In the Background of Our Culture - Rationalism, Ontological Dualism, and Relationality:

If not dualism, if life is always in connection, then what? The immediate, obvious answer to disconnection, isolation, and so forth is, of course, to reconnect—­with each other, with our bodies, the nonhuman world, the stream of life (e.g., Macy 2007). One rising answer to the problematic of disconnection/reconnection is thus relationality. ­There are many ways to understand relationality. Dualism is itself a form of relationality but one that, as we have seen, assumes the preexistence of distinct entities whose respective essences are not seen as fundamentally dependent on their relation to other entities—­they exist in and of themselves. Network theories imply a more serious effort at taking into account the role of interrelations in making up ­things and beings. Many network approaches nevertheless still take for granted the existence of inde­pen­dent objects or actors prior to the networking, and despite their thrust ­toward topological thinking, they fall back into Euclidean geometries of objects, nodes, and flows. As Sharma puts it, speaking about the ­notion of interdependence in biology, many of ­these notions still imply “in­de­pen­dent objects interacting.” ­There are two shifts, according to Sharma, that have to happen for a genuine concept of interdependence to arise: the first implies going “from considering ­things in isolation to considering ­things in interaction”; the second, more difficult to accomplish, is “from considering ­things in interaction to considering ­things as mutually constituted, that is, viewing ­things as existing at all only due to their dependence on other ­things” (2015, 2).

Is it pos­si­ble, then, to develop a deeper notion of relationality, one in which the relational basis of existence radically pervades the entire order of t­hings? One general princip­le I find useful is that ==a relational ontology is that within which nothing preexists the relations that constitute it==. In t­hese ontologies, life is interrelation and interdependence through and through, always and from the beginning. Buddhism has one of the most succinct and power­ful notions in this regard: nothing exists by itself, every­thing interexists, we inter-are with every­thing on the planet. This princip­le of interbeing has been amply developed in Buddhist thought.20 A dif­fer­ent way to look at it, from the perspective of phenomenological biology, is the already-­mentioned idea of the “unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing, and our knowing” (Maturana and Varela 1987, 35); in other words, ­there is a deep connection between action and experience, which in turn instills a certain circularity in all knowledge, which Maturana and Varela summarize with the maxim “All ­doing is knowing, and all knowing is ­doing” (26), or by saying that “­every act of knowing brings forth a world” (26). This coincidence of being~~­doing~~knowing implies that we are deeply immersed in the world along with other sentient beings, who are similarly and ineluctably knower-­doers as much as ourselves. This equates with Sharma’s insistence that genuine interdependence obtains only when we consider all entities as mutually constituted.

note 21: “This is an intellectual approximation to relationality, of course; grasping its nature more fully, according to some, demands transrational forms of engagement with the real, such as contemplative, hallucinatory, or shamanic experiences.”

Jane Bennett Vibrant Matter Vital Materialism #Materialism Matter has vitality - rel

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4JNZm3qnkXyENBx7KW2CHD?si=Q54UsgzuShmKKzVccv0c4Q&t=1139

autopoesis The Tree of Knowledge relational ontologies