The World - A "Space" of Relations

I am calling the world a "space." A space of relations.

We are so used to thinking of objects that we can point to as the model for anything that exists, that it is difficult to reorient ourselves to "relations" as something that are even more existentially primary than objects. But I'm saying that they are so. (This is a little -- a little, I underscore, since analogies easily lead astray -- like saying that "spirit" is more real than "matter.")

Our habit, when we move intentionally into thinking, is to imagine the things of the world as objects. Not only is it an age-old starting place for western philosophy, this "positing" of things as objects, it's also a way, quick and easy, of orienting ourselves us in the totally "disorienting" place of thinking. (In my mind, I "point" to that thing and other things -- yep, there those things are and here I am. Yep, let me double check. Yeah, that seems pretty clear.)

In thinking, we conceive, we make distinctions, we make determinations and judgments, which together are the essence of what orients us. Yet thinking can be disorienting, because it is so vast in possibility, and because thinking can question anything and everything, and destabilize all that makes us feel secure.

Before thinking, in the supporting underbeing of thinking, we are living mammals, living in co-ordinated interplay with other people and the earth. Our species, having come into being through eons of interaction between the earth and solar system, between organisms and earth's environment, is naturally fit into and embedded in nature. Hence there precedes language and thinking in language great and complex systems of coherences, which are the systems of all life on earth, and the individual living systems -- such as ourselves -- within them.

Hence thinking on the one hand comes into a world already characterized by order.

Yet on the other hand, thinking itself -- by which I mean language and the making of distinctions in our experience (which is more than words themselves, but involves a way of relating in the world) -- brings something new into existence. It adds a new layer of being to nature. It brings things into existence that never would exist without thinking, speaking beings. Languaging is not merely a transparency on the world, an "adding nothing" that, when it's working rightly, "only reveals what is there." No. Not at all. Languaging makes possible what we call human community, institutions, arts -- languaging is a power whereby we can create a human world that is set within nature.