To begin in the middle:
– There is no “it”, but there is talk about “it”. Ultimately the talk about “it”, the pointing to “it”, is more fundamental to “it” than anything else, because it is the RELATIONS that are primary: thingness is a subset of relatedness. Relations are not between two “things” but are recursively self-generated between other relations – things fall out of relations (things = Earth, relations = Water). Relations themselves are a precipitate of tension between complementarily opposing potentials (Air). Relations are to opposing potentials as things are to relations. Opposing potentials are themselves a precipitate of the whole, and work alongside each other within the whole simultaneously. Each step from the whole is a step-down transformation, we could say that beginning with level N, we move to level N-1. Each level is pulled out of simultaneity by an act of distinction within the whole, of the whole, by the whole. A cascading of levels of distinction yields the ontology of “things”, and simultaneously an epistemology of “knowing” activity, which together yield the whole of cosmology.
– This can be approached in another way. We can begin first with a problem of the modern condition, made apparent most strongly by both postmodernism and deconstructionism. The problem is that language is (more…)