#Panrelationalism

There is no point in asking for terms of relations which are not themselves relations, for everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down and all the way out in every direction; you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations. The system of natural numbers is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious, and obviously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are not simply clusters of further relations.

The system of natural numbers is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious, and obviously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are not simply clusters of further relations.
PasAA p.88
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

There is no point in asking for terms of relations which are not themselves relations, for everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down and all the way out in every direction; you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations. The system of natural numbers is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious, and obviously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are not simply clusters of further relations.

There are, so to speak, relations all the way down and all the way out in every direction; you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.
PasAA p.88
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

There is no point in asking for terms of relations which are not themselves relations, for everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down and all the way out in every direction; you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations. The system of natural numbers is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious, and obviously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are not simply clusters of further relations.

There is no point in asking for terms of relations which are not themselves relations, for everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever.
PasAA p.88
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

At this point, I hope, you will conclude that, whatever sorts of things may have intrinsic natures, numbers do not—that it simply does not pay to be an essentialist about numbers. Pan-relationalism holds that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else. We suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an infinitely large, and forever expansible, web of relations to other objects.

We pan-relationalists suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an infinitely large, and forever expansible, web of relations to other objects.
PasAA p. 88
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

At this point, I hope, you will conclude that, whatever sorts of things may have intrinsic natures, numbers do not—that it simply does not pay to be an essentialist about numbers. Pan-relationalism holds that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else. We suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an infinitely large, and forever expansible, web of relations to other objects.

It simply does not pay to be an essentialist about numbers. Pan-relationalism holds that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else.
PasAA p.88
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

So much for a large, vague sketch of what I mean by pan-relationalism. Now I want to offer a suggestion about how to see things from the panrelationalist point of view. This is that you think of everything as if it were a number. The nice thing about numbers, for my present purpose, is just that it is very difficult to think of them as having intrinsic natures. It is hard to think of a number as having an essential core surrounded by a penumbra of accidental relationships. Numbers are an admirable example of something difficult to describe in essentialist, substantialist, language.

How to see things from the panrelationalist point of view: Think of everything as if it were a number. The nice thing about numbers, for my present purpose, is just that it is very difficult to think of them as having intrinsic natures.
PasAA p.87
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

Pan-relationalism puts aside the distinction between subject & object, between the elements in human knowledge contributed by the mind & those contributed by the world. It does so by saying that nothing is what it is under any and every description of it.
PasAA p.85
#Pragmatism
#Panrelationalism

It is useful to think of this Whiteheadian criticism of Aristotle (a criticism found in other early twentieth-century philosophers—e.g., Peirce and Russell—who tried to formulate a non-subject-predicate logic) as paralleling Derrida’s criticism of logocentrism. Derrida’s picture of words as nodes in an infinitely flexible web of relationships to other words is obviously reminiscent of Whitehead’s account, in his Process and Reality, of actual occasions as constituted by relations to all other actual occasions. My hunch is that the twentieth century will be seen, by historians of philosophy, as the period in which a kind of neo-Leibnizian pan-relationalism was developed in various different idioms—a pan-relationalism which restates Leibniz’s idea that each monad is nothing but all the other monads seen from a certain perspective, each substance nothing but its relations to all the other substances.

Twentieth-century neo-Leibnizian Pan-relationalism restates Leibniz’s idea that each monad is nothing but all the other monads seen from a certain perspective, each substance nothing but its relations to all the other substances.
PasAA p.212
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

It is useful to think of this Whiteheadian criticism of Aristotle (a criticism found in other early twentieth-century philosophers—e.g., Peirce and Russell—who tried to formulate a non-subject-predicate logic) as paralleling Derrida’s criticism of logocentrism. Derrida’s picture of words as nodes in an infinitely flexible web of relationships to other words is obviously reminiscent of Whitehead’s account, in his Process and Reality, of actual occasions as constituted by relations to all other actual occasions. My hunch is that the twentieth century will be seen, by historians of philosophy, as the period in which a kind of neo-Leibnizian pan-relationalism was developed in various different idioms—a pan-relationalism which restates Leibniz’s idea that each monad is nothing but all the other monads seen from a certain perspective, each substance nothing but its relations to all the other substances.

My hunch is that the twentieth century will be seen, by historians of philosophy, as the period in which a kind of neo-Leibnizian pan-relationalism was developed in various different idioms.
PasAA p.212
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

The second lecture in this pair—“Against Depth”—says that if we are pan-relationalists we shall see everything on, so to speak, a single horizontal plane. We shall not search for the sublime either high above, or deep beneath, this plane. We shall instead move things about, rearrange them so as to highlight their relations to other things, in the hope of finding ever more useful, and therefore ever more beautiful, patterns. From this point of view, great intellectual achievements (Newton’s laws, Hegel’s system) are not categorically different from small technical achievements (getting the pieces to fit together neatly in a piece of cabinetry, getting the colors of the landscape to harmonize in a watercolor, finding a reasonable political compromise between conflicting interests).

