The Things | Relations Dichotomy

Yin-Yang by Sandi Baker

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

We humans have always been accused of dichotomous thinking: us and them, good and evil, for and against, and so on.  It pervades our thinking, and our existence.  Such dichotomous thinking is closely familiar to us.  Not a day goes by without someone suggesting that we should be more nuanced, less one-sided, better rounded. 

Yet there is a strange dichotomy which is more pervasive still, which passes all but unnoticed in our lives—and, I shall argue, bedevils all of our thinking.  Within its broader bounds, it goes by hundreds of names—which in itself suggests that it has too much escaped our attentions.  One might describe it as the static and dynamic, or being and becoming—but there are many ways to describe it besides:

• things and relations (Kant)
• objects and arrangements (Wittgenstein)
• the spatial and the temporal
• nouns and verbs
• operators and variables

And so on. It is the simple matter of a world where things exist (we include events, which is things that happen), and exist in a certain relation to one another.  This dichotomy pervades all of our thinking—and this it does at a level which is embedded in our thinking.  As one sees, even in our grammar and our sums, for example.

It all has to do with individuation.  We all begin, apparently, with what William James called ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion’, then we single out complexes from nature and call them things, entities, objects, even concepts—or events, actions, processes, and so on.  We distinguish these then from the relations between them.

We may have said enough in these few words to identify the presence of this dichotomy at the core of some major philosophical problems, of which just a sample here:

• The fact-value distinction (Hume).  We have fact on the one hand—or statements which contain things—yet do not know on the other how we should arrange them or bring them into relation. 
• The ‘own goal’ of science (Hawking).  By singling out things from nature, and discarding all that (we think) does not belong to them, we create a world of unforeseen side-effects, as we relate them.
• Free will and determinism.  Free will goes to the question of cause and effect, and causation in turn is about the relation between two or more events. This, too, rests on the dichotomy of things and relations.
• The mind-body problem.  This problem may rest on our experience that things exist in the world (or so we feel), while only relations can exist in our networking brain—not things, of course.
• God.  The problem of God’s existence may rest on the notion of causality, since that which is caused is not influenced by God.  Again, causality rests on the distinction between events and their relations.

We may put it this way.  If we did not have this dichotomy of things (and the sort) versus relations, it would be impossible that we should have any of the problems listed above—and many more.  This suggests that we may solve these problems by doing away with one side of the dichotomy—say, things.  This would leave us only with relations, and relations within relations.  It is not an entirely new idea.

Someone might object.  Even if we have no things, objects, entities, events, actions, and so on, we do still have relations—and these relations are governed by scientific law.  But wait a moment.  Without things, there is no scientific law.  At least, not as we know it.

The fact of the dichotomy is presented here simply as food for further thought.  In my view, the dichotomy is artificial and false.  It is a reflection of something in the human fabric that insists first on our individuating things, then on relating them one to the other.  Yet there never has been anything to set this on a firm foundation.