Relations in Nature

I am half inclined to start by just gesturing toward Merleau-Ponty and various articles which have made similar points. There is more I want to say than they say, however.

First, the external conception of nature is the notion of nature as a bunch of particles combining in various ways, governed by various laws. This is all well and good. The notion goes on to view everything as reducible to the particles which each have a nature of its own, independent of other particles. Some people hold this kind of view in some domains but not others, but my concern here is with the trajectory of this sort of view.

First off, we are part of nature. We are thus equally subject to these laws of nature. This gives rise to psychological experimentation on motivation and grit, which, again, I am not against. The problem in this realm arises when we start treating ourselves as things. That is, when we start treating our problems as engineering problems, where we expect a five step troubleshooting plan to solve our issues. Most self-help falls into this category, as do many blog posts. Life becomes skill, rather than wisdom.

Next, nature becomes something to control. It is resource, problem, or solution. By viewing its parts as external to each other, we fail to recognize the dynamic systems which occur in nature, and imagine instead that we can simply engineer our way to a world built for ourselves.

By now it should be clear how nature is not related externally to itself. Nature is full of systems, from atoms to electrical circuits to the weather to the solar system, there are an immense variety of interlocking facets, where each part reacts to a change in every other part. By disrupting these systems beyond their capacity to accommodate change, we discover that nature is not infinitely resilient, but is constructed to resist us should we play god too far.

At this point it may be good to try to articulate a little more of what we might call gestalt metaphysics. A gestalt is a form. However, particularly in Merleau-Ponty's usage, a gestalt is a dynamic form. A system which holds together, accommodates changes, and maintains itself to some degree. Merleau-Ponty's definition holds that a gestalt occurs where each part depends for its properties on every other part (if I remember correctly). What I have been trying to sketch in these posts is the view that much of what we think of as independent of its surroundings actually exists in a gestalt and contributes the form of that gestalt. Our social institutions form a system which holds together and accommodates changes to some extent, sometimes reacting against threats whether we notice or not. Social groups collect in a way such that they can sustain themselves without much effort from participants. Even with means/end relations, the meaning of an action depends on the situation which provides the background against which the action appears as any particular action, and thus the action depends on its situation to be the action it is.