From the pan-relationalist point of view, great intellectual achievements (Hegel’s system) are not categorically different from small technical achievements (getting the pieces to fit together neatly in a piece of cabinetry).
PasAA p.xxxiv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

The second lecture in this pair—“Against Depth”—says that if we are pan-relationalists we shall see everything on, so to speak, a single horizontal plane. We shall not search for the sublime either high above, or deep beneath, this plane. We shall instead move things about, rearrange them so as to highlight their relations to other things, in the hope of finding ever more useful, and therefore ever more beautiful, patterns. From this point of view, great intellectual achievements (Newton’s laws, Hegel’s system) are not categorically different from small technical achievements (getting the pieces to fit together neatly in a piece of cabinetry, getting the colors of the landscape to harmonize in a watercolor, finding a reasonable political compromise between conflicting interests).

We pan-relationalists move things about, rearrange them so as to highlight their relations to other things, in the hope of finding ever more useful, and therefore ever more beautiful, patterns.
PasAA p.xxxiv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

The second lecture in this pair—“Against Depth”—says that if we are pan-relationalists we shall see everything on, so to speak, a single horizontal plane. We shall not search for the sublime either high above, or deep beneath, this plane. We shall instead move things about, rearrange them so as to highlight their relations to other things, in the hope of finding ever more useful, and therefore ever more beautiful, patterns. From this point of view, great intellectual achievements (Newton’s laws, Hegel’s system) are not categorically different from small technical achievements (getting the pieces to fit together neatly in a piece of cabinetry, getting the colors of the landscape to harmonize in a watercolor, finding a reasonable political compromise between conflicting interests).

If we are pan-relationalists we shall see everything on, so to speak, a single horizontal plane. We shall not search for the sublime either high above, or deep beneath, this plane.
PasAA p.xxxiv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

The third pair of lectures turns…to what might, somewhat misleadingly, be called metaphysics. In “Panrelationalism” I argue that a lot of the best recent philosophy can be summed up as an attempt to get rid of the substance-accident and essence-accident distinctions by claiming that nothing can have a self-identity, a nature, apart from its relations to other things. I argue that a thing has as many identities as there are relational contexts into which it can be put. This suggestion chimes with my suggestion (in an essay called “Inquiry as Recontextualization” which I published some years ago) that there is no such thing as “the correct context” in which to read a text, place a person, or explain an event. Rather, there are as many such contexts as there are human purposes. For the same reason, there is no such thing as the correct description of anything: there are only the descriptions which, by relating it to other things, put it in contexts which serve our current, varied, needs.

There is no such thing as the correct description of anything: there are only the descriptions which, by relating it to other things, put it in contexts which serve our current, varied, needs.
PasAA p.xxxiv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

The third pair of lectures turns…to what might, somewhat misleadingly, be called metaphysics. In “Panrelationalism” I argue that a lot of the best recent philosophy can be summed up as an attempt to get rid of the substance-accident and essence-accident distinctions by claiming that nothing can have a self-identity, a nature, apart from its relations to other things. I argue that a thing has as many identities as there are relational contexts into which it can be put. This suggestion chimes with my suggestion (in an essay called “Inquiry as Recontextualization” which I published some years ago) that there is no such thing as “the correct context” in which to read a text, place a person, or explain an event. Rather, there are as many such contexts as there are human purposes. For the same reason, there is no such thing as the correct description of anything: there are only the descriptions which, by relating it to other things, put it in contexts which serve our current, varied, needs.

There is no such thing as “the correct context” in which to read a text, place a person, or explain an event. Rather, there are as many such contexts as there are human purposes.
PasAA p.xxxiv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

The third pair of lectures turns…to what might, somewhat misleadingly, be called metaphysics. In “Panrelationalism” I argue that a lot of the best recent philosophy can be summed up as an attempt to get rid of the substance-accident and essence-accident distinctions by claiming that nothing can have a self-identity, a nature, apart from its relations to other things. I argue that a thing has as many identities as there are relational contexts into which it can be put. This suggestion chimes with my suggestion (in an essay called “Inquiry as Recontextualization” which I published some years ago) that there is no such thing as “the correct context” in which to read a text, place a person, or explain an event. Rather, there are as many such contexts as there are human purposes. For the same reason, there is no such thing as the correct description of anything: there are only the descriptions which, by relating it to other things, put it in contexts which serve our current, varied, needs.

A thing has as many identities as there are relational contexts into which it can be put.
PasAA p.xxxiv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

The third pair of lectures turns…to what might, somewhat misleadingly, be called metaphysics. In “Panrelationalism” I argue that a lot of the best recent philosophy can be summed up as an attempt to get rid of the substance-accident and essence-accident distinctions by claiming that nothing can have a self-identity, a nature, apart from its relations to other things. I argue that a thing has as many identities as there are relational contexts into which it can be put. This suggestion chimes with my suggestion (in an essay called “Inquiry as Recontextualization” which I published some years ago) that there is no such thing as “the correct context” in which to read a text, place a person, or explain an event. Rather, there are as many such contexts as there are human purposes. For the same reason, there is no such thing as the correct description of anything: there are only the descriptions which, by relating it to other things, put it in contexts which serve our current, varied, needs.

A lot of the best recent philosophy can be summed up as an attempt to get rid of the substance-accident and essence-accident distinctions by claiming that nothing can have a self-identity, a nature, apart from its relations to other things.
PasAA p.xxxiii
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism