Relational Realities

Male and female are relation realities. "Personality" is a relational reality. The human person itself is a relational reality.

It is no coincidence that Late Modern Americans have so many grave and profound doubts about the existence of all three. We don't relate directly to things anymore, let alone persons. We relate to images, which are related to other images, which are related to text captions. Our most sacred dogma is the existence of the Absolute Individual Self that consumes and uses and chooses everything for itself without qualification, while being itself subject to or dependent on or in relation to nothing. Our idea of knowledge is "Science," which means the total subjection of a being as "object" to the knowledge and control of this Absolute Self, and the rejection of all aspects of that being not capable of being so controlled and subjected. Every reality that is relational and interdependent has to be rejected inasmuch as it is not capable of such mono-directional subjection, or, in other words, inasmuch as its existence acts inevitably as a limitation on the control and willing of the idealized Absolute Self.

The terms of any relation are mutually interdependent at the very least qua related. Inasmuch as a particular relation is constitutive of the essence of one term, that term is dependent for its existence and coherency on the other term. If both terms are constituted by that relation, neither is capable of being understood or existing apart from the the other.

The classic instance and limit case of this in Christian philosophy was of course the Trinity, where God himself exists as a Trinity of Persons that are (as Aquinas argues) nothing other or more than the relations by which they are constituted: the Person of the Father having no existence apart from his begetting of the Son, the Son existing only as begotten in relation to the Father as begetter, and the Holy Spirit existing only by way of the relationship of Procession from them both.

What makes you a human person, then, is primarily your constitutive relation with the Trinitarian God as the source of all reality, and then secondarily your interdependent and constitutive relations with other human persons, as well as your various relations with all the other creatures of the cosmic order. What makes you a male or female person is in the first place your interdependent and inter-coherent relation with persons of the opposite sex, which primary relation itself impacts in various ways your relations with other creatures and objects of the cosmic order. What makes you a particular person with a particular personality is the irreducible particularity of each of these relationships in your actual concrete existence as opposed to abstract universal form, and all the fine modalities present in each one.

None of these things are "subjective": none of them is manufactured by the individual human mind or society playing tricks on itself. At the same time, none of these things is able to be coherently grasped apart from the various relations that constitute it.

Our modern anti-relational philosophy, indeed, is itself dependent on relational reality; it merely replaces every one of these relations with a single mono-directional relation with an idealized Absolute Self. This Absolute Self is in a sense a twisted, monstrously anthropomorphized and psychologized (and incidentally anti-Trinitarian) vision of the monotheistic God; but in its deepest reality it is rather an idealized limit case of the (powerful, wealthy, characteristically male) human person as knower and controller of the natural world and other persons. Reality as a whole, then, is divided up into various instances or approximations to the relation between absolutely controlling and willing Self and the absolutely controlled and known Object. Systems formed on in reaction to or rejection of this system still base their view of reality on it--as should be massively evident from even a shallow perusal of our current intellectual world.

Inasmuch as we refuse to acknowledge relational reality, we will have no choice but to abolish and dogmatically deny most of reality. The human person, as such, will have to be abolished. This is, more or less, what our society at the moment is working towards.