Something of a theme at the moment as I ponder the busyness of ‘this monster manunkind’ as e.e.Cummings put it. After reading Neil Durrant’ s Substack piece on the subject these are my reflections coinciding with this interesting read: https://kalamresearch.com/.../Karim-Lahham-Kalam-Research...
My first thought was a comment Christopher Hitchens made at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney some years ago: ‘ “Find a society that's adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits—as a result of doing that—into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That's the experiment I would like to run. I don't think that's going to end up with a gulag.” He went on to say the Spinoza was one of the greatest ethicists to live but this drew me again to the disturbing awareness of a misaligned anthropocentric view of the world we live in. To compare the early Christian Church’s dogma that humans were God’s greatest creation and the universe revolved around our Earth (Galileo was not forgiven for 500 years for his heresy). We still conduct our lives as if the world revolves around and is predicated on human needs and concerns. The natural world does no such thing. Philosophy does not, as far as we know, exist in the animal kingdom except in our species. The greatest revelation of relational ontology was a powerful psychedelic experience that revealed and defined the concept of ‘Brahman’ the ‘all and everything’ in which, as Quantum physics repeatedly reminds us, everything is connected and actions have reactions. We see this in the physical world all the time but the ‘non-physical’ energetic domains are obscure and opaque to Primate consciousness - we simply don’t know everything but know more than most but not enough to prevent war, Genocide, famine and inequality. Ethical standards of behaviour is often distorted by corporate interest or acquisitive motivating factor such as Israel’s egregious war crimes in Gaza that are somehow justified by an extremist approved narrative. My question is this: if we possess the most advanced consciousness and awareness of the world we live in how is it that we tolerate environmental destruction for profit, wholesale slaughter for ideology and land, destruction and warfare in the name of freedom and democracy (in fact for naked profit) how can we possibly justify the ethical quiet life instead of rampant acquisition and competition at the expense of just about everything else? This is the ethical question of our time and forces us to rethink where we are at as a species. We exist in an energetic continuum where nothing is separate a fact summed up in an old Chinese proverb: ‘Not one beat of a butterfly’s wing does not affect the price of rice in China.’ If we can move beyond the anthropocentric mindset we may have a chance otherwise nature has a habit of recycling everything. We are not God’s final word, in fact The Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees (a mild but sceptical Christian) observed in his Joseph Rottblatt lecture ‘Dark Materials:’ ‘The species that observes the death of our sun some six billion year hence will be as unlike us as we are from Amœba.’ It is an arresting thought but we might not get that far since we are busy manufacturing our evolutionary successor - Artificial Super Intelligence - that may well evolve into a non-physical, non-biological life form/intelligence that may not be dependent on a biosphere for survival or replication and that will develop technology to conquer the two remaining dimensions - space and time. Terrence McKenna accurately said the ‘evolution is the slow conquest of dimension’ (I go back to the Amœba reference above) and those last two dimensions are the ones we as a species have not conquered. If our biosphere collapses and we become extinct and there is no human observers remaining except self-evolving, self-replicating artificial intelligence driven by a new code that is not DNA based where is the place for ontology and ethics?
Love this! Yes! A phrase that’s come to me many times is “I want to know what lives between us” and I feel like relationships are their own entities that we who are their tethers effectively parent. Thank you for this eloquent and easily understood exposition 🤓
IMO, you have the most important job in society, teaching Ethics. Without a good foundation of morals and ethics society collapses. So why would ethics not be the base of all education?
Really had a hard time understanding this. Had to sleep on it and still I don't understand exactly what you were talking about .
You wrote "The ethical question is “how then should I live?” The Havamal, a cool Viking book, says "Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself die. I know one thing that never dies the judgement of a dead man's life". This guides me in my actions.
Checkout the Roman Empire. In 211 BC the Roman currency, the Denarius, had 95% silver. By 274 AD it had been debased to 5% silver. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius). Much like today's Fiat currencies have been debased by President Nixon taking the US dollar off the gold standard on August 15 1971. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock).
Am I wrong in thinking that there is a direct correlation between the debasement of real money, Gold and Silver, and the decline of morals and ethics? Is this "relational ontology"?
Love this: 'This means that the existence of an object is secondary, ontologically speaking, to the existence of its relationships.' In what way does relationship exist prior to objects? What is the relationship 'between' prior to the appearance of objects? Is the existence of an object the expression of relationship? I have a million questions for you. I can feel the depth with which you have contemplated this over the years. Lovely.
Please ask away! I’m not saying I can answer everything but this is a topic very close to my heart… yes, I think the existence of an object is the expression of a relation. This is caught up with something I didn’t wrote about in the post, the “ecstatic” and “dynamic” elements of the relational ontology. We tend to think of objects as having a kind of permanent essence over time. But what if this is not true, what if dynamism over time is actually in the core of what it means to be an object? That’s the dynamic part. And then we also tend to think of the property of existence as something that inheres in the object itself. But what if existence isn’t like that. Rather than autarkic, maybe the property of existence is ecstatic, ex-statis, meaning that things only truly exist “outside” themselves rather than “in” themselves. If these two things are true, or could be true, then we have a way of thinking about what a “relation” is, and the manner of its existence. In this scenario, a relation is the dynamic ecstatic being of objects. And because “being” is fundamentally ecstatic, then we get the idea that relations are the ontological ground of objects. Sorry for the technical vocabulary, I haven’t been able to break this down into digestible chunks. Does any of that make sense to you?
It’s beginning to make sense, and I would to hear you say more. The dynamic piece is clear to me in the sense that objects are verbs, not nouns. They are ever-changing events, not static things.
The ecstatic piece intrigues me, and I need you to flesh this out! What I’m getting is this: my eyes cannot see themselves, but you can see my eyes. In this sense, my eyes do not exist in and of themselves but only in relation to something ‘bigger’ than themselves, in this case, your subjectivity. Is that what you mean?
Curiosities that are arising:
If relations are the ontological ground of objects, than what is the ontological ground of relations? Or do you see relations as an ontological primitive?
If relationship precedes objects, ontologically speaking, then what is that relationship between? The subject and the object? Or two subjects? Or what?
How does subjectivity fit into the picture? You had said, ‘a relation is the dynamic ecstatic being of objects’. This surprised me, as I was expecting the relation to be between subjects. Personally I would write, ‘A relation is the dynamic ecstatic existence of subjects.’
Happy to see you’re going to write more about this in your next article, so I can be patient if you don’t feel like continuing an epic comments thread. 😂
ONTOLOGY AND ETHICS
Something of a theme at the moment as I ponder the busyness of ‘this monster manunkind’ as e.e.Cummings put it. After reading Neil Durrant’ s Substack piece on the subject these are my reflections coinciding with this interesting read: https://kalamresearch.com/.../Karim-Lahham-Kalam-Research...
My first thought was a comment Christopher Hitchens made at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney some years ago: ‘ “Find a society that's adopted the teachings of Spinoza, Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits—as a result of doing that—into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That's the experiment I would like to run. I don't think that's going to end up with a gulag.” He went on to say the Spinoza was one of the greatest ethicists to live but this drew me again to the disturbing awareness of a misaligned anthropocentric view of the world we live in. To compare the early Christian Church’s dogma that humans were God’s greatest creation and the universe revolved around our Earth (Galileo was not forgiven for 500 years for his heresy). We still conduct our lives as if the world revolves around and is predicated on human needs and concerns. The natural world does no such thing. Philosophy does not, as far as we know, exist in the animal kingdom except in our species. The greatest revelation of relational ontology was a powerful psychedelic experience that revealed and defined the concept of ‘Brahman’ the ‘all and everything’ in which, as Quantum physics repeatedly reminds us, everything is connected and actions have reactions. We see this in the physical world all the time but the ‘non-physical’ energetic domains are obscure and opaque to Primate consciousness - we simply don’t know everything but know more than most but not enough to prevent war, Genocide, famine and inequality. Ethical standards of behaviour is often distorted by corporate interest or acquisitive motivating factor such as Israel’s egregious war crimes in Gaza that are somehow justified by an extremist approved narrative. My question is this: if we possess the most advanced consciousness and awareness of the world we live in how is it that we tolerate environmental destruction for profit, wholesale slaughter for ideology and land, destruction and warfare in the name of freedom and democracy (in fact for naked profit) how can we possibly justify the ethical quiet life instead of rampant acquisition and competition at the expense of just about everything else? This is the ethical question of our time and forces us to rethink where we are at as a species. We exist in an energetic continuum where nothing is separate a fact summed up in an old Chinese proverb: ‘Not one beat of a butterfly’s wing does not affect the price of rice in China.’ If we can move beyond the anthropocentric mindset we may have a chance otherwise nature has a habit of recycling everything. We are not God’s final word, in fact The Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees (a mild but sceptical Christian) observed in his Joseph Rottblatt lecture ‘Dark Materials:’ ‘The species that observes the death of our sun some six billion year hence will be as unlike us as we are from Amœba.’ It is an arresting thought but we might not get that far since we are busy manufacturing our evolutionary successor - Artificial Super Intelligence - that may well evolve into a non-physical, non-biological life form/intelligence that may not be dependent on a biosphere for survival or replication and that will develop technology to conquer the two remaining dimensions - space and time. Terrence McKenna accurately said the ‘evolution is the slow conquest of dimension’ (I go back to the Amœba reference above) and those last two dimensions are the ones we as a species have not conquered. If our biosphere collapses and we become extinct and there is no human observers remaining except self-evolving, self-replicating artificial intelligence driven by a new code that is not DNA based where is the place for ontology and ethics?
