Surrogates

ULTIMATE CONDITIONS, BEING, AND THEIR SURROGATES

6. ULTIMATE CONDITIONS, BEING, AND THEIR SURROGATES Finite beings are together with others in a domain that is governed by an ordered set of ultimate conditions, and within whose compass more limited governances occur. Persons are primarily governed by assessors, humanized beings by affiliators, natural beings by extensions, and cosmic beings by coordinators. The different governances have specialized forms, with more limited ranges, that are more prone to change. Every being exists and acts under both universal and more limited laws. The most comprehensive of the laws are those that apply to every being, no matter what the domain. It is these that mathematicians and logicians seek to understand. More specialized versions of them are expressed in the laws that govern whatever occurs in some domain; they are of primary interest to those who want to understand the limits within which the actions of what is there occur. The laws that govern the humanized world interest many who wish to know only what those laws prescribe, allow, and proscribe. The laws vary in range, with some applying only for limited times, specializing those that always apply to all. Evidently, finite beings are subject to a hierarchy of conditions having greater and greater ranges. Those conditions do not exist in a distant upper space; they are where they govern. The conditions that govern what occurs have enough reality to enable them to interplay with and to counter the insistencies of what they govern . Conversely, beings, no matter how limited in power, are interinvolved with what governs them; the outcome therefore cannot be attributed solely to the conditions. No law makes a body fall at a particular rate. No body pulls a law out of an eternal realm to make the law apply to itself. Laws and other conditions interplay with singulars to yield amalgamations of insistencies of both. Galileo made evident in his discourses that it is not the weights of complex bodies that determine the rate at which they fall. That does not mean that the weights contribute nothing to the occurrence. In their absence , obviously, there would be nothing to fall. It may well be true that a body (in a perfect vacuum that has never been encountered or produced) would fall at the rate that its parts do. It is also true that our lived and organic bodies have natures of their own, acting in ways that no collection of their parts does, though, of course, not without being affected by the ways those parts function and interplay. The failure of the total weight of a complex body to dictate how fast it will fall does not mean that the body, as a unit, plays no role. It provides its parts with a common locus and an opportunity to be expressed in and through it in various ways. Galileo made unmistakably evident that Aristotle held an untenable view. He and Galileo, though, had no difficulty in understanding the fall of bodies to be governed by laws that were applicable to all bodies, presumably as they exist in the cosmos. Man-made laws, even when they effectively govern what occurs, exert no force. They must be backed by habits or by threats of loss to assure their controlling instantiation in what occurs. The laws that govern the activities of all bodies, no matter what the domain, and the ways they interplay, have wider ranges than these, as well as powers to govern that with which they are interinvolved. There is no swooping down from on high to capture and bind free beings. When and as beings are, they both express themselves , and unite with conditions to constitute law-governed occurrences. The governances in one domain are interrelated with those in others by the Dunamic-Rational. Being, that which necessarily is, is acknowledged by many, but sometimes named as The Absolute, The One, or God. Often enough, these are taken to have similar features and activities, but also to have some distinctive ones. Those who are religious usually take some finite being, or a number of them, to be loci of the emphatic presence of that Being, and hold that this could be approached and even reached by using some objects under certain conditions and in special ways, and thereupon begin good moves toward that source. Usually called “God,” that source is taken to be eternal and perfect, and to be most available to those who are religious , or at least to those who believe and act in ways that...