[This essay is a lightly edited fragment from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which might be delayed a bit longer (maybe middle of March?) because of a relatively mild but persistent sinus infection as well as major housecleaning tasks as the result of a death in my family.]
From ancient times, men have told tales and produced philosophical and theological works which state or at least imply that man has some sort of an interior which is immaterial in some sense. Many would-be traditionalists think wrongly that we can defend our religious and moral beliefs only if there exists an actual `immaterial’ entity which is part of an individual human being: soul or mind as conceived as a sort of strange substance attached to our physical substance. This assumption of a soul-entity or mind-entity is unnecessary, meaning it can be eliminated if not plausible given what we know about the world of concrete being. Soul and mind are useful ways of speaking about, of pointing to, relationships. Relationships between parts of entities—mind and heart and hands of a human being or relationships between entities—communities or communal human being or relationships between God and His various creatures account for all the immaterial aspects of human being.
Once again, the question arises: are communities real or just ways of speaking about gatherings of freestanding individuals?
At a speculative level, though we’re still dealing with sophisticated ways of thought drawn from modern mathematics, we can consider two sets of questions raised by the issue of communal human being.
- Can we think of the insides of an individual who then has communal relationships on the outside? Can we think of links between the insides of individuals or do all relationships between individuals take place on the outside?
- Can individuals overlap with other individuals in well-defined ways? Can individuals overlap with communal human being? Can communities overlap other communities?
Relationships are real. Communities are real. Conceptual tools, perhaps generalizations or abstractions of mathematical concepts such as state-spaces and manifolds (topological thinking in general), are good for providing disciplined ways of speaking about the plausibility of those realities, those parts of Creation. Such tools can lead to ways of thinking, frameworks if you will, which can provide for better testing for the reality and particular characteristics of communal human being. After all, even the most numerical of statistical tests, such as those used to test for group selection in evolutionary biology, can’t provide answers outside the frameworks in which they are set; if you assume individuals are the ultimate and only reality in biology, then your tests will produce conclusions compatible with your assumptions. (Actually, insightful minds are often capable of seeing signs their ways of thought aren’t fully compatible with reality. Such minds are those of Galileo and Newton and Darwin and Gauss and Einstein and so on.)
Relationships are real. Communities are real. After all, communities are relationships between individuals, strong relationships which outlive any individual. Biologists, as well as a variety of philosophers and other thinkers, consider the persistence of a gray whale or a human being to be proof of the real existence of those organisms despite the complete turnover of their basic physical stuff. The same thinkers don’t consider the persistence of communities, genetic family-lines as well as cultures, to be evidence that those communities have a real existence. They make implicit or explicit appeals to Occam’s razor without seeming to realize any such powerful, high-level tool can be used only in some particular context, ultimately some particular worldview. Since I believe in the reality of the Creation of the Christian God, since I specifically believe in the reality of communal human being, I would use that razor in the context of such a Creation in which communal human being exists. The only test of the reality of a reduced universe against the reality of a Creation understood in Christian terms is the plausibility and coherence of empirical reality in terms of those major worldviews.
Relationships can create new stuff and relationships can shape existing stuff, including the concrete individual entities made of stuff. And so it is that I repeat: communities are for real, formed by relationships between concrete individual entities, not directly manifested in communal `stuff’, comparable to soul-stuff or mind-stuff.
Relationships do not respect inside and outside, nor do they allow boundaries. Minds form relationships, sometimes to come into some sort of synchronization, sometimes even forming something of a group mind. This happens among teenagers who are together in school and other activities for perhaps ten hours a day during the week and some hours a day during the weekend. This also happens to scholars and co-religionists and medical professionals. Hearts and hands also come into synchronization, where `synchronization’ should be taken as a mere pointer to a process where the synchronized entities or parts of an entity are being reshaped so that they are effectively a better organized entity and perhaps one which is a community of entities which retain their own individual identity.
For several centuries, Westerners and some others influenced too much by the West have regarded human beings as freestanding individuals, as if we have shells which prevent any direct contact between our insides and what lies outside, humans and other entities as well as what might be called the entirety of an environment. Relationships are now seen as no more than communications between freestanding individuals who may not even know each other and don’t really have any deep effects upon each other. Against this, Christians have traditionally maintained that:
- The world came to exist because God first loved it; the Almighty didn’t create the world and then choose to love it.
- We can change each other and help each other even by praying for those not physically present.
There is no magic that ties together a human being’s literal heart with his liver and brain and big toes. They are part of a system composed of parts which are synchronized in such a way that a human organism results. If you have the sort of philosophical attitude that requires that all of reality be explained in terms of some mythical first principles you carry around in your head, then you might object that we need a way to `explain’ (whatever that might mean in this context) why an entity becomes one, why an organism reaches some sort of state of awareness and maybe even self-awareness. Won’t work. The reality of communities, the relationships which form real communities, come from the greater reality, from the nature of Creation—`just’ the universe if you prefer.
Complexity theorists and other disciplined thinkers have analyzed complex entities to tell us much about how they work, but the why of the matter might run into the true principle that the world is what it is and not something to be explained (away) by Kant or any other such thinker. In fact, I’d suggest that the mathematical models of complexity theory are abstractions of properties of Creation or of `just’ this universe if you prefer.
Kant’s botched understanding of the geometry of space and of dynamics should be a stronger warning than it has proven to be—reality is what it is and not something to be constructed from some humanly preferred assumptions. To a Christian, even much that might be explainable in more basic (usually more abstract) principles can’t in fact be explained without considering:
- Creation was made through and of the Person who is the Son of God and manifests the divine Being of a Person.
- The basic principles can’t even be seen directly because they are the truths manifested by God as the raw stuff of Creation and lie realms of abstraction beyond or above or beneath the still not understood abstract form of being from which concrete matter and energy are shaped: the wavefunctions of quantum physics.
Even a physical entity such as a star is made up of regions which exchange energy and matter by way of processes which take hundreds of thousands of years or even millions of years. The light which comes to us from that sun took only 8 minutes or so to travel the 93 millions miles of space between earth and sun, but that light took probably those hundreds of thousands or millions of years to travel out from the nuclear fusion core at the center of the sun to the surface where it might be emitted into space. This is because of the density of matter in the core of the sun and because of the complex physical interactions between particles as a photon or other particle travels outward through and from that core.
How can a star be a single entity if made of regions which `contact’ each other over such long periods of time? How can an individual human being be a single entity if made of organs and other parts which are in contact in vague and ambiguous ways over smaller but still significant periods of time? How can Western Civilization be real if it is no more than persistent, long-term relationships between various ephemeral groupings of ephemeral human beings?
A star is a single entity. An individual human being is a single organism. A particular human community, such as Western Civilization as a whole or the musical institutions of Tanglewood and others found in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, is a single human community.
An individual human being is a member of multiple communities. We should take reality on its own terms rather than trying to explain it away by use of allegedly fundamental principles we carry around inside our little minds. Sometimes, we should start our efforts to understand by viewing reality in its various levels of complexity, including individual entities being parts of greater entities whether they retain their individuality or not. There is a sense in which the world, indeed all of Creation, must be understood as a whole before we can understand so much as an elementary particle or a basic operation of arithmetic.