In a recent short post, Not Probabilistic Smudges but Relationships, I jumped the gun and said:
In James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, he refers to an early theory developed by Feynman and John Wheeler as “a classical theory, not a quantum one. It treated objects as objects, not as probabilistic smudges.”
Mr. Gleick is speaking in terms of concepts of mainstream thinkers in physics and I’m not criticizing him, but I’d suggest that it’s better to regard objects not as objects and also not as probabilistic smudges but rather as nodes of relationships. When certain relationships are complete at both ends, one node to another, the object acts much like an object of the common-sense world. When that object is dependent upon a pending relationship, it has a fuzziness which can be labeled a “probabilistic smudge,” I guess, though the term seems little more than a meaningless placeholder.
Later in the book, he notes that Feynman came to speak of particles as being of the nature of interactions. Fair enough, though I’d prefer language which recognizes that relationships, or interactions, are primary and bring thing-like stuff into being. At the same time, thing-like stuff does exist and is truly such when it is shaped from that more abstract stuff which Feynman considered to be interactions though I prefer to think of things as nodes in complex sets of relationships.
I’m trying to be sensitive to these little differences in foundational matters because they can be the difference between a solid foundation and a cracked foundation. There is an example in the writings of Etienne Gilson which is relevant: he said that there were at least two modern existentialists who were worth considering as rediscoverers of the Thomistic understanding of being: the Lutheran Kierkegaard and the atheist Sartre. Oddly enough, Gilson said that Kierkegaard saw the nature of what Aquinas called the act-of-being but he went too far and lost his respect for the stuff which can result from that act-of-being. On the other hand, he said that Sartre had seen the act-of-being but also retained his respect for the stuff around him.
We need to respect the act-of-being by which created being comes to exist and the acts-of-being by which abstract being is shaped to a more concrete level of being. We also need to retain a balanced view, respecting that more concrete being as a so-called ‘thing in itself’. Most of the difficulty in seeing that ‘thing in itself’, noted by Heidegger and others, is due not to some imagined detachment from the thing-like being around us. Most of the difficulty is due to the very richness and depth, the levels of increasingly abstract levels of being, to be found in even the most humble thing. Seeing and understanding things in themselves takes a great effort; it is a work of the body and the mind in all its aspects especially the imaginative aspects. At the end of our lives, probably at the end of human existence in this mortal realm, we’ll have failed to complete our understanding of even the simplest aspect of created being if only because the simplest aspects melt away and reform with each new understanding of deeper levels of being, but this is a major part of being a human person. Even those who never pass beyond the state of human animal to that of morally well-ordered human person will likely have at least some curiosity about some parts of this world and will likely explore those parts even if they never so much as try to make greater sense of what lies around them.
It’s part of our human nature to look at a rock and wonder, wonder as a philosopher interested in the nature of concrete being, as a painter interested in colors and shapes, as a chemist wishing to find all the different sorts of stuff in that rock, as a miner hoping to see signs of gold or iron, even as a child looking for a good projectile to hit that nearby tree.