Relations Internal and External

In this post I want to try to explain the concepts of internally related and externally related things and how they differ.

When two things are internally related, understanding one requires understanding the other. If two concepts are internally related, then one simply cannot really understand one of the concepts without understanding the other. Black and white, male and female, up and down, are all cases of internally related concepts, in this case, related via opposition. Some things are internally related in other ways, however. A tree and the seed from which it sprouted or the seed it spawned are internally related in that one does not really understand a tree without understanding the life cycle of a tree. Male and female are internally related not only by contrasting, but by being formed in such a way that their organs go together in a natural manner. One cannot understand manhood apart from womanhood not only because manhood excludes womanhood but because manhood presupposes womanhood for its subsistence.

When two things are externally related, they exist simply alongside each other. They may be related, as when an apple rests on a desk, but they are so only contingently. It is extraneous to what they are that they are related. A finger and the hammer which hits it are externally related. I do not need to understand anything about a hammer to understand a finger, nor a finger to understand a hammer. A world without hammers could have fingers in just the same way as ours does (granted, not having fingers might alter how we constructed hammers, but I think the point is clear).

There are a variety of phenomena which are internally related but which we have been trained to think of as externally related. The means/end relation is one, the relation of people to society is another, and the relations of various parts of nature is a third. I will spend a post analyzing how thinking of these as external relations works itself out, why they are actually internally related and what that means in each case, and at least a gesture in the direction of how thinking about them correctly might work out.