Qualities and Relations

No discussion of sexuality could be complete without considering marriage, abortion, homosexuality, and the nature of the masculine and feminine. I will try to examine at least a few of these. However, there are certain relevant facts needed before one can make progress in this direction. All of these issues are politically charged, and so we must be careful what we say, but some things are relatively certain.

Currently the liberal/conservative battle over human nature rages on because neither side is thinking very deeply. While the Right argues from Biblical authority and cultural tradition, the Left swallows wholesale the assumptions of Modernity and then develops its opinions reasoning from the ideas of individualism, freedom, and empiricism. Neither approach will work. Biblical and cultural authority is only helpful if one understands the statements by the authority. Currently the Right does not understand the nature of the human being (in fact, it has a similar view as the Left), although they are technically correct in what they propound in terms of laws and policies.

The Left is in a similar situation. Their authorities are the great 20^th century intellectuals. However, these authorities base most of their thought on the premise of materialism, and, as we shall see, materialism does not allow a comprehensive version of the human self. I would not claim to be an expert on such matters myself, but what I think I know I will try to explain.

To try to demonstrate the importance of the metaphysics we will discuss, I will first lay out what can be known about the person by a strictly materialist account. First, we can know that human beings are physical animals. Second, a human being’s body will die after one hundred years or so. Third, desires and feelings make up a large part of the choices that human beings make. Fourth, one of the major purposes of human life is to mate and raise children. Fifth, the conscious life of a human being is heavily dependent upon the brain. Sixth, the body (and brain specifically) can be developed through training. Seventh, we have experience of the world through the five senses.

There is a little more to it, specifically in considering the physical properties of man and woman, the brain, and mammals in general, but this is a rough outline of what one can know by a physicalist perspective. I also think that these are rather certain facts. Nevertheless, unfortunately, much of the information we need to make specific choices cannot be gleaned from these physical descriptions of the human being.

The main limitation to the physical point of view is in its very nature. It makes no statements about non-physical reality, which is in fact the environment in which we live, move and have our being. It is also a part of our very nature to be a spiritual being; which certainly at least means non-physical. A very brief description of nonphysical reality can do a lot to help us understand human nature.

Loosely speaking, all things, physical or not are composed of properties and matter. These properties can be qualities or relations. We need knowledge of the qualities and relations of the physical world in order to deal with that world. In fact, physical qualities are often more important than physical relations. In the morning, I can compare the colors of two socks in order to make sure I am wearing a matching pair. You could ask me to hand you the piece of paper on a particular shelf and I would understand you. Unfortunately, today that is usually about as far as we go. If there are only physical qualities and relations, then one cannot make sense of the need for marriage to be life long (and not merely to cease after mating and raising children), nor is it clear why abortion is undesirable. After all, whatever else one may say, a fetus is not a fully developed human being, and it is a particular part of a woman’s body. Not much can be said about homosexuality and gender “roles” as well, apart from perhaps what one observes among the rest of the animal kingdom. As we have already noted, if the physical that is all that exists, there is no permanent future in the universe for each individual human being.

But this is not all that can be known. From our own daily lives we can know that there is a part of us that cannot be described by science: our conscious experience itself. There is a lot to say here of course, but I will pass over it in the interest of this particular essay.

This nonphysical dimension of the person has traditionally been called the soul. Nearly all religion, and most art and literature before the twentieth century is based upon this supposition. Carved in stone at my undergraduate institution was “O stream of life, run ye slow or fast, all streams reach the sea at last.” The soul itself can be thought as a river flowing through time. It is in fact closely related to the body, and so people have been led to call it the “form” of the body, or perhaps its “principle of life.” Death is the separation of the soul from the body.

Without going into too many of the details, the soul survives physical death and then is maintained by God for a period until it is again deposited in a body. This is a matter of special revelation, but many of the profound humanist thinkers have come to the same conclusion.

The soul then has qualities and relations that are rooted in its substance and which make it what it is. In contrast with the physical case, the relations of the soul are actually much more important than the soul’s qualities. We will have a lot to say about this in later posts regarding the sexual/gendered dimension of the self. What must be said is that these relations are as real and as strong as ‘redness’ in a sweater or heat in a cup of warm coffee. These relations do in fact determine most if not all of our lives. (Of course, free choice is a certain kind of relation.)

In our cultural climate, one needs to have these relations of the soul clearly before one’s mind if one does not want to lapse into the way of the world. As we have already remarked, the nature of God, law, love itself, and the many gender issues that we will be discussing cannot be understood without the notion of real relations in and around the soul. It may in fact turn out that qualities and relations are very much the same in an essential way, and thus they are often both termed ‘properties.’ In the next essays, I will attempt to apply these metaphysical notions to the complicated political issues I have mentioned.