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ONE WITH ANOTHER: AN ESSAY ON RELATIONS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DNISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PHILOSOPHY DECEMBER 2004 By Rohit Dalvi Dissertation Committee: Arindam Chakrabarti, Chairperson Eliot Deutsch Graham Parkes Roger Ames Lee Siegel ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been completed without the supererogatory efforts of my committee members. Prof. Arindam Chakrabarti has been an exemplary chairperson who let my writing intrude even into his vacation time. I also owe him thanks for a half decade long, profoundly provocative philosophical conversation about relations, difference and otherness. Prof Eliot Deutsch has been a constant source of insights, support and encouragement and without his efforts and interventions I would have certainly dropped out ofacademic philosophy. I am grateful to Prof. Graham Parkes for his support, approachability, and openness. Conversations with ProfParkes persuaded me to rethink and clarify some ofmy ideas. ProfRoger Ames opened up for me a way of thinking which is quite distant from my own Indo-European conceptual scheme. My interest in relations was reaffirmed by encountering his presentation of a relational worldview in the Chinese tradition. Fragments from his lectures and books have been in my mind as I articulated some of the ideas presented here. Prof Lee Siegel has consistently supported me in his usual, cool way. From all these people I still have much to learn. The following friends have sustained me philosophically over the past five years: Brad Park, Keyvan Maroufkhani, Amjol Shresta, Jeung-Yeup Kim, and Apama Deshpande. Thanks are also due to Eiho Baba who gave me the laptop on which this dissertation was written. 111 Abstract The problem ofrelations has been a persistent one in the history of philosophy. It has been treated extensively by Aristotle who divides relations into two fundamental types, paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic. Scholastic philosophy develops some of the issues present in Aristotle. Scholastic philosophers like Ockham, Duns Scotus and Abelard adopt different positions on the nature of relations and their ontological status. Relations are an important issue in Indian philosophy as well. The Nyaya school adopts a realist starlCe and the Buddhist adopt a radical nominalism. Both the nominalist and realist approaches, as well as thinking of relations as relational predicates leads to philosophical difficulties. A third alternative has to be suggested which avoids both these positions. lV TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Abstract .iv Preface v Chapter 1 : Introduction 1 Life and Philosophy: Replete with Relations 1 Anti-Realism about Relations 3 Bradley and the Regress of Relations 15 Relations as Incomplete Simples................................................ 21 Classifying Relations 24 The Loewenberg Problem 28 Chapter 2: Relations in Ancient Greek Philosophy 33 Relations in Plato '" 33 Aristotle on Relations 37 Stoic Nominalism and its Refutation 46 Chapter 3: Relations in Medieval Philosophy........................................ 55 The how ofa genuine relation: fragments from the medieval lexicon 60 Duns Scotus and Non-Reductive Realism..................................... 68 Individuation of Relations: Form and Content. ... ... ... ...... ...... ....... .. 75 Ockham on Relations. ........................................................... 76 Leibniz on Relations.............................................................. 81 Chapter 4: Locke on Relations. ....................................................... 89 Locke's Theory ofRelations 89 Lockean Anti-Realism about Relations........................................ 92 v Clarity ofRelational Ideas 95 Correlation, Meta-relations and Relations between Relations..................... 96 Relations between Relations 99. Morals and Relations. ................................................................. 103. Chapter 5: Nyaya realism about relations and Dharmakirti's Buddhist Critique 105 Sambandha: Fragments from the Indian lexicon 105 Inherence 109 The Buddhist critique 111 Chapter 6: The Semantic Relation 118. Can we do without the denotation relation? 118 Word-Meaning relation in Indian Philosophy 123 Bhartrhari 128 Bhartrhari's Paradox , 133 Chapter 7: Levinas and the ethical relation '" 136 Metaphysics is enacted in the ethical relation........................................ 136 Relation without Relation.............................................................. 142 Some Obvious Objections............................................................. 146 Chapter 8: Conclusion........................................................................ 151 Realism and Anti-Realism about Relations.......................................... 151 Anti-Realism about Relations......................................................... 154 Realism about relation: Social Relations as "Forms ofLife". ...... ...... .. ..... 157 Sticky Individuals..................................................................... 161 References. ............................................................................. 164 V1 PREFACE Being is analyzed by philosophy through the prism of language, which divides it into elements corresponding to nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, and other parts of speech. Prepositions proliferate in language as much as nouns or adjectives; things are "with," "above," below," "of," "at," "to" one another. Being is prepositional, as much as it is nominal or expressed through verbs and adjectives. The reality that prepositions capture has a density that cannot be explained away, prepositions are richly descriptive and not mere accretions or perspectives on objects. Prepositions capture relations in language. It is the purpose of this dissertation to attempt to shed some light on this prepositional, relational aspect of reality. Prepositions, especially the preposition "with" I will contend is the point ofdeparture for a philosophical project diametrically opposed to solipsism. Relations can be obscured by their very obviousness. Just as philosophers have expended considerably more effort in understanding the nature and workings ofnames at the cost of neglecting prepositions, similarly relations have become victims of their own obviousness. Even for a Buddhist who accepts that there are no non-relational individuals since everything is dependently co-originated, relation itself does not become an item deserving its own metaphysical shelf space. It is the acceptance of a profoundly dependent and relational aspect to everything that allows a NagaIjuna to deny that things have their own-nature. Yet, relation for the Buddhist fades into a certain mind­ dependence, which fails to recognize that to have being is essentially to relate. Relation in the richest sense is not mere propinquity. Relation is a way ofbeing which goes well beyond simple proximity or juxtaposition in space or time. This is perhaps less Vll pronounced in the case ofrelations between objects and is sharply brought out in human relations. In the case of human relations being with is more than simply something structural or a given as it were for human beings, as Hiedegger understands it in his development of the concept of mitsein or being with others. Without diminishing this structural aspect of relations, human relations have a dimension that is lacking in relations between objects. In the case of human relations, this "with" is an affective "with." It is not the impassive "with" of juxtaposition or spatio-temporal coincidence; this "with" is colored and made meaningful by love and anger, reverence and hatred, loyalty and betrayal. This is the "with" which elicits a smile from a stranger with whom you wait at a bus-stop, it is the "with" which deepens into a caress or into tears at parting. This ''with'' is indicative of relations which I will argue make subjects of us all. It is the density of this "with" which is arguably an experienced "with" which is my concern in what is to follow. Although I concern myself less with the human dimension ofrelations than I do with the workings of relations in the object domain, the discussion of"relation without relation" as formulated by Levinas is a notable exception. In Chapter 1, I delineate the metaphysical concerns about relations and propose the concept of a "relation as such" to facilitate a general discussion of the essential features of relations without being mesmerized by the issues concerning specific relations like causality. This project of painting the philosophical picture of relations with a broad brush necessitates certain omissions at best and oversimplifications at worst. In Chapter 2, I discuss the analysis ofrelations evident in Ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. Aristotle's discussion of relations in the Categories remains by far the most influential discussion of relations in the history of philosophy. It is also relevant in its V111 sustained attempt to capture the essential feature ofrelation that it has minimal being that is to say it is an ens minimum or as Aquinas puts it "Relation has a very weak being (esse debillisimum), characteristic ofitself alone. 1 The third chapter deals with the medieval discussion of relations emphasizing the different attitudes toward the ontological questions about relations gleaned from Peter Abelard (1079-1144), John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), Walter Burley (c1275-c1344), Aquinas (1225-1274)
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