another way of phrasing the “farm” point

A follow up from two posts ago, about Zubiri and the farm and how relationists would look at that point… (The only reason I’m blogging so much is because it turned into a hideous afternoon, weather-wise, and that’s rare for Alex. The attempt to go out this afternoon simply wasn’t worth it. Time to wait for sunset.)

Let’s oversimplify a bit and say that Farm is an object composed of Human plus Land.

Relationists (which even Zubiri is, in this limited case) want to claim that Farm is nothing more than its effect on Human (and perhaps on Land too, if they are more open to that sort of thing).

But the fact that Farm is generated by those two components does not in any way entail that it is reducible to its effect on those two components. For it is actually a special case that an object with work retroactively on its own pieces. It is quite likely that humans are entangled in assemblages that have emergent properties without or noticing them, and without their even affecting us.

In the case of the object called Farm, humans figure twice. In one respect we are a component of it, and in another case we are the users and observers of it. But it is no more reducible to the second of these than it is to the first.

Insofar as we are a component of Farm, it still has properties that belong neither to us nor to the land, and so it is irreducible to us in this downward direction.

And insofar as Farm is used by us, it is still never completely used by us– it withdraws not just qua land, but also qua farm. There are various farm-uses of it that we have not exhausted in any given moment, and those unexhausted possibilities point toward some root in reality from which they emerge (namely, the Farm-object lying hidden between its components and its uses). Important note: Farm is not the sum total of all its possible uses, but the reality that makes all those uses possible. Otherwise you’re stuck with a bunch of discrete actual and possible uses and just bundling them together in the end, probably with humans getting to decide what makes one thing or not.

To shift examples to one I have argued previously with Hallward… The fact that shoes as we know them exist only for humans does not entail that the shoe is no more than its current shoe-function for some person in some context. Certain fluctuations in that usage can occur without the shoe becoming a different shoe.

Too many problems result when you try to take the unity of things out of things themselves and put them in the human mind as a quasi-divine bundling agent. I sometimes call this position upside-down occasionalism, because that’s what it is. They can mock God all they want, but they end up turning humans into mini-gods of occasionalism, responsible for all relation and all bundling. One privileged entity is given magic causal and relational powers that are forbidden to everything else.