspective.

This is all pretty low stakes for your showerhead, of course. Yet it does matter, at least when you come to any meaningful decision points about the showerhead. For example, zooming out and thinking about the upstream and downstream impacts of a showerhead's production, sale, use, and disposal, and about the cumulative impacts of millions of showerheads, might nudge your purchase of a new one in a more regenerative, labor-friendly and sustainable direction. You might look for a low-flow label, recyclability, a union mark, or other indicators of corporate social and environmental responsibility. Or you might live in a society that has knowledgeable regulators who set general standards so you don't have to become some kind of showerhead expert just to avoid unnecessary harms from your purchase.

It may seem like ridiculous #showerthoughts to think of this as in any way metaphysical. But it is! Again, everything is; it's impossible to think about a thing without some framework of what things are. Automatically assuming the narrowest and least contextual relevance-lines get to the truest reality of a thing, and that we can safely ignore everything more complex and relational than that without too much trouble, can't happen without underlying map-metaphysics assumptions about the fundamentality of separateness and stasis. "It's just a showerhead" is a metaphysical claim—a bad one. On the flip side, process-relational reality enables and demands greater care and responsibility, even about something as mundane as a showerhead.

*For centuries, there have been massive debates between naive or scientific realism on one side, and idealism and social constructivism on the other. These debates got quite spicy in the 1990s "science wars." As complicated and nuanced as they have been, they basically boil down to what side of a subject-object divide is most fundamental. Much of contemporary Euro-Western process-relationality has been motivated in part by a desire to transcend this substantialist map-metaphysics divide. It takes process-relationality to retain the respective advantages of both science and constructivism while limiting their flaws. This probably merits a future post.