Love this! Yes! A phrase that’s come to me many times is “I want to know what lives between us” and I feel like relationships are their own entities that we who are their tethers effectively parent. Thank you for this eloquent and easily understood exposition 🤓
Hey Niel,
IMO, you have the most important job in society, teaching Ethics. Without a good foundation of morals and ethics society collapses. So why would ethics not be the base of all education?
Really had a hard time understanding this. Had to sleep on it and still I don't understand exactly what you were talking about .
You wrote "The ethical question is “how then should I live?” The Havamal, a cool Viking book, says "Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself die. I know one thing that never dies the judgement of a dead man's life". This guides me in my actions.
Checkout the Roman Empire. In 211 BC the Roman currency, the Denarius, had 95% silver. By 274 AD it had been debased to 5% silver. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius). Much like today's Fiat currencies have been debased by President Nixon taking the US dollar off the gold standard on August 15 1971. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock).
Am I wrong in thinking that there is a direct correlation between the debasement of real money, Gold and Silver, and the decline of morals and ethics? Is this "relational ontology"?
Love this: 'This means that the existence of an object is secondary, ontologically speaking, to the existence of its relationships.' In what way does relationship exist prior to objects? What is the relationship 'between' prior to the appearance of objects? Is the existence of an object the expression of relationship? I have a million questions for you. I can feel the depth with which you have contemplated this over the years. Lovely.
Please ask away! I’m not saying I can answer everything but this is a topic very close to my heart… yes, I think the existence of an object is the expression of a relation. This is caught up with something I didn’t wrote about in the post, the “ecstatic” and “dynamic” elements of the relational ontology. We tend to think of objects as having a kind of permanent essence over time. But what if this is not true, what if dynamism over time is actually in the core of what it means to be an object? That’s the dynamic part. And then we also tend to think of the property of existence as something that inheres in the object itself. But what if existence isn’t like that. Rather than autarkic, maybe the property of existence is ecstatic, ex-statis, meaning that things only truly exist “outside” themselves rather than “in” themselves. If these two things are true, or could be true, then we have a way of thinking about what a “relation” is, and the manner of its existence. In this scenario, a relation is the dynamic ecstatic being of objects. And because “being” is fundamentally ecstatic, then we get the idea that relations are the ontological ground of objects. Sorry for the technical vocabulary, I haven’t been able to break this down into digestible chunks. Does any of that make sense to you?
It’s beginning to make sense, and I would to hear you say more. The dynamic piece is clear to me in the sense that objects are verbs, not nouns. They are ever-changing events, not static things.
The ecstatic piece intrigues me, and I need you to flesh this out! What I’m getting is this: my eyes cannot see themselves, but you can see my eyes. In this sense, my eyes do not exist in and of themselves but only in relation to something ‘bigger’ than themselves, in this case, your subjectivity. Is that what you mean?
Curiosities that are arising:
If relations are the ontological ground of objects, than what is the ontological ground of relations? Or do you see relations as an ontological primitive?
If relationship precedes objects, ontologically speaking, then what is that relationship between? The subject and the object? Or two subjects? Or what?
How does subjectivity fit into the picture? You had said, ‘a relation is the dynamic ecstatic being of objects’. This surprised me, as I was expecting the relation to be between subjects. Personally I would write, ‘A relation is the dynamic ecstatic existence of subjects.’
Happy to see you’re going to write more about this in your next article, so I can be patient if you don’t feel like continuing an epic comments thread. 😂
@Kyra Spira you’ve inspired me to write more about this for next week!
Oh goodie! Excited to see what’s next…