A note on Internal Relations

Writing a paper for my class of dialectics, I've come up with this quick explanation of what the philosophy of internal relations mean. It is extremely short, but I offer it to my readers, especially to those closer to philosophy, to know their position regarding this controversial school of thought initiated by Hegel. Let it be known that many of the things said following I consider them correct, contrary to what analytical philosophy claims. It says:

Internal relations cannot see the world as a sum of objects. The word “object” implies that there is a finished unit that is separable from the rest. This is not the case. Internal relations assume that any object is not an object proper, but a thing that is determined by all the relations this thing has with the things that it is not; that is, with its environment. For example: a chair is not in itself a unit, because a chair needs space to exists; however space is not a part of what the chair is, but is an indispensable environmental condition without which the chair cannot exist. In this sense the chair’s actual existence is determined by the space in which it is. It means that in the real existence of the chair by necessity there must be the existence of space. This relation of the chair with space (that the chair cannot be understood without the space in which it remains, but acknowledging that the space does not form part of the chair itself) is an internal relation. Basically no-thing stands by itself without the use of abstraction. That a thing exists implies everything that that thing is not, but without which it cannot exist. The thing is by virtue of everything that it is not. Because every thing has a relation to all the rest that it is not, then its determination in the real world takes the form of relations and not of objects. An object would imply that the thing can be taken outside all its external determinations without ceasing to exist.

The relation is internal because things and facts are not seen as objects but as relations. A chair stands in opposition to everything the chair is not. This that the chair is not forces the chair to have boundaries, and hence the chair is intelligible and can exist. If the chair is not related to everything it is not, then it would have no boundaries because it stands in isolation from the rest (it would be a thing by itself without needing anything else), and the chair would become universal; that is everything, which is, of course, nonsense. It is implicit in the bodily existence of the chair everything that the chair negates by virtue of not being it.

As an external relation we take the chair as given in its objective condition, and then relating itself to other things in a mechanic-like structure, like crashing or forcing themselves. This is the path of physics. The chair does not need the rest to be understood, and the rest only plays a role of modifying the chair by having contact with it. External relations are those that take place between finished objects in their physical contacts. In the philosophy of internal relations what the chair is not is part of the structure of being of the chair itself. The chair cannot be understood without its environment. Its environment also determines what the chair is.

A coarse example: A chair is a chair as long as it is used as a chair. Why? Because what makes a chair what it is is its relation to its environment by virtue of having a particular use. If we take the chair and use it to beat someone, the relation with its environment has completely changed. Now it is not being used as a chair but as a blunt weapon. Dialectically it means that the thing in question is no longer a chair but a chair-shaped blunt weapon. The thing changed in being by virtue of a change in its relations to the environment without any actual change in its physical shape. What make a thing what it is, then, is the sum of its relations to its environment. Because of this reason, nothing can be taken as an object in itself, because nothing stands objectively in itself, but in relation to what it is not (its environment).

An elegant example: if we take the Latin alphabet, we have certain units we call letters. If we take A, we can say that in itself it stands as an A: that is A=A, which is a basic proposition of formal logic. However if we want to see A as an internal relation we can also say that: A=-B,-C,-D…-Z. This is saying exactly the same thing but not from the vantage point of A as an object and finished unit in contrast with the rest, but A being part of an environment of letters as the structure of its being. The other letters, by virtue of their negative value, set the boundaries for each positive unit. So if we take a set of letter in this way “-B…-Z” the only possible solution is “A”, because the only one thing excluded from the set of negative determination is precisely the positivity of A.

We can go further in proving the negative quality of everything when seen as internally related with its environment. Let us not take any thing in particular but every thing except the thing that we are not taking. By taking everything except the one thing, this one thing is already implicit in everything taken, because is the only thing that remains missing. We can say that B…Z=-A. The letter “A” becomes a negative determination of the whole when seen from the vantage point of the whole minus what we are not taking. This negative value or determination is what we call contradiction in dialectics. And it is because of this reason that dialectics is a logic of contradictions.

The important thing to understand is that a thing never stands in isolation as an object. The mentioning of anything has implicitly everything else that it is not, because the thing itself excludes the rest. So we can see the thing from the vantage point of the rest, from the negation of the rest. Take something as everything that it is not and we will, by necessity, have what the thing is because it is the remaining from everything that a thing is not. Conclusion: everything includes within its structure of being everything that it is not, because its concrete existence depends on negating the concrete existence of everything else. The structure of being of any thing and fact is determined by contradictions between it and the rest.

In this sense a thing can be abstractly divided in infinite parts. If any thing stands in relation to a whole that remains its environment, also the thing stands as a whole in relation to its parts. The conclusion of this analysis is that the most important hypotheses of dialectics is that the development process of every thing consists in the contradictory relations of its internal parts, not external influences. There are no external influences in dialectics because they are taken to be also part of a bigger whole. This is the inevitable result of an analysis that insists in taking things not as objects but as relations. This is probably the most important aspect of dialectics, and I am going to explain it further ahead. Now I move to explain what dialectics means by the word contradiction.